How Risk Taking, Innovation & Artificial Intelligence Transform Human Experience | Marc Andreessen

welcome to the huberman Lab podcast where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday [Music] life I'm Andrew huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and Opthalmology at Stanford school of medicine today my guest is Mark andreon Mark andreon is a software engineer and an investor in technology companies he co-founded and developed Mosaic which was one of the first widely used web browsers he also co-founded and developed Netscape which was one of the earliest widespread used web browsers and he co-founded and is a general partner at andrees Hartz one of the most successful Silicon Valley venture capital firms all of that is to say that Mark Andre is one of the most successful innovators and investors ever I was extremely excited to record this episode with Mark for several reasons first of all he himself is an incredible innovator second of all he has an uncanny ability to spot the innovators of the future and third Mark has shown over and over again the ability to understand how Technologies not yet even developed are going to impact the way that humans interact at large our conversation starts off by discussing what makes for an exceptional innovator as well as what sorts of environmental conditions make for exceptional innovation and creativity more generally in that context we talk about risk-taking not just in terms of risk-taking in one's profession but about how some people not all but how some people who are risk-takers and innovators in the context of their work also seem to take a lot of risks in their personal life and some of the consequences that can bring then we discuss some of the most transformative technologies that are now emerging such as novel approaches to developing clean energy as well as AI or artificial intelligence with respect to AI Mark shares his views as to why AI is likely to greatly improve Human Experience and we discuss the multiple roles that AI is very likely to have in all of our lives in the near future Mark explains how not too long from now all of us are very likely to have ai assistants for instance assistants that give us highly informed Health advice highly informed psychological advice indeed it is very likely that all of us will soon have ai assistants that govern most if not all of our daily decisions and Mark explains how if done correctly this can be a tremendously positive addition to our life in doing so Mark provides a stark counterargument for those that argue that AI is going to diminish Human Experience so if you're hearing about and or concerned about the ways that AI is likely to destroy us today you going to hear about the many different ways that AI Technologies now in development are likely to enhance our human experience at every level what you'll soon find is that while today's discussion does center around technology and Technology development it is really a discussion about human beings and human psychology so whether you have an interest in technology development Andor AI I'm certain that you'll find today's discussion to be an important and highly Lucid view into what will soon be the future that we all live in before we begin I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford it is however part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to Consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public in keeping with that theme I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast our first sponsor is element element is an electrolyte drink that has everything you need and nothing you don't that means plenty of the electrolytes sodium magnesium and potassium in the correct ratios but no sugar the electrolytes and hydration are absolutely key for mental health physical health and performance even a slight degree of dehydration can impair our ability to think our energy levels and our physical performance element makes it very easy to achieve proper hydration and it does so by 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episode is also brought To Us by eight sleep eight sleep makes Smart mattress covers with cooling Heating and sleep tracking capacity I've spoken many times before in this podcast about the fact that sleep that is getting a great night's sleep is the foundation of all mental health physical health and performance when we're sleeping well everything goes far better when we are not sleeping well or enough everything gets far worse at the level of mental health physical health and performance now one of the key things to getting a great night's sleep and waking up feeling refreshed is that you have to control the temperature of your sleeping environment and that's because in order to fall and stay deeply asleep you need your core body temperature to drop by about 1 to 3° and in order to wake up feeling refreshed and energized you want your core body temperature to increase by about 1 to 3° with eight sleep it's very easy to induce that drop in core body temperature by cooling your mattress early and throughout the night and warming your mattress toward morning I started sleeping on an eight sleep mattress cover a few years ago and it has completely transformed the quality of the sleep that I get so much so that I actually loathe traveling because I don't have my eight Sleep mattress cover when I travel if you'd like to try eightsleep you can go to eights sleep.com huberman and you'll save up to $150 off their pod 3 cover eight sleep currently ships in the USA Canada UK select countries in the EU and Australia again that that's 8sleep.com huberman and now for my discussion with Mark andreon Mark welcome Hey thank you delighted to have you here and have so many questions for you about Innovation AI your view of the landscape of tech and Humanity in general I want to start off by talking about Innovation from three different perspectives there's the inner game so to speak or the psychology of the innovator or innovators thing like their propensity for engaging in conflict or not their propensity for having a dream or a vision and in particular their Innovation as it relates to some psychological trait or expression so we'll get to that in a moment the second component that I'm curious about is the outer landscape around innovators who they place themelves with uh the sorts of choices that they make and also the sorts of personal relationships that they might have or not have and then the last component is this notion of the larger landscape that they happen to find themselves in what time in history uh what's the geography Bay Area New York Dubai Etc so to start off is there a common trait of innovators that you think is absolutely essential as a seed uh to creating things that are really impactful yeah so I'm not a psychologist but I've picked up some of the concepts uh some of the some of the terms and so i' it was a great moment of delight in my life when I learned about the Big Five personality traits because I was like aha there's a way to actually describe right the answer to this question in at least reasonably scientific terms um and so I I think what you're looking for when you're when you're talking about real innovators like people who actually do really creative breakthrough work I think you're talking about a couple things so one is very high in what's called tradeit openness right which is one of the big one of the big five um which is basically just like Flatout open and new ideas um and of course the the nature of trade openness is trade openness means you're not just open to new ideas in one category you're open to many different kinds of new ideas and so we might talk about the fact that a lot of innovators also are very creative people in other aspects of their lives right even outside of uh their their specific creative domain so that's important but of course just being open is not sufficient because if you're just open you could just be curious and explore right and spend your entire life reading and and doing you know talking to people and never actually create something so you also need um a couple other things you need a high level of conscientiousness which is another one of the big five you need somebody who's really willing to apply themselves in our world typically over a period of many years right to be able to to to accomplish something great you know they they typically work very hard um that often gets obscured because the stories that end up getting told about these people are you know it's just like this was this kid and he just had this idea and it was like a stroke of Genius and it was like a moment in time and you know it's just like oh he was so lucky and it's like no like for most of these people it's years and years and years of of Applied effort and so you need you need somebody with like an extreme you know basically willingness to defer gratification and really apply themselves to a specific thing for a long time um and of course this is why there aren't very many of these people is there aren't many people who are high in openness and high in conscientiousness because to a certain extent they're they're opposed right traits and so you need somebody who has both of those third is you need somebody high in disagreeableness which is the third of the big five um so you need somebody who's just like basically ordinary uh right because if they're not ordinary then they'll be talked out of their ideas by people who will be like oh well that you know because the reaction most people have new ideas is oh that's dumb um and so somebody who's too agreable will will be easily dissuaded to to not to you know not pulling the threat anymore so you need somebody highly disagreeable again the nature of disagreeableness is they tend to be disagreeable disagreeable about everything right so they tend to be these very sort of iconic clastic you know kind of renegade characters um and then there's just a table sticks component which is they just also need to be high IQ right they just they just need to be really smart because it's just it's hard to innovate in any category if you can't synthesiz large amounts of information quickly um and so those are four like basically like high spikes you know very rare traits that basically have to have to come together um you could probably also say they they probably at some point need to be relatively low in neuroticism which is another the big five because if they're too neurotic they probably can't handle the stress right so so it's kind of this this this dial in there and then of course if you're if you're if you're into like this the sort of Science of the big five basically you know these are all people who are on like the far outlying kind of point on the on the normal distribution across all these traits and and then that just gets you to I think the the sort of hardest topic of all around this this this whole concept just just there are very few of these people do you think they're born with these traits yeah well so the they're born with the traits and then and then of course the traits are not you know genetics are not Destiny and so the the the traits are not deterministic in the sense of that you know just because they have those personality traits doesn't mean they're they're going to you know deliver great creativity but like they need to have those properties because otherwise they're just not either going to be able to do the work or they're not going to enjoy it right or I mean look a lot of these people are highly capable competent people you know it's very easy for them to get like high-paying jobs in traditional institutions and you know get lots of you know traditional Awards and you know end up with big paychecks and you know there there's a lot of people at you know big institutions that we we know you and I know well and I I deal with many of these where people get paid a lot of money and they get a lot of respect and they go for 20 years and it's great and they never create anything new right and so there's there's a lot of Administrators a lot of them yeah a lot of lot of them end up in administrative jobs um and that's fine that's good the world needs you know the world needs that also right the the innovators can't run everything because everything you know the the the rate of change would be too high society I think probably wouldn't be able to handle it so you need some people who are on the other side who are going to kind of keep the lights on and keep things running um but but there is this decision that people have to make which is okay if I have the sort of latent capability to do this is this actually what I want to spend my life doing and do I want to go through the stress and the pain and the trauma right and the anxiety right and the risk of failure right and so do do I really want to once in a while you're run into somebody who's just like can't do it any other way like they they just have to who's an example of that I mean El elan's the you know the Paramount example of our time and he and I I bring him up in part because he's such an obvious example but in part because he's talked about this um in in in in interviews where he he basically says like he's like I can't turn it off like the ideas come I have to pursue them right it's why he's like running five companies at the same time and like working on a sixth right um uh it's just like he can't he can't turn it off you know look there's a lot of other people who are probably had the capability to do it who ended up talking themselves into or you know whatever events conspired to put them in a position where they did something else um you know obviously there are people who try to be creative who just don't have the the capability and so there there's some V diagram there of determinism through traits but also choices in life and then also of course the situation in which they're born the context within which they grow up culture right what their parents expect of them and and so forth and so you have to you know you kind of get all the way through this you have to thread all these all these needles kind of at the same time do you think there are folks out there that meet these criteria who are disagreeable but that can feain agreeableness you know that can for those just listening Mark just raised his right hand um um in other words that that can sort of um phrase that comes to mind maybe because I can relate to a little bit they um sneak up through the system meaning they behave ethically as it relates to the requirements of the system they're not breaking laws or breaking rules in fact quite the opposite they're paying attention to the rules and following the rules until they get to a place where being disagreeable feels less threatening to their overall sense of security yeah I mean look the really highly competent people don't have to break laws right like it's it's the there was this there was this there was this myth you know that's sort happened around the movie The Godfather and then there was this character my Lansky you know who's like ran basically the mafia you know 50 60 70 years ago and there was this there was this great line of like well my Lansky had only like applied himself to running General Motors he would have been the best CEO of all time it's like no not really right like the people who are like great at running the big companies they don't have to they don't have to be my bosses they don't have to like break laws they can you know they can they can do they can work they're they're smart and sophisticated enough to be to work inside the system you know they don't need to take the easy out so I I don't think there's any implication that they have to you know that they have to have to break laws that said they have to break Norms right and and specifically the the thing this is probably the thing that gets missed the most because the process of the process of innovating the process of creating something new like once it works like the stories get retconed um as they say um in comic books so the stories get adapted to where it's like it was inevitable all along you know everybody always knew that this was a good idea you know the person has won all these Awards Society embraced them it's if if invariably if you if you were with them when that was when they were actually doing the work or if you actually get a couple drinks into them and talk about it it' be like no that's not how it happen at all they faced a wall of skepticism just like a wall of basically social you know essentially denial no this is not going to work no I'm not going to join your lab no I'm not going to come work for your company no I'm not going to buy your product right no I'm not going to meet with you and so they they they they get just like tremendous social resistance so they're they're not getting positive feedback from their from from their social network the way that more agreeable people need to have right and this is why this is why agreeableness is a problem for Innovation if if you're agreeable you're going to listen to the people around you they're going to tell you that new ideas are stupid right end of story you're you're not going to proceed um and so I I would put it more on like they need to be able to deal with they need to be able to deal with social discomfort to the level of ostracism um or at some point they're going to get shaken out and they're just going to quit do you think that people that meet these criteria do Best by banding with others that meet these criteria early or is it important that they form this deep sense of self like the ability to cry oneself to sleep at night or you know line the fetal position worrying that things aren't going to work out and then still get up the next morning and get right back out there right so Sean Parker has the best line by the way on on on on this he says you know being a being an entrepreneur being a Creator is like uh you know getting PED in the face like over and over again he said eventually you start to like the taste of your own blood and I love that line because it makes everybody like massively uncomfortable right but it gives you a sense of like how basically painful the process if you talk to any entrepreneur you know who's been through it about that they're like oh yeah that's exactly that's exactly what it's like so so so there is this there is a big individual component to it but look but look it can be very lonely right um and it especially you know very hard I think to do this if if nobody around you is trying to do anything even remotely similar right and if you're getting just universally negative responses like I you know very few people I think have very few people have the ego strength to be able to survive that for years so I do think there's a huge advantage and and this why you you do see clusters there's a huge advantage to clustering right and so you have and and you know throughout history you've had this clustering effect right you had you know clustering of the great artists and sculptors and Renaissance Florence you know you had the clustering of the philosophers of Greece you have the clustering of tech people in Silicon Valley you have the clustering of creative you know arts movie TV people in Los Angeles right and so forth and so on you know for you know there's always a scene right there's there's there's always like a Nexus and a place where where people come together um you know for for these kinds of things so generally speaking like if somebody wants to work in Tech innovate in Tech they're going to be much better off being around a lot of people who are trying to do that kind of thing than they are in a place where nobody else is doing it having said that the clustering has it can have downsides it can have side effects and and you put any group of people together and you do start to get group think even among people who are individually very disagreeable um and so these same clusters where you get these very idiosyncratic people they do have fads and Trends just like every place else right and so they get they get they get wrapped up in their own social dynamics the good news is the social dynamic in those places is usually very forward-looking right um and so it's usually it's usually like you know it's I don't it's like a herd of iconic class looking for the next big thing right so iconic class looking for the next big thing that's good the herd part right that's what you got to be careful of so even when you're in one of these environments you have to be careful that you're not getting sucked into the group think too much when you say group think to you mean excessive friction do to pressure testing each other's ideas to the point where things just don't move forward or are you talking about group think where people start to form a consensus or the um self-belief that gosh we are so strong because we are so different um what what do you can we better Define group think it's actually less either one of th those things both happen those are good those are good uh the part of group think I'm talking about is just like we all we all basically zero in we we just end up zeroing in on the same ideas right in Hollywood there's this classic thing it's like you know there are years where all of a sudden there's like a lot of volcano movies it's like why are there all these volcano movies and it's just like I don't there was just something in the gal right there was just something in the air you know look Tech Silicon Valley has this you know there there are moments in time where you you'll have these but it's like the old thing like what's the difference between a fat and a trend right you know fat fat is the trend that doesn't last right um and so you know Silicon Valley is subject to fads and both fads and Trends just like any place else right in other words you take smart disagreeable people you cluster them together they will act like a herd right they they will end up thinking the same things unless they try very hard not to you've talked about these personality traits of great innovators before um and we're talking about them now you invest in innovators you try and identify them and you are one so you can recognize these traits here I'm making the presumption that you have these traits indeed you do um we'll just get that out of the way um have you observed people trying to Fain these traits um and are there any specific questions or um behaviors that are a giveaway um that they're pretending to be the young steep jobs or that they're pretending to be the the young Henry Ford um pick your list of other other names that qualif ify as uh authentic legitimate innovators um we won't name names of people who have tried to disguise themselves as true innovators but what are some of the um uh the the litmus tests and uh I realize here that um we don't want you to give these away to the point where they're uh lose their potency but if you could share a few of those help that's good we're we're actually pretty open book on this so um so yeah so so first of all yes so there are people who definitely try to like come in and basically present as being something that they're not and they you know like they've read all the books they will have listened to this interview right they they will you know they study everything and they they construct a facade um and they come in and presented something they're not I would say the amount of that varies exactly correlated to the NASDAQ um right and so when stock prices are super low like you actually get the opposite when stock prices are super low people get too demoralized and people who should be doing it basically give up because they just think that whatever whatever the industry is over the trend is over whatever it's all hopeless um and so you get this flushing thing so nobody ever shows up at a stock market low right and says like I'm the new I'm the new I'm the new Next Big Thing um uh and and and and doesn't really want to do it because because there are higher status the kinds of people who do the thing that you're talking about they're they're fundamentally oriented for social status they're they're trying they're they're trying to get the social status without actually without actually the substance and there are always other places to go get Social Status so so after 2000 the joke was um so you know when I got to Silicon Valley in 9394 the valley was dead we can talk about that by 98 it was roaring and you had a lot of these people showing up who were you know Bas you basically had a lot of a lot of people showing up with with side kind of stories 2000 market crash by 2001 the joke was that um there were these terms B to C and B2B and in 1998 they meant B to C meant um business to Consumer and B2B meant business to business which is two different kinds of business models for internet companies by 2001 uh B to B to B meant back to banking uh and B to C meant back to Consulting right which is the high status people who the people oriented to status who showed up to be in Tech were like yeah screw it like this is over stick a fork in it I'm going to go back to you know golden or go back to Mackenzie you know where I can where I can where I can be high status and so you you you get this flushing kind of effect that happens in in a downturn um that said on a on a in a big upswing yeah you you get you get a lot of you get a lot of people showing up with with a lot of um you know with a lot of uh you know kind of let's say public Persona without the substance to back it up um so the way we stress that I can actually say exactly how we test for this which because it's the test exactly addresses the issue in a way that is impossible to fake um and and it's actually this it's actually the same way homicide detectives trying to find out if you if you're if you're if you've actually like if you're innocent or whether you've killed somebody it's the same it's the same tactic um which is you you ask increasingly detailed questions um right and so you know the way the homicide cop does this is you know what were you doing last night you know oh I was at a movie well which movie you know which theater you know okay which seat did you sit in you know okay what was the end of the movie right like right and you you ask increasingly detailed questions and people have trouble at some point people have trouble making up and things just fuzz in it just just kind of obvious and basically fake Founders basically have the same problem they have a con they're able to relay a conceptual theory of what they're doing that they've kind of engineered um but as they get into the details it just it just fuzzes out whereas the the the true people that you want to back that can do it basically what you find is they've spent five or 10 or 20 years obsessing on the details of whatever it is they're about to do and they're so deep in the details that they know so much more about it than you ever will and in fact the best possible reaction is when they get mad right um which is also what the homicide cops say right what you actually want is you actually want the you want the emotional response of like I can't believe that you're asking me questions this detailed and specific and picky and they kind of figure out what you're doing um and then they get upset like that's good that's perfect right but but but they they have you know but then they have to prove in themselves in the sense of like they have to be able to answer the questions in in in great detail do you think that people that are able to answer those questions in great detail have actually taken the time to systematically think through the ifans of all the possible implication of what they're going to do and they have a specific vision in mind of how things need to turn out or will turn out or do you think that um they have a a vision and it's a no matter what it will work out because the world will sort of bend around it I mean in other words do you think that they Place their Vision in context or they simply have a vision and they have that tunnel vision of that thing and that's going to be it let's use you for an example um with Netscape I mean that's how I first came to know your name um when you were conceiving Netscape did you think okay there's this search engine and this browser and and it's going to be this thing that looks this way and works this way and feels this way um did you think that and also think about you know that there was going to be a gallery of other search engines and it would fit into that landscape of other search engines or were you just projecting your vision of this thing as this unique um and special um brainchild let me give the general answer and then we can talk about the specific examp so the general answer is what what Entre entrepreneurship creativity Innovation is what economists call decision making under uncertainty right and so in both parts was important decision- making like you're going to make a ton of decisions because you have to decide what to do what not to do and then uncertainty which is like the world's a complicated place right and and in mathematical terms the world is a complex adaptive system with feedback loops and like it's really I mean it's it's EXT you know Isaac azimov wrote the you know the in his novels he he wrote about this field called psycho history right which is the idea that there's like a supercomputer that can predict the future of like human Affairs right and it's like we don't have that not yet not yet get that later we certainly don't have that yet um and so you're just dealing you know military uh uh commanders call this the fog of War right you're you're just dealing with a situation where the number of variables are just off the charts it's all these other people right who are inherently unpredictable making all these decisions in different directions and then the whole system is combinatorial which is these people are colliding with each other influencing their decisions and so I mean look the most straightforward kind of way to think about this is it's just it's amazing like anybody who believes in economic Central planning it always blows my mind because it's it's just like try opening a restaurant like try just opening a restaurant on the corner down here and like 5050 odds the restaurant's going to work and like all you have to do to run a restaurant is like have a thing and serve food and like and it's like most restaurants fail right and so and restaurant people run restaurants are like pretty smart like they're you know they're they usually think about these things very hard they all want to succeed um and it's hard to do that and so to start a tech company or to start an artistic movie or to or to fight a war like you're just going into this like basically B conceptual Battleground or military terms real Battleground where there's just like incredible levels of complexity branching future paths and so there there's nothing it's it's you know there's nothing predictable and so what we look for is basically the the the sort of D the really good innovators they've got a drive to basically be able to cope with that and deal with that and they they basically do that in two steps so one is they try to pre-plan as much as they possibly can and and and we call that the process of navigating the we call theide maze right and so the idea maze basically is I've got this general idea and it might be the internet's going to work or search or whatever and then it's like okay in their head they have thought through of like okay if I do it this way that way this third way here's what will happen then I have to do that then I have to do this then I have to bring in somebody to do that here's the technical challenge I'm going to hit and they've got in their they got in their heads as best anybody could they they've got as complete as sort of a map of possible Futures as they could possibly have and and this is where I say when you ask them increasing detailed questions that's what you're trying to kind of get them to kind of chart out is okay how far ahead have you thought and how much are you anticipating all of the different twists and turns that this is going to take okay so then they start on day one and then of course what happens is you know now they're now they're in it they're in now they're in the fog of War right they're in true true uncertainty and now that idea m is maybe not helpful practically but now they're going to be basically constructing on the Fly day by day as they learn and discover new things and as the world changes around them and of course it's a feedback loop because they're going to change you know if their thing starts to work it's going to change the world and then the fact the world is changing is going to cause you know their plan to you know to change as well um and so yeah the great the great ones basically they they course correct you know they the great ones course correct every single day you know they take stock of what they've learned um you know they they modified the plan um the great ones tend to think in terms of hypothesis right little bit like a scientific sort of mentality which is they tend to think okay I'm going to try this like I'm gonna go into the world I'm gonna announce that I'm doing this for sure right like I'm gonna say like this is my plan I'm gonna tell all my employees that I'm gonna tell all my investor that I'm going to put a Stak in there it's my plan and then I'm going to try it right um and even though I sound like I have complete certainty I know that need to test to find out whether it's going to work and if it's not then I have to go back to all those same people and have to say well actually we're not going left we're going right and they have to run that Loop thousands of times right and they had you know to get through the other side and this this led to the creation of this great term pivot which has been very helpful in our industry because the the word when I was when I was young the word we used was up um and pivot like sounds like so much better sounds like so much more professional but yeah you like make mistakes it's just it's just too complicated to understand you course correct you adjust you evolve often these things at least in business the businesses that end up working really well tend to be different than the original plan but that's that's part of the process of a really smart founder basically working their way through reality right as as as they're executing their plan the way you're describing this has parallels to a lot of models in biology and the practice of science um you know random walks but that aren't truly random pseudo random walks in biology Etc but one thing that uh is becoming clear from the way you're describing this is that I could imagine a great risk to early success so for instance somebody develops a product people are excited by it um they start to implement that product but then the landscape changes and they don't learn how to Pivot to use the um less profane version of it right they don't learn how to do that in other words the uh and I think of everything these days um or most everything in terms of reward schedules and dopamine reward schedules because that is the universal currency of reward um and so when you talk about the Shawn Parker quote of um learning to enjoy the Tastee of one's own blood that is very different than learning to enjoy the taste of success that's right right it's about internalizing success as a process of being self-determined and less agreeable Etc in other words building up of those five traits becomes the source of dopamine perhaps in a way that's highly adaptive so on the outside we just see the product the end product the iPhone the MacBook the Netscape Etc but I have to presume and I'm not a psychologist um but I have done neurophysiology and I've studied the dopamine system enough to know that what's being rewarded in the context of what you're describing sounds to be a reinforcement of those five traits rather than oh it's going to be this particular product or the company's going to look this way or the logo is going to be this or that that all seems like the peripheral to um what's really going on that great innovators are really in the process of of establishing neural circuitry that is all about reinforcing the me and the process of being me yeah yeah so this this goes to yeah so this is like extrinsic versus intrinsic motivation so the the Steve Jobs kind of Zen version of this right or the sort of hippie version of this was the journey is the reward right he he always he always told he always told his employees that is like look like you know everybody thinks in terms of these big public markers like the stock price or the IPO or the product launch or whatever he's like no it's it's actually the the process itself is the point right and and and if you to your point if you have that mentality then that's that's an intrinsic motivation not an ex extrinsic motivation and so that's the kind of intrinsic motivation that can keep you going for a long time another way to think about it is competing against yourself right it's like can I get better at doing this right and can I prove to myself that I can get better um there's also a big social component to this and this is one of the reasons why Silicon Valley punch is so so far above its weight as a place um there's a psychological component which is also goes to the comparison set um so a phenomenon that we've observed over time is the leading uh tech company in any City uh will aspire to be as large is the previous leading tech company in that City but often not larger right because they sort of they have a model of success and as long as they beat that level of success they've kind of you know checked the box like they've made it you know and and then they but then in contrast you're in Silicon Valley and you look around and it's just like Facebook and Cisco and Oracle and you know F Packard and Gladiators yeah and you're just like looking at these you know Giants and and and you know many of them are still you know Mark Zuckerberg still you know going to work every day and like trying to trying to do you know like and so like these people are like you know the role models are like alive right right they're like right there right and it's so clear like how much better they are and how much bigger their accomplishments are and so what what we find is Young Founders in that environment have much greater aspirations right because they just again maybe it's May at that point maybe it's the social status maybe there's there's an extrinsic component to that but or maybe it helps calibrate that internal system to basically say actually you know no the opportunity here is not to build a local you know what you might call local maximum form of success but let's build to a global maximum form of success which is which is something as big as we possibly can um ultimately the great ones are probably driven more internally than externally when when it comes down to it and that is where you get this phenomenon where you get people who are you know extremely successful and extremely wealthy who very easily could punch out and move to Fiji and just call it and they're still working 16-hour days right and so obviously something explains that that has nothing to do with external rewards and and I think it's it's it's an internal thing as many of you know I've been taking ag1 daily since 2012 so I'm delighted that they're sponsoring the podcast podast ag1 is a vitamin mineral probiotic drink that's designed to meet all of your foundational nutrition needs of course I try to get enough servings of vitamins and minerals through whole food sources that include vegetables and fruits every day but often times I simply can't get enough servings but with ag1 I'm sure to get enough vitamins and minerals and the probiotics that I need and it also contains adaptogens to help buffer stress simply put I always feel better when I take ag1 I have more focus and energy and I sleep better and it also happens to taste great for all these reasons whenever I'm asked if you could take Just One supplement what would it be I answer ag1 if you'd like to try ag1 go to drink a1.com huberman to claim a special offer they'll give you five free travel packs plus a year supply of vitamin D3 K2 again that's drink a1.com huberman I've heard you talk a lot about the inner landscape the inner psychology of these folks and I appreciate that we're going even deeper into that today and we will talk about the the landscape around whether or not Silicon Valley or New York whether or not there are specific cities that are ideal for certain types of Pursuits I think there was an article written by Paul Graham some years ago about um the conversations that you overhear in a city will tell you everything you need to know about whether or not you belong there uh in terms of your uh professional Pursuits um some of that's changed over time and now we should probably add Austin to the mix as um because it was written some time ago um in any event I want to return to that but I want to focus on an aspect of this intrinsic versus extrinsic motivators in terms of something that's a bit more cryptic which is uh one's personal relationships you know if I think about the um catalog of innovators in Silicon Valley some of them like Steve Jobs had complicated personal lives romantic personal lives early on then it sounds like he worked it out I don't know I didn't uh I wasn't their couple's therapist but you know he um when he died he was in a marriage that for all the world seemed like a happy marriage um you also have examples of innovators who have had many partners many children with other partners Elon comes to mind um you know I don't think I'm disclosing anything that isn't already obvious um those could have been happy relationships and just had many of them but the reason I'm asking this is you can imagine that for the innovator the person with these traits who's trying to build up this this thing whatever it is that having someone or several people in some cases um who just truly believe in you when the rest of the world may not believe in you yet or at all right could be immensely powerful and we have examples from Cults that um uh embody this we have examples from politics we have examples from Tech Innovation and science uh and I've always been fascinated by this because I feel like it's the more cryptic and yet very potent form of allowing someone to build themselves up it's a combination of inner psychology and extrinsic motivation because obviously if that person were to die or leave them or um cheat on them or you know pair up with some other innovator which we've seen several times recently and in the past it can be devastating to that person but what are your thoughts on the role of personal and in particular romantic relationship as it relates to people having an idea and their feeling that they can really bring that idea to fruition in the world so it's a real mixed bag you have lots of examples in all directions I and I think it's something like it's something like something like following so first is we talked about the personality traits of these people they tend to be highly disagreeable doesn't Foster a good romantic relationship highly discre people can be difficult to be in a relationship I may have heard of that once or twice before a friend may have given me that example yeah right and you know maybe you just need to find the right person who like complements that and is willing to you know there's there's a lot of relationships for like you it's always this question about relationships right which is do you want to have the same personality you know growth profile the same behavioral traits basically as your partner or do you actually want to have you know is is it an opposit opposites thing and you know look I'm sure you've seen this there are relationships where you'll have somebody who's highly disagreeable who's paired with somebody who's highly agreeable and it actually works out great because one person just gets to be on their Soap Box all the time and the other person's just like okay right it's fine right it's fine it's good um you know you put two disagreeable people together you know maybe Sparks Fly and they have great conversations all the time and maybe they come to hate each other right and so um so anyway so these people if you're going to be with one of these people you're fishing out of the disagreeable end of the pond and and again when I say disagreeable I don't mean you know these are these are normal distributions I don't mean like 60% agreable 80% disagreeable the people we're talking about are 99.99% disagreeable right so these are ordinary ordinary people so so so part of it's that and then of course they have the other personality traits right they're they're you know super conscientious they're super driven as a consequence they tend to work really hard they tend to not have a lot of time for you know family vacations or other things you know they're not they then they don't enjoy them if they're forced to go on them and so again that kind of thing can Fray at a at a relationship so so there's a so there's a fair amount in there that's loaded like somebody's going to partner with one of these people needs to be signed up for the ride um and that's that's a hard thing you know that's a hard thing to do or or you need a true Partnership of two of these which is also hard to do so I think that's part of it um and then look I think a big part of it is you know people achieve a certain level of success um and you know either in their own minds or you know publicly um and then they start to be able to get away with things right um and they start to be able to like well okay you know now we're rich and successful and famous and now I deserve you know and and this is where you get into I view this now in the realm of personal choice right you get in in this thing where people start to think that they deserve things um and so they start to behave in you know very bad ways um and and then they blow up their personal worlds as a consequence and maybe they regret it later and maybe they don't right it's always a always a question um so yeah so I think there's that um and then I don't know like yeah some people just need maybe the other part of it is some people just need more emotional support than others and I don't know that that's a big I don't know that that tilts either way like I know I know some of these people who have like great loving relationships and seem to draw very much on having this kind of firm foundation to rely upon and then I know other people who are just like their personal lives are just a continuous train wreck and it doesn't seem doesn't seem to matter like professionally they just keep doing what they're doing and and and maybe there's a maybe we could talk here about like you know whatever is the personality trait for risk-taking right like some people are so incredibly risk-prone that they need to take risk in all aspects of their lives at all times and and if if if part of their life gets stable they find a way to blow it up um and that's some of some of these people you could describe in those terms also yeah let's talk about that um because I think um risk-taking and sensation seeking is something that fascinates me um for my own reasons and in my observations of others um does it dovetail with these five traits in a way that can really serve innovation in ways that can benefit everybody the reason I say to benefit everybody is because there is a view of how we're painting this picture of the innovator as this like really cruel person um but often times what we're talking about are innovations that make the world far better for billions ions of people yeah that's right yeah by the way everything we're talking about also is not just in Tech or science or or in business it's also everything we're also talking about is trueu for the Arts right so you know the history of like artistic expression is you know you have people with all these same kinds of traits well I was thinking about Picasso and his and his regular turnover of lovers and partners and he was very open about the fact that it was one of the sources of his productivity UHC creativity uh he wasn't shy about that um I I suppose if he were alive today it might be a little bit different he might be judged a little differently right or that was histor for you know behaving in a pattern that you know was very awful for the people around him and he didn't care right right maybe they left him yeah like you know who knows right so so so you know puts and takes to all this um but um but no okay so I have a theory so here here's a theory this this is one of these I keep a list of things that'll get me kicked out of a dinner party um topics at any given point in time do you read it before you go in yeah I just I yeah have it on my on auto recall so that I can I can get out of these things but um so here here's the thing that get me kicked out of a dinner party um uh especially these days um so uh think of the kind of person where it's like very clear that they're like super high to point there is somebody super high output and whatever domain they're in they've done things that have like fundamentally like changed the world they've brought new whether it's businesses or Technologies or art you know works of art um uh you know entire schools of of creative expression in some cases to the world and then at a certain point they blow themselves to smithin right and they do that either through like a massive like Financial Scandal they do that through a massive personal you know breakdown they do that through some sort of public expression that causes them a huge amount of problems you know they say they say the wrong thing maybe not once but several hundred times and blow themselves to smithin um and and and there's this you know there's this kind of Arc there's this moral Arc that people kind of want to apply which it's like the Icarus you know the the you know flying too close to the Sun and you know he had it coming and he needed to keep his ego under control and you get kind of this you know kind of this this this this judgment that applies um so I have a different theory on this so the term I use to describe these people and a lot of and by the way a lot of other people who don't actually blow eles up but get close to it um which is a whole another set of people um I call the martyrs to civilizational progress right so so and we're backwards civilizational progress so look the only way civilization gets moved forward is when people like this do something new right because civilization as a whole does not do new things right groups of people do not do new things right these things don't happen automatically like by by by default nothing changes the only way civilizational change on any of these axes ever happens is because one of these people stands up and says you know no I'm going to do something different than what everybody else has ever done before so this is the this is progress like this is actually how it happens sometimes they get lionizer rewarded sometimes they get crucified sometimes the crucification is literal sometimes it's just you know symbolic but like you know they are those kinds of people um and then and then and then murders like when when they go down in flames like they have and again this is where it really screws the people's moral judgments because everybody wants to have the sort of super clear story of like okay did a bad thing and he was punished and I'm I'm like no no no no no no he was the kind of person who was going to do great things and also was going to take on a level of risk and take on a level of sort of extreme Behavior such that he was going to expose himself to Flying Too Close to the sun Wings melt and crash to ground but but but it's a packaged deal right the the the reason you have the picassos and the beethovens and all these people is because they're willing to take these extreme level of risks they they they are that creative and original not just in their art or their business but in everything else that they do that they will set themselves up to be able to fail psychologic you know a psychologist would probably or psychiatrist would probably say you know maybe you know to what extent do they actually like have a Death Wish do they do they actually you know at some point do they want to punish themselves do they want to fail that I don't know but you see this they they they they deliberately move themselves too close to the Sun and and and you can you can see it when it's happening because like if they get too far away from the Sun they deliberately move back towards it right you know they they come right back and they they want the risk uh and so anyway like I I I yeah so Martyrs to civilizational progress like this is progress happens when these people crash and burn the natural you know inclination is to judge them morally I tend to think we should basically say look like and and I don't even know if this means like giving them a moral pass or whatever but it's like look like this is how civil civilization progresses and we need to at least understand that there's a self-sacrificial aspect of this that that may be tragic and often is tragic but it it is it is quite literally self-sacrificial are there any examples of great innovators who um were able to compartmentalize their risk-taking uh to such a degree that they had what seemed to be a morally impeccable life in every domain except in their business Pursuits yeah that's right so some people are very some people are very highly controlled like that um some people are able to like very narrowly and I I don't really want to set myself an example on a lot of this but I will tell you like as an example like I I will never use debt in business uh number one you know number two like I have the most plaed personal life you can imagine number three I'm not I'm the last person in the world who ever going to do an extreme sport I mean I'm not even going to go on the sa on the ice bath like I'm not I'm not doing any of this like I don't doing any I'm not skiing I'm not I'm not on the Titan I'm not you know I'm not going down to see the Titanic goodness you weren't I'm not doing any of this I'm not doing any of this stuff I have no interest I don't play golf I don't ski I I have no interest in any of this stuff right and so like there are and I know people like this right who are very high Achievers who just like yeah they they're they're they're completely segmented they're extreme Risk Takers in business they're completely button down on the personal side they're completely button down you know financially they're you know they they're scrupulous with following every Rule and law you can possibly imagine but but they're still fantastic innovators and then I know many others who are just like they've their life is on fire all the time in every possible way and whenever it looks like the fire is turning into Embers they figure out a way to like relight the fire right um and they just really want to live on the edge and so I I think that's maybe I think that's an independent variable and again I would apply the same thing I think the same thing applies to the Arts um you know classical music as an example like I think Bach was you know as an example one of the you know kind of best you music of all time had just a completely sedate personal life you know never had any aberant Behavior at all in his personal life you know Family Man tons of kids apparently you know pillar of the community right and so like if Bach could be Bach and yet not like burn his way through you know 300 Mistresses or whatever you know maybe you can too so in thinking about these two different categories of innovators those that take on tremendous risk in all domains of their life and those that take on tremendous risk in a very compartmentalized way um I don't know what the percentages are uh but I have to wonder if in this Modern Age of the public being far less forgivable what I'm referring to is cancel culture um do you think that we are limiting the number of Innovations in total like by just simply frightening or eliminating an enormous category of innovators because they don't have the confidence or the means or the um strategies in place to regulate so they're just either bowing out or they're getting crossed off getting canceled one by one so do you think the public is less tolerant than they used to be or more tolerant well the systems that uh I'm not going to be careful here I think the um the large institution systems yes are not tolerant of what the public tells them they shouldn't be tolerant of um and so if there's enough noise there's enough noise in the mob I think institutions bow out and here I'm referring not just to univer they essentially say okay they let the cancellation proceed or they and maybe they're the maybe they're the gavl that comes down but but they're not the the lever that got the thing going and so I'm not just thinking about universities I'm also thinking about advertisers I'm thinking about um the big movie houses that um cancel a film that a given actor might be in because they had something in their personal life that's still getting worked out I'm thinking about people who um are in a legal process that's not yet resolved but the public has decided they're a bad person Etc my question is are we really talking about the public I I agree with your question and I'm going to come back to it but I I'm going I'm so I'm going to examine one part of your question which is is this really the public we're talking about and and I would just say exhibit a is who is the current front runner for the Republican nomination um today in the public at least on one side of the political aisle seems very on board right um number two like look uh you know there's a certain musician who like you know flew too close to the Sun blew himself to smithin he's still hitting all highs on music streams every month the public seems fine like I I think the public might I I would argue the public is actually more open to these things than it actually maybe ever has been um and we could talk about why that's the case I think it's a it's a differentiation and this is what what your question was aiming at but it's a differentiation between the public and the elites um and so so so I my view is everything that you just described as an elite phenomenon um and actually the public is very much not on board with it interesting and and and so what's actually happening is the division what's happened is the public eles have gapped out the the the public is more forgiving of of of what previously might have been considered kind of eper and extreme behavior um right F Scott fitgerald there are no second acts in American lives it turns out completely wrong turns out there second acts third acts fourth act apparently you can have a limited number of Acts the public is actually up for it yeah I mean I think of somebody like Mike Tyson right I feel like he's every you know his life exemplifies um everything that's amazing and great and also terrible about America if we took Mike Tyson to dinner tonight at any restaurant anywhere in the United States what would happen he would be loved oh he would be likeed he would the outpouring of enthusiasm and passion and love would be incredible like it would be unbelievable this this is a great example like it just like the and again I'm not even G to draw more I'm not even going to say agree with that or disagree with that I'm just like we I think we all intuitively know that the public is just like 100% like absolutely like he's a legend like he's a legend he's a living legend he's like a cultural Touchstone absolutely and you see it when he shows up in movies right he shows I remember the I mean the big breakthrough figured this out with respect to him because I don't really follow sports but when he showed up in that it was that first Hangover movie and he shows up and you know I was in a theater and like the the audience just goes Banana's crazy they're so excited to see him yeah he evokes Delight I always say that Mike Tyson is the only person I'm aware of that can wear a shirt with his own name on it and it somehow doesn't seem uh wrong in fact it just kind of makes you like him more yeah um it's it his ego feels very contoured in a way that uh he knows who he is and who he was and and yet there's a there's a humbleness woven in maybe as a consequence of all that he's been through I don't know um but yeah people love Mike public loves him now exactly now you know if he shows up to like lecture at Harvard right like I think you're probably going to get a different reaction I don't know I don't know I mean David Simon you know the the guy who wrote The Wire gave a gave a talk at Harvard and um and it sounded to me based on his report of that um which is very interesting in fact um that people adore um people who are connected to everybody in that way like I feel like everybody loves Mike from from above his status the sides below his status he's just sort of he he occupies this this Halo of of love and adoration okay all right yeah um yeah and then look the other side of this is the is is the elites and you kind of alluded to this of the institution so so basically it's like the people who are like at least nominally in charge or feel like that they should be in charge yeah I want to make sure we uh Define elite so you're not necessarily talking about people who are wealthy about people who have authority within institutions so the ultimate definition of an elite is who can get who fired right like that's the the ultimate T who can get who fired boycotted blacklisted ostracized like when push prosecuted jailed like when push comes to shove right I think that's always the question who can destroy whose career and of course you'll notice that that is heavily asymmetric when when these fights play out like there's very clear which side can get the other the other side fired which side which side can't um and so yeah so look I think we live in a period of time where the have gotten to be extreme in a number of dimensions and I think it's characterized by for sure extreme group think extreme sanctimony um extreme you know moral you know I say dudgeon um you know extreme you know this this weird sort of modern puritanism um and then an extreme sort of morality of like punishment and Terror um against their perceived enemies um but but I wanted to I want to go through that because I actually think I actually think that's a very different phenomenon I think what's happening with the elites is very different than what's happening in the in the population at large and then of course I I think there's a feedback back Loop in there which is I think the population at large is not on board with that program right I think the elites are aware that the population is not on board with that program I think they judge the population negatively as a consequence that causes the elites to harden their own positions that causes them to be even more alienating to the population and so they're you know they're in sort of an oppositional negative feedback loop um and yeah it's going to be and you know it's but again it's a sort of question okay who who can get who fired and so you know Elites are really good uh at getting like normal people fired ostracized banned you know hit pieces in the Press like whatever um you know for normal people to get Elites fired they have to really like band together right and really mount a serious challenge which mostly doesn't happen but but might be starting to happen in some cases do you think this um Power of the of the elites over um stemmed from social media sort of going against its original purpose I mean when you think social media you think you're giving each and every person their own little reality TV show their own voice and yet um we've seen a dramatic uptick in the number of cancellations and firings related to immoral Behavior based on things that were either done or Amplified on social media it's almost as if um the public is holding the wrong end of the knife yeah so the way I describe it so so I so I use these two terms and they're somewhat interchangeable but Elites and institutions and then they're they're somewhat interchangeable because who runs the institutions the elites right so it's it's a it's a sort of a self self-reinforcing thing um any know institutions of all kinds institutions everything from you know the government bureaucracies companies nonprofits foundations NOS you know tech companies you know on and on and on like you know people who are in people who are in charge of big complexes and that that carry a lot of basically power and influence and capability and money as a consequence of their positional Authority right so you know the head of a giant Foundation may never have done anything in their life that would cause somebody to have a high opinion of them as a person but they're in charge of this you know gigantic multi-billion dollar complex and have all this power the results and so that's just Define terms institutions um so it's actually interesting uh Gallup uh has been doing polls on The Following on the question of of trust in institutions which is sort of a therefore proxy for trust and Elites uh basically since the early 1970s um and what you find and and they do this across all the categories of big institutions you know basically every every everyone I just talked about a bunch of others big business small business Banks newspapers broadcast television um the military police so they've got like 30 categories or something and basically what you see is almost all the categor basically started in the early ' 70s at like 60 or 70% trust and now they've basic almost across the board they've just done had a complete basically linear slide down for 50 years basically my my whole life um and you know they're they're they're now bottoming out you know Congress and journalists bottom out at like 10 per. right like the the two groups everybody hates are like Congress and journalists um and then it's like a lot of other big institutions are like 20 in their 20s 30s 40s actually big business actually scores fairly high tech score is quite High the military score is quite high but basically everything else has really caved in and so so this is sort of my fundamental challenge to everybody who basically says and you you didn't do this but you you'll hear this the simple form of this which is social media caused the current trouble and it's called this an examp collapse in faith and institutions and and Elites let's call that part of the current trouble um everybody's like well social media caused that I was like well no social media social media is new right in the last you know social media is effectively new practically speaking since 2010 2012 was when it really took off um and so if the trend started in the early 1970s right and has been continuous then we're dealing with something broader um and and and and U Martin G uh wrote I think the best book on this called the Revolt of the public where he goes through this in detail and and he he he does he does say that um social media had a lot to do with what's happened in the last decade but he says yeah if you go back you look further it was basically two things coinciding uh one was just a general change in the media environment and in particular the 1970s is when you started to and especially in the 1980s is when you started to get um specifically talk radio which was a new outlet um and then you also start you also got cable television um and then you also by the way it's actually interesting in the 50s 60s you had paperback books which was another one of these which was an outlet so you you you had like a fracturing of the media landscape that started in the 50s through the 80s and then of course the internet like blew it wide open having said that if the elites and the institutions were fantastic you would know it more than ever information is more accessible and so the other thing that he says and I agree with is the public is not being tricked into thinking at least institutions are bad they're they're they're learning that they're bad right and and and the mystery and therefore the mystery of the gallet pole is why those numbers aren't all just zero right which is you know arguably you know in a lot of cases where they should be I think one reason that oh and by the way he thinks this is bad so he and I have a different view so here's where he and I disagree he thinks this is bad so he's he basically says you you can't replace elites with nothing you can't replace institutions with nothing if if if because what you're just left with is just going to be wreckage you're going to left with a completely basically you know atomized out of control societ that has no ability to Marshal you know any sort of activity in any direction it's just going to be a doggy dog awful you know World um I have a very different view on that which we can which we can talk about yeah I'd love to I'd love to hear your views on that yeah I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor inside 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cardiovascular health and energy regulation if you'd like to try inside tracker you can visit insid tracker.com huberman to get 20% off any of insid tracker's plans again that's insid tracker.com huberman to get 20% off the the quick question I was going to ask before we go there is I think that one reason that I and many other people sort of reflexively assume that social media caused the the demise of our faith in institutions um is well first of all I wasn't aware of this um uh lack of correlation between the the decline in faith and institutions and and the rise of social media but secondarily that we've seen some movements that have um essentially rooted themselves in Tweets in comments and posts that get Amplified and those tweets and comments and posts come from Everyday People in fact I can't name one person who initiated uh a given cancellation or movement because it was the sort of dog piling or mob adding on to some person that was essentially Anonymous so I think that for many of us we we have the bot to use Neuroscience language is sort of a bottomup and a perspective oh you know someone sees something um in their daily life or experiences something in their daily life and they tweet about it or they comment about it or they post about it and then enough people dog pile on the accused that um it picks up force and then the elites feel compelled um obligated to cancel somebody um that tends to be the narrative and so I think the logical conclusion is oh you know social media allows for this to happen whereas normally someone would just be standing on the corner shouting or calling lawyers that don't have faith in them and you know you got the like the Aaron Brockovich model of a you know um you know that turns into a movie but that's a rare case of this lone woman who's got this idea in mind about how um big institution is is doing wrong uh or somebody is doing wrong in the world and then can leverage big institutions excuse me but the way that you describe it is that the elites are um are leading this oh this shift so 100% so what is the role of the public in it I mean I mean just to give it a concrete example um if for instance no one um tweeted or commented a me too or no one tweeted or commented about um some ill behavior of some I don't know University faculty member or um business person would the elite have come down on them anyway oh yeah so what's happening so would based on what I've seen over the years um is is it's it's there is so much astroturfing right now there are entire categories of people who are paid to do this um some of them we call journalists um some of them we call activists some of them we call you know NGO you know nonprofit some of them we call University professors like some of them we call grad students like whatever they're paid to do this you know I don't know if you've ever looked into the misinformation industrial complex there's this whole universe of basically these funded groups that basically do quote unquote misin you know quotequote misinformation and and they're constantly mounting these kinds of attacks they're constantly trying to Jin up this kind of basically Panic to cause somebody to get fired like so it's not a Grassroots it's the opposite of Grassroots no and almost always going to trace these things back it was it was a journalist it was an activist it was a it was a it was a public figure of some kind um these are entrepreneur there's these are entrepreneurs in in a sort of a weird way like they're they're basically they're they're paid their job Mission calling in it's all wrapped up together like they're True Believers but they're also getting paid to do it um and there's a giant funding I mean there's a very large funding complex for this coming from you know certain high profile people who put huge amounts of money into this is this well known yes well so I mean it is in my world so this is what the social media companies have been on the receiving end of for the last decade um is it's this it's it's Bas it's basic it's basically a political media activism complex with very Deep Pockets behind it and you've got people who basically literally people who sit all day and watch the TV network on the other side or watch the Twitter Fe the other side and they wait they they basically wait it's like every politician this has been the case for a long time now every every politician who goes out and gives stump speeches you'll see there's always somebody in the crowd with a camcorder or now with a phone recording them and that's somebody from the other campaign who's paid somebody to just be there and like record every single thing the politician says so that so that when aitt Romney says whatever the 47% thing they've got it on tape and then they clip it and they and they try to make it viral so this stuff is and again like look like these people believe what they're doing I'm I'm not saying it's even dishonest like these people believe what they're doing they think they're fighting a holy war they think they're protecting democracy they think they're protecting civilization they think they're protecting whatever it is they're protecting um but but they and then they know how to use the tools and so they they know how to they know how to try to Jin up the outrage and then by the way sometimes it works in you social Cascade sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't sometimes they Cascade sometimes they don't but if you follow these people on Twitter like this is what they do every day they're constantly trying to like life is fire right I assume that it was really bottom up but it like it's sort of a mid level and then it and then it captures the elites and then the thing takes on a life of its own by the way it also intersects with the trust and safety groups at the social media firms right who are responsible for figuring out who gets promoted who gets banned right across this and you'll notice one large social media company has recently changed hands and has implemented a different kind of set of trust and safety and all of a sudden a different kind of boycott movement has all of a sudden started to work that wasn't working before that and and another kind of boycott movement is not working as well anymore um and so there's like for sure there intermediation happening like look the stuff that's happening in the world today is being intermediated through social media because social media is the defining media of our time um but there are people who know how to do this and and do this for a living so so no I I very much view this as a I I view very much the like cancellation way of like this whole thing it's it's a it's a it's it's an it's an elite phenomenon um and when it appears to be a Grassroots thing it's it's it's either Grassroots among the elites which you know is possible because there's you know a fairly large number of people who are like signed up for that you know that particular Crusade um but there's also a lot of astroturfing that's taking place inside that the question is okay at what point does the population at large get pulled into this and and maybe maybe there are movements at certain points in time where they do get pulled in and then maybe later they get disillusioned and so then there's some question there and then there's another question of like well if the population at large is going to decide what these movements are are they going to be the same movements as that the elites want and are the elites how are the elites going to react when the population actually like fully expresses itself right and so there's and like I said there's a feedback loop between these where the more extreme the elites get they tend to push the population to Mark stream views on the other side and vice versa so it ping ping pongs back and forth and so yeah this is yeah this is our world yeah this explains a lot yeah um I want to make sure that Tai so mik shellenberger Matt taibe a bunch of these guys have done a lot of work just if you just look into What's called the misinformation industrial complex you'll find a network of money and power that is really quite amazing I've seen um more and more shellenberger showing up right um and he's just look he's on this stuff he and he and T they're just they're literally just like tracking money it's just like it's it's very clear how the money flows including like a remarkable amount of money out of the government you know which is of course like in theory very concerning very interesting the government should not be funding programs that take away people's constitutional rights and yet somehow that is what's been happening very interesting yes I want to make sure that I hear your ideas about why the uh decline in confidence in institutions and is not necessarily problematic um is this going to be a uh total Destruction burning down of the forest that will lead to New Life is that your view yeah well so this this is the thing and and look there's a question if here there's a couple questions in here which is like how how bad is it really like how bad are they right and I I you know I I think they're pretty bad uh a lot of them are pretty actually bad um and so so so so that's one big question and then yeah look the other question is like okay if the institution has gone bad or a group of Il have gone bad like can can it's this wonderful word reform right can can can they reformed and everybody always wants to reform everything and yet somehow like nothing ever quite ever gets reformed right um and so people been trying to reform you know housing policy in the area for decades and you know we're not building we building fewer houses than ever before so somehow Reform movement seemed to lead to more just just just more bad stuff but anyway yeah so if you have an existing institution can it be reformed can it be fixed from the inside you like what's happened in universities like there's a lot of there are professors at Stanford as an example who very much think that they can fix Stanford like I don't know what you think it doesn't seem like it's going in productive Direction right now well I mean there are many things about Stanford that function extremely well I it's a big institution it's certainly got its issues like any other place um they're also my employer Mark's giving me some interesting looks he wants me to get a little more vocal here um no no you don't oh no I I mean I think that um I didn't mean to put you on the spot yeah I mean one of the things about being a researcher at a big institution like Stanford is well first of all it meets the criteria that you described before you know you look to the left you look to the right or anywhere above or below you and you have Excellence right I mean I've got Nobel Prize winner below whose daddy also won a Nobel Prize and there his scientific Offspring is likely to win I mean you it it inspires you to do bigger things than uh than one ordinarily would no matter what so there's that and that's great and that persists um there's all the uh bureaucratic red tape about trying to get things done and how to implement decisions is very hard um and there are a lot of reasons for that and then of course there are the things that um you know many people are aware of are there are uh public accusations about people in positions of great leadership and that's getting played out and it's and the whole thing becomes kind of overwhelming and a little bit opaque when you're just trying to like run your lab or live your life and so I think one of the reasons for um this lack of Reform that you're referring to is because um there's no position of reformer right so Deans are dealing with a lot of issues provos are dealing with a lot of issues presidents are dealing with a lot of issues and and then some in some cases and so um you know we don't have a dedicated role of reformer someone to go in and say listen there there's just a lot of fat on this and we need to trim it or we need to create this or do that there there just isn't a system to do that um and that's I think in part because um universities are are built on Old systems and there you know it's like build it's like the New York subway it's still it's amazing it's still works as well as it does and yet it's got a ton of problems also yeah well look so so so the point the point we could we could debate the the the university specifically but the point is like look if you do think ests are going bad then you have to make it number one you have to figure out if you think EST are going bad the population largely does think that and then at the very least the people who run institutions ought to really think hard about what that means but people still strive to go to these places and I still hear from people who like for instance did not go to college are talking about how a University degree is useless they'll tell you how proud they are that their son or daughter is going to Stanford or is going to UCLA or is going to or ban a champagne I mean it's almost like to me that's always the most um you know shocking contradiction is like yeah like these institutions don't matter but then when people want to hold up a card that says why their kid is great it's it's not about how many push-ups they can do or that they started their own business most of the time it's they're going to this University and I think well what's going on here so do you think the median voter in the United States can have their kid go to Stanford no no no and and think the median voter in the United States could have their kid admitted to Stanford even with perfect sat no no no in this day and age the competition is so Fierce that it requires more yeah so like so first of all again we're dealing here yes we're dealing with they small number of very elite institutions people may admire them or not um most people have no connectivity to them whatsoever in the statistics in the polling universities are not doing well the population at large yeah they may have fantasies about their kid going to Stanford but like the reality of it is they have a very very say collapsing view of these institutions um so so anyway this this actually goes straight to the question of Alternatives then right which is like okay if you believe that there's collapsing faith in the institutions if you believe that it is merited at least in some ways um if you believe that reform is effectively impossible then you are faced and we could debate each of those but like the population at large seems to believe a lot of that um then there's a question of like okay like can can it be replaced and if so like are you better off replacing these things basically while the old things still exist or do you actually need to basically clear the field to be able to have the new thing exist the universities are a great case study of this because of the stud because of how student loans work right and the and the way student loans work is to to be able to be a to be to be an actual competitive University and compete you need to have access to federal student because if you don't everybody has to pay out of pocket and it's completely out of reach for anybody other than you know a certain class of either extremely rich or foreign students um so you need access federal student loan facility to get access to federal student loan facility you need to be an accredited University guess who runs the accreditation Council I don't know the existing universities right so it's a it's a it's a it's a it's a it's a it's a self- laundering machine like they they decide who the new universities are guess how many new universities get accredited right each year to be able zero zero right um and so as long as that system is in place and as long as they have the government wired the way that they do and as long as they control who gets access to federal student loan funding like of course there's not going to be any competition like of course there can't be a new institution that's going to be able to get to scale like it's not possible and so if you actually wanted to create a new system that was better in the you know I would argue dozens or hundreds of ways it could obv obviously be better if you were starting today um it probably can't be done as long as existing institutions are actually intact um and this my counter to to Martin which is like yeah we look we we if we're going to tear down the old there may be a period of disruption before we get to the new but we're never going to get to the new if we don't tear down the old when you say counter to Martin you're talking about the author of Revolt of the public Martin gur yeah what Martin gur says is like look he said basically um what Martin says what Martin says is as follows um the elites deserve contempt um but the only thing worse than these Elites that deserve contempt would be no Elites at all right um uh and and and because and he basically says on the other side on the other side of the destruction of the elites and the institutions is is nihilism you're basically left with nothing and and by the way there is a nihilistic streak I mean there's a nihilistic streak in the in the culture in the politics today there are people who basically would just say yeah just tear tear the whole system down right and there without any particular plan for for what follows and so you you I think he he makes a good point in that you want to be careful that you actually have a plan on the other side that you think is actually achievable but but the but again the counter argument to that is if you're not willing to actually tear down the old you're not going to get to the new now what's interesting of course is this is what happens every day in business right so like entire way like how do how do you know that the capitalist system works the way that you know is that the old companies when they're no longer like the best at what they do they get torn down and then they ultimately die and they get replaced by better companies yeah I haven't seen a Sears in a while exactly right and we know what's so interesting is we know in in capitalism and a market economy we know that that's the sign of Health right that's the sign of how the system is working properly right and in fact we get actually judged by antitrust authorities in the government on that basis right it's like the best defense against antitrust charges is no people are like coming to kill us and they're doing like a really good job of it like that that's how we know we're doing our job and in fact in business we are specifically it is specifically illegal for companies in the same industry to get together and plot and conspire and plan and have things like these accreditation bureaus like we we would get if I created the equivalent in my companies of the kind of accreditation Bureau that the universities have I'd get straight to federal prison and a trust violation Sherman Act straight to prison people have been sent to prison for that so in the business world we know that you want everything subject to Market competition we we know that you want creative destruction we know that you want replacement of the old with with Superior new it's just once we get outside of business we're like oh we don't want any of that we want we want basically stagnation and log rolling right and in you know and basically you know institutional you know incestuous like you know entanglements and conflicts of interest you know as far as the eye can see and then we're surprised by the results so let's play it out um as a bit of a thought experiment so let's say that um one small banding together of people who want to start a new University where free exchange of open ideas um where unless somebody has you know egregious Behavior violent Behavior you know truly sexually inappropriate behavior against somebody you know that committing a crime right they're allowed to be there they're allowed to be a student or a faculty member um or administrator and let's just say this um accreditation Bureau allowed student loans for this one particular University or let's say that there was an independent source of funding for that University such that students could just apply there they didn't need to be part of this you know this Elite accredited group um which is sounds very Mafia like frankly um not necessarily violent but certainly coercive in this in and uh in the way that it walls people out um let's say that then there were 20 or 30 of those or 40 of those do you think that over time that model would overtake the the existing model isn't it interesting that those don't exist remember the Sherlock Holmes the dog that didn't bark it is interesting those don't exist right so there's there's two possibilities one is like nobody wants that which I don't believe um and then the other is like the system is wired in a way that will just simply not allow it right and you did a hypothetical in which the system would allow it my response to that is no of course the system won't allow that were the people that band together you know have enough money or or get enough resources to say look we can um you know we can afford to give loans to you know 10,000 students per year you know 10,000 isn't a trivial number when thinking about the size of a university and um and you know they most of them hopefully will grab graduated in four years and there'll be a turnover and um do you think that the great future innovators would tend to orient toward that model um more than they currently do toward the traditional model and what I'm trying to get back to here is how do you think that the current model thwarts Innovation um as well as maybe some ways that it still supports Innovation um certainly cancellation and the the risk of cancellation from the way that we framed it earlier is going to um discourage risk taker um of the category of Risk Takers that take risk in every every domain that really like to fly close to the Sun and sometimes into the Sun or are doing research that is just not politically right yeah looking into issues that you know right that um that you know we can't even talk about on this podcast probably without without causing a distraction of what we're actually trying to talk about that gives up the whole game right there exactly yeah um so the uh you know I keep a file and it's a written file um because I'm afraid to put it in into elic form of all the things that I'm afraid to talk about publicly because I come from a lineage of advisers who are all three died young and I figure if nothing else I'll die and then you know I'll make it into the world and you know when let's say 5 10 years um 20 years and uh if not you know I know with certainty I'm going to die at some point and then we'll see where all those issues stand in any event um is that list getting longer over time or shorter oh it's definitely getting longer isn't that interesting yeah it's get it's getting much longer I mean um there are just so many issues that I would love to explore on this podcast with experts and um that I can't explore just BEC even if I had a panel of them because of the way that things get sound bited and segmented out and taken out of context it's like the whole conversation is lost and so unfortunately there are an immense number of equally interesting conversations um that I'm excited to have uh but it is it is a little disturbing do you remember lenro ISM uh no oh so l so famous in the history of the Soviet Union this is famous thing so there was a gene geneticist named lenko um that's why it sounds familiar but I'm not I'm not calling to mind he was the guy who did he did Communist gen genetics um the field of genetics the Soviets did not approve the field of genetics because of course they believed in the creation of the new man and you know total equality and genetics did not support that um and so if you were doing like traditional genetics you were you know going to be you know at the very least fired if not if not killed um and so this guy Leno stood up and said oh I've got Marxist genetics right I've got like a whole new field of genetics that basically is compliant and then they actually implemented that in the agriculture system of the Soviet Union and it's it's the origin of one of the big reasons that the Soviet Union actually fell which was they ultimately couldn't feed themselves so create a new notion of biology as it relates to genetics politically correct biology right and so so they they not only created it they taught it they they mandated it they required it and then they implemented it in agriculture um so so yeah so it's it's I I never understood there was a bunch of things in history I never understood until the last decade and that's one of them well I censor myself at the level of deleting certain things but I don't contort what I do talk about so I tend to like to play on um Lush Open Fields yeah uh just makes my life but this this goes to the rot this goes to the rot and I'll come back to your question but like this goes to the rot in the existing system which is we we've and by the way I'm no different I'm just like you like I'm not I'm trying not to light myself on fire either but like the the rot in the existing system and by System I mean the institutions and the elites the the rot is that the set of things that are no longer allow I mean that list is like obviously expanding over time um and like that's a real like like historically speaking that doesn't end in good places is is this group of a particular generation that we can look forward to the time when they eventually die off it's sort of the Boomers plus the Millennials so we got a while good good news bad news I mean Gen X is weird right gen I'm gen Gen X Gen X is weird because we we kind of slipped in the middle we we're kind of we were kind of the um I don't like I don't know how to describe it we were the kind of non-political generation kind of sandwiched between the Boomers and the Millennials gen Z is a very o I think open question right now which way they go I could imagine them being actually like much more intense than the Millennials on all these issues I could also Imagine them reacting to the Millennials and being far more open-minded we don't know which way it's gonna go it's gonna go might be different groups of them I mean I'm Gen X also I'm 47 you're 50 5 yeah right so more L same so grew up with some John Hughes films and so where the the jocks and the hippies and the punks and the were all divided they were all segmented but then it all sort of mishmash together a few years later um and I think that had a lot to do with um like you said the sort of a political um aspect to our generation we just knew we the genx just knew the Boomers were nuts right like all the I mean this is the canonic right the one of the great sitcoms of of of the era um was Family Ties right with the character Michael Pete Keaton and he was just like this guy he was just like yeah my Boomer hippie parents are crazy like I'm just going to like go into business and like actually do something productive like there was something like iconic about that character in our culture and you know people like me were like yeah obviously go into business you don't go into like political activism and then you know it's just like man that came whipping back around with the Next Generation Um so just to touch real quick on the University thing so look there are people trying to do and I'm actually going to do a thing this afternoon with the University of Austin which is which is which is which is one of these and so there are people trying to do new universities um you know I I like I say it's certainly possible I hope they succeed I'm pulling for them I think it'd be great I think it'd be great if there were a lot more of them who founded this University uh this is a whole group of people I don't want to um freelance on that because I don't know originally who the idea was University of Austin not UT Austin yeah so this is not UT Austin it's called it's called University of Austin or they call it I think it's what is it uatx um and so um and it's a lot of very sharp people associated with it um and um then they're they're they're going to try to very very much exactly like what you described they're going to try to do a new one I would just tell you like the wall of opposition that they're up against is profound right um and part of it is economic which is can they ever get access to federal student lending and I you know I I hope that they can but I you know it seems nearly inconceivable the way the system is rigged today um and then you know the other is just like they're going to they already have come under I mean any any anybody any anybody who publicly Associates with them who is in traditional Academia immediately gets lit on fire right and there's like you know cancellation campaigns like so they're up against a wall of social ostracism wow um they're up against a wall of you know press attacks um they're up against a wall of um you know people just like doing the thing P pouncing on any anytime anybody says anything they're gonna try to like burn the place down this reminds me of like like um Jerry Springer episodes and Heraldo Rivero episodes where um you know it's like if a teen listen to um you know like Dan Zig or Marilyn Manson type music or Metallica that they were considered a devil worshiper like we right now we just laugh right we're like that's crazy right people listen to music with all sorts of lyrics and ideas and looks and and like that's crazy um but you know there were people legitimately sent to prison I think with the West Memphis 3 right these kids out in West Memphis that looked different acted different were accused of murders that eventually was um made clear they clearly didn't commit but they were imprisoned because of the music they listened to I mean this sounds very similar to that and I remember seeing bumper SAR free the West Memphis 3 and I thought this was some crazy thing you look into it and this isn't uh it's a little bit Niche but um I mean these are real lives and there was a active uh Witch Hunt for people that looked different and acted different and yet now we're sort of in this inverted world where um on the one hand we're all told that we can express ourselves however we want but on the other hand you can't get a bunch of people together to take classes where they learn biology and sociology and econ in Texas wild yes well so you know the simple explanation is it's this is puritanism right so this is the original American Puris puritanism that just like Works itself out through the system in different ways at different times you know there's this phenomen there's a religious phenomenon in America called the Great Awakenings there's just there there'll be these periods in American history where there's basically religiosity Fades and then there will be this Snapback effect where you'll have this basically this you know frenzy basically of religion you know in the old days it would have been you know tent revivals and people speaking in tongues and all this stuff um and then in the modern world it's it's you know it's of the form that that we're living through right now um and so yeah it's just basically these waves of sort of American religious and you know remember like religion in our time religious impulses in our time don't get Express you because we live in we live in more advanced times right we live in scientifically informed times and so religious impulses in our time don't show up as overtly religious right they show up in a secularized form right which of course conveniently is is is therefore not subject to the First Amendment separation church and state right as long as the church is secular there's no problem right and so but but we're we're acting out these kind of religious scripts over and over again and we're in the middle of another religious frenzy there's a phrase that I hear a lot and um I don't necessarily believe it but I want your thoughts on it which is the pendulum always swings back yeah not quite well so that's how I feel too because you know I'll take be great take any number of things that we've talked about and um you know gosh it's so crazy you know the the way things have have gone with institutions or it's so crazy the way things have gone with social media or it's so crazy fill in the blank and people will say well you know the pendulum always swings back like like this like it's the stock market or something right you know after every crash there'll be an eventual boom and vice versa by the way that's not true either right right most most stock markets we have of course survivorship it's all survivor everything is Survivor it's all everything you just said is obviously survivorship by us right so if you look glob most stock markets over time Crash and Burn and never recover the American Stock Market has always recovered right I was referring to the American Stock Market right globally but the reason everybody refers to the American Stock Market is because it's the one that doesn't do that the other 200 or whatever that crash and burn and never recover like let's go check in on the you know on Argentina stock market right now like I don't think it's coming back anytime soon yeah my father is Argentine and immigrated to the US in the 1960s so he would definitely agree with you yeah like it doesn't come it doesn't come you know like when when when their stocks crash don't come back um so and then you know lysenkoism like the Soviet Union never recovered from lysenkoism it never came back it led to the end of the country you know literally the things that took down the Soviet Union were oil and and wheat and the wheat thing you can trace the crisis back to lysenkoism um and so um yeah no look I pendulum always swings back is true only in the cases where pendulum swings back everybody just conveniently forgets all the other circumstances where that doesn't happen one of the things people you see this in business also um people have a really hard time confronting really bad news I don't know if you've noticed that um like every Doctor Who's listening right now is like yeah no but like like there are situ you see in business there are situations that it's Star Trek remember Star Trek the kobashi Maru uh simulator right so the big lesson to become a Star Trek Captain as you had to go through the simulation called the kop Asim Maru and the point was there's no wi it's a no win scenario right and then the and then it turned out like Captain Kirk was the only person never win the scenario and the way that he did it was he he went in ahead of time and hacked the simulator right it was the only way to actually get through and then there was a debate whether to fire him or make him a captain so they made him a captain um and like you know the problem is in real life like we we you do get the kobashi Maru on a regular basis like there are actual no win situations that you can't work your way out of and as a leader you can't ever cop to that right because you have to like carry things forward and you have to look for every every possible choice you can but like every once in a while you do run into a situation where it's really not recoverable and at least I found people just like cannot cope with that and so and so what happens is they basically then they basically just like exclude it from their memory that it ever happened I'm glad you brought up simulators because I want to make sure that we talk about um the new and emerging landscape of AI artificial intelligence um and I could try and uh smooth our conversation of a moment ago uh with the this one uh by creating some clever segue but I'm not going to except I'm going to ask is there a possibility that AI is going to remedy some of what we're talking about let's make sure that we ear Mark that for discussion a little bit later but first off because some of um the listeners of this podcast might not be as familiar with AI as perhaps they should be we've all heard about artificial intelligence people hear about machine learning Etc but um it'd be great if you could Define for us what AI is um people almost immediately hear Ai and think okay robots taking over I'm G to wake up and I'm going to be you know strapped to the bed and my organs are going to be pulled out of me um the robots are going to be in my bank account they're going to kill all my children and um dystopia um for most um clearly that's not the way it's going to go um if you believe that machines can augment human intelligence and human intelligence is a good thing so um tell us what AI is and um where you think it can take us both good and bad yeah so so so there was a big debate when the computer was first invented which was in the 1930s 1940s this people like alen Turing and jnan neyman and these people um and the big debate at the time um was because they knew they wanted to build computers they they had the basic idea um and you know there had been like calculating machines before that and there had been like there had been these looms that you basically program to punch cards and so there was like a there was a prehistory to computers that had to do with building sort of increasingly complex calculating machines so they were kind of on a track but they knew they were going to be able to build they call a general purpose computer that could basically you could program in the way you program computers today um but they had a big debate early on which is should the fundamental architecture of the computer be based on either a like calculating machines like cach registers and looms right and other things like that or should it be based on a model of the human brain um and they actually had this idea of computer's model on the human brain back then um and this was this concept of so-called neural networks um and it's actually fairly astonishing from a from a research standpoint the original paper on neural networks actually was published in 1943 right so so so they didn't have our level of Neuroscience but like they actually knew about the neuron and they actually had a theory of like neurons interconnecting and synapsis and information processing in the brain even even even back then um and a lot of people time basically said you know what we should basically have the computer from the start be model after the human brain because like if we could if the computer could do everything that the human brain can do like that would be the best possible general purpose computer and then you could have it do jobs and you could have it you know create art and you could have it do all kinds of things like humans can do um it turns out that didn't happen um in our world what happened instead was the industry went in the other direction it went basically in the model the calculating machine or the cach register and I I think practically speaking that kind of had to be the case because that was actually the technology that was was practical at the time um but but that's the path and so what what we all have experiences with up to in including the iPhone in our pocket is computers built on that basically calculating Machine model not the human brain model and so what that means is computers as we have come to understand them you know they're basically like you know mathematical sants you know at best right so they're like they're really good at like you know doing lots of mathematical calculations they're really good at executing these extremely detailed computer programs they're hyper literal um one of the things you learn early when you're a programmer is as a prog as the human programmer you have to get every single instruction you give the computer correct because it will do exactly what you tell it to do and and and bugs in computer programs are always a mistake on the part of the programmer interesting you never blame the computer you always blame the programmer because that that that's the nature of the thing that you're dealing with one down score off and the whole thing yeah yeah and it's the it's the programmer's fault um and if you're talk to any programmer they'll agree with this it'll be like yeah if there's a problem it's it's my fault I I did it I can't blame the computer the computer has no judgment it has no ability to interpret synthesize you know develop an independent understanding of anything it's just it's literally just doing what I tell it to do step by step so so for 80 years we've had this just you know this very kind of hyper literal you know kind of kind of model computers these are called uh technically these are what are called V noyman machines based after the mathematician John Von noyman they run in that way and like they've been very successful and very important and our world has been in shaped by them but there was always this other idea out there which is okay how about a completely different approach which is based based much more on how the human brain operates um or or at least our our kind of best understanding of how the human brain operates right because those aren't the same thing um it basically says okay what what if you could have a computer instead of being hyper literal what if you could have it actually be conceptual right um and creative and able to synthesize information right and able to draw judgments and able to you know U uh behave in um you know in ways that are not deterministic but are rather um you know creative right and and so and and and and and the applications for this of course are endless and so for example the self- driving car the only way that you can make a you you cannot program a computer with rules to make it a self-driving car you have to do what Tesla and whmo and these other companies have done now you have to use AI right you have to use this other architecture uh and you have to basically teach them how to recognize objects and images at high speeds the same way basically the same way the human brain does and so those are those are socalled neural networks running inside so essentially let the machine operate based on priors you know we we we almost clipped a uh a boulder going up this particular drive and so therefore this shape that previously the machine didn't recognize as a boulder and now introduces to its catalog of Boulders is that is that a good example or let's even make it even even Starker for self driving car um there's something in the road is it a small child or or a plastic shopping bag being blown by the wind very important difference if it's a shopping bag you you definitely want to go straight through it because if you deviate off course you might you know hit you know you're going to make a fast you know it's the same it's the same challenge we have when we're driving like you don't you don't want to Swerve to avoid a shopping bag because you might hit something that you didn't see on the side it's a small child for sure you want to Swerve right um and so but it's very but like in in that moment when you know small children come in different like shapes and descriptions and are wearing different kinds of clothes they might tumble onto the road the same way a bag would tumble yeah they might look like they're tumbling and by the way they might not be you they might be wearing a Halloween mask right so the face they might not have a recognizable human face right it might or it might be a kid with you know one leg right you definitely want to not hit those right like so there so you you can't this is what basically we figured out is you can't apply the rules-based approach of a vanoyan machine to basically real life and expect the computer to be in any way understanding or resilient to change to to basically things happen in real life and this is why there's always been such a stark divide between what the machine can do and what the and what the human can do um and so basically what's happened is in the last decade that second type of computer the neural network-based computer has started to actually work U it started to work actually first interestingly in Vision recognizing objects and images which is why the self-driving car is starting work um and face recognition face recognition I when I was started off in visual Neuroscience which is really my original home um in Neuroscience the idea that a computer or a camera could do face recognition better than a human was like a very low probability event um based on the technology we had at the time based on the understanding of the face recognition cells and the fusal form gyrus now you would be smartest to put all your money on the machine yeah you know you want to find faces in airports even with masks on and you know at profile versus straight on machines can do it far better than most all people I mean there're the super recognizers but even they can't match the best machines now 10 years ago what I just said was the exact reverse right that's right yeah right so fa faces handwriting um right um uh and then voice right being able to understand voice um like if if you use just as a user if you use Google Docs it has a built-in voice transcription they have sort of the best industry-leading kind of voice transcription if you use a voice transcription Google Docs it's breathtakingly good you you just speak into it and it just like types what you're what you're saying well that's good cuz in my phone every once in a while I'll say I need to go pick up a few things and he'll say I need to pick up a few thongs and so um Apple needs to get on board uh whatever the voice recognition is that Google's using maybe it knows you better than you think um so that was not the topic I was avoiding discussing you know no so that's on the list right that's on your your list um so um so look there there's actually this there's a reason actually why Google's so good and apple is not right now at that kind of thing and it actually goes to actually the It's actually an ideological thing of all of all things um uh apple does not permit pooling of data um for any purpose including training AI whereas Google does um and and Apple's just like stake their brand on privacy and among that is sort of a pledge that they don't like pull your data um and so all of Apple's AI is like AI that has to happen like locally on your phone um whereas Google's AI can happen in the cloud right it can happen across pool data now by the way some people think that that's bad because they think pooling data is bad but but that that's an example the shift that's happening in the industry right now which is you have this separation between the people who are embracing the new way of training AIS and the people who basically for whatever reason are not you um excuse me um you say that some people think it's bad because of privacy issues or they think it's bad because of the A reduced functionality of that AI oh no so you're you're definitely going to get so so um so there's three reasons AIS have started to work one of them is just simply larger data sets um larger amounts of data so so so specifically the reason why objects and images are now the reason machine are now better than humans at recognizing objects images or recognizing faces is because modern facial recognition AIS are trained across all photos on the internet of people billions and billions and billions of photos right unlimited number of photos of people on the internet um attempts to train facial recognition systems 10 or 20 years ago they'd be trained on you know thousands or tens of thousands of photos so the input data is simply much more vast much larger and this is the reason to get to the conclusion on this this is the reason why cat GPT works so well is cat GPT one of the reasons cat GPT works so well is it's trained on the entire internet of text and the entire internet of text was not something that was available for you to train an II on until it came to actually exist itself which is new in the last you know basically decade so in the case of face recognition I could see how having a much larger input data set would be beneficial if the goal is to recognize Mark inuries in face because you are looking for signal to noise against everything else right but in the case of chat GPT when you're pulling all text on the internet and you ask chat GPT to say um construct a paragraph about um Mark Andre's prediction of the future of human beings over the next 10 years um and the uh likely to be most successful Industries give chat jpt that if it's pulling across all text how does it know what is authentically Mark Andre's text because in the case of face recognition you have a um you've got a standard to work from a a verified image versus everything else um in the case of text um you have to make sure that what you're starting with is verified text from your mouth so um which makes sense if it's coming from video but then if that video is um deep faked all of a sudden what's true your your your valid Mark andreon is of question and then everything chat GPT is producing that is then of question right so I would say there's a before and after thing here there's like a before there's like a before chat GPT and after GPT question right because the existence of GPT itself Chang changes changes the the answer so before chat GPT so the reason the version you're using today is trained on data up till September 2021 is they're cut off with their train the training said up until September 2021 almost all text on the internet was written by a human being um and then most of that was written by people under their own names some of it wasn't but a lot but a lot of it was and why do you know this from me is because it was published in a magazine under my name or it's a podcast transcript and it's it's under my name and and generally speaking if you just did a search on like what are things Mark andreon has written and said 90 plus percent of that would be would be correct M and there look somebody might have written a fake You Know parody article or something like that but like not that many people were spending that much time writing like fake articles about like things that I said right not many people can pretend to be you exactly right and so generally speak you can you can kind of get your arms around the idea that there's a corpus of material associated with me or by the way same thing with you there's a corpus of of YouTube transcripts and other your academic papers and talks you've given and you can kind of get your hands around that and that's that's how these systems are trained they they take all that data collectively they put it in there and and that's why this works as well as it does and that's why if you ask chat GPT to speak or right like me or like you or like you know somebody else it it will actually generally do a really good job because it has that it has all of our prior text in it in its training data um that said from here on out this gets harder and of course the reason this gets harder is because now we have ai that can create text we have ai that can create text at industrial scale is it watermarked as AI generated text no no no not how hard would it be to do that I think it's impossible um I think it's impossible there are people who are trying to do that this is a Hot Topic in the classroom I was talking to a friend who's got like a 14-year-old kid in in in a class and there's like these recurring scandals like every kid in the class is using chat GPT to like write their essays or to help them write their essays um and then the um uh the the teacher is using one there's a tool that you can use that it reports to be able to tell you you know whether something was written by CH GPT but it's like only right like 60% of the time and so there was this case where this student wrote an essay where their parent sat and watched them write the essay and then they submitted it and this tool got the conclusion Incorrect and then the student feels outraged because he got unfairly cheated but the teacher is like well you're all using the tool then it turns out there's another tool that basically you feed in text and it actually um is sort of uh it's it's a it's called they call it a summarizer but what it really is is it's a cheating mechanism to to basically um just Shuffle the words around enough so that it sheds whatever characteristics were associated with AI so there's like a an arms race going on in educational settings right now around this exact question I I don't I don't think it's possible to do there are people working on the water marking I don't think it's possible do the water marking and I think it's just kind of obvious why it's not possible to do that which is you can just read the output for yourself it's it's really good how are you actually going to tell the difference between that and something that a real person wrote and then by the way you can also ask chat GPT to write in different styles right so you can tell it like you know write in the style of a 15-year-old right you can tell it to write in the style of you know a non-native English speaker right or if you're a non-native English speaker you can tell it to write in the style of an English speaker uh native English speaker right and so the tool itself will help you evade so I I I I don't think that I think there's a lot of people who are going to want to distinguish right quote real versus fake I I think those days are I think those days are over Genie's out of the bottle I Genie's completely out of the bottle and and by and by the way I actually think this is good this doesn't map to this doesn't map to my worldview of how we use this technology anyway which which we can come back to um so there's that so so so there's that so and and then there's the problem therefore of like the so-called deep fake problem so then there's the problem of like deliberate basically manipulation and that's like you know one of your one one of your many enemies what if your increasingly long list of enemies like mine um who B it's like wow I know how I'm going to get him right I'm going to I'm going to I'm going to create some I'm going to I'm going to use it to create something that looks like a heban transcript and I'm going to have him say all these bad things or a video or a video or a video I mean Joe Rogan and I were deep faked in a video um I don't want to flag people to it I won't so I won't talk about what it was about but um where it for all the world looked like a conversation that we were having and we never had that specific conversation yeah that's right so that's going to happen for sure so there there's so what there's going to need to be is there's need to be basically Registries where basically you you like in your case you will you will um submit your legitimate content into a registry under your unique cryptographic key right and then basically there will be a way to check against that registry to see whether that was the real thing and I think this needs to be done for for sure for public figures it needs to be done for politicians it needs to be done for you know music what about taking what's already out there and being able to authenticate it or not in the same way that um many times per week I get asked is this your account about some a direct message that somebody got on Instagram and I always tell them look I only have the one account this one verified account although now with the Advent of payto playay verification makes it a little less potent as a you know security blanket for um knowing if it's not this account um you know then it's not me but in any case these accounts pop up all the time pretending to be me and I'm I'm you know relatively low on the on the scale not not um not low but relatively low on the scale to say like a um you know like a Beyonce or something like that who has you know 100 of millions of followers so um is there a system in mind where people could go in and and verify text you know click yes or no this is me this is not me and even there there's the opportunity for people to fudge to eliminate things about themselves that they don't want out there by saying no that's not me it wasn't I didn't actually say that or create that yeah no that's right and so yeah so technologically this is actually pretty straightforward so the way to implement this technologically is with public it's called public key cryptography which is the basis for how you know cryptography information is secured in the world today and and so basically what you the implementation form of this would be you would like you would pick whatever is your most trusted Channel and let's say let's say it's your YouTube channel as an example where just everybody just knows that it's you on your YouTube channel because you've been doing it for 10 years or whatever and it's just obvious and you would just publish like in the about me page on you Youtube you would just publish your your your public cryptographic key that's unique to you right and then anytime anybody wants to check to see whether any piece of content is actually you they go to they registry in the cloud somewhere and they basically submit they basically say okay is this him and then they can basically you to see whether somebody with your public key you had actually certified that this was something that that you made um now who runs that registry is an interesting question um if that registry is run by the government we will call that the Min Ministry of truth I think that's probably a bad idea um if that registry is run by a company um we would you know call that basically the equivalent of like a credit bureau or something like that maybe that's how it happens the problem with that is that company now becomes hacking Target number one right of every bad person on earth right because you can you know if anybody breaks into that company you know they can they can they can fake all kinds of things they own the truth right they own the truth right and and by the way Insider threat also their employees can monkey with it right so you have to really trust that company um the third way to do it was with a blockchain right and so this with the crypto blockchain technology you could have a distributed system B distributed database uh in the cloud that is run through a blockchain and then it it it implements this cryptography and the certification process what about Quantum Internet yeah um is that another way to encrypt these things I know um most of our listeners are probably not familiar with Quantum Internet but um put simply it's a way to um secure Communications on the internet uh let's just leave it at that um it's sophisticated and we'll probably do a whole episode about this at some point but maybe you have a succinct way of describing Quantum Internet but um that would be better and if so please please offer it up but is Quantum Internet going to be one way to secure these kinds of um data and resources maybe in in the in the future years in the future we don't yet have working quantum computers in practice so it's not it's not currently something you could do but maybe maybe in a decade or two um tell me I'm going to take a stab at defining Quantum Internet one sentence it's a way in which if anyone work to try and peer in on a conversation on the internet essentially um would be futile because of the way that um uh Quantum Internet uh changes the way that the communication is happening so fast and so many times in any one conversation essentially changing the translation or the language so fast that there's just no way to keep up with it is that more or less accurate yeah con conceivably yeah not yeah not yet but yeah someday so going back to AI you know most people who hear about AI are afraid of AI um and um well I think most who aren't informed this goes back to our Elites versus masses thing oh interesting uh well I heard you say that um you know um and this is from a really wonderful tweet thread that we will link in the show note captions that that you put out um not long ago and that I've read now several times um and that everyone really should take the time to read it probably takes about um 20 minutes to read it carefully and to think about each piece and it's I highly recommend it um but you said um and I'm quoting here let's address uh the fifth the one thing I actually agree with which is AI will make it easier for bad people to do bad things y yeah yeah well so so yes so um so so yeah so so first of all there is a general freakout happening around AI I think it's primarily it's one of these again it's an elite driven freak out I don't think the man in the street knows knows cares or feels one way or the other it's just not a relevant concept and it's probably just sounds like sciencefiction um so there's there's I think there's there's an elite driven freak out that's happening right now um I think that Elite driven freak out has many aspects to it that I think are incorrect which is not surprising I would think that given that I think the elites are incorrect about a lot of things but I think they're very wrong about a number of things they're saying about AI U but that said look it's a it's a this is a very powerful new technology right this is like a new general purpose like thinking technology right so like what if machines could think right and what if you could use machines that think and what if you could have them think for you there's obviously a lot of good that could come from that um but also people you know look criminals could use them to plan better you know crimes um you know terrorists could use them to plan better Terror attacks and so forth and so these are going to be tools that bad people can use to do bad things for sure um I can think of some ways that AI could be leveraged to do fantastic things like um in the realm of medicine um an AI pathologist perhaps can scan 10,000 slides of histology and find the one microtumor Cellar aberration that would turn into a full-blown Tor whereas the um even mildly fatigued or well-rested human Pathologists as great as they come might miss that right and perhaps the best solution is for both of them to do it and then for the human to verify what the AI has found and vice versa right that's right right and that's just one example I mean I can come up with thousands of examples where this would be wonderful um give another one by medicine um so you're talking about something an analytic result which is good and important the other is like the machines are going to be much better bedside manner they're going to be much better at dealing with the patient um and we already know there's already been a study there's already been a study on this so there was already a study done on this um uh where um there was a a study team that scraped thousands of medical questions off of an Internet forum and then they had real doctors answer the questions and then they had basically GPT 4 answer the questions and then they had another panel of doctors score the responses right so there were no patients experimented on here this was a test contained within the within the medical world but and then the the the panel of the judges the panel of doctors the judges scored the answers on both factual accuracy um and on bedside manner um on empathy um and the gp4 was was U was equal or better on most of the faal questions analytically already um and it's not even a specifically trained medical AI um but it was overwhelmingly better on empathy amazing right um and so and and you know I don't think yeah I don't you you Tre patient do you treat patients directly in your work you don't yeah don't we do we run clinical trials right um but I don't I don't do any direct clinical so I I you know I have no direct experience with this but from the surgeons I from like if you talk to surgeons or you talk to people who train surgeons what they'll tell you is like surgeons need to have an emotional remove from their patients in order to do a good job with the surgery the side effect of that and then by the way look it's a hell of a job to have to go in and tell somebody that they're going to die right or that they have so never going to recover they're never going to walk again or whatever it is and so there's a there's sort of something inherent in that job where they need to keep an emotional Reserve from the patient right to be able to do the job and it's expected of them as professionals the machine has no such limitation like the machine can be as sympathetic as you want it to be for as long as you want it to be it can be infinitely sympathetic it's happy to talk to you at 4 in the morning it's happy to sympathize with you it's and by the way it's not just sympathizing you in the way that oh it's just ly you know it's just making up words to lie to you to make you feel good it can also sympathize with you in terms of helping you through all the things that you can actually do to improve your situation right and so you know boy like if you be you know can you keep a patient actually on track with a physical therapy program can you keep a patient on with a nutritional program can you keep a patient off of drugs or alcohol right and if they have a machine medical companion that's with them all the time that they're talking to all the time that's infinitely patient infinitely wise right infinitely loving right and and it's just going to be there all the time and it's going to be encouraging and it's going to be saying you know you did such a great job yesterday I know you can do this again today cognitive behavioral therapy is an obvious fit here these things are going to be great at at CBT and that's that's already starting you can already use chat GPT as a as a CBT therapist if you want it's actually quite good at it and so so there's there's a universe here that's it goes to what you said there's a universe here that's opening up which is what what I believe is it's it's partnership between man and machine right it's it's a symbiotic relationship not an adversarial relationship and so exactly the doctor is going to pair with the AI to do all the things that you described but the patient is also going to pair with the AI and and I think it's I think I think this this partnership that's going to emerge is going to lead among other things to actually much better health outcomes I mean I've relied for so much of my life on excellent mentors mhm right um from a very young age and still now um in order to make best decisions possible with the information I had it um and rarely were they available at 4 in the morning sometimes um but not on a frequent basis and they fatigue like anybody else and they have their own stuff like anybody else baggage events in their life Etc um what you're describing is a sort of AI coach or therapist of sorts that hopefully would learn to identify our best self and encourage us to be our best self and um when I say best self I don't mean that in any kind of pop psychology way I mean I could imagine AI very easily knowing you know how well I slept the night before and what types of good or bad decisions I tend to make at 2 o'clock in the afternoon uh when I've only had five hours of sleep or maybe just less REM sleep the night before I might encourage me to take a little more time to think about something might give me a little uh tap on the wrist through a device that no one else would detect to um you know refrain from something you know never going to judge you it's never going to be resentful it's never going to be upset that you didn't listen to it right it's never going to go on vacation it's going to be there for you like I think this is the this is the way people are going to live it's going to start with kids and then over time it's going to be adults I the way people are going to live is they're going to have a exactly friend therapist companion Mentor coach teacher right assistant and that that that that or or by the way maybe multiple of those it may be that we're actually talking about six like different personas interacting which is a whole another possibility but they're going to have a committee yeah yeah yeah yeah exactly actually different personas and may by the way when there are difficult decisions to be made in your life maybe what you want to hear is the argument among the different personas um and so you're just gonna get you're just going to grow up you're just going to have this in your life and you're going to always be able to talk to it and always be able to learn from it and always be able to help it make you know and like it's just it's going to it's it's going to be a sympotic relationship it's gonna I think it's be a much better way to live I think people are going to get a lot out of it what modalities will it include so I can imagine um my phone has this um engine in it uh this AI companion and I'm listening in headphones as I walk into work and it's giving me some um not just encouragement some warnings some um thoughts that uh things that I might ask Mark andreon today that I might not have thought of uh and so on um I could also imagine it having a more human form I could imagine it being uh tactile having some haptics or tapping to remind me so that it's not going to enter our conversation in a way that that it interferes or distracts you but I would be aware oh right um you know things of that sort I mean how many different modalities are we going to allow these AI coaches to approach us with and is anyone actually thinking about the hardware piece right now because I'm hearing a lot about the software piece uh what does the hardware piece look like yeah so the entrepr this is where Silicon Valley is going to kick in so the entrepreneurial Community is going to try all of those right and by the way the big companies and and and startups are going to try all those and so there's obviously there's big companies that are working you know the big companies that have talked about a variety of these including you know heads up displays arvr you know kinds of things um you know there's lots of people doing voice you know the the voice thing is voice is a real possibility it may just be an earpiece um there's a new startup that just unveiled a new thing um where it's actually they actually project so you'll have like a pendant you wear on like a necklace and it actually like projects like literally It'll like project images like on your hand or like on the table or on the wall in front of you so like maybe that's how it shows up um yeah there are people working on so-called haptic or touchbased uh kinds of things there are people working on actually picking up uh nerve signals like out of your arm um right to be able to um uh to be able to uh there's um people there's you know there's some science for being able to do basically like subvocalization um so maybe you could pick up um you could pick up that way uh bone conduction you know um so yeah these are all going to be tried so so so that's one question is the physical form of it and then and then the other question is the software version of it which is like okay what's the level of abstraction that you want to deal with these things in like you like right now it's like a question answer Paradigm so called chatbot like ask question get an answer ask question get an answer like well you want that to go for sure to more of a fluid conversation you want it to build up more knowledge of who you are and you don't want to have to explain yourself the second time and so forth and then you want to be able to tell it things like well remind me this that or you know be sure and tell me when X um but then maybe over time more and more you want it actually deciding when it's going to talk to you right um and when it thinks it has something to say it says it and otherwise it stays silent and and normally at least in my head unless I make a concerted effort to do otherwise I don't think in complete sentences um so presumably this these AI um these machines could learn my style of fragmented internal dialogue and U maybe I have an earpiece and I'm walking in and and I start hearing something but at some you know advice Etc um encouragement discouragement um but at some point those sounds that I hear in an earphone are very different than seeing something or hearing something in the room we know this based on the neuros science of musical perception and language perception hearing something in your head is very different and I could imagine at some point that the AI will cross a preus where if it has inline wiring to actually control neural activity in specific brain areas and I don't mean very precisely even just stimulating a little more prefrontal cortical activity for instance through the earpiece you know a little ultrasound wave now can stimulate prefrontal cortex in a non-invasive way that's being used clinically and experimentally um that the AI could decide that I need to be a little bit more um context aware right um this is something that uh is very beneficial for those listening that are trying to figure out how to navigate through life it's like you know know the context you're in and know the catalog of behaviors and words that are appropriate for that situation and not others and um you know uh this would go along with agreeableness perhaps but strategic agreeableness right context is important um there's nothing diabolical about that context is important but I could imagine the AI recognizing ah we're entering a particular environment I'm now actually going to ramp up activity in prefrontal cortex a little bit in a certain way that allows you to be more situationally aware of yourself and others which is great unless I can't necessarily shortcircuit that influence because you know at some point the AI is actually then controlling my brain activity and my decision- making and my speech yeah right I think that's what people fear is that once we cross that precipice that we are giving up control to the artificial versions of our human intell yeah and look I think we have to decide we we collectively and we as individuals I think have to decide exactly how to do that and and this is the big thing that I believe about AI there just a much more I would say practical view of the world than a lot of the panic that you hear is just like these are machines they're able to do things that increasingly are like the things that people can do in some circumstances but these are machines we build the machines we decide how to use the machines when we want the machines turned on they're turned on we want them turned off they're turned off um and so yeah so I I think that's absolutely the kind of thing that the individual person should always be in charge of I mean everyone was and I have to imagine some people are still afraid of crisper of Gene editing um but Gene editing stands to revolutionize our treatment of all sorts of diseases um you know inserting and deleting particular genes in adulthood right not having to um recombine in the womb a new a new organism is an immensely powerful tool um and yet the Chinese scientist who did crisper on humans this has been done actually did his postto at Stanford with Steve Quake then went to China did crisper on babies mutated um something I believe it was the HIV one of the HIV receptors I'm told it was with the intention of augmenting human memory it had very little to do in fact with um limiting susceptibility to HIV per se to do with the way that that receptor is involved in human memory um the world demonized that person we actually don't know what happened to them whether or not they have a laboratory now or they're sitting in jail it's unclear but in China and elsewhere people are doing crisper on humans we know this um it's not legal in the US um other countries but it's happening um do you think it's a mistake for us to fear these Technologies so much that we back away from them and end up 10 20 years behind other countries that could use it for both benevolent or um malevolent reasons yeah so there's always and you know the det The Details Matter so it's technology by technology but I would say there's there's two things there's you always have to think in these questions I think in terms of counterfactuals and opportunity cost right and so so chrisper is an interesting one chrisper you at the human genome nature manipulates the human genome like in all kinds of ways yeah when you pick a spouse and you have a child with that spouse you're doing genetic recombination you are really yes you are quite possibly you know if you're gask Khan you know you're determining the future of you know Humanity right by those like like yeah nature I mean look M mutations like so this is the old this is the old question of like basically you know this is all state of nature State of Grace like you know basically is nature good and then therefore artificial things are bad um you know which is kind of sh a lot of people have like ethical views like that um uh I'm always of the view that like Nature's a and wants us dead like Nature's out to get us man like nature wants to kill us right um like nature wants to like evolve all kinds of like horrible viruses nature wants you plagues nature wants to like do you know weather you know like nature nature wants to do all kinds of stuff I mean look the original nature religion was the original religion right like that was the original thing people woried and the reason was because nature was the thing that was out to get you right um before you had scientific and technological methods to be able to to be able to deal with it so so so the idea of not doing these things to me is just saying oh we're just going to turn over the future of Everything To Nature and I don't think that that there's no reason to believe that that leads in a particularly good direction or bad you know that that's not a value neutral decision um and then the related thing that comes from that is this always this question around What's called the precautionary principle um which shows up in all these conversations on things like risper um which basically is this it's this principle that basically says the inventors of a new technology should be required to prove that it will not negative effects before they roll it out um this of course is a very new idea this is actually a new idea in the 1970s um it's actually invented by the German greens the 1970s um before that people didn't think in those terms people just invented things uh and rolled them out and we got all of modern Civilization by people inventing things and and rolling them out um the German greens came up with the precautionary principle for one specific purpose I'll bet you can guess what it is uh it was to prevent famine nuclear power oh it was to shut down attempts to do civilian nuclear power um and if you fast forward 50 years later you're like wow that was a big mistake right um so with with what they said at the time was you have to prove that nuclear reactors are not going to melt down and cause all kinds of problems and of course as an engineer can you prove that that will never happen like you can't like you you can't rule out like things that might happen in the future um and so that that philosophy was used to stop nuclear power by the way not just in Europe but also in the US and around much of the rest of the world if you're somebody who's concerned about carbon emissions of course this is the worst thing happened in the last 50 years in terms of energy we we actually have the Silver Bullet answer to unlimited energy with zero carbon emissions nuclear power we we choose not to do it not only do we choose not to do it we're actually shutting down the plants that we have now right in California we just shut down you know the big plant Germany just shut down their plants Germany's in the middle of an energy war with Russia right that we are informed as existential for the future of Europe but unless the risk of nuclear um Power Plant U meltdown has increased and I have to imagine it's gone the other way yeah um what is the rationale behind shutting down these plants and not expanding them because nuclear is bad right nuclear is Icky nuclear is nuclear nuclear has been tagged it just sounds bad nuclear yeah yeah yeah go nuclear nuclear well so what what happened we didn't shut down postal offices and you hear go postal so what what happened was so so nuclear technology arrived on planet Earth as a weapon right so it arrived in the form of the the first thing they did was in the middle of World War II the first thing they did was the atomic bomb they dropped on Japan and then and then there were all the debates that followed around nuclear weapons and disarmament and there's a whole conversation to be had by the way about that because there's different views you could have on that and then it was in the like 50s and 60s where they started to roll out civilian nuclear power and then there were AC there were there were accidents there was like you know through Mile Island melted down and you know and then Chernobyl you know melted down in the Soviet Union and then even recently you know Fukushima melted down um and so you know there have been meltdowns and so I think it was a combination of it's a weapon um it is sort of icky scientist sometimes say the ick Factor um right um it's sort of it's you know it's radioa it glows green you know by the way it becomes you know becomes like a mythical fictional thing and so you have all these movies of like horrible you know super villains powered by like nuclear energy and all this all this stuff well the intro to The Simpsons right is the nuclear power plant and the three-eyed fish and the you know all all the negative implications of this nuclear power plant run by um at least on The Simpsons idiots um and that is the you know uh the dystopia where people are unaware of just how bad it is and who owns the nuclear power plant right this is like evil you know this like evil capitalist right like so it's like connected to like you know capitalism right um and so we're blaming Matt groaning for the demise of a particular he certainly didn't help he didn't right um but it's literally this amazing thing where if you're just like thinking if you're just thinking like rationally scientifically you're like okay we want to get rid of carbon this is the obvious way to do it so so okay fun fact Richard Nixon um uh did two two things that really mattered on this so one is he defined in 1971 something called project Independence uh which was to create a thousand new state-of-the-art nuclear plants civilian nuclear plants in the US by 1980 and to get the US completely off of oil and cut the entire US Energy grid over to nuclear power electricity cut over to electric cars the whole thing like detach from carbon um you'll notice that didn't happen um why did that not happen because he also created the EPA and the nuclear Regulatory Commission which then prevented that from happening right and the nuclear Regulatory Commission did not authorize a new nuclear plant in the US for 40 years why would he hamstring himself like that you know he got distracted by yeah he had by by Watergate and Vietnam yeah I think ellsburg just died recently right the guy who released the Pentagon papers yeah so complicated but it's yeah yeah yeah exactly it's this thing yeah he didn't you know he left office shortly thereafter he didn't have time to you know fully figure this out I don't know whether he would have figured it out or not you know look Ford could have figured it out Carter could have figured it out Reagan could have figured it out any of these guys could have figured it out it's like the most obvious knowing what we know today it's the most obvious thing in the world the Russia thing is the amazing thing is like Europe is literally funding Russia's invasion of Ukraine by paying them for oil right and they can't shut off the oil because they won't cut over to nuclear right and then of course what happens okay so then here's the other kicker of what happens right which is they won't do nuclear but they want to do Renewables right sustainable energy and so what they do is they do uh solar and wind solar and wind are not reliable because it sometimes gets dark out and sometimes the wind doesn't blow and so then what happens is they fire off the coal plants right and so the actual consequence of the precautionary principle for the purpose it was invented is a massive spike in use of coal that's taking us back over a hundred years yes correct that is the the consequence of the precautionary principle like that's the consequence of that mentality and so it's a failure of a principle on its own merits for the thing it was designed for and then you know there there's a whole movement of people who want to apply it to every new thing and and and this is the Hot Topic on AI right now in Washington which is like oh my God these people have to prove that this can never get used for bad things sorry I'm hung up on this nuclear thing and and um I wonder uh can it just be renamed I mean seriously I mean there is something about the naming of things we know this in biology right I mean um you know lamaran Evolution and things like that bad these are bad words in biology but we had a guest on this podcast OD did Ravi who's over in Israel who's shown you know inherited traits but if you talk about as lamaran then it has all sorts of negative implications but he's the his discoveries have important implications for everything from inherited trauma to treatment of disease I mean there's all sorts of positives that await us if we are able to reframe our thinking around something that yes indeed could be used for evil right um but that has enormous potential and that is in agreement with nature right this fundamental truth that U at least to my knowledge no one is revising in any significant way anytime soon so what if it were called something else it could instead of nuclear it's it's called um you know sustainable right I mean it's amazing how marketing can can shift our perspective of robots for instance or um anyway I'm sure you can come up with better examples than I can but oh is there a uh good solid PR firm working from the nuclear side thian th oh thian like if she got if she was in favor of it yeah which by the way she's not she's dead set against it she said that 100% yeah B based on based on I mean principles the prevailing the prevailing ethic and environmentalism for 50 years is that nuclear is evil like they won't consider it there are by the way certain environmentalists who disagree with this and so Stuart brand is the one that's been the most public and he has impeccable credentials in the space and he wrote this Po's catalog catalog guy yeah and um he's written a whole bunch of really interesting books since and he he wrote a recent book that goes through in detail he's like yes obviously the correct environmental thing to do is nuclear power um and we should be we should be implementing project Independence we should be building a thousand we should specifically we should he didn't say this but this is what I would say we should hire Charles Coke we should hire Coke Industries right and they should build us a thousand nuclear power plants right and then we should give them the presidential metal of freedom for saving the environment and that would put us independent of our Reliance on oil yeah we're done with oil like we're just think about what happens we're done with oil zero emissions we're done with the Middle East we're done we're done we we're not drilling we're not drilling on American land anymore we're not drilling on foreign land like we have no military entanglements in places where we're drilling we're not you know despoiling Alaska we're not nothing no offshore rigs no nothing we're done and you basically just you build state-of-the-art plants engineered properly you have them just completely contained when there's nuclear waste you just in tumb the waste right in concrete so it it it just sits there you know forever um it's just very small you know footprint you know kind of kind of thing um and you're just done and so this is like the to me it's like scientifically technologically this is just like the most obvious thing in the world um it's a massive tell on the part of the people who claim to be Pro environment that they're not in favor of this and if I were to say um tweet that I'm Pro nuclear power because it's the more sustainable form of power if if I hypothetically did that today um what would happen to me in this be a crypto fascist you know dirty evil capitalist you know Monster how dare you right I'm unlikely to run that experiment I was just curious that was what we call a gonan experiment experiment in our you're a Terri Andrew you're a terrible human being w we we were looking for evidence that you're a terrible human being and now now we know it right and so this is a great example of of the I I gave Andrew a book on the way in here with this my favorite new book it's the title of it is when reason goes on holiday um and this is a great example of it is the people who are the people who simultaneously say they're environmentalists and say they're anti- nuclear power like the positions simply don't reconcile but that doesn't bother them like at all so clear I predict none none of this will happen amazing uh I need to learn more about nuclear power long coal long coal long coal invest in Coal because you think we're just going to revert it's the energy source of the future well because it can't be solar and wind because they're not reliable so you need something if it's not nuclear it's going to be either like oil natural gas or coal and you're unwilling to say bet on nuclear because you don't think that um the sociopolitical elitist trends that are driving against nuclear are likely to dissipate anytime soon not a chance I I can't imagine it would be great if they did but the that they are the the powers that be are very locked in on this as a position and look they've been saying this for 50 years and so they'd have to reverse themselves off of a bad position they've had for 50 years and people really don't like to do that one thing that's good about this and other podcasts is that young people listen and they eventually will take over yeah and by the way I will say also there are nuclear entrepreneurs um so there are actually a there are a bunch on the point of young kids there are a bunch of of young entrepreneurs who are basically not taking no for an answer um and they're trying to develop in particular there people trying to develop new very small form factor uh nuclear power um plants um with a variety of possible use cases um so you know look maybe you know maybe they show up with a better mous trap and people take a second look but we'll see we just rename it um so my understanding is that you think we should go all in on AI with the constraints that we discover we need in order to reign in safety and things of that sort not unlike social media yeah not unlike the internet not unlike what we should have done with nuclear power and in terms of the um near infinite number of ways that AI can be envisioned to harm us how do you think we should cope with that um psychologically you know because I can imagine a lot of people listening to this conversation are thinking okay that all sounds great but there are just too many wh ifs that are terrible right you know what if the machines take over what if you know all the silly example I gave earlier but um you know what if one day I could log into my um you know hard- earned bank account and it's all gone right you know the AI version of myself like ran off with someone else and with all my money right right my AI coach abandoned me for somebody else after it learned all the stuff that I taught it yeah it took off with somebody else yeah stranded you know and it has my bank account numbers like this kind of thing right you could really make this scenario horrible if if you kept going yeah um well we can throw in a benevolent example as well um to counter it but um just kind of fun to think about where the human mind goes right yeah so first I say we got to separate the real problems from the fake problems and so there's a lot a lot of the science fiction scenarios I think are just not real and the on that you just cited as an example like it's not that's not what's going to happen and I can explain why that's not what's going to happen so you should there's a set of there's a set of fake ones and the fake ones are are ones or the ones that just aren't I think technologically grounded that aren't rational it's the a is going to like wake up and decide to kill us all it's going to like yeah it's going to develop the kind of agency where it's going to steal our money you know money and our spouse and everything else our kids um like that's just that's not how it works um and then there's also all these concerns you know destruction of society concerns and this is you know misinformation hate speech deep fakes like all that stuff uh which I I don't think is a real is a is actually a real problem um and then there's a people have a bunch of economic concerns around um you know what's going to take all the jobs and all those kinds of things we could talk about that I don't think those are those are those are I don't think that's actually the thing that happens but then there are two actual real concerns that I actually do very much agree with and one of them is is what you said which is um bad people doing bad things and there there's a whole set of things to be done inside there the big one is we should use AI to build defenses against all the bad things right and so for for example there's a concern AI is going to make it easier for for bad people to build pathogens right design pathogens in Labs which you know bad people bad scientists can do today but this is going to make it easier easier to do well obviously we should have the equivalent of an operation warp speed operating you know in perpetuity anyway right but then we should use AI to build much better biod defenses right and we should be using AI today to design like for example full spectrum vaccines against every possible form of pathogen right and so so defensive mechanism um hacking you can use AI to build better defense tools right and so you should you should have a whole new kind of Security Suite wrapped around you wrapped around your data wrapped around your money where you you you're having AI uh repel um attacks uh disinformation hate speech deep fakes all that stuff you should have an AI filter when you use the internet where it you know you shouldn't have to figure out whether it's really me or whether it's it's a madeup thing you should have an AI assistant that's doing that for you oh yeah I mean these these little banners and cloaks that you see on social media like this has been deemed misinformation you know if you're me you always click right because you're like what's behind the scrim and then um or this is a I don't always look at the the this image is is gruesome type thing sometimes I just pass on that but if it's something that um seems debatable of course you look well and you should have you should have an AI assistant with you when you're on the internet and you should be able to tell that AI assistant what you want right so yes I want the full I want the full experience to show me everything um I want it from a particular point of view and I don't want to hear from these other people who I don't like I by the way it's G be my eight-year-old is using this I don't want anything that's going to cause a problem and I want everything filtered and and and AI based filters like that that you program and control are going to work much better uh and and be much more honest and straightforward and clear and so forth than what we have today so so anyway so so basically what I want people to do is think every time you think of like a risk of how it can be used just think of like okay we can use it to build a countermeasure and the great thing about the countermeasures is they can not only offset AI risks they can offset other risks right because we already live in a world where pathogens are a problem right um we ought to have better vaccines um anyway right uh we already live in a world where there's cyber hacking and cyber terrorism there already live in a world where there's bad content on the internet and we have the ability now to build much better AI power tools to deal with all those things I also love the idea of that AI Physicians um you know getting decent Health Care in this country is so difficult even for people who have means or insurance I mean the number of phone calls and weights that you have to go through to get a referral to see a specialist I mean it's absurd like I mean the process is is absurd I mean it makes one partially or frankly ill just to go through the process of having to do all that I don't know how anyone does it um and granted I don't have um the highest degree of patience but I'm pretty patient and it drives me insane um to even just get a remedial care but um so I can think of a lot of um but benevolent uses of AI and I'm I'm grateful that you're bringing this up and uh here and that you've tweeted about it in that thread again we'll refer people to that and that you're thinking about this I have to imagine that in your role as investor um nowadays that you're also thinking about AI quite often um in terms of all these roles um and so does that mean that there are a lot of uh young people who are really bullish on AI and are going for it yeah okay this is here to stay yeah okay yeah oh yeah that time okay unlike crisper which is sort of in this Lial place where biotech companies aren't sure if they should invest or not in in uh in crisper because it's unclear whether or not the governing bodies are going to allow Gene editing right just like it was unclear uh 15 years ago if they were going to allow gene therapy but now we know they do allow gene therapy and immunotherapy okay so there is a fight having said that there is a fight there's a fight happening in Washington right now over exactly what should be legal or not legal um and there's quite a bit of risk I think attached to that fight right now because there are some people in there that are being telling a very effective story to try to get people to either Outlaw AI or or specifically limit it to a small number of big companies which I think is potentially disastrous um by the way the EU also is like super negative um you know the EU has turned super negative on basically all new technology so they're moving to try to Outlaw AI which if they succeed Outlaw AI like flat out don't want it but that's like saying you're gonna Outlaw the internet I don't see how you can stop this train and frankly they're not a big fan of the internet either so like they're I I think they regret the EU has a very especially the EU bureaucrats the people who run the EU in Brussels have a very negative View on a lot of modernity but what I'm hearing here you know calls to mind things that I've heard people like David gogin say which is you know there's so many um lazy undisciplined people out there that nowadays it's easier and easier to become exceptional I've heard him say something to that extent it almost sounds like there's so many countries that are just backing off of um particular Technologies because it just sounds bad from the pr perspective um that you know it's creating great kind of low hanging fruit opportunities for people to bar forward and countries to barge forward if they're willing to embrace this stuff it is but number one you have to have a country that wants to do that um and and those exist and there countries like that um but and then the other is look they they need to be able to withstand the attack from uh stronger countries that don't want them to do it right so like EU like the EU has you know nominal control over like what whatever it is 27 or whatever member countries so like even if you're like whatever the Germans get all fired up about whatever like Brussels can still in a lot of cases just like flat out basically control them and tell them not to do it right and then the US I mean look we have you know we have a lot of control over a lot of the world but it sounds like we sit somewhere sort of in between like right now people are developing AI Technologies in US companies right so it is happening yeah today today it's happening but like I said there's a set of people who are very focused in Washington right now about trying to either ban it outright um or trying to as I said limit it to a small number of big companies um and then look China's got a whole the other part of this is China's got a whole different kind of take on this right than we do and so they're of course going to allow it for sure but they're going to allow it in the ways that that their their system wants it to happen right which is much more for population control um and to implement authoritarianism um and then of course they they they are going to spread their technology and their vision of how Society should run across the world right so we're we're we're back in a cold war Dynamic like we were with the Soviet Union where there are two different systems that have fundamentally different views on on issu you know Concepts like freedom and and individual choices freedom of speech and so on um and you know we know where the Chinese stand we're still figuring out where we stand right there a lot of so I'm having a lot of schizophrenic I'm having specifically a lot of schizophrenic conversations with people in DC right now where if I talk to them in China doesn't come up they just like hate Tech they hate American tech companies they hate AI they hate social media they hate this they hate that they hate crypto they hate everything and they just want to like punish and like ban and like they're just like very very negative but then if we have a conversation half hour later when we talk about China then the conversation totally different now we need a partnership between the US government and American tech companies to defeat China it's like the exact opposite a discussion right is that fear or competitiveness on China specifically on on in terms of the the US response in Washington when you know you bring up these Technologies like you know I'll lump crisper in there things like crisper nuclear power AI it all sounds very cold very dystopian to a lot of people and yet there are all these benevolent uses as we've been talking about and then you say you raise the issue of China and then it sounds like this big you know Dark Cloud emerging and then all of a sudden you know it's we need to galvanize and and develop these Technologies to counter their effort so is it fear of them or is it competitiveness or both well so without them in the picture um you just have this and basically it's there's an old bedan was it saying as uh me against my brother me and my brother against my cousin me and my brother and my cousin against you know the world right like so so with it's it's actually it's evolution in action way I think would think about it is if there's no external threat then the conflict turns inward um and then and then at that point there's a big fight between specifically Tech and then I was just say generally politics and and my interpretation of that fight is it's a fight for status it's it's fundamentally a fight for status and for power which is like if you're in politics you like this you like the status quo of how power and Status work in our society you don't want these new technologies to show up and change things because change is bad right CH change threatens your position it threatens your you know the respect that people have for you and your control over over things um and so I think it's primarily a status fight which we could talk about um but the the China thing is just like a straight up geopolitical USS them you know like I said it's like a cold war scenario and you know look 20 years ago the prevailing view in Washington was we need to be friends with China right and we're going to be trading partners with China and yes they're a totalitarian dictatorship but like if we trade with them over time they'll become more democratic in the last five to 10 years it's become more and more clear that that's just not true um and now there's a lot of people in both political parties in DC who very much regret that and want to change too much more of a sort of a cold war footing are you willing to comment on Tik Tock and Technology that emerge from China that are in um widespread use within the US like how much you trust them or don't trust them I can um go on record myself by saying that early on when Tik Tok was released we were told at Stanford faculty that we should not and could not have Tik Tok accounts nor WeChat accounts so start with there are a lot of really bright Chinese Tech entrepreneurs and Engineers who are trying to do good things I'm totally positive about that so I think that many of the people like me mean very well but the Chinese have a specific system and the system is very clear and unambiguous and the system is everything in China is owned by the party it's not it's not even know by the state it's own by the part it's own by the Chinese Communist party so the Chinese Communist Party owns everything they control everything by the way it's actually illegal to this day it's illegal for an for an investor to buy equity in a Chinese company there's all these like basically legal ma machinations that people do to try to do something that's like economic equivalent to that but it's actually still illegal to do that the CH Chinese have no intention the Chinese Communist party has no intention of letting foreigners own any of China like zero intention of that and they they they regularly move to make sure that that doesn't happen so so so they own everything they control everything so I was sorry to interrupt you but people in China can invest in American companies and do all the time well they can subject to US Government constraints there there is a there is a US government system that attempts to mediate that called cifas um and there are more and more there are more and more limitations being put on that but if you can get through that approval process then legally you can do that whereas the same is not true with respect to China um and so um so so they just have a system and so if you're if you're the CEO of a Chinese company it's not optional if you're the CEO of B Daner CEO 10 it's not opt your relationship with the Chinese Communist party is not optional it's required and what's required is you are a unit of the party and you and your company do what the party says and when the party says we get full access to all user data in America you say yes when the party says you change the algorithm to optimize to a certain social result you say yes right so so it's just it's whatever it's whatever is whatever xuin Pang and his party cadres decide and that's what's gets implemented if you're the CEO of a Chinese tech company there is a political officer assigned to you who has an office down the hall um and at any given time he can come down the hall he can grab you out of your staff meeting or board meeting and he can take you on the hall and he can make you sit for hours and study Marxism and shenping thought and quiz you on it and test you on it w and you'd better pass the test right like so it's like a straight political control thing and then by the way if you get crosses with them like you know so when we see um uh Tech Founders getting called up to Congress for um you know what looks like interrogation but it's probably pretty light interrogation compared to what happens in other countries yeah it's it's a it's a it's state it's state power they they just they just have this view of top down state power and they view it's the their system and they view that it's necessary for lots of historical and moral reasons that they've defined and that's how they run and then they've got a view that says how they want to propagate that Vision outside the country and they have these programs like Belton Road right um that basically are intended to propagate kind of their Vision worldwide um and so they are who they are like I will say that they don't lie about it right they're they're very straight forward they give speeches they write books you can buy X Jinping speeches he goes through the whole thing they have they their Tech 2025 plan you know this is like 10 years ago their whole AI agenda it's all in there and is there goal that you know in 200 years 300 years that China is the superpower controlling everything about yeah or 20 years 30 years or two years three years yeah well they got a shorter Horizon I mean look they're yeah they're they're I mean if if you're it's you know I don't know everybody's a little bit like this I guess but yeah if you're they want to win well the the crisper in humans example that I gave earlier was interesting to me because first of all I'm a neuroscientist and they could have um edited any genes but they chose to edit the genes involved in um the attempt to create super memory babies right which presumably grow into Super memory adults um and whether or not they succeeded in that isn't clear those babies are alive and presumably by now walking talking as far as I know whether or not they have super memories isn't clear but um China is clearly unafraid to augment biology in that way um and I believe that that's inevitable that's going to happen elsewhere um probably first for the treatment of disease but at some point I'm assuming people are going to augment biology to make smarter kids I mean people um not always but um often will select based on the traits they would like their children to inherit so this happens far more frequently than could be deemed uh bad because either that are people are bad because people do this all the time selecting mates that have physical and psychological and cognitive traits that you would like your Offspring to have crisper is a more targeted approach of course you know the reason I'm kind of giving this example and and examples like it is that I feel like so much of the way that um governments and the and the public react to Technologies is to just you know take that first Glimpse and it just feels scary yeah um you think about the old Apple ad of the you know 1984 ad I mean there was one very scary version of the personal computer and computers and robots taking over and everyone like automatons and then there was the Apple version where it's all about creativity love and peace and it had this pseudo psychedelic California thing going for it again great marketing seems to convert people's thinking about technology such that what was once viewed as very scary and dangerous and dystopian is like an oasis of opportunity so why are people so afraid of new technologies so this is a thing I've tried to understand for a long time because the history is so clear um and the history basically is every new technology is greeted by what's called a moral Panic um and so it's basically this like hysterical freak out of some kind that causes people to basically predict the end of the world and you go back in time and actually this historical sort of effect it happens even in things now where you just B back and it's ludicrous right and so you mentioned earlier the satanic Panic of the of the 80s and you know the concern around like heavy metal music right before that there was like a freak out around comic books you know in the 50s there was a freak out around jazz music in the 20s and 30s you know it's devil music um you know there was a freak out the arrival of bicycles caused a moral panic in the like 1860s 18 bices bicycles yeah so there was this thing at the time so bicycles were the first um they were the first very easy to use personal transportation thing that basically let kids travel between towns um um uh you know quickly um without any overhead you know you have to take care of a horse just jump in a bike and go um and so it was there was a hysterical Panic specifically around at the time young women um who for the first time were able to venture outside the confines of the town to maybe go have a boyfriend in another town um and so the magazines at the time ran all these stories on this phenomenon medical phenomenon called bicycle face and the idea of bicycle face was the exertion caused by pedaling a bicycle would cause your face your face would Grimace and then if you r on the bicycle for too long your face would lock into place and right and then sorry just right and then you would be you would be unattractive and therefore of course unable to then you know get married um uh cars there was a moral Panic around car red flag laws there were all these laws that greeted the the automobile automobile freak people out so there are all these laws if in the early days the automobile um in a lot of places you had to um you would take a ride an automobile uh and Automobiles they broke down all the time so it would be you only rich people had automobiles it' be you and your mechanic in in the car right uh for when it broke down and then you had to hire another guy um to walk 200 yard in front of the car with a red flag um and he had to wave the red flag and so you could only drive as fast as he could walk because the red flag was to warn people that the that the car was coming and and then and then in I think it was Pennsylvania they had the most Draconian version which was uh they were very worried about the cars scaring the horses um and so there was a law that said if you saw a horse coming um you need to stop the car you had to disassemble the car and you had to hide the pieces of the car behind the nearest hay bale wait for the horse to go by and and then you could put your car back together so anyway this example is electric lighting there was a panic around like whether was is going to come like completely ruin you know this is going to completely ruin like the Romance of the dark and it was going to cause you know you know a whole new kind of like terrible civilization where everything is always brightly lit so there's just like all these examples and so it's like okay what on Earth is happening that this is always what happens and so I finally found this book that I think has a has a good model for it a book is called men machines in modern times and it's written by this MIT Professor like 60 years ago so it it predates the internet um but it uses a lot of historical examples and what he says basically he says there's there's actually a three-stage response there's a three-stage societal response to new technologies it's very predictable he said stage one is um basically just denial uh just ignore like we just like don't pay any attention to this nobody takes it seriously we just like there's just a blackout on the whole topic um he says stage uh that's stage one stage two is rational counter argument um so stage two is where you line up all the different reasons why this can't possibly work it can't possibly ever get you know know cheap or you know this that you know not fast enough or whatever the thing is and then he says stage three he says is when the name calling begins um so he said stage three is like when right right so when they failed to ignore it and they failed to argue Society out of it I love it they move to the name calling right and what's the name calling the name calling is this is evil this is moral Panic this is evil this is terrible this is awful this is going to destroy everything like don't you understand like you know all this you know it's just it's just like this is this is horrifying and you you know the person working on are being Reckless and evil and you know all all this stuff and you must be stopped and and he said the reason for that is because basically fundamentally what these things are is there a war over status um it's a it's it's a war over status and therefore a war over power and then of course ultimately money but but stat status human status is the thing and so and because what he says is what what is the societal impact of a new technology the societal impact of a new technology is it reord status in the society so the people who are specialists in that technology become High status and the people who are specialists in the previous way of doing things become low status and generally people don't adapt right generally if you're the kind of person who is high status because you're you're you're an evolved adaptation to an existing technology you're probably not the kind of person that's going to enthus enthusiastically try to replant yourself onto a new technology and so and so this is like every politician who's just like in a complete state of panic about social media like why are they so freaked out about social media is because they all know that the whole nature of modern politics has changed the entire battery of techniques that you use to get elected before social media are now obsolete obviously the best new politicians of the future are going to be 100% creations of social media and podcast and podcast and we're seeing this now as we head towards the next presidential election that podcasts uh clearly are going to be featured very heavily in that next election because long form content is a whole different landscape so this is exact so this is the this is so funny so Rogan Rogan's had like what like he's had like Bernie he's had like Tulsi he's had like a whole series of RK most recently and that's created a lot of controvers but also my understanding he's I'm sure he's invited everybody I'm sure he I'm sure he'd love to Biden on I'm sure he'd Lov to I'm sure you'd have to ask him I mean I think that um you know every podcaster has their own ethos around who they invite on and why and how um so I certainly can't speak for him but um but I have to imagine that any opportunity to have true long form discourse that would allow people to really understand people's positions on things I have to imagine that he would be in favor of that sort of yeah or somebody else would right you know some some other top top podcast outly would right and so so there's a if my point exactly I totally agree with you but my point is if if you're a politician if you're if you're say a legacy politician right you have the option of embracing the new technology you can do it anytime you want right but you you don't they're not they won't like they won't do it and why won't they do it well okay first of all they want to ignore it right they want to pretend that things aren't changing you know second is they want like they have rational counterarguments for like why the existing campaign system works the way that it does and this and that and the existing media networks and like here's how you like do things and here's how you give speeches and here's the clothes you wear and the tie and the thing and the pockets Square you got your whole system it's how you succeeded was coming up through that system so you got all your arguments as to why that won't work anymore and then and then we've now proceeded to the the name calling phase which is now it's evil right now it's evil for somebody to show up in you know on a on a stream God forbid for three hours and actually say what they think right it's going to destroy Society right so it's exactly right it's like it's it's a it's a classic example of this pattern and anyway so mor Morrison says in the book um basically this is the forever pattern like this will never change this will this is one of those things where you can learn about it and still nothing the entire world could learn about this and still nothing changes because at the end of the day it's not it has it's not the tech that's the question it's the it's the reordering of status um I have a lot of thoughts about the podcast component uh I'll just say this because I want to get back to um the topic of innovation of Technology um but on a long form podcast there's no um safe Zone you know the person can get up and walk out but if the person interviewing them and certainly Joe is um the best of the very best if not the most skilled podcaster in the entire universe at continuing to press people on specific topics when they're you know trying to Bob and weave and wriggle wriggle out he'll just keep you know either drilling or alter the question somewhat in a way that forces them to finally come up with an answer of some sort and I think that probably um puts certain people's cortisol levels through the roof um such that they just would never go on there I think there's another deeper question also or another question along with that which is how many people actually have something to say real substance right like how many people can actually talk in a way that's actually interesting to anybody else for any length of time like how much substance is there really and like a lot of historical politics was to be able to manufacture a facade where you honestly as far as I you can't tell like how How deep the thoughts are like even if they have deep thoughts like it's kept it's kept away from you they would certainly never cop to it it's going to be an interesting next what is it about uh you know 20 months or so um into the next elction panic and the name calling have already started so yeah it's yeah I was going to say this list of three things denial um you know uh the counterargument and name calling it seems like with AI um it's already just jumped to numbers two and three yes correct right we're already at two and three and it's kind of leaning three yes yeah yeah that's correct so is unusual just because um it had so new technologies that take off they almost always have a prehistory they almost always have a 30 or 40 year history where people tried and failed to get them to work before they took off AI has an 80-year prehistory so it has a very long one um and then it it it just it all of a sudden started to work dramatically well like seemingly overnight and so it it went from basically it as far as most people were concerned it went from it doesn't work at all to it works incredibly well in one step and that almost never happens so so I actually think that's exactly what's happening I think it's actually speedrunning this progression just just because if you use mid Journey or you use GPT or any of these things for five minutes you're just like wow like obviously this thing is going to be like obviously in my life this is going to be the best thing ever like this is amazing there's all these ways that I can use it and then and then therefore immediately you're like oh my God this is going to transform everything therefore step three right straight to the name calling in the face of all this uh there are innovators out there maybe they are aware they are innovators um maybe they are already starting companies or maybe uh they are just some uh young or older person who has these five traits in a abundance or doesn't but knows somebody who does and is partnering with them in some sort of idea um and you have an amazing track record at identifying these people um I think in part because you have those same traits yourself I've heard you say the following uh the world is a very malleable place if you know what you want and you go for it with maximum energy and drive and passion the world will often reconfigure itself around you much more quickly and easily than you would think that's a remarkable quote um because it says at least two things uh to me one is that um you have a very clear understanding of the inner workings of these great innovators we talked a little bit about that earlier these five traits Etc but that also you have an intense understanding of the world landscape and the way that we've been talking about it for the last hour or so is that it is a really intense and kind of oppressive landscape you've got countries and organizations and Elites and journalists that you know that are trying to not necessarily trying but are suppressing The Innovation process I mean that's sort of the the picture that I'm getting so you it's like we're trying to innovate inside of a vice that's getting progressively Tighter and yet this quote argues that it is the the person the boy or girl man or woman who says well you know what that all might be true but my view of the world is the way the world's going to bend or I'm going to create a dent in that Vice that allows me to exist the way that I want or you know what I'm actually going to uncurl the vice the other direction and so um I'm at once picking up a sort of um pessimistic glass half empty uh view of the world as well as a glass half full View and um so tell me about that and and tell if you would could you tell us about that from the perspective of someone listening who is thinking you know I've got an idea and I know it's a really good one because I just know I might not have the confidence of extrinsic reward yet but I just know there's a seed of something um what does it take to Foster that and um how do we Foster Real innovation in the landscape that we're talking about yeah so part is I think you just I think one of the ways to square it is I think you you as the innovator need to be signed up to fight the fight right so and again this is where like the fictional portrayals of startups I think take people off course or even scientists or whatever because they when there great success stories they get kind of prettified uh after the fact um and they made they get made to be like cute and fun and it's like yeah no like if you talk to anybody who actually did any of these things like no there was it was just like these things are always just like brutal exercises and just like sure willpower and fighting you know fighting fighting forces that are trying to get you so um so so part of it is you just you have to be signed up for the fight and this kind of goes to the conscientiousness thing we're talking about we also my partner Ben uses the term courage a lot right which is some combination of like just stubbornness but coupled with like a willingness to take pain um and not stop um and you know have people think very bad things of you for a long time until it turns out you know you hopefully prove yourself prove yourself correct um and so you have to be will to do that like it's it's a these are it's it's a context sport like it's these aren't easy roads right it's a context sport so you have to be signed up uh for the fight the advantage that you have as an innovator um if is that is at the end of the day the truth actually matters um and all the arguments in the world classic Victor Hugo quote is there's nothing more ful in the world an idea whose time has come right like if if it's real right and this is a just pure substance if the thing is real if the idea is real like if it's a legitimately good scientific discovery you know about how nature works if it's a new invention um if it's a new work of art and if it's real you know then you you you do at the end of the day you have that on your side um and all of the people who are fighting you and arguing with you and telling you no they don't have that on their side right it's not like they're showing up with some other thing and they're like my thing is better than your thing like that's not the main problem right the main problem is like I have a thing I'm convinced everybody else is telling me it's stupid wrong it should be illegal whatever the thing is but at the end of the day I still have the thing right and so so so at the end of the day like yeah the truth really matters the substance really matters if it's real it's really I give you an example it's really hard historically to find an example of a new technology that came into the world that was then pulled back and you know and we could you know nuclear is maybe maybe an example of but even still there are still you know nuclear there are still nuclear plants like running today um you know that that that still exists um you know I would say the same thing as scientific like at least I do this I don't know I don't know of any scientific discovery that was made and then people like I I know I know there areas of science that are not politically correct to talk about today but every scientist knows the truth right like the truth is still the truth I mean even the geneticists in the Soviet Union who were forced to buy in lysenkoism like knew the whole time that it was wrong like that I'm completely convinced of yeah they couldn't delude them elves especially because the basic training that one gets in any field establish is some core truths upon which even the crazy ideas have to rest and if they don't as you pointed out um Things Fall to Pieces I would say that even the technologies that um did not pan out and in some cases were disastrous but that were great ideas at the beginning are starting to pan out so the example I'll give is that um most people are aware of the Elizabeth Holmes Theros debacle U to put it lightly you know analyzing uh what's in a single drop of blood as a way to analyze hormones and disease and antibodies Etc I mean that's a great idea I it's a terrific idea as opposed to having a FLOTUS come to your house or you have to go in and you get tapped with a you know and the pulling vials and the whole thing there's now a company um born out of Stanford that is doing exactly what she sought to do except that at least the courts ruled that um she fudged the thing and is that's why she's in jail right now now um but the idea of getting a wide array of markers from a single drop of blood is an absolutely spectacular idea the biggest challenge that company is going to confront is the idea that it's just the next Theos but if they've got the thing and they're not fudging it as it apparently Theos was um I think um everything will work out allaha Victor Hugo yeah exactly yeah yeah because who wants to go back like if if they if they if they get to the work if it's real it's going to be like this is the thing the the opponents the opponents they're not bringing their own ideas like they're not bringing their oh my ideas better than yours like that's not what's happening they're bringing the silence or counterargument right or name calling right well this is why I think um people who need to be loved probably stand a um reduced chance of success um and maybe that's also why having people close to you that do love you and allowing that to be sufficient can be very beneficial this gets back to the idea of partnership and family around innovators um because if you feel filled up by those people local to you y you know in your home then you don't need people on the internet saying nice things about you or your ideas because you're good and you can forge forward um another question about Innovation is the teams that you assemble around you and you've talked before about um the sort of small Squadron model um you know sort David and Goliath uh examples as well where you know small group of individuals can um create a technology that frankly outdoes what a you know a giant like Facebook might be doing or what um any other large company might be doing there are a lot of theories as to why that would happen but I know you have some unique theories um why do you think small groups can defeat large organizations so the conventional explanation is I think correct and it's just that um large organizations have a lot of advantages but they just have a very hard time um actually executing anything because of all the overhead so large organizations have combinatorial communication overhead right the the number of people who have to be consulted who have to agree on things gets to be staggering the amount of time it takes to schedule the meeting gets to be staggering you know you get these really big companies and they have some issue they're dealing with and it takes like a month to schedule the pre- meeting to like plan for the meeting which is going to happen two months later which is then going to result in a post meeting which will then result in a board presentation which will then result in a planning offsite right and so they're like I thought Academia was bad but what you're describing is giving me hives kfka was Kafka was a documentary yeah like this is this is yeah so it it's just like these these are I mean look you'd have these organization at 100,000 people or more like you're you're more of a nation state than a than a than a than a company um and you've got all these competing internal you know it's the bedin thing I was saying before you've got all these internal like at most big companies your internal enemies are like way more dangerous to you than anybody on the outside um can you elaborate on that oh yeah yeah you're big compet the big compet at a big company the big competition is for the for the next promotion right and and the enemy for the next promotion is the next executive over in your company like that's your enemy the other the competitor on the outside is like an abstraction like maybe they'll matter someday whatever I got to beat that guy inside my own company right um and so the internal Warfare is at least as intense as the external Warfare um and so yes it's just I mean this is just all the you know Iron law of all these big big bureaucracies and how they function so if if a big bureaucracy ever does anything productive I think it's like a miracle like it's like a miracle to the point where there should be like a celebration there should be parties there should be like tick or tape parades for like big large organizations that actually do things like that that's great because it's like so it's so rare it doesn't happen very often so anyway so that's the conventional explanation whereas look small small companies small teams you know there's a lot that they can't do because they can't they're not operating at scale they don't have Global coverage and you know all these kind of you know they don't have the resources and so forth but at least they can move quickly right um they can organize fast they can have them you know if there's an issue today they can have a meeting today they can solve the issue today right and everybody they need to solve the issue is in the room today and so they can just move a lot faster um I think that's part of it but I think there's another deeper thing underneath that that people really don't like to talk about that takes us back full circle to where we started which is just the sheer number of people in the world who are capable of doing new things is just a very small set of people um and so you're not going to have a hundred of them in a company or a thousand or 10,000 you're going to have three eight or 10 maybe and some of them are flying too close to the Sun some of them are blowing themselves up right some of them are so I I actually first learned this I so my first actual job job was at IBM when it was and when when IBM was still on top of the world right before it caved in in the early 90s and so when I was there it was 440,000 employees which and again if you inflation adjust like today for that same size of business inflation adjusted Market size adjusted it would be it's equivalent today of like a two or three million person organization it was like a it was a nation state uh there were 6,000 people in my division you know we were next door to another building that had another 6,000 people in another division so you just you could work there for years and never meet anybody who didn't work for IBM the first half of every meeting was just ibmers introducing themselves to each other like it it was just mindboggling in the level of of complexity but they were so powerful um that they had uh four years before I got there in 1985 they were 80% of the market capitalization of the entire tech industry right so so they were at a level of dominance that even you know Google or Apple today is not even close to right at the time so that's how powerful they were and so they had a system and it worked really well for like 50 years they had a system which was most of the employees in the company were expected to basically rig follow rules so they dressed the same they acted the same they did everything out of the Playbook you know they they were trained very specifically um but they had this category of people they called wild ducks um and this was an idea that the founder Thomas Watson come up with wild ducks and the wild ducks were they often had the formal title of an IBM fellow and they were the people who could make new things and there were eight of them and they got to break all the rules and they got to invent new products they got to go off and work on something new they didn't have to report back um they got to pull people off of other projects to work with them um they got you know budget when they needed it they they reported directly to the CEO they got whatever they needed he supported them in doing it and they were glass Breakers and you know they showed the one in Austin at the time was this guy Andy heler and he would show up in you know jeans and C boots and you know amongst an ocean of men in you know blue suits white shirts red ties um and put his cowboy boots up on the table and it was fine for Andy to do that and it was not fine for you to do that right and so they very specifically identified we we have we have like a like almost like an aristocratic class within our our company that gets to play by different rules now the expectation is they deliver right they they their job is to invent the next breakthrough product but we IBM management know that the 6,000 person division is not going to invent the next product we know it's going to be crazy Andy heler in his um in his cowboy boots and so I I was always like very impressed like and again like ultimately IBM had its issues but like that model worked for 50 years right like worked incredibly well and I I think that's basically the model that works um and so but it's a paradox right which is like how do you have a large bureaucratic regimented organization whether it's Academia or government or business or anything that has all these rule followers in it and all these people who are jealous of their status and don't want things to change but then still have that spark of of creativity I would say mostly it's impossible mostly it just doesn't happen those people get driven out right and in Tech what happens is those people get driven out because we will fund them these are the people we fund right I was goingon to say I I gather that you are in the business of finding and funding the wild ducks the wild ducks that's exactly right and and actually this is actually to close the close the loop this is actually I think the simplest explanation for why IBM ultimately caved in and then HP sort of in the 80s also C you know the IBM and HP kind of were Model there were these incredible monolithic incredible companies for 40 or 50 years and then they kind of both caved in in the 80s and 90s and I actually think it was the emergence of venture capital it was the emergence of a parallel funding system Where the wild ducks or in hp's case their their Superstar technical people could actually leave and start their own companies and again it goes back to the university discussion we're having is like this is what doesn't exist at the University level this certainly does not exists at the government level and until recently in media it didn't exist until there's this thing that we call podcast exactly right exactly right which clearly have picked up some um some momentum and I I would hope that these other wild duck models will um will U move quickly yeah but the one thing you know and you know this like the one thing you know is the people on the other side are going to be mad as hell yeah they're going to well well I think um they're past denial um the counterarguments continue um the name calling is prolific name calling is fully underway yeah yes well Mark we've covered a lot of topics but as with every time I talk to you I learn oh so very much so I'm so grateful for you taking the time out of your schedule to talk about all of these topics in depth with us you know I'd be remiss ified and say that it is clear to me now that you are hyper realistic about the landscape uh but you are also intensely optimistic about the existence of wild ducks yes and those around them that support them and that are necessary for the implementation of their ideas at some point yeah and that also you have um a real Rebel inside you so that is Oho welcome on this podcast and it's um Oho needed in uh these times and every time so on behalf of myself and the rest of us here at the podcast and especially the listeners thank you so much thanks for having me thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Mark andreon if you're learning from Andor enjoying this podcast please subscribe to our YouTube channel that's a terrific zeroc cost way to support us in addition please subscribe to the podcast on both Spotify and apple and on both Spotify and apple you can leave us up to a five-star review if you have questions for me or comments about the podcast or guests that you'd like me to consider hosting on the hubman Lab podcast please put those in the comment section on YouTube I do read all the comments please also check out the sponsors mentioned at the beginning and throughout today's episode that's the best way to 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