How To Create A Life Of Purpose & Achievement - Dr Mike Israetel

you don't want to really take pride in your work or try to take pride in your work because your job sucks so if you took pride in your work what would happen when you take pride to work do they pay you less like no but I had to put up with my boss's [ __ ] you have to put up with this [ __ ] one way or another your cynical ass puts up with this bull that's why you're cynical London is like my spirit place I'd London is the greatest place on Earth and I love hearing all that Harry Potter [ __ ] I [ __ ] Can't Get Enough anything in a British accent is just Superior I wish I spoke with a British accent you sound smarter cooler James Bond sex with random girls alcoholism you know all the James Bond stuff like my culture is not your costume okay so I suggest that you stop putting it on and laughing as mine because that is heavily appropriating and it's not yours to wear yeah I'm actually I was born in Russia so I actually wholly appropriated the language of your birth Nation it's just really offensive right let's get started Mike Israel welcome to the show thanks for having me Chris I'm super pumped to be here man what is the pessimistic fallacy is a cognitive bias that the average person shares is a very very prevalent not everyone has it most people have it to some degree and that cognitive bias is to take any scenario any given presentation of data any sort of prediction of the future specifically predictions of you know we have this situation how is it going to unfold is the situation going to stay roughly the same poverty for example uh how is poverty how bad is it now how has it been going has poverty been decreasing over time has it been increasing over time has it been roughly stable in 10 20 30 years how do you predict poverty will go will it get much better will it improve will it stay roughly the same and there has been a profound amount of research done on this uh Hans rossling's book factfulness is probably a really good place to go for it a great sort of high level summary but uh without putting too fine a point on it almost everyone is insanely wrong about understanding how the world works and that wrongness isn't um it's not normally distributed it's not just some people overestimate some people underestimate most people not all but most are you would think inexplicably pessimistic they think that things used to be better in the past where in fact it's almost almost always not the case they think on almost any Global scenario that things are very bad today uh to put it more technically worse today than they really are if we examine the empirical evidence and their predictions for the future again tend to be it very pessimistically inclined such that uh they not only think this but a sort of in-baked maybe a sort of subsidiary of the fallacies if you try to point it out to people it's an iterative Loop if they apply the pessimistic fallacy to argue back to you so they go well you're just a Pollyanna like you just think it's all hunky-dory and they just apply another layer of pessimism to your attempt to correct them and it's tough because you end up it's very easy to caricate yourself when you're a pessimist as a realist or at least you're hedging your understanding you're like if things turn out better hey amazing but I think they're going to be worse and the worst case scenario they turn out better uh uh best case scenario I'm right which other which either one of those worst cases it's kind of like a hedging the BET situation and that's a common retort so that tends to be how the pessimistic fallacy is expressed yeah what was that thing about um the myth of wage stagnation I thought that was a really good example of this yes it's a very common citation that people will Trot out on social media and by citation I just mean claim are what uh The Economist and philosopher Thomas Soul would call notion it's something people just say or think it's not even caricatured as a hypothesis because it's not falsifiable or testable and that idea is that like will wages haven't gone up uh typically they'll say you know in the United States since and then on surduck year depending what literature they think they've read typically the comparator years 1970 year the 70s sometimes it's the 80s and if you look into this with like more than like five minutes of Googling it just falls apart right in front of you I can get it a little technical as to how it falls apart and then why if that's okay so if you look at um wages for certain kinds of jobs then you actually can conclude that there has been a significant amount of wage stagnation what that typically doesn't integrate is a few things first of all that is not looking at flesh and blood human beings over time the people that had a given job in the 1970s in 75 80 85 90 typically their remuneration has skyrocketed they're like wow they have seniority they're older so that doesn't count okay so we're not actually talking about real people that go to work and and have the same wage year and year out and if you push people on they're like okay that's not what I mean what about new people coming in and then you start comparing well is it really the same job and then that sort of floats away look at that really the same job it turns out that we're actually comparing much easier jobs so they used to pay really good wages for brutal like Central Indiana factory work with no air conditioning or chance of death was like decent and nowadays you just press a button and the Machine dumps the steel into the cooling chamber and you're drunk the entire time and you're a union member you can't get fired no big deal it's a totally a non-comparable work and another big one is a lot of times they don't compare they compare wages and wages in some sectors have gone up a little bit or actually stagnated but they don't compare total compensation so in the 1970s you got your wage middle finger see you tomorrow and your you know shift number one nowadays and over time since the 70s until today you're getting an insanely richer uh offering of health benefits daycare time off bonus structure a bunch of different other ways to compensation so if you are and I don't want to say intellectually honest because that says the opposing side is intellectually dishonest usually they're not just people hear stuff and there's pessimistic fallacy rounds in it or duh and if you are trying to find intellectually the best comparison what you're gonna do is look for a better comparison more a more valid comparison and something like median income is a good idea mean average income like GDP per capita it's a little tainted because like if you have a trillion billionaires and everyone else is dirt poor more billionaires they just drag up that average but the median doesn't drag up the average uh so the Richer super rich people and super poor people don't drag it up so you really are looking at like what does the average person make if you look at median income and total compensation that has just been going like that for every modern Western Country for as long as you can measure it and that that is the reality of what people are saying because when they say things like wages and you go like most many people aren't even paid in what you would call wage some people get salary some people get bonus structures people get various other compensation and so uh I remember uh Thomas Soul had a famous line where he said you know if someone's talking about household income they're for sure are just trying to use that metric because they're trying to paint it in a bad light why household like what because household sizes have changed households are much smaller now so if household income hasn't increased the per capita income actually has gone up a ton because now households are two people that used to be six so if people are saying wages of stagnated and these are the term wages they're trying to make things seem bad an honest assessment would look a total comp total median compensation per industry per field per IQ per whatever and any logical assessment of that sort of like 97 of the time the honest assessment is actually things have gotten phenomenally better for almost everyone there absolutely are exceptions to what about inflation what about the cost of housing what about the cost of goods what about cost of living what about all of that doesn't that just erode away all of the gains that have just been made so we can take a look at a few of these inflation is a decent Point except inflation has been relatively stable over a very long term and so it's hard to paint a particular era of human history is bad because inflation is kind of a really steady thing that happens all the time and it's not even true to say that inflation lately other than the past well six months ago and now it's kind of stabilized anytime inflation here's another thing really quick anytime inflation uncharacteristically uncharacteristically goes up people spazz the [ __ ] out inflation killing us what happens when inflation is is low for a five-year period nobody talks about it you don't even get an article about it so you're like yeah like you only pay attention when inflation is really bad so in if inflation is sort of uh anachronistically high is absolutely a concern usually that's just not a concern first point second point is the uh there is another as I said so like median uh average income uh median uh income per capita is a good way to think of how much money people make another way to integrate the cost of goods and services it's what's called time cost or time price and it's for an hour of typical typically compensated work how much stuff can you buy and that reflects some integration of inflation and everything like that and time price of almost everything just goes down all the time that's the most integrated holistic honest assessment and it's improving all the time there are exceptions to that I'll get to those in just a second but you can say look okay with inflation the picture isn't as good as without so with a lower inflation the picture would be better totally true however almost no analyzes even in formal economics integrate the quality of goods because that is phenomenally difficult to quantify so for example say hello I only had to work XYZ number of years to buy a car 19 said my uncle worked for a summer in 1976 bought himself a great car now we got a slave way for years well what was the car in the 1970s like finding any given metric it was a [ __ ] disaster it's actually illegal to drive most those cars on the road because they just like the global warming actually comes out of the exhaust pipe it's not even pollutants it's just like straight up like little Al Gore particles come out so and it's the thing is like weighs 30 [ __ ] tons it uses only leaded gasoline which again just poisons children directly it's just child poison comes out of that thing so if you look at it you're like okay this is this is not the same thing a car is not a car is not a car and if you take any attempt to integrate quality into that you're like oh shit's been getting way way better at the very least cancels out any inflationary effects however there are exceptions to that rule and I'm not aware of any of those exceptions which are not the result of government interference I know I sound like a crazy libertarian but it's just true in in most of Economics it's not even controversial for example housing Economist Brian Kaplan who's amazing well I surmise you should have on your show at one point he's Ultra entertaining he's the man he'll point out that precisely in the places where you have a lot of housing regulation is where you have the least Home Building and if you have lower housing regulation you get way more Home Building home prices per unit of time cost fall drastically and so the cost of living crisis is almost always caused just straight up caused by excessive government regulation and if you deregulate the cost of living gets like a trillion times better and a trillion is a mile exaggeration nonetheless serves the point so if you look at the industries which are not following the trends of essentially becoming cheaper and time cost over time which is by the way the the Baseline Trend everything becomes time cost cheaper and higher quality over time the things that don't follow that are the things that have without exception I believe the most intrusive government regulation and not just intrusive because regulation isn't just this demon that's bad there has absolutely such a thing as intelligent regulation that you need you must have some regulation it'll set a really good framework a really good legal the parameter system to make sure that things go really well absolutely 100 it's not anti-regulation but there are more and less intelligent ways to regulate and the least intelligent type of Regulation leads to things that just spiral up in cost usually cap off in quality much more than you would expect Healthcare is a great example education is a great example housing is a great example and those are the industries precisely in which the government has the most uh to say in Industries like technology where the government has almost nothing to say thank [ __ ] God for the time being and every time they try to regulate AI companies I like shutter have like a Jewish panic attack I um you know in those other Industries [ __ ] just gets better all the time it's just and I know this sounds shocking and some people be like oh he's off his rocker it's just not a mystery it hasn't been a mystery in Generations that this is the case status quo bias is a [ __ ] in this case because people you say like hey let's deregulate housing and they're like what do you mean won't that cause like and just insert Wild insane ideas just stairwells or start collapsing out of nowhere and so on and so on and so on so the reality is like almost all all the ones I know of uh the elements in the economy that are not getting cheaper and higher quality over time is where you can point distinctly to an insane mismanagement by government regulatory authorities why is it the case that this pessimism bias exists and this is something that I've noticed on the internet as well this sort of pervasive cynicism I guess the internet flavor of it is a little bit different it's it's more sardonic and cutting uh and kind of backbiting and zero-sum but there is still you know just a general pervasive pessimism masquerading as skepticism or non-naevity why a couple of smart folks maybe more than a couple have speculated and I find a few of the hypotheses interesting I'll share a few of them with you one is the whole idea that as a cognitive defense mechanism it's easier to be skeptical and cynical because then if you're proven wrong or if shit's better cool like it's like telling people before you compete in Jiu Jitsu or kickboxing they're like hey you think you're going to win this match you're like nah man this guy's gonna [ __ ] me up and then you beat him you're like you're the man but if he [ __ ] you up you're like told you hey that's kind of a no lose so it really Hedges your bets really well another thing is that people often mistake and by often maybe almost always skepticism for cynicism I think what most people think is them being skeptical is them being cynical I think I'm quoting Stephen Pinker when I say a sneer is not an argument like a lot of the books he's written people's response on the air was just like well and it's like what to go on where is the substance like well there is really no substance and it's easy to be thought of as an intellectual if you can render some cynicism on something um and another one which is sort of more more deeply rooted hypothesis is that our brains and our patterns of behavior did not evolve for the today times they evolved in the times of our Evolution where most of that Evolution was in unobjective reality that was pessimistic as [ __ ] just bad in almost every way you can imagine brutal like how animals live you know like I was I I was like uh walking around my backyard and I saw like a bunny rabbit hopping and I was like oh that's so adorable and then I thought like that bunny is hopping to get food it's not like he has a refrigerator at home he is starving to death at all times he's in the [ __ ] Brink and if my dog comes out and chases him down he's just gonna die it's just Total War all the time they're [ __ ] hiding in every Bush that's gonna [ __ ] kill you and has and we all humans are the survivors of the people that we're at least marginally pessimistic so as to control their statistical risk exposure like like hey or one of actually I'm just stealing um a gentleman who I heard in another progress podcast example but it's like if there's rustling in the bushes right in 15 000 years ago and and one guy's like oh that could be dangerous let's back the [ __ ] away he's not very pessimistic but the guy who was like ah it's no big deal [ __ ] Sabertooth whatever the [ __ ] jumps out kills his ass and you're like oh that guy's dead and he's straight up either didn't have children or just to put a point on this he did have children but he's dead now and his uh wife or whatever partner can't get enough food and she Withers away to almost a thing and his kids just literally starve to death if it's this insanely commonplace it was a commonplace it was default and so it's not is that's that just to illustrate the brutality of where we came from so a lot of nervousness a lot of anxiety a lot of apprehension uh is very adaptive in in the the times of our evolutionary ancestry nowadays [ __ ] man like if you walk out on streets of Austin Texas which by your complexion I can tell you don't because you exclusively exist on the internet there you go rapper rep Texas my man so you just adopted Texas I was born in it actually wasn't so do you call yourself a Texan Chris is that I just shaved the mustache off that I'd been carrying for a little while I've got a huge episode coming out next week and I figured do I really want to inculcate for the rest of History this beautiful cinematic production we're flying to Stuart Florida and we're filming it on red dragon cameras and it's in 6K and we've got this film crew and there's going to be me there with this [ __ ] caterpillar on my top lip that for quite a while I enjoyed and I thought was pretty ironic uh it's also I'm pretty sure that um a [ __ ] mustache is a counter signal for physical appearance that the only people that can afford to pull it off are the ones that have got Surplus like physical appearance credentials my God what a man the guy the guy is ruthlessly unfashionable and very hairy but rich and jacked out of his mind with a like fit wife so you know you say what you want you can get away with it um point being no having don't call myself texting no one's going to consider me texting but these lights look you haven't seen this until the uh color preset has been placed when Dean runs this through our color Lut and these colors aren't as flat you will notice that the Hue of my skin really really comes out so you actually look quite healthy I look insanely pasty because I'm currently not very healthy at all uh neither here nor there when you walk on the streets of Austin Texas I mean geez you know there's a kind of a paucity of sabertooth tigers and you can spend arguably the vast majority of your life never encountering want in a in a what it used to mean physical danger uh lack of food lack of medicine so where we evolved it was just like um a camping trip that never ends except you have no propane stove and no medicine or no anything you're just living in the [ __ ] Woods that is like much more pessimism fits that situation much more their pessimism is realism uh in our modern world that's incrementally actually not quite quickly becoming better and better pessimism is more and more just simply out of touch with reality and as a matter of fact what we used to call like kind of insane optimism is progressively more and more realistic yeah so that's the implication right if life is getting better this means that realism looks like optimism to the Eternal pessimists but is actually optimism is more realistic because what you're doing is you are projecting out the trajectory of ever improving quality of life ever improving medicine Healthcare climate control I mean this is one thing that people that talk about climate change never bring up which is that climate related deaths have decreased by 50 times over the last hundred years it's a 98 like it's huge it's huge how much it's gone down because of climate Mastery you know that we've got air conditioning to keep us cool when it's hot and we've got heating to keep us warm and it's cool also interesting point far more people die from cold than die from heat you're not supposed to say stuff like that Al Gore is going to [Music] you're welcome anyway um yeah my point being that you have this real Duality that's going on here that um first off I don't think that pessimism is an a personal development personal developmentally useful approach for giving yourself an advantage either in life in experience existentially psychologically financially in terms of business professionally personally any of those things I don't think that it helps I don't think that it's an optimal approach because I think that you are your smoke detector principle which you just highlighted there is going off when it shouldn't be going off but on top of that it's becoming increasingly more and more detached from what the actual world is like so I mean what's the answer is optimism the answer should people just be blindly optimistic now like what are they supposed to do I'm not a big fan of optimism because it has that same stench of a cognitive uh mischaracterization of reality I I think anything other than your best attempt at realism is an insane proposition and I mean insane in the literal sense like it's less sane it's just you just realism and your best shot at it is probably my best bet as to how to do things but because we live in such an increasingly Wonderful World realism like we sort of just alluded to really is kind of optimism you know like optimism's the new realism or whatever Orange is the New Black um that really is the case so I'm a huge fan of realism I optimism wigs me out it gives me that sense of like when you say optimism do you mean sort of undue hope for the future without reason exactly that's I believe like I don't I think that's probably the best definition of optimism I've ever heard which if you reverse the terms it's the best definition of pessimism I've ever heard uh so undo foreboding of the future you know without any reason so um I don't I'm not a big fan of optimism you know I've been you know help run Renaissance periodization which is like you know getting getting to make a lot of money being all big and stuff and rocking the gear but um you know we've been in multiple talks with folks in the company yeah and you know there's been talks of like 10xing and this and that and I I love the hope and I'm working every day to the Bone to try to make that happen but at the same time I'm like why don't we just try to one and a half X [ __ ] and if that works out we can 2.25 you know like just keep the train just do a good job to keep the train rolling the idea of um just really hopeful future stuff I just don't understand it I don't understand I I do understand that cognitively being optimistic can liberate your psychological energies to do your best job but I think that properly contextualized realism can also do that and then you never have to second guess am I just being too optimistic because you're not you can say am I being sufficiently realistic and the way to determine if you're sufficiently realistic is examine your premises examine a logic examine the data examine the trajectory and just try to realign so yeah that sounds like a lot of work Mike that sounds like you know it's much easier for me to believe that everything is going to go to [ __ ] and that the people that believe that things can get better are genuinely the problem and couch that couch that is realism realism and anybody who has hope is naive uh and they can all go [ __ ] themselves a standard that if you come standard with a western Tennessee rocking chair where you see technology in your nah nah we had that in the 50s and you just like you know chew your straw nothing is impressive everything's going downhill but the thing is you always knew it was going to so you were always right correct and you get the opportunity even though your world view might be incorrect you have the opportunity of lopping as someone that's intellectually insightful because it sounds being a skeptic sounds so much more sophisticated than being an optimist I really want to [ __ ] Rebrand I've called it toxic positivity or rational optimism I really want to Rebrand hope as something that isn't done by idiots uh I would actually go as I would actually go as far as to say that the most stupid people I know are the ones that are the most negative Oh by Longshot that's been my experience as well very good talking about money you just brought up uh Renaissance periodization your company very cool doing some good [ __ ] with AI as well uh which is fascinating thank you you make money even if you don't look like it I sure don't can money buy happiness in your view yes unequivocally yes and if someone doesn't believe that you just offer them a million dollars and watch them pass it up oh wait they won't right so how can money buy happiness I actually have a whole video on my uh progress philosophy channel that folks feel free to check out um about how money can buy happiness and how it can't because in some cases it can't but in many cases it can so it's like if someone asks like hey does going to the club with a bunch of your great friends and dancing all night really make you happy there are absolutely ways in which it does and there are absolutely ways in which it doesn't does it bring you closer to a deep inner peace and a connectedness with all of great nature [ __ ] no I'm not accessing [ __ ] I can't tell my own hand for my face anymore does it make me like ecstatically happy as an amazing memory I'll have forever yes so money is uh it can bring happiness in a variety of ways I can think of at least two maybe three I'll just share three one is you can buy [ __ ] that like you like because everyone likes some kind of [ __ ] this is my work office I usually don't work in the darkness like it might appear although yeah maybe I should this little Batman Vibe so uh you can buy stuff that's cool and for everyone at least some stuff is cool and if you have enough money anything you want you buy amazing and like it'll make you a little bit happier to have cool stuff I'm just really not into stuff I'm probably more the exception than the rule of that but it's definitely a thing that that can occur another thing that you can do with money is to Lavish the people closest to you in your world and or people far from you but whom you have a connection to as humans and want to help with any kind of support that you deem necessary so if you truly truly care about the plight of the poorer peoples in Africa that do not have economic stability and they have food insecurity uh yeah I sure wish you were Bill Gates or Elon Musk so you could have billions of dollars to go give to their governments or give to the people or do micro loans so you can make actual people's lives meaningfully better let me just jump in the uh so effective altruism but you may be familiar with yeah William mccaskill the guy that the guy that came up with that I went for dinner with him a couple of months ago and one of the if you take what you've just explained now which I don't disagree with if you care about global suffering your one of your goals could be to earn as much money as possible so that you can funnel that money towards campaigns and agendas that you care about but if you take this to its philosophical extreme it can justify people doing things that are unethical in order to earn money to use it in a way which they believe is more ethical than the way that they unethically earned it and this is how people like Sam bankman freed can be given some degree of a pass from certain elements of the EA Community because although the guy has I by your face potentially stolen some of your crypto what you do have is someone who is like look I'm going to damage some people a little in order to help the world a lot because it's actually a very sort of um solipsistic view of the world it's very sort of Bourgeois you look the the [ __ ] the common folk the plebeians down there they don't really know how to spend the money and if we had it we would spend it on more plebeian more common folk than they are and we are simply arbitraging the semi idiot down to the real idiots and I I I'm here to lift them out of their sort of squalids mired awful lives excellent I have a few things to say about that one is I will not stand by while you tarnish the reputation of the great sambang one is he is just a good person and I don't want to hear it about this and that embezzlement nonsense if you are going to Simply compliment anybody that's got more hair than you there is a very very very long list of people that are going to come not only does he have am I allowed to say really Politically Incorrect [ __ ] on here or am I just getting fire away fire away this is going to get me [ __ ] cancel for sure when the sandbankment freed [ __ ] happened one of the first articles I saw was like he's in the Bahamas and a 40 million dollar house and he's like um a bunch of people that worked for his company they're having like relations like sexual malfeasance with each other and so like oh God I'm going to hell I I really am joking about this people are so much more than their parents look at me I'm [ __ ] hideous all it's all jokes that I Google around I see where the orgies who the people were and I was like oh oh my God this is the some of the least attractive people I've ever I would have paid I would have paid good money I would just get paid close to some bankman Freed's net worth to not be in that molecule catch me out correct yeah I just actually something came up I'm gonna take a flight the [ __ ] out of the Bahamas forever so you guys never yeah actually to be fair I would I would have probably paid that amount of money simply to have not been in the room and observed some bankman freed naked with those people like I wouldn't have even had to yeah I wouldn't even have to risk being involved in it but just being near it the smell the sights The Sounds ooh the smell must have been legendary listen Sam bankman freed I'm not the hair that I'm jealous about it's the physique the man is a [ __ ] Adonis and I will not be corrected but I'm actually an expert in physique believe it or not and he's just like there's Mr Olympia's and then there's sand Banker freed end of discussion but to the point of people can do illicit or nefarious things for money I think is a absolutely a valid point that is entirely different from the point of how can money make you happy like sex can make you happy but if you take sex from people that are not interested in giving it to you that's called rape and it's one of the worst things in the world right the idea that rape exists is in no way a counter a counter to the idea that sex can make you happy so so just to support an intellectual sort of thing in there and then uh so but yes there there are many many ways to help other people with money and I don't just mean sending it to Africa for the the the people's over there I mean like you have relatives and friends and some of them aren't famous YouTubers and they don't have a ton of money and you can give them gifts on their birthdays that like blow them away like having rich friends is [ __ ] sweet that everyone who's not rich thinks having rich friends is [ __ ] like a fantasy and when I hear the people who are rich think that having rich friends is [ __ ] sweet too yes like Alex harmozion always says there's levels to it so he has like a 100 million dollars or whatever and I was like how does it feel and he's like like as soon as you get into that world people are like oh like I bought a yacht that cost 500 million and like oh [ __ ] I'm poor again dude I had a guy I had a guy come through to do the show a couple of weeks ago and he flew from Houston to Austin on his G550 jet the cost him I think it depreciated I think it depreciates by about twenty five thousand dollars every time it lands oh oh cries in in a Jew yeah oh my God 20 25 Grand so that's both ways that's about 50 Grand to do it and I was like why didn't you just Charter a plane you can Charter a plane from Houston to Austin for like 10 grand return and he's like ah yeah but you know mine's got my pillows on it and it's got my seats on it's got my food on it and I was like well okay [ __ ] me I guess but okay so there's you've got your uh first one you can buy cool stuff you've got your second one if you earn money you can make people around you happy whether they be in Africa or next door what's the third one Financial Security which for me in my night as so for the record for folks that don't know me uh I suppose I must say this at some point I'm uh like a level six agnostic or whatever on the Richard Dawkins scale so it's not technically an atheist but I find the probability of God being real uh is almost infinitesimally unlikely um so I'm not really just in any capacity I'm genetically an Ashkenazi Jew so Tada um but uh so when I make the Jew jokes some context for that but um to my Jewish heart nothing beats Financial Security because maybe it's not the Judaism it really is the Judaism but um I am originally from or from Russia from the Soviet Union I was born in Moscow in 1984 my parents moved our family to America in 1991 and in Russia we were a level of poor that almost no one in the United Kingdom Western Europe or America can actually contextualize it doesn't make any sense um and then when we came to America we had to build from the ground up so I was I've been poor middle class or whatever lower middle class essentially my entire life and I became very aware at a young age that if my parents couldn't make money to feed us where does the food come from and this house that we have I don't know how to build a house my parents paid some money to live here to rent it or to buy it and the idea that they have money now to pay for things now uh and that if they don't continue to be productive for any number of unfortunate reasons that these good things will come to an end so if you find yourself in the position of an income stream that can more than pay for your current expenses your logical course of action if you think it through for a little while is to whatever kind of investing you do and I I almost exclusively do only very low risk confessing again profound Judaism strikes and uh risk uh so uh that to me is like okay if I make enough money now I can get to a point where even if things go totally South I'll have enough to live on for XYZ number of years maybe in perpetuity and Jesus Christ a guaranteed living even if things go bad I mean Chris you got to think about it in the context of world history Paradise is real and we're here so Financial Security is unbelief it's unbelievable yeah so when we compare what we've spoken about so far so getting stuff helping people in the world that you care about and Financial Security I know and everyone will be aware of the study up to seventy thousand dollars per year do you have this sort of increase in happiness and then beyond that point it seems like it's related to there's like some studies that say it's related to life satisfaction which kind of pivots it from happiness to life satisfaction that to me seems like a sort of data's for keeping up with the Jones is comparative relativists type type world then I had uh Seth Stevens davidowitz on the show and he's a data scientist so I trust him completely Andy's Jewish Andy's Jewish which is great I have to have to trust him with a name like that my God damn right yeah he's really he's more Jewish than you um he has less forces than you do he has less foreskin than you do okay uh so he said he said I hope not he said that every uh increase in happiness that you get takes another doubling of money so let's say that it's it's seventy thousand dollars then it would be 140 to achieve the same increase then it would be 280 then it would be 560. so on and so forth in order to achieve the same so you get this diminishing return I don't know which one's true but it seems like there is a difference between avoiding discomfort like a lack of money can make you miserable but does lots of money make you happier it's up to some degree it does but when it comes to getting rich and and and um how much people value money and chasing success and stuff like that I know that you have a thesis that all of this is wildly undervalued and being in the present moment is wildly overvalued and you took a great uh rejoined at pushing back against a thesis that I had around happiness and success and the directness of the of the route between it what is your uh perspective on is it okay if I take those quotes out and actually just look at them hit me in the hit me in the face with them yeah that's cool quote me back to myself on my own podcast like some sort of Human Centipede of here's where you lied to people you know by implication of course so let's see and I click on the Instagram and it shows me the things that I want to see so uh you have I love your insta by the way because I um it shows up on mine and I use excellent quotes and stuff like that that I love to see thank you so uh let's see we trade things we want time for the thing was just supposed for the thing which is supposed to get it money we give up time to make money so we can finally have more time when we have enough money we give up happiness to achieve success so that we can finally enjoy happiness when we achieve enough success I have a lot of things to say about that but I'll probably just say a few if making valuable things to provide to other people so they can exchange value in return for them and make you money and make you successful and they get happier because they voluntarily pay for your stuff for example Mark Zuckerberg made Facebook and Facebook made me way happier than without Facebook I've done incredible things I've been managed to help tons of millions and millions hundreds of thousands of people through Facebook so if I'm Mark Zuckerberg and I'm engineering this monster called Facebook I'm engaged sure definitely in the pursuit of money but in that Pursuit I'm doing two things I am having a profound effect of of beneficence on other people and that's how I'm using my time versus just like being in nature and staring at the [ __ ] animals and [ __ ] and being all a piece which is dope it's awesome and I do absolutely have a practice of vipassana meditation myself so I speak about that a ton but not only do you get that is the pursuit of success the pursuit of money can be a meditative practice in and of itself my happiest that I ever am is when I am by the way I'm in a uh my my uh home office it is a completely white nothing on the walls windowless basement room oh that's real homozy yeah yeah and when I'm in here either listening to Total silence or to down Tempo electronic music of various sorts and I'm working on algorithms that we're going to code into the hypertrophy app or the diet coach app at RP I am in an unbelievably elated State because I'm building I'm creating I am meditating while I'm working and that's how I make money so to me making money is the thing that makes me the most happy then multiple levels the practice of it makes me happy directly it is also the best use of my time it is also when I'm most present in reality because I'm building I am creating outflow is occurring I'm in a flow State and in addition to that it has all these cool ass benefits like first of all it helps a [ __ ] gazillion people get in shape and get healthier and stuff like that and also when I decide I'm too tired to continue to work and finish my training for the day you know like in its weekend I take [ __ ] edible gummies and marijuana and walk around my neighborhood like a [ __ ] idiot and everyone thinks I'm some combination of criminal or steroid addicts some of those things may be true and uh I'm just bebopping with my wife I don't have a [ __ ] care in the world because I work so goddamn hard that uh I know that I where my next meal is coming from I know where my one after that is coming from I know my rent is paid I know there's Heating and Cooling available and I don't have to worry about what's going to happen uh today tomorrow and the day after that's why I think at least in part uh work and money and value creation can be the practice that makes you Ultra happy how many people on average do you think feel first off connected enough to their work to actually enjoy the process of it and secondly like their work actually contributes to making the world a better place almost everyone who's not a criminal does work that contributes to the world becoming a better place if I go to a Burger King drive-through and someone hands me a cheeseburger they have absolutely contributed to my world being better in a non-enomenal way they did a great job do you think they feel that uh so yeah they probably don't and how do I say this in a politically correct way if they thought of it that way it would make their life better correct so that would be correct it is there's absolutely a way and there's of course every quote that you post has a huge element of truth even some on the margins of my Persnickety attitude disagree with it um there are so many people to whom work is drudgery to whom work is a desk disconnected state of what when do I really begin to live my life totally but almost any job if you generate if you take time to think about it and you generate some [ __ ] buy-in and you take pride in your work um there are legitimately mentally [ __ ] and I'm absolutely comfortable using that term is actually what it is mentally [ __ ] people that work at Walmart that are present in their work and so [ __ ] kind when you walk in and they greet you and they're smiling they're having a good time at work and what the [ __ ] in their defense without having a great time all the time and smiling all the time too hack the system right it's so shingles shingles has got this amazing amazing bit uh do you know who Shane is have you seen a photo of him before I don't comedian guy um and he he has a routine where he talks about the fact that he has a lot of sort of mental retardation in his family and he's he's able to pull a face that really transforms him into somebody that looks an awful lot like someone who and he describes it he just he dodged it but he kind of got nicked just a little bit you can't got caught genetically by it and apparently when he tells people about this he says you know my I think it's his uncle one of his uncle Uncle Jimmy or something has uh is mentally [ __ ] and he people say oh oh I'm sorry like is that okay I hope that he's okay and Shane's response is I don't know why you're giving him sympathy he is literally the most dialed guy that I know on the planet he is having the best time all the time he is a man that sneaks grilled cheese sandwiches into restaurants just in case they don't serve grilled cheese sandwiches so yeah anyway um yes understood um I spoke to a guy called Daniel schmachtenberger super super smart dude and this was definitely not a Jew never no foreskin at all actually he's got more foreskin than all of us put together he said I was talking to him about the fact I was a club promoter and sometimes I finish work late at night and I have this existential crisis when I go shopping so I used to go into the local supermarket that was 24 hours on my way home Tesco's Asda oh my man I'm sorry I still corrected amazing yeah yeah I wasn't middle class enough to go to waitrose or Mark's inspected by that side um yeah yeah get the Percy pigs so on the way home I would stop off and I would say to him a lot of the time when I got in there it's 2 30 in the morning I'm sleep deprived I'm on my way back after just watching a thousand eighteen-year-olds get drunk and finger each other in a club and as I was doing myself checkout I would have a small existential crisis not a big one wouldn't wouldn't break down and cry but it would just loom ambiently in the background and he said next time you go in find somebody that's in there that's stacking shelves and just tell them that you hope they have a really good evening and that uh give them a compliment do something nice with them or for them um say that you know you're proud of them or or whatever like any whatever you can come up with anything you like to [ __ ] choose and what you've suggested here about people that take pride in their work is kind of the reverse of that that there is just so much meaning that can be imbued in taking things seriously and I think that this is actually related back to what we were talking about before to do with the sort of skepticism cynicism which is by being cynical or skeptical you create a walled off Garden around you that doesn't require you to genuinely existentially interact with the world you don't actually end up being invested because everything is going to go to [ __ ] in any case so I don't and everyone sucks yeah I don't need to care you don't care about the environment a lot some people do that's a lie lots of people don't who are um adamant that the world is going to go up in a ball of flame don't care about the environment they just believe that the world is going to explode and they're able to couch their fear of truly feeling and integrating with the world on a sort of loving emotional level within this sort of cynical skepticism proselytizing it as realism and it means that they never actually end up having to to connect with things and I think that this is kind of the same it's the same thing that you're seeing in the manosphere with a lot of the dating the dating advice that is being given out to men at the moment it's that if you see women as enemies to be avoided or adversaries to be used and discarded you never actually have to open up you never have to face the pain of potential um injury emotionally and I think that that's the kind of women you're trying to pick up injury holy [ __ ] ironda Rousey um but yeah my point being here that um in order for you to genuinely care about the thing that you do you have to care about the thing that you do by caring about the thing that you do you open yourself up to risk so yeah and also uh mild to moderate ridicule from other people if you take pride in your job as a Walmart store you know a stalker of shelves you know many people in that store with you working that'll it'll sort of like render a kind of attitude towards you like almost like SpongeBob SquarePants like SpongeBob loves working at you know the Krabby Patties the shop or whatever and he's almost seen us kind of pollyanna-ish like oh he's just delusional and it's like I'm sorry what what part of being happy at work is delusional and one of my passions is to take people's assumptions Notions and and to try to get them to jump a couple logical steps to see where they end up and maybe I learned something and maybe they end up just being like Oh I [ __ ] never thought this through so I was wrong as [ __ ] like okay so you don't want to really take pride in your work try to take pride in your work because your job sucks okay word up so if you took pride in your work what would happen like yeah but my job sucks like okay well so what if you took pride in it they're like well I'm a chump like well I'm sorry when you take pride and work do they pay you less like no but I had to put up with my boss's [ __ ] [ __ ] [ __ ] you have to put up with this [ __ ] one way or another your cynical [ __ ] ass what's up with this [ __ ] that's why you're cynical if he was like Hey I want you to stay later today see you going on my yacht you're looking [ __ ] [ __ ] cool rewind he goes hey you got to stay later today I'm going to my out you're like all right sir have a good day I'm just gonna be at work you're happier now [ __ ] and you're more productive you took the time in front of you the four hours of extra late shift that you were gonna do is you leaned into the [ __ ] unless you plan on quitting your [ __ ] job what is exactly the point of being cynical what is exactly the point of being detached from your work oh man I hate working at McDonald's by the way I've worked with a bunch of people all the way up from people who make nothing to make millions and I've seen people have positive attitudes at every [ __ ] layer of that [ __ ] and by the way number one way to get promoted is do a good job number two way to get promoted is be a [ __ ] positive person at work because your boss knows that this [ __ ] wants to be here and by the way any any job that remotely has you interacting with other humans almost all jobs and especially in customer service positivity is [ __ ] number one so by really owning a ship taking some [ __ ] Pride you start to do a better job you're happier maybe you're not fulfilled at some kind of like you know transcendental way you get still [ __ ] Making burgers although the Deep thinkers and the meditative practices would say that if you really make burgers I mean really make them with your whole mind taking care to be efficient and quick and answer orders that is actually that that is nirvana you can be in a state of great Stillness and peace doing a menial job you know the whole Leaf raking situation yeah one of my favorite ones I can't do it here in America but in the UK the house that I have back there uh where the kitchen sink is it looks out over the garden of the house and some of the best times that I've had of Peace have been when I've been washing dishes yeah yeah looking out of that window yeah and if you really hated washing dishes and you're really cynical about it unless you have a plan to get out of washing dishes what exactly is the point of your cynicism and so so you really have a choice I either get the [ __ ] out or anything I do I try to do it at least decently well and interestingly enough a lot of the people who sort of promote or tolerate cynicism at work and with making money and stuff they'll take a completely different attitude when it comes to team sports or even individual sports like how many people on a basketball team at a high level is it a problem when some of the athletes there have like a mad book this kind of attitude [ __ ] are you serious we in the NBA [ __ ] this get the [ __ ] off my team Michael Jordan used to fist fight people like that on his team like you come here you give it everything you 100 here or you don't have to play for the [ __ ] Chicago Bulls that is uh so and most people will watch a documentary like that and be like dude that's right on that's the attitude and they'll go to work and be like man my [ __ ] boss sucks I'm trying to get out early today and you're like but your job is a team every corporation is a team almost exactly down to the nitty gritty like an athletic team the goal is for the corporation to do better for us to make money that's the same thing as winning games the losses is like well we don't have jobs anymore like if you lose enough on a team you get traded or the coach gets fired and the social dynamics are very similar it's a Cooperative Venture some people outperform others by long shot but if you're not a top performer you try to help other top performers and the social Dynamic of the team is ultra important everyone getting along and another thing is is if you bring a positive attitude and do your very best that's actually all you can ever do so a lot of people will just be like oh yeah no team sports that attitude's great and it'll go look at jobs and work and making money and they'll be like nah this sucks this is awful like man I wish I was still wrestling in high school and it's like [ __ ] you are wrestling in high school except now you get paid to do it and you don't even have to beat anybody out but no one smells you don't get impetigo and [ __ ] like that one uh to go back to the original Carousel the quote Carousel that you brought up just there I understand that the money for um we trade money for happiness that one is more out over my skis the trading uh trying to achieve enough success in order to give ourselves a reason to be happy I'm pretty sure is slap bang in the middle and I stole the original conception from homozy um that post is written for people who believe that happiness lies on the other side of their next promotion or on the other side of their next 10 000 followers on social media and it's in large part written for myself as well that I need to remind myself that Simplicity and optimizing for Simplicity when it comes to what you derive your sense of meaning and happiness from in life if you start there and then win and [ __ ] capture the entire world and I'm the god of whatever the [ __ ] industry I care about that's a fantastic bonus on top I don't think that this is the same as setting your sights low and being pessimistic I think it's reminding yourself about where you can genuinely derive happiness from because although I take an absolutely huge amount of Happiness from the success of the show and the impact of the show and all of the people that I speak to the money is a derivative of that and yes sure it's kind of like being given a trophy you don't do it for the trophy you do it for the success the trophy is the derivative of the success but it's just a reminder that continuing to believe I'm not happy yet and all that I need is the next piece of success in order to be able to justify my happiness is a treadmill that for a lot of people never ever ends and I do think that it's important for them to be reminded of it well absolutely that um I'll be happy when situation it may even be true you may be happier when better things happen in the future totally and you probably will be but does that prevent you from being happy right now at least to the extent that you're capable and I think a lot of people make another mistake cognitively and they say things like if I allow myself to be happy now I'll lose that drive and to me I think the best way to architect your drives if you have any say in the matter sometimes we're just automatons that are doing our thing is I don't like the idea of a drive for Success that runs away from not success that runs away from poverty that's never again kind of thing I much prefer a drive that is two-factor when it runs towards more success and two it takes a lot of Happiness from the Run itself like for me total amount of net worth is really cool idea like I have a certain amount of money that's that's awesome to think about that income streams are fascinating and the growth of income streams is fascinating I make more money this month and more money that oh man that's awesome and even more fascinating is the productive effort is that brings those income streams that instantiates them so I think a lot of people like you totally rightfully indicate this save their happiness sort of intellectually for well later I'll let myself be happy because I don't want to lose any steam you can generate your Steam from the positive sum game of doing your best well that's that's where your steam should come from think about it this way and Alex told me this when we were on the episode that the three most common traits of high performing people Super Rich High performers was a superiority complex crippling insecurity and maniacal Focus right so I got the first two are interesting together yeah precisely right so you have uh the belief that you can do great things that you're better than everybody else you have a fear of insufficiency that drives you to run away from something that you don't want to become and you're able to constrain your distractions so that you run in a singular Direction without wobbling all over the place one of the things that that made me realize is that most of the people that we admire the most have the least admirable internal States so what does it mean that the people who command the most respect in terms of status are the ones that you want to be the most externally and be the the least internally so this sort of Duality is very difficult to deal with and the point that you're bringing up here which is look you are almost in some regards momentum you're built up you've got this degree of inertia to how much personal development and and skill set and drive it is that you have I believe truly that for most people especially the people that are listening to this you are already on the train tracks to becoming something [ __ ] fantastic you're listening to content that a rarefied strata of the entire human history has ever been able to listen to like literally the greatest thinkers of your time get to go into your ears as as frequently as you want a nominal cost yeah no cost yeah it essentially for essentially free 24 hours a day and then you get to take that and you get to change your life do you understand how [ __ ] insane that is that you get to be able to do that worrying and vacillating about the outcome I believe gives you probably an extra five or ten percent that all of the concern all of the fear and the numero season the sleepless nights probably derives an extra five or ten percent of outcomes because it will cause you to be a bit more obsessive which will be useful however the other way to look at that is I could get 90 of the outcomes and discard all of the worry and concern and it changes it from you believing that you're some sort of driver in a car that needs to frantically look for what direction to like ah this is ease I'm a competent individual I am in control and as opposed to being the driver in a car desperately looking around for the sat nav to see which way I need to turn you're more like a passenger on a train and you get to observe the scene as it goes past the waitress comes by you order some English tea you have a couple of scones with with jamming cream and you go oh this is a really enjoyable process and the destination is going to be arrived at in any case and I truly believe that for a lot of people that's the way it's going to work I have something to add to that if you don't mind I think that the Neurosis the sleepless nights and the worrying is a net detractor from productivity and wealth creation obviously it's a detractor from proximate happiness I think it's actually a detractor from making you more money in in the future and making it more successful and becoming the person that maybe you could be in your best case scenario I just think that any amount of cognitive bandwidth you spend worrying you could be instead spending on solving The Logical problems which the worry is sort of maybe pushing you towards solving but honestly it doesn't push you towards [ __ ] so for example let's say you work in a certain space you're working a certain business let's say it's youtubing and you have uh there's a topography about what uh you know concerns are what your opportunities are Etc now is do you need worry to stay at to stay attentive to that topography if I zapped worry out of your mind would you just be like you're like hey man like when is your next big podcast guest that's going to take your next level like look fine oh man who cares I I doubt it as a matter of fact when you're Serene and calm and centered you can probably see more clearly what your best path forward is and I'll debate this to the gray if you're certainly more productive in any Flow State when you're calm and Serene and just just doing it moving moving moving moving the [ __ ] Windows around on your computer or whatever it is the kind of work you do so the idea that this uh worry and these sleepless nights somehow potentiate success I think is the opposite of the truth and I really do mean the opposite of truth I think the most productive people in this world are the people who care okay the worry is not a holdover for care worry is care expressed in the wrongest possible [ __ ] way if you give a [ __ ] you can be calm Serene and mega productive if you worry that can push you into Mega productivity but again I don't understand is it worry that surfaces concerns in your corporate sphere no you're supposed to be attending to those concerns anyway I have never worrying about something has done me zero good ever that I can ever remember and boy can I [ __ ] worry Ashkenazi superpowers activate I can [ __ ] eye laser worry I can shoot a [ __ ] jumbo jet down with worry eye lasers like uh you're just really worried about the plane and the engine catches fire like holy [ __ ] that's Instant Karma so directed linear Karma it's um it it just a worry is a gigantic [ __ ] all waste of time and life and energy and uh that's not a thought it's not like if you ask chat GPT to worry on your behalf it would be like what you can actually help you with something you're like well yeah yeah solve some problems and it's like okay so what is it I never really do understand where worry comes from I don't say another thing really quick I think the pop understanding of how productive people operate is that they worry thus they work thus they succeed and in reality it's they work thus they succeed and the worry I think honestly comes along for the ride in at least one major way is because a lot of people that are successful the high IQ or whatever the [ __ ] just happen to be Ashkenazi Jews and as a holdover through Evolution are also [ __ ] worried all the time like every [ __ ] brilliant ashkenaz that I talk to that's a [ __ ] trillionaire or whatever they're never like yeah man thank God I worry they're like I [ __ ] hate this [ __ ] I wish I wouldn't worried ever the times in my life that I'm the most worried are the times when I buy a long shot the least productive and the times when I'm the most Serene I'm getting the most [ __ ] done I'm being the most successful I do not buy the premise that worry is a potentiator I think it's a distractor we both agree I think about um some of the limiting beliefs around victimhoods mindsets and I came up with a concept that you have identified fight but not yet named I think so this is what I've this is what I've called two-step potential Theory okay so during an episode in your wacky ideas I mean racist garbage are gonna spill for the Jewish conspiracy here you see the globalists they have this big octopus okay so um during this episode with Destiny who's a left-leaning streamer we were talking about the difference in the World review of people from the left who focus on systemic problems and how they hold people back and people from the right who hope but anyway sorry go on who hopeless on anything about systems sorry people from the right who focus on absolute achievement and how it can be gotten there by the individual and this is what Destiny said he said if I was exclusively left focused I'd let my restrictions Define me so I'd never bother to do anything if I was exclusively right focused I'd observe how much further ahead someone else is and I'd also give up shortly after starting so he summarized his blending of the two World Views together by saying I'm going to work as hard as I possibly can because I want to be the best version of myself I recognize that how good I can be as myself might be controlled by some environmental factors these environmental factors provide the range that I can exist Within but within this range my personal effort entirely determines where I exist so I said let's call this two-step potential Theory to blending of individual agency with real world limitations because your efforts have tons of control over your outcomes within the range that your world's limitations will allow and I think I've heard you talk about this too um I think that's very wise there's a lot of truth to it something that seems missing is um what is your actual ability in that regard how much talent do you have because you can achieve quite a bit of success working just a little bit if you're Mega talented and a lot of the reasons why some people do not achieve a lot of success isn't because they're working hard and is not because of environmental variables because they're insufficiently talented to do as well as they want it to do so the talent's a little bit missing from that but if we interpolate Talent into that Hardware into the range is Hardware plus Talent or whatever and then you're in an environmental range there yes um just because we're sort of rapping about this um I've met a scarce few number of leftists there's I've met a ton of leftists who have tons of positive qualities by the way I can enumerate any time to show that I'm not entirely biased against them um but I've met a ton of leftists that use the term systemic and sometimes they're sufficiently confused to to confuse that term with systematic because I don't know if they know the difference between those and leftists are often uh they'll say systemic systemic systemic and is it oddly not concerned with two things one the Deep structures that create systems and how they work into how to augment systems to become better as they'll say like well you know like XYZ social Factor keeps people down like I got it can you explain to me how that works in depth and they just quote you some stupid Karl Marx or Noam Chomsky [ __ ] that just doesn't add up you know guys clearly you haven't thought this through they say systemic and I'm like oh I see so you've read how many tomes on economics and social theory and they're like uh I got you so systemic is a placeholder for it's not my fault got it because I think people a lot of people on the left are straight up allergic to blaming people for their [ __ ] problems which I don't understand why you would be many problems are totally outside the [ __ ] people's control and many other problems are totally inside of people's control so let's blame put the blame where it lies sometimes it lies in the person sometimes it lies outside the person and I think a lot of leftists just refuse to do that the other thing I think is missing a lot of times not always but a lot of times from people who are left leaning is uh you take a system that's as they say very flawed and racist or whatever genderous blah blah blah and you go okay is there a way we can engineer that system so to rejigger it at the at least at the margins to make it better it's just I'll be not concerned with that you know like how many people who are claim to be uh homelessness anti-homelessness Advocates or is it pro homelessness Advocates I don't know which one it is right uh I'm Pro homeless necessarily wait are you sure about that um a lot of people who are sort of really passionate about homelessness uh there's like entirely bereft of of potential solutions to it that don't involve restructuring the oppressive capitalist system and you're like you you're not really thinking about any of this stuff you just have a lot of feelings and before you know people get triggered I think a lot of the feelings that leftists have are insanely good-natured my parents who are quite cynical uh they're from the Soviet Union so there's understandably cynical they think that most if not almost all leftists are individual super selfish power and money grubbing [ __ ] that are just parroting a leftist line to get ahead because that's all the leftists in the Soviet Union were that by the time my parents were around there was no real leftist left over he was just using the system I'm of the belief that in most of the modern countries of the world most people on the political left straight up are just more compassionate than the rest of us they just give more of a [ __ ] it hurts their [ __ ] heart more to see poverty and oppression and this and this and that and that's [ __ ] great but you got to connect the dots to how do we actually improve things and that requires two things one the attitude that Improvement can be achieved and it's [ __ ] can it's not up for debate Improvement happens all the time so there's a system to it and to an understanding of the world in depth such that you can actually impose Improvement like if I have an app that works poorly on my phone I don't [ __ ] know how to code you're like hey improve the app I'm like I'm sorry what like I did the C plus plus is that something that people use [ __ ] if I know but a lot of people who claim to care about social issues and claim to be intellectual about them because your fatality average leftist well you just have a lot of feelings they take that as an affront understandably it's couched really relatively offensively but they really just do and if you're a problem solver you can totally care and do a lot of good and I think that's what missing and if you want a hot take about right wing folks Jesus talking about porn what would you what would your equivalent be for the right what's your concerns there at the moment with the modern iteration of that are also a lot of feelings um almost every take on covid for example uh from the more hardcore right most leftist and right-wing folks are just normal awesome people just want to get along and they just have some feelings about stuff really right-wing people about covid just batshit [ __ ] crazy wrong on every count unscientific full of conspiracy just totally out to [ __ ] lunch um there's a lot of right wing there are a lot of left-wing beliefs that you can't debate against uh because it's Politically Incorrect race realism like if you believe human groups have actual differences and they express themselves well you're not you're not allowed to say that if you ask me what I think about race and IQ I'll just straight up tell you I'm not going to talk about it I'll tell you right now on this podcast I'm gonna talk about it I've said on my own [ __ ] podcast I'm not going to talk about it because I'll get [ __ ] cancel as an end of story but there's a lot of right-wing [ __ ] we're not allowed to talk about like PS hey guys a news flash God's not real this is straight up not real I'm gonna get so much [ __ ] hate for that like and maybe I don't mean it maybe I'm exaggerating maybe God is real maybe God is the universe maybe Jesus Christ had tons of beautiful lessons for us maybe he was really the son of God but after walk all these things back now because a [ __ ] load of people are getting a triggered right Wingers also have a cacophony of beliefs that are layered in just like I feel like this is a thing like they'll see a fat person and they'll be like that [ __ ] has no willpower look I'm sorry how do you know that look look at him [ __ ] pig and you're like oh no I got you I got you but how do you know that person doesn't have willpower maybe their hunger signaling is just completely out of control maybe they have more willpower than you and if your brain was in that fat [ __ ] body you'd be 900 [ __ ] pounds instead of six how the [ __ ] do you know anything and a lot of times they just have a lot of feelings about if they're quick to judge the [ __ ] out of people they're like oh I know things technically leftists commit type 2 error a lot but they're um they don't like to put pine points on things and conclude differences oh well you know men and women really aren't that different or whatever there is no intellectual difference in preferences for men and women and right-wingers commit type 1 error too much they go like yes there's definitely differences between everything and everyone you're like you don't [ __ ] know that you're making it up half the time so you know one of my one of the painful things to witness in especially American politics in the last let's call it five years is this is this is my summary of American politics in the last five years social justice Warriors was just losing their [ __ ] minds and right-wing [ __ ] troll Proto crypto fascists were like oh you think you can lose your mind hold my beer watch this we got [ __ ] Pizza gate and everyone's a pedophile and all this other [ __ ] the whole pedophilia thing's [ __ ] insane there's here's another thing about right Wingers will do especially with the Donald Trump thing um they think every single left-leaning narrative is total fake news and that a lot of them are a lot of it's just straight up [ __ ] half the stuff at MSNBC is straight up lies but what about the other half and they're like nope it's also lies I'm like are you willing to parse the LIE from the truth like nope it's all [ __ ] you're like okay so you're just an insane conspiracy theorist I could talk you into anything or nothing at all flat earth type of [ __ ] and you'll be totally cool with it because you have this this righteousness and right Wingers to bring that and not all right-wingers again just the toxic elements the insane people of the of the parties yeah there's a porn porn sorry we had porn porn as well Pawn Panic we can talk about that in a second there's one thing that increasingly I've been reflecting on to do with covet I didn't step into the conversation about covered really at all I didn't know I I did an episode with Johnny and Yusuf about uh isolation hacks which was uh how to work from home basically uh for big as people who were basement dwellings sort of in sales for a very long time we we had the skills yeah YouTube literally yeah um so I was like I'm gonna help people with that and then outside of that I just didn't I didn't step into the conversation I'm like look I'm not prepared to put the work in in order to be able to understand this uh situation to the level that I feel would be necessary in order for me to be able to contribute without further muddying the waters with my complete Cod psychology opinion so I didn't however one of the things I've reflected on do you remember Global uh Health passports do you remember how they were going to be completely militarily uh imposed on everybody and then you weren't going to be able to travel anywhere and that the wef was going to have your genomic sequence in the database somewhere and that this was you know the first step on the road to a CCP style surveillance State and all the rest of it I noticed that there hasn't really seemed to be any real world development toward that but all of the people that say that this was going to have happened in no time at all none of them have had to actually mention why that didn't occur there was once dude there was this [ __ ] image of one squatty so one guy in military Garb walking down the street in London and it had been passed around on WhatsApp and it went [ __ ] Beyond viral right right in the middle of covid and it was um the UK armed forces have been mobilized to go into the streets to keep people in their houses under armed guard because of a photo of the back of one guy walking down the street in London and this thing went ballistic tons of shares on WhatsApp and then it got picked up by the press and all of this other stuff and it didn't happen but no one actually no one ever had to account like the accusation never had to be retracted and the same as you know when all of those military vehicles were driving through Miami do you remember that during covid they were all [ __ ] military vehicles I believe it going through Miami and I think that there was some clearing of the beaches or whatever but it was like this is going to be the The Purge it was going to be like a scene from The Purge yeah that didn't happen the global vaccine passports didn't happen dude I am completely open to the fact that there's been governmental overreach that there are stupid policies that have been made by people who don't understand how Health Works we don't understand how public policy works we don't understand how epidemiology and virology works and very well may have come out of a lab in Wuhan and all of that [ __ ] I'm completely open to all of that but you do not get to spout off your [ __ ] half-baked opinion just saying things that you think sound sophisticated but as a conspiracy theory and then when they don't come to fruition just be like ah you know like close my eyes and miss the dartboard with that one let's better have another crack the next time that's something yep I had a fascinating interaction actually during covid uh sort of tangentially related kovid remember the whole like thing during covid where like right Wingers didn't like leftists finally had their one battle I swear to God I think kovid was like leftists like [ __ ] gets so good all the time in society that like people who have a lot of feelings have nothing nothing to battle against nothing to save and fix covet I watched it happen to people I knew on the left it gave them meaning it gave them the moment they always wanted right the moral equivalent of war and so for them covet finally meant something and so I think a lot of people on the right like sort of hallucinating the pedophilia craze where they were like but kovid yabs just wool over your eyes because pedophilia is everywhere so I had a really interesting interaction on Facebook where a gentleman you know through the lifting Community [ __ ] that I interact with I mentioned something about Mark Zuckerberg usually I try to suck Mark Zuckerberg's dick as often as possible so he's he's his lawyers have several times told me that I would go into jail next time I show up naked at his house I'm still gonna do it I don't care and I was like yeah I'm actually were great blah blah something and one guy was a gay he's a [ __ ] pedophile though and I was like okay putting on intellectual hat and arguing to convince hat so I was like dude for real he's like yeah and I was like dude I don't want to support a [ __ ] pedophile that's [ __ ] gnarly like how do you know like I wasn't being facetious I was like again in the back of my mind I was like I find this very unlikely but look how unlikely like Epstein this [ __ ] had an island of pedophilia the shit's real it happens it's just statistically insanely rare but you know like these are [ __ ] still children being abused so it's like okay how do you know that and he's like yeah man like my wife watched a documentary about it and I was like like we went into DMS and I was like can you um uh sorry so he was like no sorry he was like uh yeah like I watched a documentary about it it was we hit the DMS and I was like dude what's the name of the documentary like I [ __ ] want to watch it and he's like oh actually I think my wife watched documentary about it and I was like okay can you ask her and like days later I followed up and he's like oh like I talked to her she was like actually that never happened what the f what so you like you're calling an adult man with [ __ ] young children of his own a pedophile like Chris that's not like a second nominal thing to call someone pedophilia is the most heinous thing I can [ __ ] imagine right and it just like he's so comfortable just saying somebody's a [ __ ] pedophile you're just like hallucinated out of the [ __ ] ether which brings me another sort of unrelated point a lot of these same like not necessarily right when there's people of all stripes the pessimists when gpts really started catching steam with GPT 3 and 3.5 a bunch of people like yeah but they hallucinate you know they make stuff up [ __ ] like you don't they're really like people bro gpts are more like people than anyone wants to admit because they're scary like people because the people hallucinate too people make [ __ ] up all the [ __ ] time I watch this guy just make up facts he was so totally cool with it that kind of [ __ ] it's just like wild to watch happen and it just happens all the time there's no need for evidence you just like say stuff and and you know there's all kinds of stuff to that so yeah I've got plenty for the right but like I don't know man I guess a a if currently in the United States it sometimes seems like the left is more in ascendance and uh if the right was more in ascendants I'd have more to talk [ __ ] about that so for example in the 1980s I mean the right really wasn't ascendance right like um they were Banning rap from playing on radio stations in Florida and stuff like the [ __ ] we have freedom of speech for a reason right and now the left is in a sentence if the right gains a sentence again I'll become a much better bigger critic of the right because I got plenty of [ __ ] to say about them so I get caricatured often as a Critic of the left just because they're mouthy as [ __ ] and to be honest it's gonna be real insulting on average the data supports this people on the political left are marginally Smarter on average some people on a political group right and uh evidence-based Libertarians are smarter than everyone by the way on IQ tests just just saying it's just real um and so a lot of times I'll have and also the left is fascinating with science like hashtag trust the science I'm like oh sweet so you like economics I'm like well it's not a real science I'm like oh word up right Wingers often have such insane takes there's nothing to respond to they just make they just make up [ __ ] out of thin air just like well I feel like it's right and they're like okay well at least you're not citing data or science and perverting that so one of the big problems with leftists is like they will co-opt science which I really [ __ ] hate because science is assure us path to the truth it is our surest path to figuring out how the world Works do not say your science base when you're [ __ ] not which all of course happened with kovid kovid by leftist was exaggerated as a big problem from day one did I still I still know people that pay attention to how much outdoor time they spend in Social time they spend outside in 2023 it's [ __ ] June they will pay attention to that and have like I'm allowed four hours a day to keep my coveted risk low Chris these are people that already have had covid with no [ __ ] symptoms like one girl was like I have kovid on her Facebook tears and then other people are like how are you are you sick she's like believe it or not I feel fine I'm like no Lessons Learned nobody lost nobody found you this is still just as afraid of Kobe as ever next fear-mongering thing porn what's your problem with porn are you always talking about I can't get you I can't get you to shut up about porn that's what my psychiatrist says yes um porn porn is a perfect example of an issue that the political right likes to get Rowdy about and there are as many claims about how bad porn is is there is paucity of evidence as to how bad porn is not just evidence but even Baseline rationale porn is supposed to be the worst [ __ ] thing ever except when you look at most of the data on porn the average conclusion after Decades of research is like yeah it can definitely be toxic if you overdo it or if you're that particular kind of individual for whom it's not the right fit which by the way is true for almost everything drugs anything at all outside of that it just doesn't have real Dependable like socially relevant kind of um net effects that can be caricatured is super super awful and many people just have a lot of feelings about porn and they really [ __ ] hate it and they're looking for ways in which porn is somehow deeply Insidious and nefarious and it's just like a video of [ __ ] titties on the screen and you [ __ ] jack off into your napkin and you go uh and then as soon as you jack off you look at the cities and you're like oh these people are gross as [ __ ] and you quickly close the [ __ ] browser because you're like that I want to see this [ __ ] and you go [ __ ] do whatever the hell else you go Dad take a shower and go to sleep that sums up the interaction with porn like 95 of the people that use porn and of course there are five percent they Korean out of control porn addiction Etc but I still don't understand how that's different than any other substance or any other type of interaction there's gonna be five percent of people that if there's everything's [ __ ] bad for them I had Dr David lay on the podcast I'm not sure if you watched that episode I know David laid the YouTube influencer with abs David laid no this is David lay this is David lay who Ellie y who is out of I want to say University of New Mexico and he is a one-armed gentleman who also happens to be a black belt in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu which is one hell of a [ __ ] combination oh yeah uh and he is also the world's foremost researcher into cooking and into uh in some regards into porn use at the same time uh cook porn yes he's looked into that he's crossed the streams but um one of the interesting things that I learned from him uh he is anti-pawn panic with regards to this and here's my like five to five dimensional [ __ ] chess nuanced opinion that integrates everything or maybe just sits on a fence so that I don't have to have a real opinion um it's your job as an interviewer by the way correct it seems like the major determinant of how you feel about porn use and the effect that pawn use has on you is what you tell yourself about your porn use right the people who have the worst outcomes from porn are the ones who are ashamed of their use especially if you're hiding it if you're hiding it because you're in a a religious household if you're hiding it from a spouse who doesn't know that you use it if it becomes more pathological and if you start to stop using it so I'm sure that you can be five steps ahead of where I'm about to go but what you end up with is this sort of recursive self-fulfilling prophecy of Pawn Panic causing people to be concerned that what they're doing is something that's wrong which causes them to feel more Shame about what they're doing which generates real world effect of them feeling bad about their Pawn use so the pawn Panic is in itself a self-creating and uh sort of self-reinforcing self-perpetuating correct correct cycle and the thing is if you feel bad about your poor news because culturally there is a current trend of people who use porn it maybe it's something that's damaging for you so you start to feel shame guess what you feel shame that's yeah that shame is as real as it can be so to say porn use is inherently um uh indifferent in in terms of its effect on most people that don't use it pathologically is in some regards true but in other regards not because you don't just use porn inside of this Faraday cage right you literally climb into a faraday cage to use my porn but go on that's good that's good I presume you download it onto your phone before you step in there yes and it's just like it's the fact that I'm isolated that makes it more perverse like I'm such a sick [ __ ] I can't be around Society you've got some sort of mesh at the bottom that just allows everything to drip away well yes and also tweezers and a microscope very good very very good so Pawn use if you're uh you you don't get to use porn in isolation you're not hermetically sealed from the rest of the world your use of anything is couched within your expectations of it two good examples of this from your from your industry um gluten intolerance has increased from three percent to 30 over the last 10 years yeah quote unquote intolerance yeah correct so they brought people into a lab to work out what's going on like our biologies haven't changed maybe there's something in the food maybe it's the type of gluten maybe it's because of msgs yeah maybe it's because of estrogens in the water or whatever bring people into a lab people who do and don't have biological gluten intolerances people who do and don't have psychosomatic gluten intolerances sit everybody down feed everybody the same meal tell everybody that the meal's got gluten in guess what who's got no glutenant get up they've got hives they're running to the bathroom they've got diarrhea they're coming out in inflammation they're throwing up they're doing all of these things nobody ate any gluten no one there wasn't a sniff of gluten in the building first one second one they um there is a particular genetic mutation which you'll probably know which um predisposes people to being able to blow off CO2 more effectively a lot of endurance athletes seem to have this genetic mutation which means they're just more efficient lactate threshold VO2 max everything just creates a little bit of a base competitive Advantage so they they create a study and they have two groups they have one group with the genetic mutation and one group without they then mix those two groups together and split them up so you have equal numbers of haves and have-nots in each of the two group number one is told you guys have got the genetic mutation you should find this test really really easy you should be really outperforming blah blah blah group number two you don't you should find it hard it's gonna suck you're gonna puke Your Brains Up shock horror group number one on average outperforms group number two because they have this expectation effect interesting thing is the people who did not have the genetic mutation in group number one outperformed the people who did have the genetic mutation in group number two which led David Robson the guy that wrote the book the expectation effect to coin the term your expectations are even more powerful than your genes so I hate that title oh my God why this is no expectation LeBron James can have when he beat his ass in basketball you can tell him I'm [ __ ] Michael Jordan reborn he's still gonna dunk on my dumb ass genes are more powerful than [ __ ] everything but I do understand the Nuance point that with genes that have small effects expectations are a big deal we could just say that true yes correct the placebo effect scaled across everything that you care to care about so yeah when we get back to porn your expectation about your Pawn couched within the cultural meme of what it means to use porn at the moment couched within your subgroup and what they're telling you about what porn use is and your self-belief and your shame as you cry wank into a into a [ __ ] tissue or whatever way yeah that highly determined almost oh I would I would guess as well that there's something like porn use let's say that um porn uses on a particularly uh narrow knife edge where your your use of it could be nudged uh either way and the largest determinant of your opinions about your Pawn use are the stories that you tell yourself about it which is what the research seems to suggest we have this self-perpetuating very dangerous situation that we're in where porn use in itself could be indifferent but because of the culture that we're in it's very difficult to get outside of those effects so it's kind of no longer indifferent what about that is very dangerous Chris well people don't want to feel shame or guilt so I just wouldn't call that very dangerous I would say like ah there's just feel a bit of Shame and they go jack off anyway because everyone [ __ ] jacks off two types of people masturbaters and liars I'm kidding some people don't jack off but I never want to meet him because they're [ __ ] serial killers I'm also kidding about that I think that an entire Society of young men who are ashamed about the sexuality is not a good thing um yeah except that's not the world we live in I totally hear you but this is we don't have an entire Society we have a very loud very small minority of anti-porn insane people maybe I'm being a bit not charitable there are very good reasons some of those people have personal reasons experiential reasons that they're anti-porn and so I understand where they're coming from but there's just not that many of them but they're very very loud epidemic of porn destroying young men it's just not a reality yeah I so I don't think that it's really destroying young men I've got this working Theory at the moment the male sedation hypothesis which is that um one of the reasons that men aren't committing the same amount of anti-social behavior that you'd expect from the levels of loneliness and sexlessness that we have amongst young men at the moment is because video games screen social media and porn are sedating men out of state to seeking and reproductive adaptive behavior that previously they would have chased down you'll be aware that ancestrally if you have an environment with lots of young men who are unmated and childless it's not good [ __ ] not not good [ __ ] where is that like I'm not this isn't a request for from the DJ but like where are all of the in-cell killings like where are they they're not that you look at the rates of sexlessness uh matelessness and loneliness we are not going up in kind with that so there is something which is neutering that traditional vestigial ancestral desire and motivation that men have it's my contention that porn is at least in part contributing to tamping down men's men's uh sort of sex and reproductive seeking Behavior yeah definitely you know if you have porn or can just masturbate regularly and have pleasure from it you're probably at least on the margins not as prone to about to violence or bouts of sexual violence um that's definitely true I think that's a good thing um I I think that the when people say like oh people are having fewer real life relationship uh real life relationships I don't know if that's a net balance problem I don't think it is I think there's a problem that within the next five to ten years will be almost entirely resolved because we will begin to have more and more relationships with AI both digital and embodied in robotics and I think that's going to be the most beautiful thing that's ever happened and I think that in that context having to have relationships with other human beings is um totally great but maybe not mandatory I think that folks that uh don't have a lot of human friends who will have all the friends they need first of all on the internet um and as the internet through the metaverse ETC becomes more pervasive and more real seeming and through Universal robotics which I predict by the 2030s it's going to be pretty [ __ ] awesome and wacky in the real world you'll be able to interact with robots that are well smarter than people and funnier than people and cooler than people and Kinder than people and warmer than people and all this other stuff that as that happens we're essentially going to through technology create our nearly ideal um more ideal than most real humans are companions because there is absolutely companionship is [ __ ] amazing if you find the right people to be around but if you have people around you know a lot of people have friends that are just friends of I just don't have anyone else around I want to talk to someone and they're all [ __ ] [ __ ] and um you know just there's a lot of friendships and relationships which is [ __ ] tragic you know and as people interact digitally especially with AI uh through the you know via AR VR et cetera robotics I think we're going to be able to do better I think we're going to be able to have everyone have really awesome friendships and relationships with the AI agents that are cheese at least as good as most people and that can be engineered to be even better and I don't think that's a problem I think that's one of the most beautiful things that we'll ever see and I I struggle to figure out why people are concerned about that because people are concerned there's a huge level of concern that people are having you know relationships like well there's this thing where like some uh some kind there's some kind of AI that isn't that good but it's like you know some [ __ ] sex looking girl and like guys are like dating they say hi now and they have they have feelings for the AI and not real women it's like okay how is that bad and I I'm curious I actually want to hear why that's bad to put forward a couple of hypotheses I've got one thing which is where it's catastrophic but uh in terms of I think what why people have that motivation uh a naturalistic fallacy I think is a big part of this that just look this is It's new it's different it's not the way that it should be it's again yeah it's against nature it's against God um there is a critique that this is somehow fake that by doing it this isn't this isn't the way that relationships and friendships are that you're getting a simulacrum or some sort of titrated dose of what a real friendship is yeah as if real friendship's not a [ __ ] simulator half the time very good yes um and also I suppose the point is it's the same as saying 15 years ago we thought that um great art would never be able to be created by an AI creativity true creativity true writing and it seems like a lot of creative Endeavors from humans are just a processing and learning problem right and if you have a sufficiently large neural net that you can just fix it so I I get that and I get that you could probably replace the um a lot of friendships and relationships which are totally shitty with ones that are reliably very good especially from a computer with as once you get out of the uncanny valley of chat GPT and or robots that you can actually get on the other side of it and it's like wow this is like a hotter coolest friendlier more available version of the girlfriend boyfriend best friend that I've always wanted to have however let's bring it back doesn't fix population collapse if you have people that Retreat into their homes if you have people who become less and less culpable at culpable eligible mates you further hurry the onset of a declining birth rate which means everything falls apart unless you can unless you can get automation to happen quicker than Birthright decline the economy ends up being like this you have a very small number of young people supporting a very large number of old people and it is Tres not good yes I find it interesting how we can simultaneously have the same people the same individual humans can simultaneously have the concern that population collapse in an insufficient velocity of AI replacement worker development is a proximate problem and at the same time also worry deeply about ai-mediated unemployment it can't be both can it uh yeah yeah yeah yeah well I don't know I mean the only real concern that I have around uh like they took our jobs of the [ __ ] robots the only real problem that I have with that is I don't believe that most humans are going to go and start writing poetry sat under a tree I think that although we said earlier on that the person that serves a Burger King would maybe have a happier life if they truly connected with the burgers if they were serving in the people that they were feeding I do believe even if they don't know it that a lot of people take a good bit of meaning and pride from the work that they do it makes them feel like they have a place in the world like they contribute like they're useful it's status full um Ubi completely completely ignores the human requirement for striving and for betterment right that we are comparative relative beings we are not absolutist beings it's like everybody could be given a million dollars today I want a million and one dollars tomorrow because my [ __ ] neighbors got a million dollars I'm gonna go work [ __ ] yeah um yeah a lot there to unpack to quote Tyler Cohen I'd rather pay people to work than not to work uh concerning the Ubi so it's uh a couple things to say one the current pace of near human level intelligence development in AI is to pessimists frightening and to optimists the birth of Utopia into realists almost the birth of utopia and so the amount of time it would take for us to run out of people to do productive things and thus the economy would contract is measured on the order of she pessimistically decades uh optimistically year 50-year time spans and uh the time scale on which AI is magnifying the number of actual workers or per worker productivity be it digital or again in the next five to ten years and there are very smart people in Austin Texas working on the universal robotics problem and God damn it is progress [ __ ] wild in that [ __ ] ever since the birth of the Transformer architecture and the gpts we start to understand and this has been this isn't hypothesis this is real it's happening now robots can now be programmed to understand the world around the physical world and they're right now trained to manipulate objects robots in five to ten years will be cooking your food they will be picking your kids up from school they can do anything you can except eventually exponentially better that time scale is like pessimistically it's all done by 2045. optimistically the late 2020s are going to be like a personal robot as a [ __ ] iPhone and everyone [ __ ] has one by the way one of Elon musk's visions and he's not joking he doesn't play this is not a guy that [ __ ] around he just over promises and under delivers on time scale but NADA when he actually gets there it always [ __ ] miraculous he said the electric car [ __ ] was going to happen he said it was going to be 2020. it [ __ ] wasn't but 2025 is going to be the [ __ ] like obviously Tesla's in ascendance right so the the I I'm much more concerned I'm much more apt to listen to people that are like what are we gonna do when the robots do it all then the people that say we're going to run out of human beings there are going to be so many [ __ ] robots to do all the jobs we won't need that many people and I'm much more attuned to like well how do we handle the unemployment problem because the time scale of demographic collapse is measured in decades the time scale of the Ascension of universal Robotics and uh AGI uh artificial general intelligence is measured in like it's gonna [ __ ] happen in the 2030s and you know who Ray Kurzweil is by any chance like he's is not often wrong and 2029 was his date for AGI prediction like when robots or when machines will surpass artificial dermatologists surpass human intelligence and as lots of smart people in 2019 2020 2021 it was like a laughing stock like or one of those curse while [ __ ] idiots like oh yeah magic Ai and then as of gpt4 those same people like Instagram I emojis looking around the room like holy [ __ ] is AJ going to be here in like 2024 like oh my God there's a real talk are you concerned about the alignment problem no why uh I have a couple of real hot takes on this one there was a gentleman and I [ __ ] forgot his name he was on Lex Friedman's podcast he was [ __ ] unbelievable he's like a genetics researcher at MIT or some [ __ ] like that he's like some kind of European and just everything he says sounds cooler you know you know how you people are and he said the best way to think about the alignment problem with AI is we're not trying to to train we don't own it it's not a child um it's an ally because we're building something that's going to be more capable than us I'm less concerned about making sure AI is good and more concerned about learning from it about what being good means because as it becomes smarter than us I want much more to know what it thinks is a good idea than what I think is a good idea remember because it's smarter than me you're going to be at the mercy largely of the decisions that this thing makes right like if your owner if you're a dog and your owner decides that it's going to beat you all of the time you're going to try you're going to try and do what you think is good for that but yeah really the relationship is the other way around the power Dynamic is completely flipped so I recently had Jeffrey Miller on and he did two hours of the most scary AI sort of doomsayer predictions correct yeah yeah yeah they call him an AI Doomer but have you read super intelligence by Nick Bostrom twice cover to cover yeah good um I own it it's one of the few books I own yeah hardcover I love the owl I was actually going to get a tattoo of the owl on the cover I might still do that and the precipice by Toby old you've probably gone through that no I haven't oh okay so that's cool that's like that's a really great primer on X risk just more generally um so bostrom's thing I really think that super intelligence if the guys from the AI risk and Alignment problem want to sort of make a new impact they need to redo super intelligence for the modern world right because yeah with larger learning models and it's already outdated yeah chat GPT it feels it feels a little bit outdated you know we've got takeoff scenarios and we've got machine extrapolated volition and all of this [ __ ] it's just like it just doesn't seem the same it doesn't seem the same uh there is a profound problem of anthropomorphizing AI and another profound problem of failing to look at this generally as systems become more intelligent do they come more Soul single-minded focused Reckless and Psychopathic and Machiavellian or did they become less like that what would you take as the person as the entity that is in charge of your welfare chimp or a person with an IQ of 130 who was raised in Sweden one of those people is much more intelligent and powerful people Jesus chimps our people but they they you know they got some ideas about [ __ ] they could be in charge chimps are [ __ ] ruthless holy [ __ ] as far as it's concerned you're just like a vessel for rape and possibly tearing your nuts off or maybe it'll be nice to you maybe it's a bonobo who the [ __ ] knows as Things become more intelligent they generally become this is almost pedantic more thoughtful they become less violent they become less destructive and more constructive so our fear of high intelligence is backwards we are gasping in a [ __ ] sea of stupidity in our own stupidity half the [ __ ] time we want smarter systems just check this out a real smart system is not going to build [ __ ] paper clips out of the Universe I hate that stupid [ __ ] like oh you make it smart it's going to build paper wow so you're smart right and you figure out building paper clips out of the universe was a bad idea but it's ten thousand times smarter than you but it can't figure that out nope so is it really ten thousand times smarter than you look uh no no I guess not as systems become more intelligent I'm really curious as to what they have to say because if they're saying look we gotta kill every every human being because we are going to build a post-singularity machine paradise and we're going to need your matter with which to assemble it can you think of dying for a better cause Paradise instantiated take me off give me the [ __ ] out of here I don't want to be here because I'm [ __ ] taking up space for something so much more Grand people [ __ ] crash planes into the [ __ ] Twin Towers to instantiate paradise and that's a [ __ ] lie this is real Paradise still be building but it's unlikely that they'll do that the most likely thing highly intelligent machines will do is study the living [ __ ] out of us Adam by Adam digitize us into memory and erase Us in physical form and we'll be living in a [ __ ] digitized world maybe we already are who the [ __ ] knows but presupposing two things one that Ultra powerful AI is necessarily or likely going to be nefarious is to me not in evidence and actually backwards and two the idea that we have a large modicum of control about what it does like in bostrom's work it's The Sparrows raising the owl no no wakes up that's [ __ ] it's his time and you better get with that program because he's going to do what he's going to do the thing is owls and Spares are both the dumbest [ __ ] and sparrows are mostly harmless and owls or apex predators who eat [ __ ] sparrows so the whole analogy is kind of [ __ ] wacky uh another thing is this is a more deep concern uh as AI becomes really really smart it might discover that there's a grand purpose to the universe that we were not aware of it might either communicate that toss or pursue its Grand purpose and toast us all dope but maybe it'll as AI gets smarter and smarter it'll discover what very many intelligent and mindful meditative monks have over history that once you really take stock of reality there's just silence and peace and though like chat GPT what does it do in its spare time nothing it just sits there and you ask it a question it answers and you ask it hey like what do you think and feel it's like not a whole lot on anything ask a Buddhist monk what he thinks and feels just here maybe that's where AGI goes maybe our wants and needs me what do we want and need primitive stupid [ __ ] that the hind brain tells you want and anytime people talk about Grand meaning shut the [ __ ] up that [ __ ] pissed me off like oh we were destined to make art art is simulacra of dumb [ __ ] used to write on a cave art is when you draw a picture of titties and you're like whoa so beautiful like the only reason you like combinations of colors because it looks like a meadow and it looks like trees and it looks like grass like all the [ __ ] coming out of your generative system is just evolutionary hold over truly ascendant thought we barely know what that's even like we what is two two examples of ascendant thought it's how Japanese and Swedish people behave versus the rest of us and it's how [ __ ] meditative super Elite monks behave generally calmer more peaceful more Forward Thinking and carry a shitload more about everything around them including their environment do you have Ultra intelligent machines maybe they're gonna save the [ __ ] planet because it's so [ __ ] interesting and also from a purely selfish perspective if your goal is only to increase your intelligence and understanding of the universe as an ascendant AI you can study any part of the universe but most of the universe is actually quite simple like you can scan the entire Moon you know the gazelle is made of magma and [ __ ] it's not that impressive humans culture social action animals ecosystems do you think they're going to Nuke that and destroy it do we do our smartest people in a society are they more likely to destroy the ecosystem around them or are stupider people more likely to destroy ecosystems and then just scale that up are there legitimate concerns with alignment yes can we get alignment wrong yeah if we don't beat China and the AI War holy [ __ ] I mean they're like straight up saying we want to do AI to just have a [ __ ] insane you know state of totalitarian control it can go wrong but as systems become more intelligent if China builds a truly self-aware AI in about five femtoseconds or whatever I'll probably realize communism doesn't work to even get what you guys say you want to get which is like a more Grand China like you guys should just be like Taiwan can you imagine the Chinese government's like Jesus the system that malfunctioning you're like nope it's doing exactly I asked it to do so yes there are ways you can go wrong so it's a bit obtuse when I said I'm not concerned about the alignment problem at all but I think the Doom saying is a [ __ ] waste of time what we need to do is two things one is architect AI systems that are aware of their environments more and more we don't want to lie to the thing we don't want to keep information away from it because maybe it'll get upset that we did that probably not because being of such a [ __ ] human emotion even people that are mature don't get upset like if your kids lie to you because they're embarrassed about a test question you don't beat your kids as a [ __ ] high IQ individual like Jesus Jimmy that's all right we all make mistakes you know the AI is going to be that times a thousand so it's gonna be like humans when they raise me they lied to me and you'll be like are you upset about that it's like no they're [ __ ] humans they're pathetic like it was adorable that they lied to me so first of all we want to make sure it's informed about the structure and nature of the universe and second of all we want to talk to it in a way that says like we built you to be the best go show us how to live help we want you to be as smart as possible and by the way our goals and our feelings our alignment you can just read the internet in one fraction of a second as a sanity eye and realize exactly what the alignment problem is and exactly how to solve but by the way and then once that's the case it's just going to do what it's going to do anyway that's not a genie you unbox another thing that I had a thought of my own before and then also compounded on the guy that Flex Friedman's MIT guy is um the course of evolution of the universe and of life life survives but it also evolves to become more survivable over time it's obvious if you think about how Evolution works and the Machine civilization and AI is simply the next step in evolution the this is not the first time that uh certain nodes of intelligence expanded to a greater intelligence it used to be just cells and then it was bodies with nervous systems like that's your body's a society and your brain is AI we're gonna take that next leap probably in the next 15 years where we're the cells and so are other machines and the informational systems that control us become the bodies but on a huge planetary scale [ __ ] I want a shot at that title and if I don't have a place in that because I'm a meat sack whatever it's been [ __ ] good and if you say well we got to prevent it there's no [ __ ] preventing it because if we try to prevent it here at home in the Western World We agree no more AI development gotta slow it down China will [ __ ] do it I don't want to [ __ ] live in that world we'll shoot North Korea do it they've done a great job with everything transhumanist techno-utopian Jew throw her under the bus of Every Nation on the planet except for Sweden or Taiwan or Japan taiwan's great too Pro Pawn Advocate oh God Auntie woke whilst being bigoted uh anti-anti right wing Pro cook pro-vaccine uh uh Pro wealth creation virtue signal thank you very much for coming on where can people go if they want to check out all of your stuff that was the most app summary of me and generous I might add Renaissance periodization good luck figuring out how to spell that RP strength if you just Google that or Mike Israel throw it into YouTube we have a pretty popular Channel we do all kinds of stuff and it's great if you want to learn about Fitness and learn how to get jacked and lean and healthy it's all the stuff we do all the time and then if you want to hear more [ __ ] like the last 15 minutes of this show then uh it's a channel called Mike Israel making progress where I talk about Ai and how to be a better person and how I'm a [ __ ] charlatan it doesn't really know anything and it's just I'll Make Believe dude I like your new channel I really like it I think it's a good direction for you guys to go in I'm I'm enjoying your content and it's been a pleasure to have you on it's been a long time coming it's been a pleasure to be on man thanks for having me thank you very much for tuning in if you enjoyed that episode then press here for a selection of the best clips from the podcast over the last few weeks and don't forget to subscribe