23:59:59

Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.

0:03

The Joe Rogan Experience.

0:06

Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by

0:08

night, all day. Hello,

0:13

Sam. What's happening? Not much, how are you? Thanks for coming

0:15

in here. Appreciate it. Thanks for having me. So,

0:18

what have you done? Like

0:20

ever? No, I mean, what have you done with

0:22

AI? I mean, it's

0:25

one of the things about

0:28

this is, I mean, I think

0:30

everyone is fascinated by it. I mean, everyone

0:33

is absolutely blown away

0:35

at the current capability and

0:38

wondering what the potential for the future is

0:40

and whether or not that's a good thing.

0:42

I

0:45

think it's going to be a great thing, but I

0:47

think it's not going to be all a great thing. And

0:49

that is where I think

0:54

that's where all of the complexity comes in for people. It's

0:56

not this like clean story of we're going to do this

0:58

and it's all going to be great. It's we're going to do this,

1:01

it's going to be net great, but it's going to be like

1:03

a technological

1:04

revolution. It's going to be a societal

1:06

revolution. And those

1:09

always come with change. And even

1:11

if it's like net wonderful, you

1:13

know, there's things we're going to lose along the way. Some

1:15

kinds of jobs, some kind of parts of our way of life, some

1:17

parts of the way we live are going to change or go away. And

1:21

no matter how tremendous the upside

1:24

is there, and I believe it will be tremendously good. You

1:26

know, there's a lot of stuff we got to navigate through to

1:28

make sure. That's

1:33

a complicated thing for anyone to wrap their heads

1:35

around. And there's deep and super understandable

1:38

emotions around that. That's a very honest answer

1:40

that

1:42

it's not all going to be good. But

1:45

it seems inevitable at this point. It's,

1:48

yeah, I mean it's definitely inevitable. My view

1:51

of the world, you know, when you're like

1:53

a kid in school, you learn about this technological

1:55

revolution and then that one and then that one. And

1:58

my view of the world now sort of looking backwards.

1:59

stand for, it says that this

2:02

is like one long technological revolution.

2:05

And we had, sure, like first we

2:07

had to figure out agriculture so that we had

2:09

the resources and time to figure out how to

2:11

build machines, then we got the industrial revolution. And

2:14

that made us learn about a lot of stuff, a lot of other

2:16

scientific discovery too. Let us do the

2:18

computer revolution. And that's now letting us

2:20

as we scale up to these massive systems do the

2:23

AI revolution. But it really is just

2:25

one long story of humans

2:28

discovering science and technology and co-evolving

2:30

with it. And I think it's the most

2:32

exciting story of all time. I think it's how we

2:34

get to this world of abundance. And

2:37

although, you know,

2:39

although we do have these things to navigate, there will

2:41

be these downsides.

2:42

If you think about what it means for the

2:44

world, for people's quality of lives,

2:46

we can get to a world where

2:50

the cost of intelligence

2:53

and the abundance that comes with that,

2:57

the cost dramatically falls, the abundance goes

2:59

way up. I think we'll do the same thing with energy. And

3:02

I think those are the two sort of key inputs to

3:04

everything else we want. So if we can have abundant

3:06

and cheap energy and intelligence,

3:09

that will transform people's lives largely

3:11

for the better. And I think it's gonna

3:14

in the same way that if we could go back now 500 years and look

3:17

at someone's life, we'd say, well, there's some great things, but

3:19

they didn't have this, they didn't have that. Can you believe they didn't have

3:21

modern medicine? That's

3:23

what people are going to look back at us like, but

3:25

in 50 years. When you

3:27

think about the people that currently rely

3:30

on jobs that AI will replace,

3:33

when you think about whether it's truck drivers

3:36

or automation workers, people that work

3:38

in factory assembly lines, what,

3:42

if anything, what strategies can

3:44

be put to mitigate the negative

3:47

downsides of those jobs

3:49

being eliminated by AI?

3:51

So I'll

3:55

talk about some general thoughts, but I

3:58

find making very specific. prediction

4:00

difficult because the way the technology

4:03

goes has been so different than

4:05

even my own

4:06

Intuitions or certainly my own intuitions.

4:08

We maybe we should stop there and back up a

4:11

little what we what were your

4:13

initial Thoughts if you

4:15

had asked me 10 years ago. I would have said

4:18

first AI is going to come for

4:21

Blue-collar labor, basically, it's gonna drive

4:23

trucks and do factory work and you

4:25

know, it'll handle heavy machinery Then

4:28

maybe after that it'll do like some

4:31

kinds of cognitive labor Kind

4:34

of you know, but not it won't be off doing

4:36

what I think of personally is the really hard stuff

4:38

it won't be off Proving new mathematical

4:41

theorems won't be off discovering new

4:43

science Won't

4:45

be operating code and then eventually

4:48

maybe but maybe last of all maybe never

4:50

because human creativity is this magic

4:53

special special thing

4:57

That's what I would have said

4:59

now A

5:00

it looks to me like and

5:03

for a while AI is much better at doing

5:05

tasks than doing jobs It can

5:07

do these little pieces super well,

5:09

but sometimes it goes off the rails. It can't

5:11

keep like very long coherence So

5:14

people are instead just able to

5:16

do their existing jobs way more productively

5:19

But you really still need to human there today and

5:21

then b it's going exactly the other direction Do

5:24

the creative work first

5:24

stuff like coding second They

5:27

can do things like other kinds of cognitive

5:29

labor third and we're just purposed

5:31

away from like human robots

5:34

hmm

5:35

so back to the initial question

5:39

If we do have Something

5:42

that completely eliminates factory

5:44

workers completely eliminates truck

5:47

drivers delivery drivers things

5:50

along those lines That creates

5:52

this massive vacuum in

5:54

our society. So I

5:57

think there's things that We're gonna

5:59

do

5:59

that are good

6:02

to do but not sufficient. So I think at some point

6:04

we will do something like a UBI or

6:06

some other kind of like

6:08

very long-term unemployment

6:10

insurance something, but we'll have some way of

6:13

giving people like redistributing

6:15

money in society as a

6:17

cushion for people as people figure out the new jobs.

6:21

And maybe I should touch on that. I'm

6:24

not a believer at all that there won't be

6:26

lots of new jobs. I think human

6:29

creativity, desire for status, wanting

6:31

different ways to compete, invent new things,

6:34

feel part of the community, feel valued, that's

6:37

not going to go anywhere. People have

6:39

worried about that forever. What happens

6:41

is we get better tools and

6:44

we just invent new things and more amazing

6:46

things to do. And there's a big universe out there. And

6:48

I think, I mean that like literally

6:51

in that there's like space is really big, but

6:53

also there's just so much

6:55

stuff we can all do if we do get to this

6:57

world of abundant intelligence

6:59

where you can sort of just think of a new idea and it gets

7:02

created. But

7:06

again, that doesn't –

7:08

to the point we started with that

7:11

doesn't provide like great solace to people who

7:13

are losing their jobs today.

7:15

So saying there's going to be this great indefinite

7:17

stuff in the future,

7:18

people like what are we doing today? So

7:21

you know.

7:22

I think we will as a society do

7:25

things like UBI and other

7:27

ways of redistribution, but I don't think that gets

7:29

at the core of what people want. I think what

7:31

people want is like agency, self-determination,

7:35

the ability to play a role in architecting

7:37

the future along with the rest of society, the

7:40

ability to express themselves and

7:43

create

7:44

something meaningful to them. And

7:49

also I think a lot of people work jobs they hate.

7:52

And I think there's we as a society

7:54

are always a little bit confused

7:55

about whether we want to work more or work

7:57

less. But somehow –

8:02

We all get to do something meaningful and

8:05

we all get to

8:06

play our role in driving the future

8:08

forward. That's really important. And

8:10

what I hope is as those truck driving, long

8:13

haul truck driving jobs go away, which

8:16

people have been wrong about predicting

8:18

how fast that's going to happen, but it's going to happen. We

8:21

figure out not just a way to solve

8:25

the economic problem by

8:28

giving people the equivalent of money

8:30

every month, but that there's a way that –

8:34

and we have a lot of ideas about this. There's a way that

8:36

we share

8:37

ownership and decision making

8:39

over the future.

8:41

I think I say a lot about AGI's that

8:45

everyone realizes we're going to have to share the benefits

8:48

of that, but we also have to share

8:50

the decision making over it and access

8:52

to the system itself. I'd be more

8:54

excited about a world where we say rather

8:57

than give everybody on earth like one eight billionth

8:59

of the AGI money, which we should

9:01

do that to, we say you get like one

9:04

eight billionth of the

9:05

system.

9:09

You can sell it to somebody else. You

9:11

can sell it to a company. You can pull it with other people. You

9:13

can use it for whatever creative pursuit you

9:16

want. You can use it to figure out how to start some new business.

9:19

And with that, you get sort of like

9:22

a voting right over how this is all going

9:24

to be used. And so the better the AGI

9:26

gets, the more your little one eight

9:28

billionth ownership is worth to you. We

9:32

were joking around the other day on the podcast where I was saying that

9:34

what we need is an AI

9:36

government.

9:37

We should have an AI president and have AI right there.

9:41

Just make all the decisions? Yeah. Have

9:43

something that's completely unbiased,

9:45

absolutely rational, has the

9:48

accumulated knowledge of the entire

9:50

human history at its disposal,

9:52

including all knowledge

9:55

of psychology and psychological

9:57

study, including UBI, because that comes

9:59

with a host of people.

9:59

of pitfalls and issues

10:03

that people have with it. So I'll say something there.

10:06

I think we're still very far away from a system that

10:09

is capable enough and reliable

10:11

enough

10:12

that any of us would want that, but I'll

10:14

tell you something I love about that. Someday,

10:17

let's say that thing gets built. The fact that

10:19

it can go around and talk to every person

10:22

on earth, understand their exact

10:24

preferences at a very deep level, how

10:26

they think about this issue and that one and how they also

10:28

trade off and what they want, and then understand

10:31

all of that and

10:33

collectively optimize for

10:35

the collective preferences of

10:37

humanity or of citizens of the US, that's

10:40

awesome.

10:41

As long as it's not

10:43

co-opted,

10:44

our government currently is co-opted.

10:47

That's for sure. We know for sure

10:49

that our government is heavily influenced by special

10:51

interests. If

10:53

we could have an artificial

10:56

intelligence government that has no

10:58

influence, nothing has influence on

11:00

it. What is fascinating idea? It's possible.

11:03

And I think it might be the only way where

11:06

you're gonna get completely objective,

11:10

the absolute most intelligent

11:12

decision for virtually

11:15

every problem, every dilemma

11:17

that we face currently in society. Would you

11:19

truly be comfortable handing over like

11:21

final decision making and say, all right, AI,

11:24

you got it fair? No, no, but I'm not comfortable

11:26

doing that with anybody. I

11:30

was uncomfortable with the Patriot Act. I'm uncomfortable

11:32

with many decisions that

11:34

are being made. It's just there's

11:37

so much obvious evidence

11:39

that decisions that are being made are

11:41

not being made in the best interests of the overall

11:43

well of the people. It's being made

11:45

in the decisions of whatever

11:49

gigantic corporations that

11:51

have donated to and whatever

11:53

the military industrial complex and

11:56

pharmaceutical industrial complex and then just

11:58

the money. That's really what

12:00

we know today, that money has a massive

12:03

influence on our society and the choices

12:05

that get made and the overall good

12:07

or bad for the population. Yeah,

12:09

I have no disagreement at all that

12:12

the current system is super broken, not

12:14

working for people, super corrupt

12:17

and for sure unbelievably

12:19

run by money. I

12:23

think there is a way to

12:25

do a better job than that

12:27

with AI in some way,

12:30

but

12:30

this might just be like a factor of sitting

12:33

with the systems all day and watching all of the ways they

12:35

fail. We've got a long way to go. A

12:37

long way to go, I'm sure. But

12:39

when you think of AGI,

12:42

when you think of the possible

12:44

future like where it goes to, do

12:47

you ever extrapolate? Do you

12:49

ever sit and pause and say, well,

12:51

if this becomes sentient and

12:53

it has the ability to make

12:55

better versions of itself, how

12:58

long before we're literally dealing with a God?

13:03

The way that I think about this is

13:05

it used to be that AGI was this

13:07

very binary moment. It was before and after,

13:09

and I think I'm totally wrong about that.

13:12

The right way to think about

13:14

it is this continuum

13:17

of intelligence, this smooth exponential

13:19

curve back all the way to that sort of

13:21

smooth curve of technological revolution.

13:25

The amount of

13:27

compute power we can put into the system, the

13:29

scientific ideas about how to make it more

13:31

efficient and smarter to give it

13:34

the ability to do reasoning, to think about how to

13:36

improve itself,

13:38

that will all

13:39

come. But my model

13:41

for a long time, I think if you

13:44

look at the world of AGI thinkers, there's

13:47

sort of two,

13:48

particularly around the safety issues you're talking about, there's

13:50

two axes that matter. There's

13:53

what's called short timelines or long timelines to

13:56

the first milestone of AGI,

13:58

whatever that's going to be. Is that going to happen

14:01

in a

14:01

few years, a few decades, maybe even

14:04

longer, although at this point I think

14:05

most people are a few years, a few decades, and

14:07

then there's takeoff speed? Once we get there,

14:09

from there to that point you were talking about where it's capable

14:12

of the rapid self-improvement, is

14:14

that a slow or a fast process? The

14:17

world that I think we're heading, that

14:19

we're in,

14:20

and also the world that I think is the most

14:22

controllable and the safest, is

14:25

the short timelines

14:27

and slow takeoff quadrant.

14:32

I think we're going to have, there

14:34

were a lot of very smart people for a while, and they

14:36

were like, the thing you already talked about happens in a day or

14:38

three days. That

14:41

doesn't seem likely to me given the shape of the

14:43

technology as we understand

14:45

it now. Now even if that happens

14:47

in a decade or three

14:49

decades, it's still like the blink of

14:51

an eye from a historical perspective, and

14:55

there are going to be some real challenges to getting

14:57

that right, and the decisions

14:59

we make, the

15:02

safety systems and the checks

15:05

that the world puts in place, how we think

15:07

about global

15:10

regulation

15:11

or rules of the road from a safety perspective

15:13

for those projects, it's super important

15:15

because you can

15:16

imagine many things going horribly wrong.

15:19

I

15:21

feel cheerful about the progress

15:24

the world is making towards taking this seriously,

15:26

and it reminds

15:28

me of what I've read about the conversations

15:31

that the world had around the development of nuclear

15:33

weapons.

15:35

It seems to me that this is, at least

15:37

in terms of public consciousness, this has emerged

15:40

very rapidly, where I

15:42

don't think anyone was really aware, people

15:45

were aware of the concept of artificial

15:48

intelligence, but they didn't think

15:50

that it was going to be implemented so

15:53

comprehensively, so quickly. Chat

15:57

GPT is on 4.5 now? Four.

16:01

Four. And with 4.5, there'll be

16:03

some sort of an exponential increase in its

16:05

abilities. It'll be somewhat better.

16:09

Each step, you know, from each like half

16:11

step like that, you kind

16:13

of, humans have this ability to like

16:15

get used to any new technology so quickly.

16:18

The thing that I think was unusual about the launch

16:20

of chat GPT 3.5 and 4 was

16:21

that people

16:25

hadn't really been paying attention. And

16:27

that's part of the reason we deploy.

16:29

We think it's very important that people and institutions

16:31

have time to gradually

16:34

understand this re-earth co-design

16:36

the society that we want with it. And

16:38

if you just build AGI in secret in a lab and

16:40

then drop it on the world all at once, I think that's a really

16:42

bad idea. So

16:44

we had been trying to talk to the world about

16:46

this for a while.

16:48

People – if you don't give people something

16:50

they can feel and use in their lives, they don't quite

16:53

take it seriously. Everybody's busy. And

16:55

so there was this big overhang from where

16:57

the technology was to where public consciousness was.

17:00

Now, that's caught up. We've deployed.

17:03

I think people understand it. I don't

17:05

expect a field that jump from

17:08

like 4 to whenever we finish 1.5, which will be a

17:10

little while. I don't expect that to be

17:12

the

17:14

crazy – I think the crazy switch, the crazy

17:17

adjustment that people have had to go through has

17:19

mostly happened. I think most

17:21

people have gone from thinking that AGI was

17:23

science fiction and very far off to

17:25

something that is going to happen.

17:27

And that was like a one-time reframe.

17:29

And now every year you get a new iPhone.

17:32

Over the 15 years or whatever since the launch,

17:34

they've gotten dramatically better. But iPhone

17:37

to iPhone, you're like, yeah, it's a little better. But

17:39

now if you go hold up the first iPhone to the 15 or

17:41

whatever, that's a big difference.

17:43

GPT 3.5 to AGI, that'll be a

17:45

big difference.

17:47

But along the way, it'll just get incrementally better.

17:49

Do you think about the convergence

17:52

of things like Neuralink

17:54

and there's a few competing technologies

17:57

where they're trying to implement some – sort

18:02

of a connection between the

18:04

human biological system and

18:07

technology.

18:10

Do you want one of those things in your head? I

18:12

don't until everybody does. Right.

18:15

And I have a joke about it, but it's like the idea

18:17

is once it gets done, you have to

18:20

kind of, because everybody's going to have it. So

18:22

one of the hard questions

18:25

about

18:25

all of the related merge

18:28

stuff is exactly what you just said. Like

18:30

as a society, are we going to let

18:32

some people merge with AGI

18:35

and not others? And

18:38

if we do, then... And

18:40

you choose not to. Like, what does that mean for you? Right.

18:44

And will you

18:46

be protected? How you get that moment right?

18:48

You know, if we like imagine like all the way

18:51

out to the sci-fi future,

18:53

there have been a lot of sci-fi books written about how

18:55

you get that moment right. You know, who gets to do that first?

18:57

What about people who don't want to? How do you make sure that

18:59

people that do it first like actually help lift

19:01

everybody up together? Yeah. How

19:03

do you make sure people who want to just like live their very human life

19:06

get to do that? That stuff is really

19:08

hard and honestly so

19:11

far off from my problems of the day that I don't

19:13

get to think about that as much as I'd like to, because I do think

19:15

it's super interesting. But

19:21

yeah, it seems like if we just think logically,

19:25

that's going to be a huge challenge at

19:27

some point and people

19:29

are going to want

19:33

wildly divergent things.

19:36

But

19:37

there is a societal question about how we're

19:39

going to like,

19:40

questions of fairness that

19:43

come there

19:44

and what it means for the people who don't

19:46

do it. Like,

19:47

super, super complicated. Anyway,

19:50

on the neural interface side, I'm

19:52

in the short term, like before we figure out how

19:54

to upload

19:56

someone's conscience into a computer, if that's even

19:58

possible at all, which I think there's...

20:01

plenty of sides you could take on why

20:03

it's not. The

20:06

thing that I find myself most interested

20:08

in is what we can

20:11

do without drilling a

20:13

hole in someone's head.

20:15

How much of the inner monologue can we

20:17

read out with an externally mounted device? And

20:20

if we have a

20:21

imperfect low bandwidth, low

20:23

accuracy

20:24

neural interface,

20:26

can people still just learn how to use it really well

20:29

in a way that's like quite powerful for

20:32

what they can now do with a new computing platform?

20:34

And my guess is we'll figure that out. I'm

20:36

sure you've seen that headpiece. There's

20:38

a demonstration where there's

20:40

someone asking someone a question. They

20:43

have this headpiece on. They think the question and

20:45

then they literally Google the question and get the answers

20:48

through their head. That's the kind of thing we've been in. That's the kind

20:50

of direction we've been exploring. Yeah. That

20:53

seems to me to be step one. That's

20:55

the pong of the eventual

20:57

immersive 3D video games. Like

21:00

you're going to get these first steps

21:02

and they're gonna seem sort of crude and slow.

21:05

I mean it's essentially slower

21:07

than just asking Siri. I think if

21:09

someone built

21:12

a system where you could

21:14

think

21:15

words doesn't have to be a question. It could just be your

21:17

passive rambling inner monologue. That certainly

21:19

could be a question. And that was

21:21

being fed into GPT-5 or 6. And

21:24

in your field of vision, the

21:26

words in response were being displayed.

21:28

That would be the pong.

21:29

Yeah. That's still soup. That's a very

21:32

valuable tool to have. And that seems like

21:34

that's inevitable. There's

21:37

hard work to get there on the neural interface side but

21:39

I believe it will happen. Yeah. I

21:41

think so too. My concern is that the

21:43

initial adopters of this will have such

21:45

a massive advantage over the general population.

21:48

Well that doesn't concern me because that's like a...

21:51

You know that's not... You're not... That's just like better...

21:54

That's a better computer.

21:56

You're not like jacking your brain

21:58

into something in a high-risk thing. You know what... what you do

22:00

when you don't want them when you take off the glasses. So

22:03

that feels fine.

22:05

Well this is just the external device

22:07

then. Oh I think we can do the

22:09

kind of like read your thoughts with an external

22:11

device at some point. Read your

22:13

internal monologue. Interesting.

22:16

And do you think we'll be able to communicate with an external

22:19

device as well telepathically or

22:21

semi telepathically through technology? I

22:24

do. Yeah. Yeah

22:26

I do. I think so too. My

22:29

real concern is that

22:32

once we take the step

22:34

to use an actual neural

22:36

interface, when there's an actual operation

22:39

and they're using

22:41

some sort of an implant and then that implant

22:44

becomes more sophisticated. It's not the iPhone 1,

22:46

now it's the iPhone 15. And

22:48

as these things get better and better, we're

22:52

on the road to cyborgs. We're

22:55

on the road to like why would you want

22:57

to be a biological person? Do

22:59

you really want to live in a fucking log cabin when

23:01

you can be in the matrix? It seems

23:04

like we're not – we're

23:06

on this path.

23:10

We're already a little bit

23:12

down that path, right? Like if you take away someone's

23:14

phone and they have to go function in the world

23:16

today, they're in a disadvantage relative

23:18

to everybody else.

23:20

So that's like maybe

23:22

that's like the lightest weight version of a merge

23:24

we could imagine. But I think it's worth like –

23:27

if we go back to that earlier thing about the one

23:29

exponential curve, I think it's worth saying

23:31

we've like lifted off the X-axis already

23:33

down this path for the tiniest bit. And

23:38

yeah, even if you don't go all the

23:40

way to like a neural interface, VR

23:42

will get so good that some people just don't want to

23:44

take it off that much. Right.

23:49

That's fine for them as

23:52

long as we can solve this question of

23:54

how do we like think about what a balance of power

23:57

means in the world. I think there will be many people.

24:00

I'm certainly one of them like actually the human

24:02

body and the human experience is pretty great that

24:05

log heaven in the woods pretty awesome I don't want

24:07

to be there all the time. I'd love to go play the great video

24:09

game

24:09

But like

24:11

I'm really happy to get to go there right

24:13

times Yeah, there's still human

24:16

experiences that are just

24:19

Like great human experience just laughing

24:21

with friends You know kissing someone

24:24

that you've never kissed before that you you're

24:26

on a first date that guy those kind

24:28

of things are real Moments

24:31

it just laughs yeah having a glass

24:34

of wine with a friend just laughing

24:36

not quite the same in VR Yeah now not

24:38

when the VR goes super far so you can't you know

24:40

it's like you are jacked in on your brain and You

24:43

can't tell right what's real and what's not

24:45

and then everybody gets like

24:48

super deep on the simulation hypothesis or

24:50

the like Eastern religion or whatever and I Don't

24:52

know what happens at that point Do you ever fuck around with

24:54

simulation theory because the real problem

24:57

is when you combine that with probability theory

24:59

and you talk to the people that say well If

25:02

you just look at the numbers That

25:04

the probability that we're already in a simulation

25:06

is much higher than the probability that we're not

25:12

It's never been clear to

25:14

me what to do about it

25:16

It's like okay right into that and

25:19

it'll actually makes a lot of sense Yeah, I think

25:21

probably sure right things convincing but

25:23

now what my reality is my life

25:26

and I'm gonna live it and I've

25:32

You know from like

25:34

2 a.m. In my college Hmm

25:40

what seems like one of

25:42

those It's

25:45

there's no You know, it's

25:48

if it is a possibility if it is

25:50

real First of all, once it happens,

25:53

what are you gonna do? I mean that that is the

25:55

new reality and in many ways our

25:57

new reality is

25:59

as

25:59

alien to you know

26:03

hunter-gatherers and 15,000 years ago as That

26:07

would be to us now. I mean we're already

26:09

we've already entered into some very

26:12

bizarre territory where you

26:14

know I was just having a conversation with my kids were asking

26:17

questions about something and You know

26:19

I always say let's guess What percentage

26:21

of that is this and then we just google

26:23

it and then just ask Siri and we pull it up

26:25

like look at Like that alone.

26:28

Yeah, so bizarre compared

26:30

to how it was when I was 13, and

26:33

you had to go to the library But

26:35

hope that the book was accurate totally I

26:38

was very annoyed

26:40

this more I was reading about how horrible

26:42

systems like chat GPT and Google

26:44

are from an environmental impact because it's you know using

26:46

like

26:47

some extremely tiny amount of energy for each query

26:50

and

26:50

You know how world throwing the world and I was

26:52

like before that people drove to the library

26:55

Yeah, how much carbon they burn or? What

26:57

it takes now come on those but that's just

27:00

people looking for some reason why

27:02

something's bad That's not a logical total

27:04

perspective. Well. We should be looking

27:06

at is the spectacular

27:09

changes that are possible through this

27:11

and All the problems

27:13

the insurmountable problems that we have with resources

27:16

with the environment with cleaning

27:18

up the ocean Climate change

27:20

there's

27:20

so many problems that we need this

27:22

to solve all of everything else and that's

27:25

why we need president If

27:29

if AI could make every scientific

27:31

discovery,

27:32

but we still had human presidents you think would be okay No,

27:35

because those creeps would still be pocketing

27:38

money, and they'd have offshore accounts And

27:41

it would always be a weird thing

27:43

of corruption and how to mitigate that

27:45

corruption Which is also one of the fascinating

27:47

things about the current state of technology is that we're so

27:49

much more aware of corruption We're

27:52

so much more. There's so much independent

27:54

reporting and we're so much

27:57

more cognizant of the actual

27:59

problem

27:59

problems that are in place. This is really

28:02

great.

28:04

One of the things that I've observed, obviously

28:06

many other people too, is

28:08

corruption is such an incredible

28:10

hindrance to getting anything done in a

28:12

society to make it forward progress. My

28:15

worldview had been

28:17

more US-centric when I was younger,

28:20

and as I've

28:21

just

28:22

studied the world more and had to work in more

28:24

places in the world, it's amazing how much corruption there

28:26

still is. But the shift

28:29

to a technologically-enabled world, I

28:31

think, is a major force against it because

28:33

everything is ... It's harder to hide stuff.

28:37

I do think corruption in the world will

28:39

keep trending down.

28:41

Because of its exposure through

28:44

technology. It

28:47

comes at a cost, and I think the

28:49

loss ... I am very worried

28:51

about how far the surveillance state could go

28:54

here. But in

28:57

a world where payments,

29:00

for example, are no longer like bags

29:02

of cash but done somehow digitally,

29:05

and somebody, even if you're using Bitcoin,

29:07

can watch those flows. I

29:09

think that's a corruption-reducing thing.

29:12

I agree, but I'm very

29:14

worried about central bank digital currency

29:17

and that being tied to a social credit score.

29:20

Super against. Yeah, that scares the

29:22

shit out of me. Super against. And

29:24

the push to that is not ... That's

29:27

not for the overall good of society. That's for control.

29:30

Yeah, I think

29:33

there's many things

29:35

that I'm disappointed that the US government

29:38

has done recently, but

29:39

the war on

29:41

crypto, which I think is a, like, we

29:43

can't give this up, we're going to

29:46

control this.

29:48

That's a thing that makes me quite sad about

29:50

the country. It makes me quite sad about the

29:52

country too, but then you also see with things like

29:54

FTX, like, oh, this can

29:57

get without regulation and

29:59

without someone. One overseeing it this

30:01

can get really fucked Yeah,

30:05

I'm not anti-regulation like I think

30:08

there's clearly a role for it

30:10

and

30:11

I

30:13

Also think

30:14

FTX was like a sort of Comically

30:16

bad situation. Yeah Yeah,

30:21

but it's a fun one like it's totally fun and

30:23

I love that story I mean you clearly

30:26

I Really

30:29

do I love the fact that they were all doing drugs and

30:31

have sex. Yeah. No. No, I had every

30:33

part of the drama It's like a it.

30:36

I mean it's a gripping story cuz yeah had everything

30:38

there They did their taxes with like

30:41

what was the the program that they used?

30:44

Quickbooks Billions

30:48

of dollars. I don't know why I think the word polycule

30:50

is so funny But only cool that was what they

30:53

like when you call a relationship like

30:55

a poly but closed mal like

30:57

poly amorous Molecule put together.

30:59

Oh, I see so they were like this is our polycule

31:02

So there's nine of them in their poly a man of them or

31:04

whatever. Yeah, and you call that a polycule I don't

31:06

know funny like that became like a meme

31:08

in Silicon Valley for a while that I thought was hilarious Um,

31:11

you clearly want enough regulation that that

31:14

can't happen but

31:16

they're

31:18

Like I'm not against that happening. I'm

31:20

against them doing what they did. No,

31:22

that's what I mean. I'm a cool Go

31:24

for it. No. No, I mean you want enough thing that like

31:27

FTX can't lose all of its depositors

31:29

money Yes, but but I think there's an important

31:31

point here, which is you have all of this other Regulation

31:35

that people and and it didn't keep us safe

31:38

and the basic thing which was

31:40

like

31:41

You know, let's do that. That was not all of

31:43

the crypto stuff people were talking about. Hmm

31:46

Yes, I

31:48

mean the real fascinating crypto

31:50

is Bitcoin to me I mean, that's

31:53

the one that I think has the most

31:56

likely possibility of becoming a Universal

32:00

survival currency. It's

32:04

limited in the amount that there can be. People

32:09

mine it with their own company. That

32:11

to me is very fascinating and I love the

32:13

fact that it's been implemented. I've

32:17

had Andreas Antonopoulos

32:19

on the podcast and when he talks

32:21

about it, he's

32:25

living it. He's spending all of

32:27

his money. Everything he has paid is in Bitcoin.

32:29

He pays his rent in Bitcoin. Everything

32:31

he does is in Bitcoin. I helped start

32:34

a project called Worldcoin a few years ago.

32:38

I've gotten to learn more about

32:41

the space. I'm

32:43

excited about it for the same reasons. I'm excited about Bitcoin

32:45

too. I think this idea that

32:47

we have a

32:49

global currency that is outside

32:51

of the control of any government is

32:54

a

32:55

super logical and important step

32:57

on the tech tree. Yeah, agreed. I

33:00

mean, why should the government control currency? I

33:02

mean, the government should be dealing with all the pressing

33:05

environmental, social, infrastructure

33:08

issues, foreign policy issues, economic

33:10

issues, the things that we

33:12

need to be governed in order

33:15

to have a peaceful and prosperous society

33:17

that's equal and equitable.

33:20

What do you think happens to money and currency after

33:22

AGI?

33:25

I've wondered about that because I feel

33:27

like with money, especially when money

33:29

goes digital, the bottleneck is

33:31

access. If we get to

33:33

a point where all information

33:36

is just freely shared

33:38

everywhere, there are no secrets, there are

33:41

no boundaries, there are no borders. We're

33:43

reading minds. We have complete

33:46

access to all of the

33:48

information of everything you've

33:51

ever done, everything everyone's ever said. There's

33:53

no hidden secrets. What

33:55

is money then? Money is this digital

33:58

thing. How can you possess it? how

34:00

can you possess this digital thing if

34:02

there is literally no bottleneck?

34:05

There's no barriers to anyone

34:07

accessing any information, because

34:09

essentially it's just ones and zeros. Yeah,

34:12

I mean, another way, I think the information frame makes

34:14

sense. Another way is that like money is like

34:19

a sort of way to trade labor

34:21

or to trade like a limited number of hard

34:24

assets like land and houses and whatever. And

34:28

if you think about a world where like intellectual

34:32

labor is just readily available and

34:34

super cheap,

34:36

then

34:38

that's somehow very different.

34:41

I think there will always be goods that we want

34:43

to be scarce and expensive,

34:45

but it'll only be those goods that we want to be scarce

34:48

and expensive and services that still are. And

34:51

so money in a world like that I think is just

34:54

a very curious idea. Yeah,

34:56

it becomes a different thing. I mean, it's not

34:58

a bag of gold in a leather pouch that

35:00

you're carrying around. Not going to do you much good probably.

35:04

Yeah, it's not going to do you much good. But

35:06

then the question becomes how is that money distributed and how do

35:08

we avoid some horrible Marxist

35:11

society where there's one totalitarian

35:14

government that's just dolted out? That

35:16

would be bad. I

35:18

think you've got to like – my current best idea, and maybe

35:20

there's something better, is I think you – if

35:23

we are right – a lot of reasons we could be

35:25

wrong. If we are right that like

35:27

the AGI systems of which there will be

35:30

a few become the high order bits

35:32

of

35:33

sort of influence whatever in the world, I think

35:36

you do need like

35:39

not to just redistribute the money, but the access

35:41

so that people can make their own decisions about how

35:43

to use it and how to govern it.

35:45

And if you've got one idea, you get to

35:47

do this. If I've got one idea, I get to do

35:49

that. And I have like

35:52

rights to basically do whatever I want with my

35:54

part of it. And if I come up with better ideas

35:56

than you, I get rewarded for that by whatever

35:58

the society is or vice versa. Yeah. You

36:01

know, the hardliners, the people

36:03

that are against like welfare and

36:05

against any sort of UG universal

36:10

basic income, UBI, what

36:12

they're really concerned with is human nature, right?

36:15

They believe that if you remove

36:17

incentives, if you just give people free money,

36:19

they become addicted to it, they become

36:22

lazy. But isn't that a

36:24

human biological and psychological

36:27

bottleneck? And

36:29

perhaps

36:31

with the implementation of artificial

36:35

intelligence combined with

36:37

some sort of neural interface,

36:40

whether it's external or internal, it

36:43

seems like that's a problem

36:46

that can be solved, that

36:49

you can essentially, and this

36:51

is where it gets really spooky, you can re-engineer

36:54

the human biological system, and

36:57

you can remove all of these

36:59

problems that people have that

37:01

are essentially problems that date back to

37:03

human reward systems when we were tribal

37:05

people, hunter-gatherer people, whether

37:08

it's jealousy, lust, envy,

37:10

all these variables

37:13

that come into play when you're dealing

37:15

with money and status and social

37:17

status. If those are eliminated

37:20

with technology, essentially we

37:23

become a next version

37:25

of what the human species is possible. Like

37:29

we're very, very far removed from

37:32

tribal, brutal societies

37:36

of cave people. We all agree

37:38

that this is a way better way to live, it's

37:42

a way safer, you know, we

37:44

were like I was talking about this at my comedy club

37:46

last night, because my wife

37:48

was, we were talking about DNA,

37:52

and my wife was saying that look, everybody

37:54

came from cave people, which is kind of a fucked up thought,

37:56

that everyone here is here because of cave people.

37:59

Well that... All that's still in our DNA.

38:02

All that's still. And these reward

38:05

systems can be hijacked, and they

38:07

can be hijacked by just giving people

38:09

money. And like, you don't have to work, you don't have to do anything,

38:11

you don't have to have ambition, you'll just have money,

38:14

and just lay around and do drugs.

38:17

That's the fear that people

38:19

have of giving people free money. But

38:22

if we can figure out how

38:25

to literally engineer

38:28

the human biological vehicle

38:31

and remove all those

38:33

pitfalls, if we can

38:36

enlighten people technologically,

38:38

maybe enlighten is the wrong word, but

38:41

advance the human

38:44

species to the point where those

38:46

are no longer dilemmas, because those

38:48

are easily solvable through

38:50

coding. They're easily solvable

38:52

through enhancing the human

38:55

biological system, perhaps raising dopamine

38:58

levels to the point where anger, and

39:00

fear, and hate are impossible.

39:03

They don't exist. And if you

39:06

just had everyone on Mali, how

39:09

many wars would there be? There'd be zero wars.

39:11

I mean, I think if you could get

39:12

everyone on Earth

39:14

to all do Mali once on the same day,

39:16

that'd be a tremendous thing. It would be. If

39:18

you got everybody on Earth to do Mali every day, that'd

39:20

be a real loss. But what if they did a

39:23

low dose of Mali, where you just get

39:25

to, ah, where

39:27

everybody greets people with

39:29

love and affection, and there's

39:31

no longer a concern about competition.

39:34

Instead, the concern is about

39:36

the fascination of innovation and creation

39:40

and creativity. Man,

39:42

we could talk the rest of the time about this one topic.

39:45

It's so interesting. I think

39:50

if I could push a button to remove

39:53

all human striving and

39:56

conflict, I wouldn't

39:58

do it, first of all. I think

39:59

I think that's a very important part of

40:02

our story and experience. And

40:06

also, I think we can see both

40:08

from our own biological history

40:10

and also from what

40:13

we know about AI, that very

40:15

simple

40:17

goal systems, fitness functions,

40:20

reward models, whatever you want to call it, lead

40:22

to incredibly

40:23

impressive

40:25

results

40:26

if the biological imperative is survive

40:28

and reproduce.

40:30

Look how far that has somehow gotten

40:33

us as a society. All of this, all this

40:35

stuff we have, all this technology, this building, whatever

40:37

else, like

40:43

that got here

40:45

through an extremely simple

40:48

goal in a very complex environment

40:50

leading

40:51

to all of the richness and complexity

40:53

of people for

40:56

doing this biological imperative to some degree

40:59

and wanting to impress each other.

41:03

So I think evolutionary fitness is

41:05

a simple and unbelievably powerful idea.

41:07

Now,

41:09

could you carefully edit out every

41:12

individual manifestation of that?

41:16

Maybe, but I don't want to live

41:18

in a society of drones where everybody is

41:21

just sort of

41:22

on Molly all the time either. That

41:25

doesn't seem like the right answer.

41:28

Like I want us to get you to strive. I want us to

41:30

continue to push back the frontier

41:33

and go out and explore. And I actually think something's

41:36

already a

41:38

little off track in society about

41:41

all of that and we're, I don't

41:45

know, I think like I'm,

41:48

I don't,

41:48

I thought I'd be older by the time I felt like

41:50

the old guy complaining about the youth. But

41:54

I think we've lost something

41:57

and I think that we... need

42:00

more

42:02

striving, maybe more risk-taking, more

42:05

like

42:06

explorer spirit. What do you mean by you think we've

42:09

lost something?

42:17

I mean here's like a version of it

42:20

very much from my

42:23

own lens. I was a startup investor for a

42:25

long time, and

42:27

it often was the case that

42:30

the very best startup founders were

42:32

in their early or mid-20s, late

42:35

20s maybe even, and now they skew much

42:37

older.

42:38

And what I want to know is in the

42:41

world today, we're the super great 25-year-old

42:43

founders.

42:44

And there are a few, it's not fair to say there are none, but there

42:46

are less than there were before. And

42:49

I

42:53

think that's bad for society at all levels.

42:56

Comptech company founders is one example,

42:58

but people who go off and

43:00

create something new, who push on a disagreeable

43:03

or controversial idea, we need

43:05

that to drive forward.

43:08

We need that

43:09

sort of spirit. We need people

43:11

to be able to put out ideas

43:14

and be wrong

43:15

and not be ostracized from society

43:17

for it or not have it be something

43:19

that they get cancelled for or whatever. We

43:22

need people to be able to take a risk

43:24

in their career because they believe in

43:26

some important scientific quest that may not

43:28

work out or may sound like really controversial

43:31

or bad or whatever.

43:34

Certainly when we started OpenAI and we were

43:36

saying

43:37

we think this AGI thing

43:38

is real and could

43:41

be done unlikely but so important if it happens.

43:44

And all of the older scientists in our field were

43:46

saying those people are irresponsible,

43:49

shouldn't talk about AGI. That's like they're

43:51

selling the scam or they're

43:54

kind of being

43:57

reckless and it's going to lead to an AGI winter.

43:59

We said we believed. We said at the time we knew

44:02

it was unlikely, but it was an important quest.

44:04

And we were going to go after it and kind of like fuck

44:06

the haters.

44:08

That's important to a society.

44:11

What do you think is the origin? Why

44:14

do you think there are less young people

44:17

that are doing those kind

44:19

of things now as opposed to

44:21

a decade or two ago?

44:24

I am so interested in that

44:26

topic.

44:28

I'm tempted to blame the education system,

44:31

but I'm sure that I think that interacts

44:34

with society in

44:37

all of these strange ways.

44:40

It's funny. There was this thing all over

44:42

my Twitter feed recently trying to talk about what

44:46

caused the drop in testosterone in American

44:48

men over the last few decades. And no

44:51

one was like, this is a symptom, not a cause.

44:55

And everyone

44:56

was like, oh, it's the microplastics. It's

44:58

the birth control pills. It's the whatever. It's the whatever. It's the whatever.

45:01

And I think this is like

45:02

not at all

45:04

the most important

45:07

piece of this topic, but it was just interesting

45:09

to me sociologically

45:12

that

45:13

there was only talk about it being – about what

45:16

caused it, not

45:17

about it being enough. An

45:20

effect of some sort of change in society.

45:24

But isn't what caused

45:26

it – well, there's biological

45:29

reasons why – like when we talk

45:32

about the phthalates and the microplastic

45:34

pesticides, environmental factors,

45:36

those are real. Totally.

45:38

And I don't – again, I'm so far out of my depth and

45:40

expertise here. This is – it was just

45:42

interesting to me that the only talk was about

45:45

biological factors and not that somehow society

45:47

can have some sort of –

45:48

Well, society most certainly has an effect. Do

45:51

you know what the answer to this is? I

45:54

don't. I mean, I've had a

45:56

podcast with Dr. Shanna Swan who

45:59

wrote the book Counting. down and that

46:01

is all about the introduction of petrochemical

46:03

products and the correlating drop

46:06

in testosterone, rise

46:08

in miscarriages, the fact

46:10

that these are ubiquitous endocrine

46:12

disruptors that when they do

46:15

blood tests on people, they find some

46:18

insane number. It's like 90

46:20

plus percent of people have phthalates

46:22

in their system. I

46:24

appreciate the medical. Yeah, we

46:26

try to mitigate it as much as possible.

46:30

You're getting it. If you're microwaving food, you're

46:32

fucking getting it. You're just getting it.

46:34

If you eat processed food, you're getting it. You're getting a certain

46:37

amount of microplastics in your diet and estimates

46:39

have been that it's as high as a credit

46:42

card of microplastics per week. Like flow

46:44

neuron. In your body. You consume a

46:46

credit card of that a week. The

46:49

real concern is with mammals because

46:52

the introductions, when they've done studies with

46:54

mammals and they've introduced phthalates

46:56

into their body, there's a correlating.

47:01

One thing that happens is these

47:04

animals, their taints shrink. The

47:06

taint of them, the mammal, when

47:08

you look at males, it's 50 percent

47:11

to 100 percent larger than the females. With

47:13

the introduction of phthalates on the males, the taints

47:16

start shrinking, the penises shrink, the testicles

47:18

shrink, sperm count shrinks. We

47:20

know there's a direct biological

47:23

connection between these

47:26

chemicals and how they interact with

47:29

bodies. That's

47:32

a real one. It's also the

47:35

amount of petrochemical products that

47:37

we have, the amount of plastics that we use,

47:41

it is such an integral part of our culture

47:43

and our society, our civilization.

47:46

It's everywhere. I've wondered

47:50

if you think about how

47:53

these territorial

47:56

apes evolve into

47:59

this new advanced

48:02

species. Wouldn't

48:04

one of the very best ways be

48:07

to get rid of one of the

48:09

things that causes the most problems which is

48:11

testosterone. We need testosterone.

48:14

We need aggressive men and protectors

48:16

but why do we need them? We need them because

48:18

there's other aggressive men that are evil,

48:21

right? So we need protectors from

48:24

ourselves. We need the good

48:26

strong people to protect us from the bad

48:28

strong people. But if we're

48:31

in the process of integrating with technology,

48:34

if technology is an inescapable

48:37

part of our life, if it is everywhere,

48:39

you're using it, you have the Internet of Everything

48:42

that's in your microwave, your television,

48:45

your computers, everything you use.

48:48

As time goes on, that will be more

48:51

and more a part of your life and as these

48:53

plastics are introduced into the human biological

48:56

system, you're seeing a feminization

48:59

of the males of the species. You're

49:01

seeing a downfall in birth

49:04

rate. You're seeing all these correlating

49:06

factors that would sort

49:08

of lead us to become this more

49:12

peaceful, less

49:14

violent, less aggressive,

49:17

less ego-driven thing.

49:20

Which the world is definitely becoming all the

49:23

time and

49:25

I'm all for less violence obviously. But

49:29

I don't ...

49:35

Look, obviously testosterone has many

49:37

great things to say for it and some

49:40

bad tendencies too. But I don't

49:42

think a world ...

49:43

If we leave that out of the equation and just say like

49:45

a world that has a

49:48

spirit that

49:51

we're going to

49:53

defend ourselves, we're going to ... We're

49:58

going to find a way to ...

50:00

protect ourselves and

50:02

our tribe and our society

50:04

into this future, which you can get with lots

50:07

of other ways. I think that's an important impulse.

50:10

More than that though, what I meant

50:15

is about – if we go back to the issue

50:17

of like where are the young founders, why

50:20

don't we have more of those? And

50:23

I don't think it's just the tech startup industry. I

50:25

think you could say that about like young scientists

50:28

or many other categories. Those are maybe just the ones

50:30

that I know the best.

50:35

In a world with any

50:39

amount of technology,

50:41

I still think we've got

50:43

to –

50:44

it is our destiny in some sense

50:45

to stay on

50:47

this curve. And we still

50:50

need to go figure out what's next and after the

50:52

next hill and after the next hill.

50:54

And it would be – my

50:59

perception is

50:59

that there is some long-term societal

51:02

change happening here and I think it makes us less happy

51:04

too. Right.

51:08

It may make us less happy.

51:10

But what I'm saying is if the human species

51:13

does integrate with technology, wouldn't

51:16

it be a great way to facilitate that

51:19

to be to kind of feminize the

51:21

primal apes and to

51:24

sort of downplay the role –

51:26

You mean like the tech – like should the AGI fall into

51:29

the world? Well, maybe – I don't know if it's AGI. Maybe

51:31

it's just an inevitable consequence

51:34

of technology because especially

51:37

the type of technology that we use which

51:39

does have so much plastic in it and

51:42

then on top of that, the technology that's involved

51:44

in food systems, preservatives,

51:46

all these different things that we use to make sure that people don't

51:48

starve to death. We've made incredible

51:51

strides in that. There are very few people

51:53

in this country that starve to death. Yeah. It

51:56

is not a primary issue but violence

51:58

is a – primary issue.

52:01

But our concerns about

52:03

violence and our

52:05

concerns about testosterone and strong

52:08

men and powerful people is

52:10

only because we need to protect against

52:12

others. We need to protect against other

52:14

same things. Is that true? Is that really the

52:16

only reason? Sure. I

52:19

mean, how many like incredibly violent women

52:21

are out there running gangs? No, no, that part for

52:23

sure. Yeah. I've been offering

52:25

many. What I meant more

52:27

is that the only reason that

52:29

society values like strong masculinity.

52:32

Yeah, I think so. I think it's a biological

52:34

imperative, right? And I think that biological

52:37

imperative is because we used to have to defend

52:39

against incoming tribes and predators

52:41

and animals and we needed

52:44

someone who was stronger than most

52:47

to defend the rest. And like

52:49

that's the concept of the military. That's why

52:52

Navy SEAL training is so difficult. We want

52:54

the strongest of the strong to be

52:56

at the tip of the spear. But that's only

52:58

because there's people like that out there

53:00

that are bad. If artificial

53:04

general intelligence and the implementation

53:06

of some sort of a device that changes

53:08

the biological structure of

53:11

human beings to the point where that is

53:13

no longer a concern. Like if you

53:15

are me and I am you and I know this

53:17

because of technology, violence

53:19

is impossible. Yeah. Look, by the time if

53:22

this goes all the way down the sci-fi path and we're all like merged

53:24

into the one single like planetary

53:27

universal whatever consciousness,

53:30

then yes, you don't. You don't need testosterone.

53:32

You need testosterone, but you still- Especially

53:34

if we can reproduce through other methods.

53:38

Like this is the alien hypothesis, right? Like

53:40

why do they look so spindly and without any

53:42

gender and you know when they have these big

53:44

heads and tiny mouths. They don't need physical strength. They don't need

53:46

physical strength. They have some sort of

53:48

a telepathic way of communicating. They

53:51

probably don't need sounds with their mouths and

53:54

they don't need this

53:56

urge that we have to conquer

53:58

and to spread our DNA.

53:59

that's so much of what people do

54:02

is these reward systems that

54:05

were established when we were territorial apes.

54:08

There's a question to me about how much you can

54:12

ever get

54:14

rid of that if you make an

54:17

AGI

54:18

and it decides actually

54:21

we don't need to expand. We don't need more territory. We're

54:23

just like happy. We at this point, you,

54:25

me, it, the whole thing all together all mentioned. We're

54:28

happy here on Earth. We don't need

54:29

any bigger. We don't need to reproduce. We don't need to grow. We're

54:33

just going to sit here and run.

54:36

A, that sounds like a boring life. I don't agree

54:38

with that.

54:39

I don't agree that that would be the logical conclusion.

54:42

I think the logical conclusion would be they

54:46

would look for problems

54:48

and frontiers that are

54:51

insurmountable to our current existence

54:54

like intergalactic communication and transportation.

54:57

What happens when it meets another AGI, the other galaxy

54:59

over? What happens when it meets an AGI that's

55:01

a million years more advanced? What

55:04

does that look like?

55:06

That's what I've often wondered if we are –

55:09

I call ourselves the biological caterpillars that

55:11

create the electronic butterfly that

55:14

we're making a cocoon right now and we don't even know

55:16

what we're doing. I think it's also tied into

55:18

consumerism because

55:20

what does consumerism do? Consumerism

55:23

facilitates the creation of newer and better

55:25

things because you always want the newest,

55:27

latest, greatest. So you have more advanced

55:30

technology and automobiles and computers

55:32

and cell phones and all

55:35

of these different things including medical

55:36

science.

55:40

That's all for short true.

55:44

The thing I was like reflecting on as you were saying that is

55:47

I don't think I – I'm

55:51

not as optimistic that we can or

55:54

even should

55:56

overcome our biological

55:58

base.

55:59

to the degree that I think you think we can. And

56:04

to even go back one further level, I

56:07

think society is happiest

56:10

where there's roles for

56:12

strong femininity and strong masculinity

56:14

in the same people and in different people.

56:24

And I don't think a lot of these

56:26

deep-seated things are

56:29

going to be able to get pushed

56:32

aside very easily and still have

56:34

a system that works. Sure,

56:37

we can't really think about what, if there

56:39

were consciousness in a machine someday or whatever, what

56:42

that would be like.

56:44

And maybe I'm just thinking too

56:47

small-mindedly. But

56:49

I think there is something

56:53

about us that has worked

56:55

in a super deep way.

56:58

And it took evolution a lot of search

57:00

space to get here.

57:01

But I wouldn't discount it too easily. But

57:04

don't you think that cave people would probably have

57:06

those same logical conclusions about

57:09

life and sedentary lifestyle and sitting in front

57:11

of a computer and not interacting with each other

57:14

except through text?

57:19

I mean, isn't that like what you're saying is correct?

57:21

How different do you think our motivations are

57:23

today? And what really brings

57:26

us

57:26

genuine joy in how we're

57:28

wired

57:28

at some deep level differently than

57:31

cave people? Clearly, lots of other things have changed.

57:33

We've got much better tools. But how

57:35

different do you think it really is? I think

57:38

that's the problem is that genetically,

57:41

at the base level, there's not much difference.

57:44

And that these reward systems are

57:47

all there. We interact

57:49

with all of them, whether it's

57:52

ego, lust, passion,

57:55

fury, anger, jealousy, all

57:58

these different things. And you think we'll be. Some

58:00

people will upload and edit those out. Yes.

58:03

Yeah. I think that our concern with

58:06

losing this aspect of what

58:08

it means to be a person, like the

58:11

idea that we should always have conflict and struggle

58:13

because conflict and struggle is how we facilitate

58:16

progress, which is true, right?

58:18

And combating evil is how the

58:20

good gets greater and stronger if the

58:22

good wins. My concern

58:25

is that that is all predicated

58:27

on the idea that the biological

58:29

system that we have right now is

58:32

correct

58:34

and optimal.

58:36

And I think one of the things

58:38

that we're dealing with, with the heightened

58:40

states of depression and anxiety

58:42

and the lack of meaning and existential angst

58:45

that people experience, a lot

58:47

of that is because the biological

58:50

reality of being a human animal

58:53

doesn't really integrate

58:55

that well with this world that we've created.

58:58

That's for sure. Yeah. And

59:01

I wonder if the

59:03

solution to that is not

59:05

find ways to find

59:08

meaning with the biological, you

59:11

know, vessel that you've been given, but

59:13

rather engineer those

59:16

aspects. That are problematic

59:19

out of the system

59:21

to create a truly enlightened being.

59:24

Like one of the things, if you ask someone today, what

59:26

are the odds that in three years

59:28

there will be no war in the world?

59:30

That's zero. Like nobody

59:32

thinks, no, there's never been a time in human

59:35

history where we haven't had war. If

59:37

you had to say, what is our number one

59:39

problem as a species? Well,

59:41

I would say our number one problem is

59:44

war. Our number one problem is

59:46

this idea that it's okay

59:48

to send massive groups of people who don't know

59:51

each other to go murder massive groups of people

59:53

that are somehow opposed because of the

59:55

government and because of the wines

59:57

and the sand and the terra-chords. That's clearly the same thing. The

1:00:00

same thing. How do you get rid of that?

1:00:02

Well, one of the ways you get rid of that is to completely

1:00:05

engineer out all the human reward

1:00:07

systems that pertain to the acquisition

1:00:10

of resources. So what's

1:00:12

left at that point? Well, we're a new thing.

1:00:15

I think we've become a new thing. And what does that thing

1:00:17

do once? I think that new thing

1:00:19

would probably want to interact with

1:00:22

other new things that are even more advanced than it.

1:00:25

I do believe that scientific

1:00:30

curiosity can drive

1:00:32

quite – that can be a great frontier

1:00:34

for a long time. Yeah.

1:00:38

I think it can be a great frontier for a long time as well.

1:00:40

I just wonder if what we're

1:00:42

seeing with the drop in testosterone,

1:00:46

because of microplastics, which sort of just

1:00:48

snuck up on us, we didn't even know that it

1:00:50

was an issue until people started studying. How certain

1:00:52

is that at this point that that's what's happening? I don't know.

1:00:55

I'm going to go study after this. It's a very

1:00:57

good question. Dr. Shana Swan believes

1:00:59

that it's the primary driving

1:01:01

factor of the sort

1:01:04

of drop in testosterone and all miscarriage

1:01:06

issues and low birth weights. All

1:01:09

those things seem to have a direct – there

1:01:11

seems to be a direct factor environmentally.

1:01:14

I'm sure there's other factors too. The

1:01:17

drop in testosterone, I mean, it's been

1:01:19

shown that you can increase male's

1:01:21

testosterone through resistance training

1:01:23

and through making – there's certain things

1:01:26

you can do. Like, one of the big ones they found

1:01:28

through a study in Japan is cold water

1:01:30

immersion before exercise

1:01:33

radically increases testosterone. So

1:01:36

cold water immersion and then exercise post

1:01:38

that. I wonder why. Yeah, I don't know.

1:01:40

I just see who can find that. But

1:01:44

it's a fascinating field of study, but

1:01:46

I think it has something to do with resilience

1:01:48

and resistance and the fact that your body has to combat

1:01:51

this external factor

1:01:53

that's very extreme, that causes

1:01:55

the body to go into this state

1:01:58

of preservation and – the

1:02:01

implementation of cold shock proteins and

1:02:03

the reduction of inflammation

1:02:05

which also enhances the body's endocrine

1:02:07

system but then on top of that this imperative

1:02:10

that you have to become more resilient to

1:02:12

survive this external factor

1:02:15

that you've introduced into your life every single

1:02:17

day. So

1:02:20

there's ways obviously

1:02:22

that you can make a human being

1:02:25

more robust. We know

1:02:27

that we can do that through strength training and that all

1:02:29

that stuff actually does raise testosterone.

1:02:32

Your diet can raise testosterone

1:02:34

and a poor diet

1:02:37

will lower it and will hinder your endocrine

1:02:39

system, will hinder your ability to produce

1:02:41

growth hormone, melatonin,

1:02:44

all these different factors. That

1:02:46

seems to be something that we can fix

1:02:49

in terms or at least mitigate with

1:02:52

decisions and choices and effort. But

1:02:55

the fact that these petrochemical

1:02:58

products – like there's a graph that Dr.

1:03:00

Shannon Swan has in her book that shows

1:03:03

during the 1950s when I started using

1:03:06

petrochemical products and everything, microwave,

1:03:09

plastic, Saran wrap, all those different stuff.

1:03:11

There's a direct correlation between

1:03:14

the implementation and the dip and

1:03:17

it all seems to line up

1:03:19

like that seems to be a primary factor.

1:03:24

Does that have an equivalent impact on estrogen

1:03:27

related hormones? That's a good question. Some

1:03:30

of them actually – I know some

1:03:33

of these chemicals that they're talking about actually

1:03:35

increase estrogen in men. I

1:03:38

don't know – but I do know that it increases

1:03:41

miscarriages. So I

1:03:43

just think it's overall disruptive

1:03:45

to the human body. Definitely a societal wide

1:03:48

disruption of the endocrine system in a short period

1:03:50

of time. I think

1:03:53

it's just bad and difficult to wrap our heads around. And then

1:03:55

pollutants and environmental

1:03:58

toxins on top of the – pesticides

1:04:00

and herbicides and all these other things and microplastics.

1:04:03

There's a lot of factors that are leading our systems

1:04:05

to not work well.

1:04:08

But I just really

1:04:11

wonder if this – are

1:04:14

we just clinging on to this monkey body?

1:04:16

Are we deciding? I like my monkey body. I

1:04:18

do too. Listen, I love it. But

1:04:22

I'm also – I try to be very objective.

1:04:24

And when I objectively look at it in terms

1:04:26

of like if you take where we are

1:04:29

now and all of our problems and

1:04:31

you look towards the future and like what

1:04:34

would be one way that

1:04:36

you could mitigate a lot of these? And

1:04:38

it would be the implementation of some sort of a telepathic

1:04:41

technology where you couldn't

1:04:44

just text someone or tweet

1:04:47

at something mean because you would literally feel

1:04:49

what they feel when you put that

1:04:51

energy out there. And

1:04:54

you would be repulsed. And

1:04:57

then violence would be – if

1:04:59

you were committing violence on someone

1:05:02

and you literally felt the reaction

1:05:05

of that violence in your own being, then

1:05:09

you would also have no motivation for

1:05:11

violence. If we had no

1:05:14

aggressive tendencies, no primal

1:05:16

chimpanzee tendencies – You know, it's

1:05:19

true that violence in the world has

1:05:21

obviously gone down a lot over the decades

1:05:23

but

1:05:24

emotional violence is up a lot and

1:05:26

the internet has been horrible for that. Like

1:05:28

I don't walk – I'm not going to walk over there and punch you because you're like a big

1:05:30

strong guy. You're going to punch me back and

1:05:32

also there's a societal

1:05:33

convention not to do that. If

1:05:37

I didn't know you, I might like send a mean tweet

1:05:39

about you and I feel nothing on that. And

1:05:43

clearly that has become like

1:05:45

a mega epidemic in society

1:05:48

that we did not evolve

1:05:50

the biological constraints

1:05:54

on somehow. And

1:05:58

I'm actually very –

1:06:00

worried about how much that's already destabilized

1:06:03

us and made us all miserable. It certainly

1:06:05

accentuated it. It's exacerbated

1:06:08

all of our problems. I mean if

1:06:10

you read Jonathan Hates' book, The Coddling of

1:06:12

the American Mind, Great book. Yeah it's a great

1:06:14

book and it's very damaging to

1:06:16

women, particularly young girls. Young

1:06:18

girls growing up there's a direct correlation between

1:06:21

the invention of social media, the

1:06:23

introduction to the iPhone, self-harm,

1:06:25

suicide, online bullying.

1:06:28

You know like people have always talked

1:06:30

shit about people and no one's around. I think

1:06:32

the fact that they're doing it now openly

1:06:35

to harm people. Horrible

1:06:37

obviously. I think it's super damaging to men

1:06:40

too. Maybe they just like talk about it less but I don't

1:06:42

think any of us are like set up for

1:06:44

this. No, no one set up for it and

1:06:46

you know I think famous people know that

1:06:48

more than anyone. We all get used to it. Yeah

1:06:51

you just get numb to it and or if you're wise you

1:06:53

don't engage. I don't engage. I don't

1:06:55

even have any apps on my new phone.

1:06:57

Yeah. I've got a new phone and I said

1:07:00

okay nothing.

1:07:00

That's really smart. No Twitter. So I have

1:07:02

a separate phone that if I have to

1:07:04

post something I pick up but

1:07:07

all I get on my new phone is text messages.

1:07:10

And is that more just to like keep

1:07:12

your mind pure and un-looted?

1:07:14

Yeah. Not tempt myself. You know many fucking

1:07:18

times I've got up to go to the bathroom first

1:07:20

thing in the morning and spent an hour just

1:07:23

sitting on the toilet scrolling through Instagram

1:07:25

like for nothing does zero for

1:07:27

me and there's this thought that

1:07:29

I'm gonna get something out of it. I

1:07:32

was thinking actually just yesterday

1:07:34

about how you

1:07:36

know we all have talked for so long about these algorithmic

1:07:39

feeds are gonna manipulate us in these big

1:07:41

ways and that

1:07:43

will happen but in the small ways already

1:07:46

where like

1:07:47

scrolling Instagram is not even that

1:07:49

fulfilling like you finished that hour and you're like

1:07:51

I know that was a waste of my time

1:07:55

but it was like over the threshold where you couldn't

1:07:57

quite it's hard to put the phone down. Right.

1:08:00

hoping that the next one's gonna be interesting.

1:08:02

And every now and then, the problem is every

1:08:05

30th or 40th reel that I

1:08:08

click on is wild. I wonder,

1:08:10

by the way, if that's more powerful

1:08:12

than if everyone was wild,

1:08:14

if everyone was great. Sure. You

1:08:17

have some mine for gold. You don't just go out

1:08:19

and pick it like daisies. That's so interesting. If

1:08:22

the algorithm is intentionally feeding you some

1:08:24

shit along the way. Yeah. Well,

1:08:27

there's just a lot of shit out there, unfortunately.

1:08:30

But it's just, in terms of, I

1:08:33

was talking to Sean O'Malley,

1:08:35

who's this UFC fighter, who's, obviously,

1:08:37

has a very strong mind. Really interesting guy. But

1:08:39

one of the things that Sean said is, I

1:08:41

get this low-level anxiety

1:08:44

from scrolling through things, and I don't know why.

1:08:47

What is that? And I think it's part

1:08:49

of the logical mind realizes this is a

1:08:52

massive waste of your resources. I

1:08:54

also deleted a bunch of that stuff off my phone

1:08:57

because I just didn't have the self-control. I mean,

1:08:59

I had the self-control to delete it, but not

1:09:01

to stop once I was scrolling through. And

1:09:05

so I think we're just like, yeah,

1:09:09

we're getting attention hacked in

1:09:12

some ways. There's some good to it, too, but

1:09:14

we don't yet have the

1:09:16

stuff in place.

1:09:18

The tools, the societal norms, whatever

1:09:21

to modulate it well. Right. And

1:09:23

we're designed for it. Certainly. This is

1:09:26

a completely new technology that, again,

1:09:28

hijacks our human reward systems

1:09:31

and hijacks all of

1:09:33

the checks and balances

1:09:35

that are in place for communication,

1:09:38

which historically has been one-on-one.

1:09:40

Historically, communication has been one person

1:09:43

to another. And when people write letters

1:09:45

to each other, it's generally things

1:09:48

like if someone writes a love letter

1:09:50

or they miss you. They're

1:09:53

writing this thing where they're kind of exposing

1:09:55

a thing that maybe they have a difficulty in expressing

1:09:58

in front of you, and it was Generally,

1:10:01

unless the person was a psycho, they're not

1:10:04

hateful letters. Whereas

1:10:06

the ability to just communicate, fuck that guy,

1:10:08

I hope he gets hit by a bus, is so

1:10:11

simple and easy and you

1:10:14

don't experience. Twitter seems

1:10:17

to be particularly horrible for this, the

1:10:19

mechanics work. It

1:10:22

really rewards

1:10:23

in ways that I don't think anybody fully understands.

1:10:26

It happens into something about human psychology.

1:10:29

But

1:10:32

that's how you get engagement, that's how you get followers,

1:10:36

that's how you get the

1:10:38

dopamine hits or whatever.

1:10:45

The people who I know that spend all day

1:10:47

on Twitter,

1:10:48

more of them are unhappy about it than happy. Oh

1:10:51

yeah.

1:10:51

They're the most unhappy. There's

1:10:53

quite a few people that I follow that I only

1:10:56

follow because they're crazy and then I'll

1:10:58

go and check in on them and see what the fuck they're

1:11:00

tweeting about. Some of them are on

1:11:02

there eight, 10 hours a day. I'll

1:11:04

see tweets all day long

1:11:07

and I know that person cannot

1:11:09

be happy. They're unhappy and they cannot stop. They

1:11:12

can't stop. It seems like

1:11:15

it's their life. They

1:11:19

get meaning out of it in terms of

1:11:22

reinforcement. They

1:11:24

get short term meaning out of it. I

1:11:26

think maybe each day you go to bed feeling like you

1:11:29

accomplished something and got your dopamine and at the end of

1:11:31

each decade, you probably are like, where'd that decade

1:11:33

go? I was talking to a friend of mine who was having a real problem

1:11:35

with it and he's saying he would be literally walking down

1:11:37

the street and he'd have to check his phone to see who's replying

1:11:40

and he wasn't even looking where he's walking. He

1:11:42

was just caught up in the anxiety

1:11:45

of these exchanges. And it's not because of the

1:11:47

nice things people say. No, no, no, no.

1:11:50

And with him, he was recognizing that

1:11:53

he was dunking on people and then seeing

1:11:55

people respond to the dunking. Yeah,

1:11:58

I stopped doing that a long time. I stopped interacting

1:12:01

with people on Twitter in a negative way. I just won't

1:12:03

do it Yeah, just even if I disagree with someone

1:12:05

else say something I have like

1:12:07

fleece possible I have like more of an internet

1:12:09

troll streak than I would like to admit And

1:12:12

so I try to just like not give myself too

1:12:14

much anticipation, but I slip up sometimes. Yeah,

1:12:17

it's so tempting Totally. It's

1:12:19

so tempting to and it's fun. It's fun

1:12:21

to say something shitty I

1:12:23

mean again, whatever this biological system we're

1:12:26

talking about earlier that get that that gets a positive

1:12:28

reward Well, it's a moment. There's a

1:12:30

react and you know, there's reactions You

1:12:32

say something outrageous and someone's going to react

1:12:35

and that reaction is like energy

1:12:37

and there's there's all these other human

1:12:39

beings engaging with your idea but

1:12:43

Ultimately, it's just not

1:12:45

productive for most

1:12:47

people and it's psychologically

1:12:50

It's just fraught with peril.

1:12:53

There's just so much going on. I don't know anybody

1:12:56

ages all day long. That's happy Certainly

1:12:59

not I don't like I'm

1:13:03

I think I've watched it like destroys too strong

1:13:05

of a word But like

1:13:06

knock off track the careers

1:13:09

or life or happiness or human

1:13:11

relationships Of people that are

1:13:14

like good smart conscientious

1:13:16

people.

1:13:17

Yeah, like God couldn't fight

1:13:19

this demon Yeah, like hacked there and

1:13:21

kovat really accentuated that because people

1:13:23

were alone and isolated and

1:13:26

that made it even worse because

1:13:28

then they felt They

1:13:30

felt even better saying shitty things

1:13:33

to people. I'm unhappy. Yeah, even

1:13:35

worse things about you And then there was the psychological

1:13:38

aspect of it like the angst that came from

1:13:40

being socially isolated

1:13:42

and terrified about this invisible disease.

1:13:45

It's gonna kill us all and You

1:13:47

know and so you have this like rah and

1:13:49

then you're interacting with people on tour and then you're caught

1:13:51

up in that Anxiety and you're doing it all

1:13:53

day and I know quite a few people especially

1:13:56

comedians That really lost

1:13:58

their minds and lost the respect respect

1:14:00

to their peers by doing that.

1:14:02

I have a lot of sympathy for people who lost their

1:14:04

minds during COVID because what

1:14:07

a natural thing for us all to go through and isolation

1:14:10

was just brutal. But a lot

1:14:12

of people did.

1:14:13

And I don't think the internet,

1:14:15

and particularly not the kind of like social

1:14:18

dynamics of things like Twitter,

1:14:19

I don't think that like brought on anyone's best. Yeah.

1:14:23

Well, I mean, some people I think if

1:14:25

they're not inclined

1:14:28

to be shitty to people, I think some people did seek

1:14:31

comfort and they did interact

1:14:33

with people in positive ways. I see there's

1:14:35

plenty of positive. I think the thing

1:14:37

is that the negative interactions are so much more

1:14:40

impactful. Yeah. Look,

1:14:42

I think there are a lot of people who use

1:14:44

these systems for wonderful things. I didn't mean to imply

1:14:47

that's not the case, but that's not what drives

1:14:51

people's emotions after getting off the platform in

1:14:53

the end of the day. Right. Right.

1:14:56

Right. And I think that's a pie chart of

1:14:58

the amount of interactions on

1:15:00

Twitter. I would say a lot of them

1:15:03

are shitting on people and being angry

1:15:05

about them. How many of the people that you know that

1:15:07

use Twitter those eight or ten hours a day are

1:15:09

just saying wonderful

1:15:10

things about other people all day versus the

1:15:12

virulent?

1:15:13

Very few. Yeah. Very

1:15:16

few. I don't know any of them. I know.

1:15:20

But then again, I wonder with

1:15:22

the implementation of some

1:15:25

new technology that makes communication

1:15:27

a very different thing than what we're occurring in. What

1:15:30

we're doing now with communication is less

1:15:33

immersive than communicating

1:15:35

one-on-one. You and I are talking. Yeah.

1:15:38

We're looking into each other's eyes. We're getting social cues. Yeah.

1:15:41

We're smiling at each other. We're laughing. It's

1:15:43

a very natural way to talk. I

1:15:45

wonder if through the implementation

1:15:47

of technology, if it

1:15:50

becomes even more immersive

1:15:53

than a one-on-one conversation, even

1:15:56

more interactive and you

1:15:58

will understand even more about

1:16:01

the way a person feels about what you say, about

1:16:04

that person's memory, that person's

1:16:07

life, that person's history,

1:16:10

their education, how it comes

1:16:12

out of their mind, how their

1:16:15

mind interacts with your mind and

1:16:17

you see them, you really see

1:16:19

them.

1:16:20

I wonder if that, I

1:16:22

wonder if what we're experiencing now is

1:16:25

just like the first time people invented

1:16:27

guns and just started shooting at things. Yeah,

1:16:30

if you can like feel what I feel

1:16:32

when you say something mean to me or nice to me,

1:16:34

like that's clearly gonna change

1:16:38

what you decide to say. Yes, yeah,

1:16:41

yeah, unless you're a psycho. Unless you're a psycho.

1:16:43

And then what causes someone to

1:16:45

be a psycho and can that be

1:16:47

engineered out? Imagine

1:16:50

what we're talking about when

1:16:52

we're dealing with the human mind, we're dealing with various

1:16:55

diseases, bipolar, schizophrenia.

1:16:58

Imagine a world

1:17:01

where we can find the root

1:17:03

cause of those things and

1:17:05

through coding and some

1:17:08

sort of an implementation

1:17:10

of technology that elevates

1:17:13

dopamine and serotonin and

1:17:15

does some things to people that eliminates

1:17:18

all of those problems and

1:17:21

allows people to communicate in a very

1:17:23

pure way. It

1:17:27

sounds great. It sounds great but you're not gonna have

1:17:29

any rock and roll, stand up comedy will die.

1:17:33

You'll have no violent movies, you

1:17:36

know, there's a lot of things that are gonna go out the window

1:17:38

but maybe that is also part of the process

1:17:40

of our evolution to the next stage of

1:17:43

existence. Maybe

1:17:47

I feel genuinely confused on

1:17:49

this. Well, I think you should be. We're

1:17:51

gonna find out. Yeah. I mean,

1:17:53

to be sure how it's gonna... That's the same. But I

1:17:55

don't even have like... Two versus Beyond Belief. Right.

1:17:58

I mean, you just... From

1:18:00

the when did open AI when

1:18:02

did you first start this project? our

1:18:05

like the very beginning and end of 2015 early 2016 and When

1:18:09

you initially started this project?

1:18:12

What kind of timeline

1:18:14

did you have in mind and

1:18:17

how's it stayed on that timeline? Or is it

1:18:19

just wildly out of control? I? Remember

1:18:23

talking

1:18:24

with John Schulman one of our co-founders

1:18:30

And I

1:18:30

was like yeah, that's about right to me and

1:18:34

I've always sort of thought since then now

1:18:36

I no longer think of like AGI is quite the endpoint

1:18:39

But to get to the point where we like accomplish

1:18:42

the thing we set out to accomplish

1:18:44

You know that would take us to like 20 30 20 31

1:18:49

has felt

1:18:50

to me like

1:18:51

all the way through kind of a a

1:18:55

reasonable estimate with huge error bars, and

1:18:58

I kind of think we're on the trajectory

1:19:00

I sort of assumed and

1:19:02

What did you think

1:19:04

the impact? On

1:19:07

society would be like did you when

1:19:09

you when you first started doing this and

1:19:12

you said okay if we are successful And

1:19:14

we do create some massively

1:19:17

advanced AGI What

1:19:20

what is the implementation and how

1:19:22

what is the impact on society? Have

1:19:25

did you did you sit there and

1:19:27

have like a graph like you had

1:19:29

the pros on one side the cons on the other? Did

1:19:32

you just sort of abstractly consider

1:19:34

well?

1:19:35

We definitely talked a lot about the cons

1:19:37

you know

1:19:39

Many of us were super worried

1:19:42

about

1:19:42

and so are about

1:19:46

Safety and alignment and if we build these

1:19:48

systems

1:19:49

we can all see the great future that's easy to imagine But

1:19:52

if something goes horribly wrong, it's like really horribly

1:19:54

wrong

1:19:55

And so there was a lot of discussion

1:19:58

about and really

1:19:59

A big part of the founding spirit of this is like, how

1:20:02

are we going to solve this safety problem? What does

1:20:04

that even mean?

1:20:06

One of the things that we believe is that the

1:20:08

greatest minds in the world cannot sit there and solve

1:20:10

that in a vacuum.

1:20:12

You've got to have contact reality.

1:20:14

You've got to see where the technology

1:20:15

goes. Practice

1:20:17

plays out in a stranger way than theory,

1:20:20

and that's certainly proven true for us.

1:20:23

We had a long list

1:20:25

of cons. We had a very

1:20:28

intense list of cons because there's

1:20:31

like all of the last decades of sci-fi telling

1:20:33

you about how

1:20:34

this goes wrong. Why are you supposed to shoot me right now?

1:20:38

I'm sure you've seen the John Connor

1:20:41

chat GPT memes. I haven't. What

1:20:43

is it? It's

1:20:46

like John Connor from The Terminator,

1:20:48

the kid, looking at you

1:20:50

when you open up chat GPT. Yeah,

1:20:55

so

1:20:56

that stuff we were very clear

1:20:59

in our minds on. Now, I think we

1:21:01

understand. There's a lot of work to do,

1:21:03

but we understand more

1:21:05

about how to make AI safe in

1:21:07

the –

1:21:09

AI safety gets overloaded. Does

1:21:12

it mean don't say so many people find defense? Or does it mean

1:21:14

don't destroy all of humanity or some continuum?

1:21:18

I think the word has gotten

1:21:20

overloaded, but in terms of the

1:21:22

not destroy all of humanity version of

1:21:24

it, we have a lot of work to do. But

1:21:27

I think we have finally more ideas

1:21:29

about what can work, and given

1:21:32

the way the systems are going,

1:21:33

we have a lot more opportunities available

1:21:35

for us to solve, and I thought we would have –

1:21:39

given the direction that we initially thought the technology

1:21:41

was going to go. So that's good. On

1:21:43

the positive side,

1:21:46

the thing that I was most excited about then

1:21:48

and remain most excited about now is

1:21:52

what if this system can

1:21:54

dramatically increase

1:21:56

the rate of scientific knowledge in society?

1:21:59

And that is a – I

1:22:02

think that kind of like all real

1:22:05

sustainable economic growth,

1:22:07

the future getting better,

1:22:09

progress in some sense

1:22:11

comes from increased

1:22:13

scientific and technological capacity

1:22:15

until

1:22:16

we can solve all the problems. And if

1:22:18

the AI can help us do that,

1:22:20

that's always been the thing I've been most excited about. Well,

1:22:23

it certainly seems like that is the greatest

1:22:25

potential – greatest positive potential

1:22:28

of AI. It is to solve

1:22:31

a lot of the problems that human beings

1:22:33

have had forever, a lot of the societal

1:22:36

problems that seem to

1:22:38

be – I mean that's what I was talking about at an AI president.

1:22:41

I'm kind of not joking because I feel like if

1:22:43

something was hyper intelligent

1:22:46

and aware of all the variables with

1:22:48

no human bias and no

1:22:51

incentives, no other than

1:22:53

here's your program, the

1:22:55

greater good for the community of the

1:22:58

United States and the greater

1:23:00

good for that community as

1:23:02

it interacts with the rest of the world. The

1:23:07

elimination of these

1:23:10

dictators, whether

1:23:12

they're elected or

1:23:14

non-elected who impose their

1:23:16

will on the population

1:23:18

because they have a vested

1:23:21

interest in protecting special interest groups

1:23:23

and industry. I

1:23:26

think as long as –

1:23:29

the thing that I find scary when you say that is

1:23:31

it does – it feels like it's

1:23:33

humanity not in control

1:23:36

and I reflexively don't like

1:23:38

that. But

1:23:41

if it's instead like

1:23:43

it is the collective will of humanity being

1:23:45

expressed without the mistranslation

1:23:48

and corrupting influences along the way, then

1:23:50

I can see it.

1:23:51

Is that possible? It seems like it would be.

1:23:54

It seems like if it was programmed in that regard

1:23:57

to do the greater good for humanity.

1:24:00

And and take into account the

1:24:02

values of humanity the needs

1:24:04

of humanity There's something about the phrase

1:24:07

do the greater good for you. I know terrifying

1:24:09

very Orwellian all yeah But

1:24:12

also so is artificial general

1:24:14

intelligence for sure for sure open the door I

1:24:16

wish I wish I had worked on you know something

1:24:18

that was less

1:24:19

morally fraud But do you

1:24:21

cuz no no no I mean I can't

1:24:23

imagine that I cannot imagine a cooler thing

1:24:26

to work on I feel Unbelievable I feel like the luckiest

1:24:28

person on earth. No it is not

1:24:32

It's not on easy mode No,

1:24:36

no no no I mean you are at the

1:24:39

forefront of one of the most spectacular

1:24:42

changes in human history,

1:24:44

and I would say as No,

1:24:47

I would say more spectacular than

1:24:49

the implementation of the internet I

1:24:52

think the implementation of the internet

1:24:54

was the first baby steps this

1:24:57

and that artificial general intelligence

1:25:00

is Yeah, it is

1:25:02

the internet on steroids. It's the

1:25:04

the internet in you know hyperspace

1:25:09

What I would say is it's it's the next step and there'll be more

1:25:11

steps after yeah, but it's our most exciting step yet Yeah,

1:25:14

my my wonder is what

1:25:17

are those next steps after isn't that

1:25:19

so exciting to think about it's very exciting

1:25:21

I think we're the last people I Really

1:25:24

do I think we're the last of the biological

1:25:26

people with all the biological problems. I

1:25:29

think there's a Very

1:25:31

excited about that I Just

1:25:34

think that's just what it is you're just fine

1:25:36

with it is what it is you know I mean

1:25:39

That

1:25:40

I don't think you can control it at this point other than

1:25:43

some massive natural disaster that

1:25:45

resets us back to the Stone Age Which

1:25:47

is also something we should be very concerned with yes

1:25:49

It seems like that happens a lot We're not aware of

1:25:51

it because the timeline of a human body is so

1:25:53

small You know the timeline of the human

1:25:55

existence as a person is a hundred

1:25:58

years if you're lucky, but yet the time of

1:26:01

the Earth is billions of years and

1:26:03

if you look at how many times life

1:26:06

on Earth has been reset by comets

1:26:09

slamming into the Earth and just completely

1:26:12

eliminating all technological

1:26:15

advancement. It seems like it's happened multiple

1:26:17

times in recorded history.

1:26:22

I do think I always think we don't think about

1:26:24

that quite enough. We

1:26:29

talked about the simulation hypothesis earlier. It's had this

1:26:32

big resurgence.

1:26:33

In the tech industry recently,

1:26:35

one of the new takes on it as we get closer

1:26:37

to AGI is that if

1:26:39

ancestors were simulated at us,

1:26:41

the time they want to simulate again and again is right

1:26:43

up to the creation

1:26:44

of AGI.

1:26:45

Yeah.

1:26:48

So it seems very crazy we're living through this time. It's

1:26:50

not a coincidence at all. This

1:26:52

is the time that is after we

1:26:54

had enough cell phones out in the world recording

1:26:56

intensive video to train the video model of the world

1:26:59

that's all being jacked into us now via brain

1:27:01

implants or whatever. And before

1:27:03

everything goes really crazy with AGI.

1:27:05

And it's also this interesting time to simulate

1:27:07

like, can we get through?

1:27:10

Does the asteroid come right before we get there

1:27:12

for dramatic tension? Do we figure out how to make this

1:27:14

safe? Do we figure out how to societally agree

1:27:16

on it? That's led to like a

1:27:18

lot more people believing it than before, I think. Yeah,

1:27:21

for sure. And

1:27:23

again, I think this is just where it's going.

1:27:26

I mean, I don't know if that's a good thing or

1:27:29

a bad thing. It's just a thing. But it's

1:27:31

certainly better to live now. I

1:27:33

would not want to live in the

1:27:35

1800s and be in a covered wagon trying to

1:27:37

make my way across the country. Yeah,

1:27:39

we got the most exciting time in history yet. It's the best.

1:27:42

It's the best, but it also has the most

1:27:44

problems, the most social problems, the

1:27:47

most awareness of social,

1:27:50

environmental infrastructure,

1:27:52

the issues that we have. We get to go solve them. Yeah.

1:27:56

And I intuitively,

1:27:58

I think I feel something.

1:27:59

something somewhat

1:28:02

different

1:28:03

than you, which is I think humans in

1:28:07

something close to this form are

1:28:09

going to be around

1:28:12

for a lot longer than I don't

1:28:14

think we're the last humans. How long

1:28:17

do you think we have?

1:28:19

Like

1:28:23

longer than a time frame I can reason about. Really?

1:28:26

There may be like I could totally imagine

1:28:28

a world where some people decide

1:28:31

to merge and go off exploring the universe with

1:28:34

AI and there's a big universe out there, but

1:28:37

like can I really imagine a world

1:28:39

where short of a natural disaster there

1:28:41

are not humans pretty similar

1:28:44

to humans from today

1:28:45

on earth doing human-like

1:28:47

things

1:28:49

and the sort of spirit of humanity

1:28:51

merged into these other things that are out

1:28:53

there doing their thing in the universe. It's

1:28:56

very hard for me to actually

1:28:59

see that happening

1:29:01

and maybe that means I'm like going to turn out to be a dinosaur

1:29:03

and let it

1:29:04

horribly run in this prediction, but

1:29:06

I would say I feel it more over time

1:29:08

as we make progress with AI, not less. Yeah,

1:29:10

I don't feel that at all.

1:29:12

I feel like we're done. In like

1:29:14

a few years? No, maybe

1:29:17

a generation or two. It'll probably

1:29:19

be a gradual change like wearing

1:29:21

of clothes. I don't think everybody

1:29:24

wore clothes and they invented clothes. I think it probably

1:29:26

took a while. When someone figured out shoes,

1:29:28

I think that probably took a while. When they

1:29:30

figured out structures, doors, houses,

1:29:33

cities, agriculture, all those

1:29:35

things were slowly implemented over

1:29:37

time and then now become everywhere. I

1:29:40

think this is far more

1:29:43

transformative. It's part of that because

1:29:45

you don't think there will be an option for some people

1:29:47

not to merge. Right. Just

1:29:49

like there's not an option for some people to not have telephones

1:29:51

anymore. I used to have friends

1:29:54

like, I don't even have email. Those

1:29:56

people don't exist anymore. They all have email. Everyone

1:29:58

has a phone, at least a flip phone. I know

1:30:00

some people that they just can't handle

1:30:03

social media and all that jazz. They went to a flip

1:30:05

phone good I don't know if this is true or not. I've heard

1:30:07

you can't like walk into an AT&T store anymore I

1:30:10

heard they can't change you can okay really someone

1:30:13

maybe this but I don't know if it's Verizon still hasn't

1:30:15

I was just there Hey, they still have flip phones.

1:30:17

I was like I like it I like this fucking

1:30:20

little thing that you just call people and I always

1:30:22

like romanticized about going to that

1:30:24

but my step was to go to a phone

1:30:26

that has nothing on it, but yes messages and That's

1:30:29

been a few days Feeling good

1:30:31

so far. Yeah, it's good. You know I still

1:30:34

have my other phone that I use for

1:30:36

social media but when I pick that motherfucker

1:30:38

up I start scrolling through YouTube and watching

1:30:41

videos and scrolling through tik-tok

1:30:43

or Instagram and I

1:30:45

don't have tik-tok but I've

1:30:47

I have I tried threads for a little

1:30:49

while but fucking ghost

1:30:52

town Went right back to

1:30:54

X. I Live on a ranch

1:30:56

during the weekends, and there's no I fly

1:30:58

in the house, but there's no cell phone coverage

1:31:01

anywhere else hmm and

1:31:04

It's

1:31:06

Every week I forget

1:31:08

how nice it is and what a change

1:31:11

it is to go for a walk Yeah,

1:31:13

no cell phone coverage good for your mind

1:31:15

for it's unbelievable for your mind,

1:31:17

and I think we have like

1:31:19

So quickly lost something

1:31:21

hmm

1:31:23

Like out of service just doesn't happen that doesn't even have

1:31:25

an airplanes anymore. We don't like but

1:31:28

that

1:31:30

Like

1:31:31

ours where your phone just cannot

1:31:33

buzz yeah,

1:31:35

no text message either nothing I

1:31:39

Think that's a really healthy thing

1:31:41

I dropped my phone once when I was in lanai

1:31:44

and I think it was the last time I dropped the phone the

1:31:46

phone was Like we're done, and it just

1:31:48

started calling people randomly Like

1:31:50

it would just call people and I'd hang it

1:31:52

up and call another person I'd hang it up, and

1:31:54

I was showing my wife. I was like look at this. This is crazy It's

1:31:57

just calling people and so the phone

1:31:59

was broken And so I had an order of

1:32:01

phone, and we were on vacation for like eight days. And

1:32:04

it took three days for Apple to

1:32:06

get me a phone. I bet you had a great three days. It was

1:32:08

amazing. It was amazing. Because

1:32:11

when I was hanging out with my family, I was totally

1:32:13

present, there was no options. And

1:32:16

I wasn't thinking about checking my

1:32:18

phone, because it didn't exist, I didn't have

1:32:20

one. And there was a alleviation

1:32:23

of again, what Sean

1:32:25

was talking about, that low level of anxiety.

1:32:28

It's sort of like, ehh, ehh, that

1:32:32

you have when you always wanna check your phone. Yeah,

1:32:35

I think that thing, it's so bad. We

1:32:38

have not figured out yet, like

1:32:41

the technology has moved so fast, biology

1:32:43

moves very slowly. We have not figured out

1:32:45

how we're gonna function in a society

1:32:47

and get those occasional times when

1:32:50

your phone has broken for three days, or you

1:32:52

go for a walk within the service. But

1:32:55

it's like,

1:32:59

I very much feel like my phone controls

1:33:02

me, not the other way around. Uh-huh.

1:33:04

And I hate it,

1:33:06

but I haven't figured out what to do about it.

1:33:08

Well, that's what I'm worried about with

1:33:10

future technology, is that

1:33:12

this, which was so unanticipated,

1:33:15

if you'd imagine a world, when you, can you

1:33:17

imagine going up to someone in 1984

1:33:20

and pointing to a phone and saying, one day that'll

1:33:22

be in your pocket, it's gonna ruin your life. Like,

1:33:25

what? Yeah, one day

1:33:27

people are gonna be jerking off to that thing. You're

1:33:29

like, what? One day people are gonna be

1:33:31

watching people get murdered on Instagram. I've never seen

1:33:33

so many murders on Instagram over the last few months.

1:33:36

Really, I've never seen one. Oh, been a bad timeline.

1:33:38

Me and my friend Tom Segura, every

1:33:41

morning we text each other the worst things that

1:33:43

we find on Instagram. Why? For

1:33:45

fun, he's a comedian. Okay. We're both

1:33:47

comedians. That's fun to you? Yeah. This

1:33:50

is fucking, just ridiculous. I mean, just

1:33:53

crazy car accidents, people get gored

1:33:55

by bulls and like every,

1:33:57

like we try to top each other. So every day.

1:34:00

He's setting me the most every day when I wake up and

1:34:02

I check Tom fuck when you know, I

1:34:04

think can you explain? What's fun about

1:34:06

that? Well? He's

1:34:08

a comic and I'm a comic and

1:34:10

comics like chaos. We like

1:34:13

we like ridiculous Outrageous

1:34:16

shit that is just so

1:34:19

far beyond the norm of what you experience

1:34:21

in a regular day Got it and

1:34:23

also the Understanding

1:34:26

of the wide spectrum of

1:34:28

human behavior if you're a nice person

1:34:31

and you surround yourself with nice people You

1:34:33

very rarely see someone get shot

1:34:36

you very rarely see People

1:34:38

get stabbed for no reason randomly

1:34:40

on the street, but on Instagram you see that every day And

1:34:45

there's something about that which just reminds

1:34:47

you oh The work crazy

1:34:50

like the the human species like there's

1:34:52

a certain percentage of us that are just off

1:34:55

the rails and just out there

1:34:58

just causing chaos and Jumping

1:35:01

dirt bikes and landing on your neck and all

1:35:04

that stuff is that even to hear that makes

1:35:06

me like yeah Physically like I know that

1:35:08

happens of course mm-hmm And

1:35:12

I know like not looking at it doesn't make it not happen

1:35:14

right, but it makes me so uncomfortable And I'm

1:35:16

happy to watch oh yeah, it makes me uncomfortable too,

1:35:19

but yeah, we do it to each other every day And

1:35:23

it's not good It's definitely not good,

1:35:25

but it's also I'm not gonna stop fun, but

1:35:28

why is it fun? It's fun because it's my friend Tom,

1:35:30

and we're both kind of the same in that way which Just

1:35:33

look at that look at this that I get look at this It

1:35:36

is just a thing we started doing a few months ago. It's

1:35:38

just can't stop And

1:35:40

Instagram has like learned that you do that so just keep showing

1:35:43

your more Instagram knows when I my

1:35:45

search page is A mess when

1:35:47

I go to the discover page stuff. Oh, it's

1:35:49

just crazy, but the thing is it shows up

1:35:51

in your feed, too That's what I

1:35:53

understand about the algorithm. It shows it knows

1:35:55

you're fucked up So it shows up in your feed

1:35:58

of things like even if They're

1:36:00

not people I follow, but Instagram

1:36:03

shows them to me anyway. I

1:36:05

heard an interesting thing a few days ago about Instagram

1:36:07

and the feed, which is if you use it at off

1:36:09

hours when they have more

1:36:12

processing capability available because less people are using

1:36:14

it, you get better recommendations. Your

1:36:16

feed will be better in the middle of the night. What

1:36:19

is better though? Doesn't your feed

1:36:21

more addictive to you or whatever? Right.

1:36:24

For me, better would be more murders, more animal

1:36:26

attacks. Sounds horrible. It's horrible.

1:36:29

It's just, it seems to

1:36:31

know that's what I like. It

1:36:34

seems to know that that's what I interact with, so it's just

1:36:36

sending me that most of the time.

1:36:40

Yeah. That probably has all kinds of crazy

1:36:43

psychological. I'm sure. Yeah,

1:36:45

I'm sure that's also one of the reasons why I want to get

1:36:47

rid of it and move away from it. Yeah,

1:36:49

so maybe, maybe, maybe it went

1:36:51

too far. I don't even know if it's too

1:36:54

far, but what it is is it's

1:36:56

showing me the

1:36:58

darker regions of society,

1:37:01

of civilization, of human

1:37:03

behavior. But you think we're about to edit all that

1:37:05

out. I wonder if that is a solution.

1:37:09

I really do because I don't

1:37:11

think it's outside the realm of possibility.

1:37:14

If we really, truly can engineer that ...

1:37:16

Like one of the talks about Neuralink that's

1:37:19

really promising is people

1:37:21

with spinal cord issues, injuries,

1:37:24

people that can't move their body, and

1:37:26

being able to hotwire that, where

1:37:30

essentially it controls all

1:37:32

these parts of your body that you couldn't control

1:37:34

anymore. That would be an amazing

1:37:37

thing for people that are injured, for

1:37:39

amazing things for people that are

1:37:43

paralyzed, they have all sorts of neurological

1:37:45

conditions. That

1:37:48

is probably one of the first, and that's

1:37:50

what Elon has talked about as well, when the first

1:37:52

implementations, the restoration

1:37:55

of sight, cognitive

1:37:57

function enhanced from people that have brain

1:37:59

issues.

1:37:59

issues.

1:38:01

That's tremendously exciting. Yeah.

1:38:04

And like many other technologies, I don't think

1:38:06

we can stop neural interfaces, nor

1:38:09

because of the like great good that's going to happen along

1:38:11

the way. I don't think we know where it goes.

1:38:14

It's Pandora's box for sure.

1:38:16

And I think when we open it, it's

1:38:19

just we're not going to go back, just

1:38:21

like we're not going to go back to no computers without

1:38:23

some sort of natural disaster. By

1:38:25

the way, I mean, this is a great compliment.

1:38:28

You are one of the most neutral people I have

1:38:30

ever heard talk about the merge come

1:38:32

in. You're just like, yeah, I think it's going

1:38:34

to happen. You know, it'd be good in these

1:38:36

ways, bad in these ways. But you

1:38:39

seem like unbelievably

1:38:41

neutral about it, which is always something I admire. I

1:38:43

try to be as neutral about

1:38:45

everything as possible, except for corruption,

1:38:48

which I think is just like one of the most

1:38:50

massive problems with the

1:38:52

way our culture is

1:38:55

governed. Then corruption, the

1:38:58

influence of money is just a giant,

1:39:01

terrible issue. But in terms

1:39:03

of like social issues and in terms

1:39:05

of the way human beings

1:39:08

believe and think about things, I

1:39:10

try to be as neutral as possible. Because

1:39:13

I think the only way to really

1:39:15

truly understand the way other people think about

1:39:18

things is try to look at it through their mind. And

1:39:20

if you have this inherent bias and

1:39:22

this, you have

1:39:24

this like very

1:39:27

rigid view of what's good

1:39:29

and bad and right and wrong, I

1:39:31

don't think that serves you very well

1:39:34

for understanding why people differ.

1:39:36

So I try to be as neutral and

1:39:39

as objective as possible when I look at

1:39:41

anything. This is a skill that I've

1:39:43

learned. This is not something I had in 2009 when

1:39:45

I started this podcast. This

1:39:47

podcast I started just fucking around with friends and

1:39:49

I had no idea what it was going

1:39:52

to be. I mean, there's no way I could have

1:39:54

ever known. But also I had no idea what

1:39:56

it was going to do to me as far

1:39:58

as the evolution of me. as a human being. I

1:40:01

am so much nicer. I'm so

1:40:03

much more aware of things.

1:40:05

I'm so much more conscious

1:40:07

of the way other people think and feel. I'm

1:40:10

just a totally different person than

1:40:12

I was in 2009, which is hard

1:40:14

to recognize. It's hard to believe.

1:40:16

That's really cool. But it's

1:40:19

just an inevitable consequence

1:40:21

of this unexpected education

1:40:24

that I've received. Did the empathy kind of like come

1:40:27

on linearly? Yes. That was not

1:40:29

a… No, it just came on… Well,

1:40:32

first of all, it came on recognizing that

1:40:35

the negative interactions on social

1:40:38

media that I was doing, they didn't

1:40:40

help me. They didn't help the person. And then

1:40:42

having compassion for this person that's fucked

1:40:44

up or done something stupid, it's not

1:40:47

good to just dunk on people. There's

1:40:49

no benefit there other than to give

1:40:51

you some sort of social credit and get a bunch of likes.

1:40:54

It didn't make me feel good. That's not

1:40:57

good. And also a lot of psychedelics, a ton

1:40:59

of psychedelic experiences from 2009 on and with

1:41:03

everyone a greater understanding

1:41:05

of the impact. I had one recently. And when

1:41:08

I had the one recently, the

1:41:11

overwhelming message

1:41:14

that I was getting through this was that everything

1:41:17

I say and do ripples

1:41:21

off into all the people that I interact

1:41:23

with. And then if I'm not doing

1:41:26

something with at least the goal

1:41:29

of overall good or

1:41:31

overall understanding that

1:41:34

I'm doing bad and that that

1:41:36

bad is a real thing, as much as you

1:41:38

try to ignore it because you don't interface with

1:41:40

it instantly and you're

1:41:43

still creating

1:41:45

unnecessary negativity and

1:41:48

that I should avoid that as much as possible.

1:41:50

It's like an overwhelming message

1:41:53

that this psychedelic experience was

1:41:55

giving me. And I took

1:41:59

it because I was just... particularly

1:42:01

anxious that day about the state of the

1:42:03

world, particularly anxious about Ukraine

1:42:06

and Russia and China

1:42:09

and the political

1:42:11

system that we have in this country and this

1:42:13

incredibly polarizing

1:42:16

way that the left and the right

1:42:18

engage with each other and God just

1:42:20

it just seems so just

1:42:24

tormented and so I was

1:42:26

just ugh some days I just get

1:42:28

I think too much about it I just I'm like I need something

1:42:30

yeah crack me out of this so I I

1:42:33

took the psychedelics

1:42:35

are you surprised psychedelic therapy

1:42:37

has not made

1:42:39

from what you thought would happen in the

1:42:41

early 2010s are you surprised it has not

1:42:44

made more progress sort of on a path to legalizationist

1:42:46

medical treatment

1:42:47

no no I'm not because there's

1:42:50

a lot of people that don't want it

1:42:52

to be in place and those people have tremendous

1:42:54

power over our medical system and

1:42:57

over a regulatory system and

1:42:59

those people have also not experienced

1:43:01

these psychedelics it is very few people

1:43:04

that have experienced profound

1:43:06

psychedelic experiences that don't think there's

1:43:08

an overall good for those things so

1:43:11

you're pro the problem is you're having these laws

1:43:15

and these rules implemented

1:43:17

by people who are completely ignorant about

1:43:20

the positive effects of these things and

1:43:23

if you know the history of psychedelic

1:43:27

prohibition in this country it all took

1:43:29

place during 1970 and it was really to stop

1:43:32

the civil rights movement and it was really to

1:43:34

stop the anti-war movement and they

1:43:36

they tried to find a way to make

1:43:39

all these things that these people were doing that

1:43:41

was causing them to thinking these very

1:43:43

different ways is tune in turn

1:43:45

on drop out that they just wanted to put

1:43:48