Communal Living, Sex, And Silicon Valley's Groupthink Problem — With Ellen Huet

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1:16Visit Okta.com. That's O-K-T-A dot com. Welcome to Big Technology Podcast, a show for cool-headed and nuanced conversation of the tech world and beyond. Boy, do we have a show for you today. We're joined today by Ellen Hewitt. She is a features writer at Bloomberg News and the author of a new book. And here it is. It's called Empire of Orgasm, Sex, Power, and the Downfall of a Wellness Cult. Wild title. Definitely a parental guidance episode. So if you have kids, I would definitely recommend to reverse to our more recent episodes. And if you don't, I think you're really going to enjoy this one because we are going to get into how Silicon Valley so often falls into groupthink, whether it is, you know, sort of the off-campus activities they do, or even when it comes to things like this AI bubble and the pet, the pursuit of AGI.

2:07And Ellen is the perfect person to speak with us about this. So Ellen, great to see you. Thanks for having me. Welcome to the show. Thanks for being here. All right. So you wrote this book. We're going to get into it in a moment. You managed to say the title without laughing. I did. Let me, I've been reading. Yeah. I've been reading the book. Show us the cover. I should have brought my own copy. Here's what I I did, because I've been reading it at my parents' house. And I just didn't want them to see what the title was. Wow. But this is the book. Wow. I just didn't want to have that conversation.

2:43But we'll have it here. I've been trying to get my friends, now that the book is out, which, by the way, the cover is tasteful. It's a nice cover. It's just the words on it are the ones that... I like to say it's a book for your sexy, intellectual friends, because although it's about sex, it's really like an investigative account and very intellectual. it is hilarious to me that you ripped the cover off because I've been trying to get my friends to take photos of them like reading it on the subway and send it to me so I can you know so for any listeners who read the book take a picture of you reading it in public and you know I just think it's a great cover it won't it won't be me because we have we have no cover on mine but all right and and that is like a good intro into what we're going to talk about because Silicon Valley is sort of like a petri dish for place for movements like the one we're going to talk about.

3:28And I think it really begins with the group houses. And this is something that's often mentioned like tangentially in stories about artificial intelligence or Silicon Valley, that the founders lived in a group house with many other founders. And the stories never really go too deep into what those are. Maybe because the writer doesn't want to, or maybe because it is too complex of a topic in a sort of do more than a drive-by in a story about something else. But they are core to Silicon Valley's culture. So tell us a little bit about what these group houses are within Silicon Valley. So I'll start by sharing a little bit of like my own personal perspective on this, which is for many years I lived in a communal, I would call it either communal living or like a co-living house in san francisco um it's something that um i have a lot of familiarity with like a certain part of that scene which tends to be less professionally focused it's more about like we live together but it's not because like we're all founders or because we're all working on ai but in a you know that's very adjacent to a you know lightweight network of group houses in San Francisco, Berkeley, other places in the Bay Area where they are a little bit more organized around what you do for a living.

4:50So it's like, do you work in AI? Are you like an AI researcher? Are you a founder? There are also slightly, you know, if I were drawing a constellation, these would all be like clusters near each other. But it's like, there's also, for example, HF0, which is a startup, they like to call it like, a monastery for hackers is their name. And that's more of like a temporary co-living situation where founders come together and live together for 12 weeks and focus really hard. A lot of them work on AI projects and it's more of like a live-in startup incubator that I wrote a feature about last year. There's like AGI house.

5:31There's actually been like a debate over there's two different houses that like to lay claim to the phrase AGI house. You know, there are professional houses. Yes. But I think to me, the root of a lot of what we're seeing in AI today comes like the AI debates, the effective altruists, the rationalists. Yeah. And then, of course, there are some that are just driven by pure profit. But it doesn't start right with the professional side of things. It starts with an ideology. And you've seen companies like Anthropic come out of houses like these. So it's to me, and you tell me if I'm wrong here, ideology first.

6:08You have a set of beliefs about the world. And then oftentimes people from these houses will go and start companies together. Totally. I mean, the bond of living with someone in a communal living situation like that can really create deep connection and trust. And I can imagine it feeling like, oh, we've already lived together. We've already, you know, overcome certain hurdles. We know how we show up in this house. Like, I feel much more comfortable, like, building a company with you. Or you're right that ideology will often bring people to want to live together and then they might like spin out a company from that.

6:42Right. Like take effective altruism, for example. The idea is in some of their it's it's earned to give or that in some of their ideology, it's let's go start a really successful company to, you know, then give away the profits or influence the rest of the industry of the industry to sort of take on our values. Yeah. Well, I think you're right that ideology is what underpins these. like silicon valley has always been a place where ideology feels like this very motivating factor i think often it is accurately so but sometimes it might end up being like a cover for other motivations but it is everybody does want to get rich like let's put that that is true and and some people are more or less honest about it um or upfront about it but the truth is ideology matters a lot too like it's extremely important for founders to feel like what they're working on matters and is going to like have impact on the world.

7:33And I think having an ideology that drives you, it almost feels like that is what's going to bring people together and that's going to like lead them forward into like wanting to make these really ambitious companies. Right. So I would say not every Silicon Valley company starts in a house like this. Yeah. But for the broader picture of Silicon Valley, these houses are much more influential than I think we read about. Totally. And I think the reason that journalists sometimes struggle to write about them, and I've encountered the same, is that it's just not that easily definable of a category.

8:07And so, yeah, that it can be easier to just mention it without needing to necessarily feel like you're writing the entire comprehensive thing about how these houses work, because it's hard to track every single one. Right. So that's step one, I think. We have to sort of lay the foundation that that's a core part of what we see in the tech world. Now, let's go to part two, which is who are the type of people that gravitate to Silicon Valley and fill these houses? I know I've spent a lot of time in San Francisco, more than six years living there. You've lived there for a long time. Yeah, like 12, 13.

8:42It attracts a certain type of person. Often somebody looking for adventure or didn't quite fit in at home, I think, or someone with a tremendous amount of ambition. And they go to Silicon Valley, and they often try to sort out their underlying issues through work. And then often you see people who are either part of these houses or in their orbit, they attend certain programs, right? Programs like Landmark, for instance, or programs like Hoffman, which you have also spent some time reporting on. So talk a little bit about, you know, what these their self-actualization programs are, basically programs built for the type of people that gravitate to Silicon Valley.

9:30Am I right? Yeah. I mean, I want to be careful to caveat with like, you know, not everyone falls into all these categories. But I think we're speaking broadly like you're right. People gravitate to Silicon Valley. They're looking to make a difference. They tend to be very ambitious. They want to do things, you know, from first principles and or slightly differently than maybe how they perceive others in the past have done it. And I think that type of person is drawn to often these programs that I would call personal development or personal transformation. There's kind of a whole industry of them.

10:04And some of them you might recognize. You know, Landmark actually has a decades long history associated with this like predecessor group called Est. um tony robbins is kind of like a classic example of these um but some of the ones that i know are popular among tech types right now include the hoffman process which is um yeah something that like i am curious about and like definitely want to like potentially report more on but that's like a week-long intensive therapy-ish retreat um that kind of helps you process some of the um stories and narratives in your life oftentimes these programs will help you like reassess the stories in your life with the idea that it can help you unlock like a new level of performance um i know a lot of people who have done like conscious leadership group which again these all might be like constellations on a map like they're not all necessarily exactly the same and some of them are more popular with silicon valley people than than others but they are all getting at the same thing which is like oh if you can um immerse yourself in this intensive experience you can learn more about yourself and maybe be a more effective leader or more effective professional.

11:12Right. There's also this core, I think I read about this in your book, this core ideology to it. I think this is a quote directly from you. It's about making people believe that they have agency over everything, right? So, and also like... I mean, Silicon Valley loves agency right now. Yeah. Oh, well, AI agents, right? Oh, yeah. No, no, no. Not even that. like yes ai agents but the concept of agency as a personal quality is really for lack of a better word popular among rationalists and rationalist adjacent people right now there's even um a couple people who are writing a book about agency the idea of you can just do things have you heard that phrase yeah yeah i mean i think sam altman has said that oh certainly i mean this is all coming from the same soup um so the idea that you can just um you know you can just do things is kind of a rallying cry that that tries to get people to tap into their agency and so but yeah agency is kind of seen you know being like an agentic person having high agency like these are all words that at least to me read a little bit coded of like they're a little coded for like rationalist or rationalist adjacent people, people who might work in AI, this idea that like the world is a place that you can have massive impact on.

12:37Um, and that you yourself are like a highly powerful actor in the world rather than someone who is, um, you know, responding to the environment around you, you can like affect your environment very deeply. I mean, what is it's interesting that that has to be said out loud? Like, what would be the alternative be that you sort of go with the flow? Yeah, or that you feel like you're kind of like a victim of your circumstances. What's interesting to me about agency being popular, in my view, among a certain like circle of tech people, is that agency is a different way of saying this idea of like, oh, you should consider yourself like radically responsible for your life experience and the things that are happening in your life.

13:21And that's very much an idea that comes from these personal transformation workshops and lineages. So that is something that you would find at Landmark. That's something you'd find at Tony Robbins for sure. That's something that comes up a lot at OneTaste in Conscious Leadership Group. And so it's sort of been reframed as agency, but it's all getting at the same thing. And I would say the opposite is, yeah, someone, you know, you can imagine someone who laments the circumstances of their life without thinking about how they might change it, you know. And they're like, oh, I was just born, you know, without the ability to like charm people.

13:57It's like, well, guess what? If you were more agentic, you would think of yourself and your personality as more malleable. You would think that you could learn skills that you might otherwise like dismiss. So it's people, it's drawing a distinction between people who kind of are like throw up their hands and say like, woe is me. These are my circumstances. It's not possible to change. And other people who would take a more quote unquote agentic approach, they would, or high agency, they would say like, okay, well, actually I'm going to like think strategically about how I'm going to change this about myself.

14:28I want to be, you know, it's like, maybe it's like you want to find, you're single and you want to find a partner. It's like, well, you could lament that the dating market in San Francisco has a gender ratio that is unfair to you and you could complain about it. Or you could construct like a strategic plan that exposes you to the kinds of people that you want to meet in settings where you're likely to converse with them and dedicate, you know, 15 hours a week to this project. And maybe you would be more successful. And at least you would have taken a like high agency stance on this. I mean, I've definitely met people in Silicon Valley like that.

15:05Yeah, for sure. And I think that kind of like, what's the word I want to say? It's like kind of ultra strategic or maybe like really laying out exactly the plan for doing something like that. It does read a little bit of the personality type that you might imagine in certain circles in San Francisco. Right. And so this, so it's so, okay, going back to our big picture, people come in, many live in these houses, many participate in these programs, they believe they have agency. It's a place that's sort of, maybe that's part of the secret sauce of Silicon Valley because go ahead and try to go meet your partner.

15:44Or if you really think that you can change things or you can just go do things, start a startup, join a startup. It's like the hotbed for place, for activity like that. Yeah. And it's not even like they're necessarily wrong. Like in some sense, obviously, yeah, yeah. Building a company can be a way that you very quickly have like, yeah, significant effect on the world around you if you're, you know, if you're lucky and if you're smart. And so it is kind of a high agency place. I'm not at all surprised that this is like a pervasive belief in that culture. Okay. And so this is our, we're going to start getting into OM.

16:19So if you're, again, if you have kids listening, this would be a good time to hit pause. and so but into this culture comes orgasmic meditation yeah what is that I'll give you the basic you know the basic explanation so we can move on to discussing it the book that I wrote Empire of Orgasm is the story of a company called One Taste which was started in San Francisco in 2004 by a woman named Nicole Day Doan and a co-founder but she's really like the leader the visionary like the creator of this company and one taste the company sells the way that it made money was it sold courses on orgasmic meditation orgasmic meditation is a practice in which um a stroker usually a man puts on a glove and some lube on his left index finger and strokes the clitoris of a woman in a very prescribed manner for 15 minutes exactly And the only goal of this practice is for both parties to meditate on the sensations in their body.

17:25And the, you know, the arc of this company is basically that it grew pretty big in San Francisco and beyond. It was in New York, L.A., San Diego, Austin, London, Australia. It grew pretty big in the 2010s. it was like endorsed by tim ferris gwyneth paltrow chloe kardashian like kind of got pretty big mainstream success for an obviously fringe practice and then um in the 2020s it was uh the leaders of this group you know were basically uh there were a lot of cult allegations that emerged about life inside the company and then they were indicted by federal prosecutors and then charged with a crime and um were convicted this summer in a jury trial in new york and so the leaders are currently in jail awaiting sentencing that's kind of like the whole arc but i think what's interesting and relevant to this conversation is the way that this company you know reflects some of that like it's like a different take on some of that same ambition and ideology and like just the way that um silicon valley and san francisco can be this uh yeah petri dish for growing like ideas that maybe start off in a good place but then can quickly like warp into something overpowering or something that can like warp your thinking away from like rational thought into like stranger corners right and i mean the root of this was at seventh and fulsome yeah in san francisco which is like around the corner from where i worked when i was there yeah Yeah.

19:06And eventually actually, you know, yeah, they for many years were based on one block on Folsom Street, but eventually moved their headquarters to Market Street right across from Uber, right across from Twitter. They were like, if you know, 10th and Market, it was basically like around there. And, you know, they you know, it was like the Nicole Day Doan, the founder of this company, like she kind of did some of the things that, you know, a tech CEO in the early 2010s might have done as well. She spoke at South by Southwest. She gave a TEDx talk. They held conferences at like the Regency Center in San Francisco, where everyone had their little lanyard.

19:42Like it really reminded me of the early-ish days of big tech developers conferences like Google I.O., Facebook F8. The idea that you would come and spend a few days like immersing yourself in the world of this startup or this tech company in like a corporate conference. They even had two of those in 2013 and 2014 for orgasmic meditation. Yeah, that's okay. So those are the similarities. Yeah, yeah. The difference is that people will come and practice this. Totally. So go ahead. There's also a side of this that is, yeah, pretty different from like what you'd think of as a Silicon Valley company.

20:21I mean, at IO and F8, people don't have their pants off. No. At least not by design. Yes, that is fair. I mean, the other thing, you know, in some sense, it was like modeled, One Taste was modeled like a startup. But in many senses, it was also an expression of the rapidly growing wellness industry. So remember, like Goop started in 2008. This company was really taking off like kind of in the late 2000s, early 2010s and throughout the 2010s. And so it was more of like they also had kind of the like more woo woo like wellness angle. And then, of course, it was a sexual practice. I mean, they called it a spiritual practice, but it's obviously sexual.

20:59This is like genital touch. And so the pitch of orgasmic meditation to the public was essentially that if you did this practice regularly, and if you did this practice regularly in the same way that you might do sitting meditation, you know, that calling it a practice is like, and calling it orgasmic meditation was very intentional to kind of put it in the like wellness and mindfulness boom that we were seeing in the valley um but basically if you did this orgasmic meditation practice every day the pitch was that you would have better sex better relationships but feel more intimacy and connection in your life have a better uh connection to your vitality your desire your intuition um all sorts of things that truthfully people are often looking for like the the practice appealed to people who say they were like in a long relationship and they were losing their romantic spark maybe they were one of the 10 to 15 percent of american women who struggled to have an orgasm maybe they were like someone who struggled with performance anxiety during sex or just anyone who felt like they had had a complicated sexual history or trauma in their past that they wanted to like use this practice to really address it, which is something that I think people are drawn to and often don't have that many places to talk about.

22:18So that was another way that One Taste brought people in is they were selling something that is very vulnerable thing that a lot of people yearn for and are often looking for answers. And that's very common in the wellness industry. It will offer a promise that really pulls at some pain point in your life. right over this so i don't want to get too deep into it but this is not like goop right goop you maybe get a moisturizer uh and put it on your face yeah this is this to to do this it sort of it happens in public right so you're most most of the time uh they will sometimes do public demonstrations right and then if you were a serious practitioner you might gather for group orgasmic meditation sessions, which in some senses, yes, you're doing it in front of other people, but it's not like into the public.

23:12Not in the middle of market street, but it's still not. So as I'm reading it, I'm just like, what, how does somebody go from learning about this to saying, you know, yes, I'm going to take my pants off and, you know, have this orgasmic meditation experience in front of others or be the one that's, that's, you know, doing the stroking. Like it's, to me, it was like, how do you get from point A to point B? I'll walk you through like a typical person's experience. And again, I, you know, I interviewed tons of people who were involved in this company. And this is like, you know, an amalgamation of like some of their experiences.

23:49So a typical person, let's say you're like a woman in your late 20s. Maybe it's hard for you to have an orgasm and this has been okay in your life, but you've been like interested in trying to like, I don't know, figure out, is there a way that I can address this or like understand my sexuality better. And you might, maybe you're taking like yoga teacher training courses. And then someone at yoga teacher training mentions like, oh, if you're interested in exploring your sexuality, like try orgasmic meditation. So you're like, oh, orgasmic meditation, what's that? And you attend one of the like public events that this group tended to host once or twice a week.

24:24They had an interesting name for it, right? Yeah. They called them turn-ons at some points or also, um, uh, in group, uh, which was sort of this like winking name referring to sort of like in group out group dynamics in in some of these groups and the people that came in didn't they call them something like oh marks yes sometimes they would um jokingly but also it's obviously somewhat serious they would um refer to these potential customers as marks um which is a suggestion of you know one of the allegations leveled at this company by by many of its former members is that its sales practices were very predatory so again the way this the way the the way that one taste made money was by selling courses and it wasn't just courses on orgasmic meditation if you got deeper it would be courses about like how to live your life in alignment with the philosophies of orgasmic meditation and these courses could cost upwards of 20 or 30 000 and they might be like two week intensives or this kind of thing and in that way again those group those transformational in a way those transformational packages and courses are similar to like what you might find at like you know intensives at like Tony Robbins or Landmark or that kind of thing so again all that path yeah so the typical person like comes in they they go to these intro evenings where again everyone's close day on and you just play communication games where people like talk openly and vulnerably vulnerably about their feelings and maybe there's like a little bit of suggestive or sexual like undertones but it's not like a sexual experience but then like the people who work at one taste are so friendly and they like come up to you and make really strong eye contact they invite you to come back again and maybe you're like oh these people seem cool maybe we could be friends and then you come back and maybe they invite you to come help with a weekend course or come take a weekend course and that's where you might learn to the principles of doing orgasmic meditation and you might see a demo from like two of the more advanced students who like do a demo to the class.

26:23And then, you know, for many people from that point on, some people just take a few courses at one taste and they're like, great, I got what I needed. I'm going to leave. And for other people, they're like, no, actually, I really want to go deeper. I want to understand myself in this way. I want to like experience the kind of personal transformation that I see the other staff members appear to be like displaying. and for those people on that path what they typically ended up doing would be moving out of their previous home and moving into a communal residence with other one taste people so again it's kind of like group house culture leaving their previous job and starting to work for one taste usually on the sales team because again that was the main way that the company made money and gradually distancing themselves from their previous relationships their friends and family who no longer really can understand this like new orgasmic lifestyle that you are living that tends to just happen you know on its own and so people who then get really immersed in this world you know one taste kind of has like its public face which is like we sell courses on orgasmic meditation but for people who move into that deeper that inner circle the experience does change and it becomes more intense and it becomes like well this company and this community is all of a sudden your whole life it's where all your friends are it's your co-workers it's your employment it's your home it's your spiritual community um the deeper you get the more grandiose some of the claims about the power of orgasmic meditation become um they teach it as like a way to access capital o orgasm which is redefined to no longer mean like the moment of climax but rather a sort of broad erotic energy similar to the force from star wars this is an actual comparison people to me this idea that you can tap into capital orgasm to like fuel your life or guide your intuition um so it gradually becomes more spiritual and then you know within that group there are like serious allegations that the teaching philosophies including this idea of high agency and like the you know the sort of um radical responsibility for your life that some of those philosophies are then the allegation is that those philosophies are used to manipulate people to pressure them into sex that they didn't want to have to pressure them into having sex with or doing the own practice with an investor of the company customers who might be willing to sign up for more courses if they have more access to sex the you know people told me that that the teaching philosophies of one taste were used to yeah like kind of exploit people financially sexually all this stuff so that's that's kind of what leads to all these criminal charges and the criminal conviction and that but um we can you know we can get into it more if you want yeah i actually have one more question about the practice itself um so in your book you and you talked about it here um just now you said this practice can help you focus on work calm your mind and unleash your potential um i i don't i don't fully understand how that how you get get there well or how they get well basically in some sense again the main practice is you're doing this partnered genital stroking practice but while that's happening you know there's no goal the goal is not to like reach climax it is to you're actually not supposed to right yeah it depends if you become a more advanced practitioner it is a little bit looked down on but i think there's they it depends on how serious a practitioner you are but yes this is details i'll never get get into but okay so um the idea is that you spend those 15 minutes meditating on the sensations in your body and although it's an unusual setup for anyone you know i've done a fair amount of sitting meditation for anyone who you know obviously a lot of people in the valley do this too for anyone who has spent regular time meditating that practice of noticing what's happening in your body like i do think there's a lot of value to it it is something that can help you navigate outside of like your autopilot brain it's something that can help you notice your um knee-jerk reactions and have like a more wise response so even though the orgasmic meditation yeah why does this have to be done through orgasm well i mean that's kind of yeah that's kind of their pitch is that this is um not just the benefits of meditation but also the benefits of like connection and intimacy with another person that you're experiencing this sense of meditation while having this very intimate experience with another human being so that you know that's their own pitch and like any sort of wellness group is going to argue that um their solution is going to like have holistic benefits you know beyond just beyond just the thing but i do think like when they argue like it's going to help you you know improve your focus like this is legitimately what people said when they had done a lot of orgasmic meditation um whether it was all group think or not um we can get into but basically like yeah part of part of the idea was that yeah doing this practice would help sharpen your mind and in the 2010s you know remember we had like the wisdom 2.0 conference it was like people people were doing like mindfulness workshops at google like there was this idea that mindfulness in the workplace was going to improve productivity and improve focus and we did one in my workplace i remember chewing on a raisin and just like thinking about all the sensations i was feeling as i mean call me a little woo i like that stuff there's something to there is something to of course there is it's extremely lindy as some of the uh as some people in certain pockets of silicon valley would say meditation's been around for a long time okay so then um just stick to the details of the court case but where do things go wrong well um basically the company was doing fairly well and like had a lot of like mainstream success again Nicole the founder was speaking on stage at the Goop Health Conference in 2017 they had these like endorsements they were making money and in 2018 I wrote this big investigation for Bloomberg Business Week where it was the first time that people in the company or former members of the the group talked to me at length about these allegations that the group was a cult.

33:01They basically said that they'd been exploited financially by being pressured to take on debt in order to buy more of these expensive courses. They said that they had been exploited sexually by being pressured and sort of taught these lessons that, you know, pressured them to have sex that they didn't want to have in order to like further the company's business. And so I wrote this big story and the company kind of went into hibernation in response to that. and around the same time and in all likelihood spurred by the story the fbi started investigating and then that led to many years of like the fbi looking into whether a crime had happened here and then in 2023 federal prosecutors charged nicole the founder and rachel churwitz who was kind of her like second in command the woman who had been head of sales for a long time charged both of them with um forced labor conspiracy which is like uh i won't get into the details, but it's a specific federal crime that suggests that you conspired to obtain labor unlawfully from people, either through things like threats of serious harm or serious harm.

34:07And then there were like, you know, two years of pretrial motions, which is like pretty common. And then it finally led to a criminal trial this summer in Brooklyn, which I came out and covered in person. And that was like five or six weeks. And at the end of that trial, you know, a jury unanimously decided to convict Nicole and Rachel of this crime. And so the two of them are in a jail in Brooklyn awaiting sentencing, which could come later this year or early next, and they could face up to 20 years in federal prison. Okay, so now here's like the core question, right? Silicon Valley, of course, like we've talked about, has this philosophy of being a place of agency, of, you know you you go out and change your circumstances um and you know you don't let stuff be dictated to you you could just do things how does a place like that um have this fall into a situation or how do people who believe that fall into a situation like this well it's interesting because the idea of agency showed up in one taste in this particular form which was that Nicole and other leaders of the group would share this philosophy that basically, yeah, you were 100 % responsible for your experience, your life.

35:26And the flip side of that is they would also say that to have a victim mentality was kind of like looked down upon. It was like, that was a, that was kind of like a critique that you could give of someone like, oh, you're having such a victim mentality about that. That's really small minded of you. And what's interesting is that that philosophy of having radical responsibility for your life is often for many people quite helpful. It's going to help you take charge of your life. I think there's a lot of benefit to that belief. And at the same time, in certain circumstances, within one taste, many people told me that they thought that that was taken too far right and so in one taste as in life more broadly you can have a good idea that is good for a long time and then if you take it to an extreme it starts to become harmful and so in many cases there were people at one taste who were so taught this idea that you could never be a victim and and that to see yourself as a victim was so shameful that when they experienced what they would now call serious exploitation they had a hard time even calling it that like they would have a hard time recognizing that maybe they had been hurt um and so i think that the idea of radical agency or radical responsibility was used as a cover you know to to make people think like oh well if i'm having a hard time it must be like my fault i couldn't possibly blame someone else I mean, it sort of sounds like these people, you know, I've lived in, I mean, I'm using Silicon Valley as a broader term for San Francisco and the valley itself.

37:17But when you're out there, it seems like a lot of people just want to believe in something. You're there to do something. You want to believe in something. And so once you get going and you believe you have agency, it's tough to stop. Totally. and and it also once you've dedicated a lot of your life toward a belief to change your mind and say actually that belief might have been misguided or it shouldn't have been implied in the circumstance there is a lot of cognitive dissonance or sunk cost that comes up in a situation like that where like there were lots of people at one taste who had tough experiences and they had a moment where they could have thought to themselves actually fuck this place like i don't want you know this place is hurting me but in order to say that they would have had to had they would have had to grapple with the cognitive dissonance of like well i also had invested five or six years of my life into this group it's a really hard thing to admit to yourself and also sunk cost it's like i've already dedicated so much time of time money energy social connection in this group like to leave it feels very costly feels very painful um and so you're totally right that like ideology has this stickiness to it which is the more that you orient your life around a belief if it becomes part of your public or professional persona if you know if you are like yeah the startup founder who is fighting for you know xyz the more you put yourself in that direction the costlier it is for you to change course right and i'm just like jumping out of my seat here because um well first caveats because it's important to caveat here not everybody in one taste or everyone who practices orgasmic meditation is in tech like there are people oh yeah totally in san francisco who don't work in tech believe it or not um but but it's there's so many parallels um to this pursuit of agi where like you want to believe in something and and for the record and i've said this on the show a lot of times but ai is it's a real technology totally but but there is this sort of maybe parallel like belief they put you uh much of the tech industry has put a lot of money and effort and faith into this idea that um within a couple years the current ai technology will turn into uh artificial general intelligence or super intelligence and and it's tough to say you know it's very tough for people involved in that to say hmm maybe not and i wonder if there's maybe we were yeah yeah And I wonder if there's the chance of a similar groupthink situation in that scenario.

39:58Well, I totally agree that there are strong psychological parallels here. And one of the places that I saw that come up in my own reporting was when I was writing about the intersection between AI safety, the rationalists, and effective altruism. in this sense of, you know, you might call it like doomerism, which I know has gone up and down in its popularity over the last couple of years. But if you think about what AI doomerism felt like maybe a year or two ago, it is really obvious to me that there are some parallels. And in fact, like when I wrote a big story about this a couple of years ago, and when I spoke to some people who had spent time really deep in the like doomer mindset, they described it to me in their own words as a cult they said like oh it has a lot of parallels to a doomsday cult and think about it this way it's like an ideology that tells you in this case that humanity as we know it is going to either be destroyed or you know significantly crushed within five to ten years and like our life as we think about it the world as we know about it is going to change dramatically and one of the hallmarks of a cult is like an ideology that is sort of overarching that that tends to um once you adopt it it tends to affect like many parts of your life rather than just one and then this kind of natural isolation that ends up happening between you and your previous relationships in part because of like adherence to this ideology or because of the social culture of the group and so people describe to me you know if you really truly in your heart of hearts bought into the idea that AGI was going to like lead to the destruction of humanity in a short time frame.

41:45Not only is this a belief system that affects every part of your life, like this affected where they thought they should spend their time and energy, their professional work, who they should spend time with, what they should spend their time emotionally caring about, choices about like whether they should think about the future, raising a family, saving for retirement. They also described to me this natural sense of, well, I just couldn't talk to my old friends anymore who who didn't worry about ai safety because what kind of conversation you're going to have with someone who doesn't agree that the world is going to end soon um and so it did create this like sense of isolation and insularness um and yeah people who are like in that world it tended to be like oh yeah you would go and like work at miri or you'd like work in work in ai safety it was just it was impressive to me how much of an overwhelming viewpoint it could be Like once you believe this, many, many things in your life change.

42:40And it's kind of interesting you're going to the Doomer side, which totally makes sense on that front. And, you know, can the same be said for those who are true believers in AGI? I mean, if you think about it, like, I mean, Silicon Valley, of course, is a place where they make big bets on things that are uncertain. But this belief that AGI is going to be reached has led to many hundreds of billions of dollars. I mean, of course, AI will be a useful technology, even if AGI isn't reached. But the money is there because there is a belief that it's going to get there. So do you see that parallel on the sort of the non-Doomer?