Ep 76: Accelerate or Die! Guillaume Verdon and the e/acc Movement

0:00We were always obsessed when I was working with Peter Thiel 20 years ago with how science fiction had gotten horrible and turned so negative, right? It's like science fiction used to be the most inspiring thing in America 50 years ago. How do we bring that back? Do we see it coming back? Are there ways to turn this around? I mean, that's what we're trying to do with EAC. Like, let's imagine all sorts of potential awesome futures. Let's back propagate from those ideal futures towards today. What actions can we take that maximize the likelihood of the advent of those futures? And let's do those actions.

0:24And that's a really great algorithm to sort of amplify the likelihood that we make it. Elon is very much the same, you know, has grand visions of the future and he works relentlessly towards them. In a sense, like once you identify a positive reward in the future and you really model it, your brain just like rewires itself to figure out how to get there.

0:49Today, we got to talk to the based Beth Jezos. His real name is Guillaume Verdon. He's a theoretical physicist on the cutting edge of quantum and AI. And he created the EAC, effective accelerationism movement. This is a cause that's near and dear to my heart as an American optimist. It's all about the prosperity of humanity, about accelerating into a future where we're all doing better, where technology is solving problems and making human life more successful. You know, there's a strange thing in our culture where science fiction used to be really optimistic. We used to see really positive visions of where humanity was going to be in hundreds of years in the future.

1:24And whatever you believe, whatever you work towards, it tends to bring about that reality. If society sees a positive future where we're in space, we're living on Mars, where people are living hundreds of years long, where we have a peaceful future of exploration, that becomes more likely. If society sees a dystopian future, if they see environmental destruction, if they see negative totalitarian governments, that becomes more likely. It's really important for our culture to embrace these positive visions and for us to have our best and brightest people working towards bringing about those positive visions of the future.

1:54And for that, I'm grateful for the EAC cause and I'm excited for you to meet Guillaume. I'm Joe Lonzo. Welcome to American Optimist. Guillaume, wonderful to have you here with us. Well, thanks for having me, Joe. Pleasure to be here. Really excited to chat today. Before we dive in, Guillaume, let's start with your background. You grew up in Montreal. You did your undergrad at McGill University and grad studies at Waterloo. Tell us a bit about yourself. Yeah, I mean, I've been living my life according to somewhat of a master plan, right? Living life like a game. You have a limited time. You know, you spawn, you start, you got to understand the rules of the game, identify the highest impact opportunities, and then go and pursue them.

2:28And so, you know, the first phase of my life, uh, I pursued sort of theoretical physics, trying to understand the laws of the universe. The only real laws are the laws of physics at the end of the day. Um, and, uh, that, that got me to study physics and math at McGill university. And then later on, I went to do a master's in theoretical physics at the university of Waterloo and the perimeter Institute for theoretical physics. There I was working on really what are the edges of our knowledge, right? You know, there's the cosmos, the grand scale of things, the very small scales, so the quantum mechanical scales.

3:04So I was working on quantum cosmology, a bit of black hole physics. And there I got really interested in information theory, notions of compression, because black holes are really the densest objects in the universe and they have the highest density of information. Tell us a little more about that. I'm curious to hear, how does that work in terms of actually information being compacted in a black hole? I know it squeezes all the stuff together, you know, and there's all sorts of interesting formulas at the kind of boundary of the singularity. How does this tie to information theory? Yeah, yeah.

3:35I mean, you know, information theory is originally a theory by Claude Shannon, which was, you know, laid the foundation for computing, but it's also used in physics to describe thermodynamics of various systems. And, you know, Stephen Hawking very famously worked on the entropy of black holes in their temperature. And there, the information or the entropy of a black hole actually scales with the area of the black hole. So somehow it's compressing information of what's inside the black hole into a hologram that scales as the area. And that was very interesting to me. And so I basically studied that mechanism and other mechanisms that are similar for how does nature actually encode and compress information?

4:15And can we create algorithms that decompress that information? And that's actually what got me into considering what would be a way to learn this compression code. inspire ourselves from nature. And that got me into studying quantum mechanical form of computing and trying to define a quantum mechanical form of AI. So quantum mechanics, for those not familiar, is the physics usually of the very small things are in superposition. They're very much not like day-to-day life. And at the time, you know, it was around 2015, I was seeing that, you know, quantum computing was an area of, you know, global competition.

4:53I was a theoretical physicist physicist at the time. I was like, how can I help, you know, the West? How can I help, you know, at the time I was in Canada, but how can I help Team America? And there I saw quantum computing as an opportunity and bringing my knowledge from theoretical physics to try to create value with quantum mechanical computers. So I was basically a pioneer of a field called quantum deep learning. So many people are familiar with deep learning neural networks, but extending those types of notions to quantum mechanical computers and really defining what does it even mean to have a sort of quantum mechanical deep learning program.

5:29And that journey got me to do a first startup during grad school. And during that first startup, I ended up being approached by Google to prototype really what would a TensorFlow for quantum computing look like. So TensorFlow at the time was the core software framework for Google to do deep learning. And we wanted to extend that for quantum mechanical learning. And so we hacked that prototype with a couple friends that I put together at the University of Waterloo nights and weekends. And, you know, they ended up liking it and bringing us on. And that started my journey, you know, within big tech, within Alphabet.

6:08And eventually I got out, luckily. A few things you want to pull apart there. So first of all, I love the implication that a base person in Canada is implicitly on Team America, which is how the world should hopefully work with these battles going on. But what made you want to fight for the West? A lot of people in your position didn't come up with those values. A lot of people at Google don't seem to have those values where you worked for a while. Where did this come from? I don't know. Growing up, people would say I'm the most American Canadian they know. But to me, America represents the land of opportunity, the land of freedom.

6:38It's obviously a pioneer in all things science, tech, and R &D pushes the boundaries of humanity. And that's the team I'm on, right? And it doesn't matter where you're born. If you identify with those values, you can move to America. You can become an American and you're welcome and you can contribute. And that's the American dream. It is. And you moved to Texas too, you know, for those values too. So it sounds like you spent some time here. That's right. So at Google, did you find some like minds around this? Was it something that didn't come up? Did it something you talked about with others?

7:06Yeah. Yeah, I mean, yeah, I did find a cluster of people that, you know, were more patriotic. And obviously, I can't talk too much about what I worked on. Because after that, after working at Google Quantum, I essentially moved to Google X to work for, you know, Sergey Brin and other leadership there. But there, you know, definitely we wanted to work on technologies that are important for this global competition. And so I worked on broader set of quantum technologies, including the U.S. quantum internet. So it contributed to the blueprint, quantum sensing technologies. So how to have very exotic sensors to sense gravity, biomedical signals, all sorts of signals you can resolve.

7:52Is this stuff working, by the way, yet in ways that are useful for quantum sensors for gravity and other sensors? Or is this stuff that we're actually using? I would say quantum sensors and quantum communication are much shorter term technology than quantum computing. And that's why I moved towards those fields after subfields after a couple of years in quantum computing. I do think there are very solid prototypes that can resolve regions of parameter space in terms of acceleration, positioning and timing that are not possible with classical sensors. And now it's a question of miniaturizing and robustifying those systems.

8:29But you can imagine a world where, you know, obviously, if you the first thing that happens in a conflict is GPS goes down. Right. You know, how can you precisely position yourself? If you have a very fine tuned accelerometer, you can just keep track of how much you've moved. That's fascinating. You know, my cousin at West Point tells me they train with a compass just in case because they kind of do assume that these things go down. And it would be pretty impressive to get all of Elon's satellites out of the sky. But I guess not all of them can be used for GPS. Right. Well, thank goodness for Elon.

8:58Yeah. Yeah, no, that's a good thing. But I'm intrigued, though, just going again to the point about the West. You just told me you worked at Google X and you're working on a lot of these things that are critical for the global competition. I mean, this is the same time, of course, when Google Maven was turning down working with the DoD, which was inspirational in a negative way to a lot of us. We had to get more involved and we had to be helping America. But so was Google X doing this for the reasons of helping the West or is it more just or is it more just something you're interested in? Because the way you said it, it was almost like you guys are doing this.

9:24It is really helpful to the West. Yeah, I mean, I can't comment too much on what we were working on and some of the decisions of the leadership there. But, you know, what I saw with my own eyes was that a sort of cultural subversion within big tech more broadly was stopping big tech from working with the government. Right. Like basically ideologies that sort of are very pervasive within the middle layers of the organization basically made it so that whenever, let's say, Alphabet or other organizations want to work with the government, there's a sort of, you know, protest and so on. And how convenient is that, you know, for our adversaries that the ideologies that are pervasive in our most advanced technological firms serve our adversaries in that, you know, we don't deploy the best technologies to the government because of these protests.

10:19And so that got me really thinking about, okay, you can work on technologies all day, but those that get deployed and funded, you know, if you don't have a sort of ideological or cultural support for what you're working on, you're not going to get to build and deploy certain technologies. And that kind of seeded the ideas for sort of cultural engineering, which has, you know, led to eventually to EAC. That's awesome. Let's go to EAC. I wanted people to hear about your background. You're obviously in the middle of a lot of the cutting edge stuff going on in the world. You're not just a keyboard warrior here.

10:51I think that's important context. So EAC, effective accelerationism, like what are the origins of this and how do you build this movement? Yeah, I think I started it roughly when I was towards the tail end of my stint at Google X there. Obviously, the baseline is secrecy. I couldn't talk much and, you know, about what I do and couldn't say anything too controversial. And so, you know, I started an alt account, as we say on Twitter, just to have a sort Really, you'd be surprised how much one restricts their own speech when they know they're being observed by peers, by their potential boss. I've noticed most of my friends do this.

11:25I've gotten in trouble because I don't do that enough. But yes, it seems to be what other people do. Right, right. Because once you have freedom of speech, it induces freedom of thought. And all sorts of thoughts you weren't giving yourself the right to have, you can now try to experiment in a sort of lower risk way when you have very few followers. Obviously, now I have a lot of followers and I'm docs, so it's a bit more difficult. But back then, I just wanted to putting out some ideas that, you know, that I thought in private, but that I couldn't discuss with anyone at the time. And it sort of grew, right?

11:57Because I would just say, you know, hidden truths or what I thought were truths at the time that maybe a lot of people thought in private, but couldn't vocalize. And that's sort of how the account grew initially. And eventually we put some of those thoughts into a framework that sort of went viral to some extent. Originally started just discussions. You know, Twitter space is a great product. You get to have, you know, 10, 20 people just have a discussion, just like a campfire discussion. Like, this is how things really are. Let's have a discussion. Where are things going? Where are we? Where are things going?

12:32And what can we do about it? And we wrote down some notes. It became a blog post and then it went viral. And that's how EAC started, really. It was very humble beginnings. So tell us a little bit about that framework you built. What are some of the first principles? I think it's something we're very aligned with, obviously, on my side. We're optimistic about the future. You can basically have all these problems you can actually solve by building and then things get better that way. What's the framework you started with? The basic framework comes from the study of life, biology, adaptive complex systems.

13:02Basically, most systems in nature that are alive, quote unquote, seek to acquire resources and utilize them towards their own growth. And that's kind of the basic principle. And systems that do this get selected for, like they're likelier to exist in the further future, and systems that don't tend to die out. It's that simple, right? And this happens at all scales. It happens at the individual scale, at the company scale, at the nation scale, and at the civilizational scale. So given this, it's like, okay, well, we could be an empire civilization that dies out if we have the wrong culture that induces the wrong mindset that leads to decline.

13:42So what if we created a sort of viral optimistic movement where we're self-aware that this is the thing we're optimizing for and we're seeking to optimize for the growth of the whole system? And really, we're not being prescriptive of how exactly to do this, but rather that we should maintain dynamism, adaptability, and an open mind as to how to engineer this growth. And so one of the sort of core tenets is to maintain variance, maintain adaptability, because, you know, it's just like an early stage startup versus a late stage company. an early stage startup, things aren't fully pinned down. You're still flexible.

14:18You're still malleable. You can pivot and then identify the opportunity for maximal growth. In a later stage company, maybe you have a large product. You've pinned down all sorts of processes. You're not as malleable, not as flexible. And so maintaining at a societal scale, this sort of adaptability is important for us to always be of highest fitness towards this growth. I want to play a little devil's advocate here just to get just to get some of the common pushbacks to here. And I'm 100 percent on the side of growth and dynamism. And there's all these ways we're breaking that today. But the way you define this, where you kind of want the system to grow and things to get more resources and let it keep growing and be alive.

14:56Maybe a stupid pushback. But how is that different from a virus that's growing or how is it different than like something that's, you know, they could have something that grows. That's actually like really, really nasty. That's like some kind of like empire that's nasty to everything around and just like an evil empire that conquers everything. Would that be something that counts as growing really well because it's better being an evil empire? How do you think of the ethical implications of what this is? Yeah, I think there can be fluctuations away from this perfect trajectory of growth, but on average, they tend to correct on a sufficient timescale.

15:28So if you had a sort of global authoritarian power, eventually that power would crumble because it's not a stable solution. Suppressing speech, suppressing people's thoughts eventually gets disrupted by a society that has way more freedoms, innovates much faster and outcompetes that empire. For a virus, if the virus is far too virulent, right? If it's like a parasitic growth, then it could kill the host and then it has no more substrate to grow upon, right? I think it's important to explore like the steelmen of our enemies. So, you know, when I was younger, I've been very lucky myself to grow up as like the like chess champion, math champion, like all these things where I'm, you know, pretty confident of things.

16:07And so I really valued, okay, the smartest people in the world are the ones who are going to make the biggest difference. And they're the ones who drive everything forward. And there's this whole framework around that. You can almost call it a niche-in framework where you want the Ubermensch to basically be in charge and run things in a way because that's going to make it all more effective. And it's like, basically, there's this theory that the top, whatever, 1 % or 2 % are the ones who are actually driving forward history. And I think there's a danger if you get like too into that philosophy, which is focused on like competence and growth and the very best people winning, which is that you kind of leave out like the Judeo-Christian background, which is that there are, I mean, I think society should be also be measured how it takes care of the people who are on the bottom 10%, right?

16:46There are people who are the meek of the earth, who, depending on your view of humanity, I'm kind of like, people are radically unequal on their impact. But I think equal dignity of human worth, for me, is very important. And for a lot of people, it's very important. Where you do want to take care of the bottom, even if maybe you shouldn't be putting them in charge. So maybe a society, just as an example, a quote-unquote evil society that just cut its bottom might actually grow a lot faster in some ways. Because those people are very problematic. Whereas maybe a more moral society would still grow, but take care of their bottom.

17:15How does that fit into EAC and how do you think about that? Yeah. So I would say like religions and subcultures, you know, really they're just highly evolved memes, right? You have mimetic competition for subcultures, ways to live your life. And different subcultures will confer an advantage or disadvantage to its adherence in terms of the growth of their subculture. And so these religions that have evolved are very well fine-tuned heuristics that on a long time scale ensure sort of robust growth, right? Like who knows if someone may not be productive now in society, who knows, maybe things change and their family becomes like super highly productive, right?

17:58Like down the line. So it's not worth, you know, cutting out the bottom 10%. And so really all we're saying is like, we're not saying a particular culture is the way to go. And it's not just about maximal strength at this moment. It's about search, maintaining broad search over cultures, not enforcing a single monoculture that's top down prescribed, letting people search over ways that they'd like to live their lives and maintaining that freedom to explore. that's the important thing because that's always going to yield a sort of high fitness cultural heuristic at any given point in time no it makes a lot of sense that a lot of evolution works this way you wouldn't all want to be exactly the same in the species you might get wiped out you want enough variation to adapt to new things and so why do you use energy as a measure of progress how does energy tie into that as a way to assess this yeah i mean you know fundamentally uh energy and information are some of the big two observables that we have in physics.

19:00And really, I want to measure progress that was anchored to reality, that was objective, right? There's other utilitarian philosophies like Edenism that they want to maximize some sort of subjective measure like pleasure, for example, right? And that's totally subjective. And that leads to sort of weird Optima, like wireheading, like you're just going to plug into the matrix and press the pleasure button forever. Whereas if we seek as an optimum to grow the system as measured by a measuring stick that doesn't change, which is like how much energy are we producing and consuming, then that's a good sort of anchor relative to, let's say, GDP that we can play with.

19:38We could fudge with the numbers. We can inflate the dollar away. And then once we unpinned from gold or a measuring stick, a lot of things, the world shifted towards financial engineering instead of like hard engineering. And so what I'm saying is I think every other metric of growth could be a projection of, let's say, energetic growth. That's kind of the key metric. And at least from the equations of physics, if you consider the whole system of civilization, the equations predict that the system will optimize towards its growth, towards consuming more free energy. And that's where we should go, where the universe wants us to go.

20:13It's fascinating though, because it does seem that in the last 20, 30, 40 years in the West, Like we've been able to grow in like more energy efficient ways, right? Or is that fake? Is there's nothing like growing without energy or how do you think of that? Yeah. So I'm not saying like, uh, let's grow, uh, and just burn energy for the sake of burning energy. The point is that it's growth on a long timescale. So it's not just the current instantaneous amount of energy we're burning. It's how much we're burning on a long timescale and hopefully that exponentially grows. And so if we're not utilizing our current energy in a clever way that leads to further growth, then we're doing something wrong, right?

20:51And, you know, a lot of things we do, like, let's say, developing better technologies, using that energy to develop better technologies gives us optionality for sort of later growth and helps us unlock the new scale. At the end of the day, how many humans can we sustain? How big of a civilization can we sustain is determined by our level of technology. And the more intelligences that we have, the more humans we have, the more the rate of technology progresses. And we want to keep that going, that sort of feedback loop going. I'm curious what you think. How many people could we have on the Earth at our current level of technology in a kind of comfortable, healthy way that we keep growing right now?

21:25That's a great question. All I know is that it's definitely bottlenecked by the Kardashev scale, which is the measure of how much energy production we have, because we can turn energy into food. We have all sorts of chemical processes for that. But definitely seeking forms of energy that are more potent, such as nuclear energy, which right now it's not necessarily the physics that's a problem over regulation. Yep. Right. That's going to be necessary. And so this sort of social movement where we push for less regulation, trying to make people aware that there's a huge opportunity cost to slowing things down is really important for us to unlock that next scale of civilization and unlocking the ability to support more humans, which I think most people would want.

22:06No, 100%. I feel like with nuclear energy and things like tunnels around our major cities and stuff to get rid of traffic entirely, because you're going to have arbitrarily large amounts of going in and out, it seems like there's no reason we couldn't have 100 billion people. You can still be comfortable. I think people have a bad intuition for this, but people hate it when I tell them this, so maybe I shouldn't keep telling them this. Permissionless innovation is one of your core tenets as well, which obviously that's really key for a lot of areas. That scares a lot of people about things like nuclear.

22:33They might not want you just to be able to do anything with nuclear and cause a problem. For the boundary cases for that, how do you think about it? Because regulatory states obviously slowed growth massively. I think overall it's hurt people a lot. How do you think of those boundary cases on the edge of regulation for extreme things? Yeah, I mean, I think like our point is not that like nothing should ever be regulated. It's more like the pendulum has swung toward, you know, there's been a sort of second law of bureaucratic complexity. It's only been increasing over time and it's massively slowed down many industries.

23:03For example, you know, nuclear energy has the potential of slowing down AI. Clearly, the drug discovery process as well just costs a lot right now. And that's slowed down drug discoveries. We don't know really the futures we left behind by regulating everything this hard, right? Maybe we would have discovered all sorts of drugs much faster if there were less regulations. But there is already feedback loops that are natural. If you do something terrible to another business, it could sue you. So that's a negative reward. Other businesses or consumers vote with their dollars. That's like positive reward.