#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI

24:32I think there's could be more shades of gray in here than people think and then I just add to that you know another one of these trillion dollar kind of questions is ultimately you know very sort of the verification thing and so you know is will will will LMS be evolved from here to be able to do their own facial verification. Will you have sort of add on functionality like like well from alpha right where you know another plugins where where that's the way to the verification. You know another by the way another idea is you might have a community of LMS on any you know so for example you might have the creative LM and then you might have the literal LM fact check it right and so there's a variety of different technical approaches that are being applied to solve.

25:09The hallucination problem you know some people like young leku and argue that this is inherently an unsolvable problem but most of the people working in the space I think think that there's a number of practical ways to kind of kind of corral this in a little bit yeah if you were to tell me about what could be the before we could be was created out would have left at the possibility of something like that. The possible just a handful of folks can organize right and self and moderate with a mostly unbiased way the entirety of human knowledge I mean so if there's something like the approach to Wikipedia to possible from a LMS.

25:44That's really exciting well that's possible and in fact we could be today is still not today is still not deterministically correct right so you cannot take to the bank right every single thing on every single page. But it is probably listically correct right and specifically the way I describe a computer people it is it is more likely that we could be as right than any other source you're going to find yeah it's this old question right of like okay it like are we looking for perfection are we looking for something that asymptotically approaches perfection are we looking for something that's just better than the alternatives.

26:13And Wikipedia right has exactly your point has proven to be like overwhelmingly better than people thought and I think I think that's where this stands and then underneath all this is the fundamental question of where you started which is okay what you know what is truth. How do we get to truth how do we know what truth is and we live in an era in which an awful lot of people are very confident that they know what the truth is and I don't really buy into that and I think the history of the last you know 2000 years or 4000 years of human civilization is actually getting to the truth is actually very good.

26:43Different thing to do are we getting closer if we look at the entirety of the art of human history are we getting closer to the truth I don't know. Okay is it possible is it possible that we're getting very far away from the truth because of the internet because of how rapidly you can create narratives and just as an entirety of a society just move like crowds in a hysterical way along those narratives that don't have and necessarily grounding in whatever truth is sure but like you know we came up with communism before the internet somehow right like which was I would say had rather larger issues than anything we're dealing with today.

27:21We had in the way it was implemented issues and it is theoretical structure it had like real issues. It had like a very deep fundamental misunderstanding of human nature and economics. Yeah but those folks sure work very confident there was the right way they were extremely kind of my point is they were very confident. But 13900 years into what we would presume to be evolution towards the truth yeah and so my my my assessment is my assessment is number one there's no there's no need for. There's no need for the hagelling there's no need for the hagelling dialectic to actually converge towards the truth.

27:54Like apparently not. Yeah so yeah there's a while we saw obsessed with there being one truth is it possible there's just going to be multiple truth like little communities that other believe certain things and. I think it's no number one is I think it's just really difficult like who gets you know historically who gets to decide what the truth is is either the Kangaroo the priest right like and so we don't live in an area anymore of kings are pretty stick dating into us and so we're kind of on our own. And so I might my my typical thing is like we just we just need a huge amount of humility and we need to be very suspicious of people who claim that they have the capital.

28:27Yeah, the truth and then we need we need to have I know look the good news is the enlightenment has bequeathed us with a set of techniques to be able to presumably get closer to truth to the scientific method and rationality and observation and experimentation and hypothesis and you know we need to continue to embrace those even when they give us answers we don't like. Sure but the internet and technology is enabled us to generate a large number of content that data that the process the scientific process allows us sort of damages the hope laden within the scientific process because if you just have a bunch of people saying facts on the internet and some of them are going to be LLM's.

29:13How is anything testable at all especially they involves like human nature things like this is not physics. Here's a question a friend of mine just asked me on the topic so suppose you had LLM's in equivalent of GPT for even five six seven eight suppose you had them in the 1600s yeah and Galileo comes up for trial. Yeah right and you ask the LLM like is Galileo is Galileo right yeah like what is it answer right and one theory is yet answers know these wrong because the overwhelming majority of human thought up to the truth. So that point was that he was wrong and so therefore that's what's in the training data.

29:45Yeah another way of thinking about it is well sufficiently vast LLM will have evolved the ability to actually check the math right and will actually say actually know actually you know you may not want to hear it but he's right. Now if you know the church at that time was you know on the LLM they would have given it human you know human feedback to prohibit it from answering that question right and so I like to take it out of our current context because that like makes it very clear. Those same questions applied today right this is exactly the point of a huge amount of the human feedback training that's actually happening with these LLM today this is huge like debates that's happening about whether open source you know yeah I should be legal.

30:21Well the the actual mechanism of doing the human are out with human feedback is seems like such a fundamental and fascinating question how do you select the humans exactly. How do you select the human. A alignment right which everybody like is like oh that sounds great alignment with what human values. Who's human values. And we're in this mode of like social and popular discourse where like you know there's you know you see what do you think of when you read a story in the press right now and they say you know XYZ made a baseless claim about some topic right and there's one group of people who are like a hot thing you know they're doing fact checking.

31:01There's another group of people that are like every time the press says that it's now a tech and that means that they're lying right like. So like we're in this we're in the social context where there's the level to which a lot of people in positions of power have become very very certain that they're in a position to determine the truth for the entire population is like. There's like there's like some bubble that has formed around that idea and at least it's it's flies completely in the face of everything I was ever trained about science and about reason. And strikes me as like you know deeply offensive and incorrect what would you say about the state of journalism just on that topic today are we are we not temporary kind of.

31:42Are we experiencing a temporary problem in terms of the incentives in terms of the business model all that kind of stuff or is this like a decline of traditional journalism as you know it. If I was think about the counterfactual in these things which is like okay because these questions right this question heads towards is like okay the impact of social media and the undermining of truth and all this but then you asked the question of like okay what if we had had the modern media environment including cable news and including social media and Twitter and everything else in 1939 or 1941. Right or 1910 or 1865 or 1850 or 1776 right and like I think you just introduce like five thought experiments at once and broke my head but yes.

32:25That's where there's a lot of interesting years in Canada. I just take a simple example kind of kind of like how would president Kennedy have been interpreted with what we know now about all the things Kennedy was up to like how would he have been experienced by the body of the politics in us in with the social media context right like how would LBJ have been experienced by the way how it you know like many minute if they are like the new deal the great depression I wonder where Twitter would would just would think about church and Hitler and Stalin you know I mean look to this day there you know there's there are lots of very interesting real questions around like how America got you know basically involved in World War two and who did what when and the operations of British intelligence and American soil and did FDR this that for a harbor you know yeah we're doing Wilson ran for you know his his his can't as he was run on an anti war will you know this he ran the platform not going to go or one somehow that switch you know like I'm not even making a value judgment of these things I'm just saying like we the way that our ancestors experienced reality was of course mediated through centralized top down right control at that point if you if you ran those realities again with the media environment we have today the reality would the reality would be experienced very very differently and then of course that that intermediation would cause the feedback looks to change and then reality would obviously play out you think you think you think you be very different yeah it has to be it has to be just because it's also I mean just look at what's happening today I mean just that mean the most obvious thing is just the call apps and here's another opportunity to argue that this is not the internet causing this by the way here's a big thing happening today which is the gallop does this thing every year where they do they pull for trust in institutions in America and they do it across all that you have everything for the military clergy and big business and the media and so forth right and basically there's been a systemic collapse in trust in institutions in the US almost without exception basically since essentially the early 1970s.

34:15There's two ways of looking at that which is oh my god we've lost this old world in which we could trust institutions and that was so much better because like that should be the way the world runs the other way of looking at it is we just know a lot more now. In the great mystery is why those numbers are tall zero yeah right now we know so much about these things operate and like they're not that impressive and also why do we don't have better institutions and better leaders then. Yeah and so so this goes to the thing which is like okay had we had the media environment of what that we've had between the 1970s and today if we had that in the 30s and 40s or 1900s 1910s I think there's no question reality would turn out different if only because everybody would have known to not trust the institutions which would have changed their level of credibility their ability to control circumstances therefore the circumstances would have had to change.

34:58Right and it would have been a feedback it was it would have been a feedback loop process in other words right it's it's it's your experience your experience of reality changes reality and then reality changes your experience reality right it's it's a two way feedback process and media is the intermediate force. Between that so change the media environment change reality yeah and so it's just so just as a consequence I think it's just really hard to say oh things work a certain way then and they work a different way now and then therefore like people were smarter than or better than or you know by the way dumber than or not as capable then right we make all these like really light and casual like comparisons of ourselves to you know previous generations of people you know we draw judgments all the time and I just think it's like really hard to do any of that because if we put ourselves in their shoes with a media that they had at that time like I think we probably most likely would have been just like them.

35:47So don't you think that our perception and understanding of reality would be more and more media is through large language models now. Yeah so you said media before isn't the LLM going to be the new what is a mainstream media MSM it'll be LLM yeah that would be the source of I'm sure there's a way to kind of rapidly fine tune like making LLM's real time I'm sure there's probably research problem that you can do just rapid fine tuning to the new events some like this. Well even just the whole concept of the chat UI might not be the like chat UI's just the first racket this and maybe that's the dominant thing but look maybe maybe maybe or maybe we don't we don't know yet maybe the experience most people with LLM's is just a continuous feed maybe you know maybe it's more of a passive feed and you just are getting a constant like running commentary on everything happening in your life and it's just helping you kind of interpret and understand everything.

36:41Also really more deeply integrated into your life not just like oh like intellectual philosophical thoughts but like literally like how to make a coffee where to go for lunch just whether you know how to dating all this kind of stuff. What to say in a job interview. Yeah what to say. Yeah what to say. Next sentence. Yeah next sentence. Yeah at that level. Yeah I mean yes so technically now whether we want that or not there's no question right. Boy I'll give for a pop up pop up right now the estimated engagement using is decreasing from my candidates since there's a controversy section for the Wikipedia page in 1993 something happened or something like this and bring it up that'll drive engagement up anyway.

37:25Yes that's right. I mean look this gets this whole thing of like so you know the chat interface has this whole concept of prompt engineering right. Yes. Yes. Yes. Well it turns out one of the things that all of them is a really good at is running prompts. Right. Yeah and so like what if you just outsourced and even by the way you could run this experiment today you could hook this up to do this today the latency is not good enough to do it real time in a conversation but you could you could run this experiment and you just say look every 20 seconds you could just say you know you know tell me what the optimal prompt is and then ask yourself that question to give me the result.

37:54And then as you as you exactly to your point is you add there will be there will be these systems are going to have the ability to be learned and updated essentially in real time and so you'll be able to have a pendant or your phone or whatever watch or whatever it'll have a microphone on it'll listen to your conversations. It'll have a feat of everything else happened in the world and then it'll be you know sort of retraining prompting or returning itself on the fly. And so the scenario you described is a complete is actually a completely doable scenario now. The hard question on these is always okay since that's possible are people going to want that like what's the form of experience.

38:22You know that that we won't know until we try it but I don't think it's possible yet to predict the form of AI in our lives therefore it's not possible to predict the way in which it will intermediate or experience with reality. Yeah. Yeah but it feels like those going to be a killer app. There's probably a mad scramble right now. It's not open AI and Microsoft and Google in meta and then startups and smaller companies figuring out what is the killer app because it feels like. It's possible like a Chad GPT type of thing it's possible to build that but that's 10x more compelling using already the LMS we have using even the open source LMS Lama in the different variants.

39:04This is your investing in a lot of companies and you're paying attention who do you think is going to win this using they'll be. Who's going to be the next page rank inventor. Drilling down the question another one we have a few of those today much of those so look there's a really big question today sitting here today is really big question about the big models versus the small models that's related directly to the big question of proprietary versus open. Then there's this big question of of of you know where's the training data kind of like are we topping out of the training data or not and then are we going to be able to synthesize training data.

39:38And then there's a huge pile of questions around regulation man you know what's actually going to be legal. And so I would I can when we think about it we we dovetail kind of all those all those questions together. You can paint a picture of the world where there's two or three God models that are just like staggering scale and they're just better at everything. And they will be owned by a small set of companies and they will basically achieve regulatory capture over the government and they'll have competitive barriers that will prevent other people from you know competing with them. And so there you know there will be you know just like there's like you know whatever three big banks or three big you know or by the way three big search companies are I guess two now.

40:13You know it'll it'll centralize like that. You can paint another very different picture that says no actually the opposite of that's going to happen. This is going to basically that this is the new gold you know this is the new gold rush. Elk me like thank you know this is the this is the big bang for this whole new area of a science and technology. And so therefore you're going to have every smart 14 year old on the planet building open source right you know you didn't figure out a way to optimize these things. And then you know we're just going to get like overwhelmingly better generating training data we're going to you know bring in like blockchain networks to have like an economic incentive to generate decentralized training data and so forth and so on.

40:47And then basically we're going to live in a world of open source and there's going to be a billion LLM's right of every size scale shape and description and there might be a few big ones that are like the super genius ones but like mostly what will experience this open source. And that's you know that's more like a world of like what we have today with like Linux and the web. So okay but you you painted these two worlds but there's also variations of those worlds because these are regulatory captures possible to have these tech giants that don't have regulatory capture which is something you're also calling for saying it's okay to have big companies working on the stuff as long as they don't achieve regulatory capture.

41:23But I have the sense that there's just going to be a new startup. That's going to basically be the page rank inventor which has become the new tech giant. I don't know I would love to hear your kind of opinion if Google meta and Microsoft there as gigantic companies able to pivot so hard to create new products. Like some of it is just even hiring people or having a corporate structure that allows for the crazy young kids to come in and just create something totally new. Do you think it's possible or do you think it'll come from a startup. Yeah it is this always big question which is you get this feeling I hear about this lot from CEOs founder CEOs where it's like wow we have 50 ,000 people it's now harder to do new things than it was when we had 50 people.

42:13Yeah like what has happened so that's a recurring phenomenon by the way that's one of the reasons why there's always startups and why there's FIDs or capital. It's just that's like a timeless kind of thing so that that's one observation on page rank we talked about that but on page rank specifically on page rank there actually is a page so there is a page rank already in the field and it's the transformer right so the big breakthrough was the transformer and the transformer was invented in 2017 at Google. And this is actually like really an interesting question because it's like okay the transformers it like white is open and I even exist like the transformer is invested at Google white I asked a guy I asked a guy I know who was senior at Google Brain kind of when this was happening and I said if Google had just gone flat out to the wall and just said look we're going to watch we're going to watch the equivalent of GPT forest fastest we can he said I said when could we have had it and he said 2019.

43:03Yeah they could have just done a two -year sprint with the transformer and been because they already had the compute at scale they already had all the training data. Yeah could have just done it there's a variety of reasons they didn't do it this is like a classic big company thing. IBM invented the relational database in the 1970s let it sit on the shelf as a paper Larry Ellison picked it up and built Oracle Xerox Park invented the interactive computer they let it sit in the shelf Steve Jobs came and turned into the Macintosh Right and so there is this pattern now having said that sitting here today like Google's in the game right so Google you know maybe maybe they maybe they let like a four -year gap They're go there that they maybe shouldn't have but like they're in the game and so now they've got you know now they're committed They've done this merger they bring an end to us.

43:42They've got this merger with deep mind Yeah, you know they're piling in resources. There are rumors that they're you know building up an incredible you know super l .lm You know way beyond what we even have today And they've got you know unlimited resources and a huge you know they've been challenged their honor Yeah, I had a chance to hang out with son there were a couple days ago and we took this walk and this is giant new building Oh, there's going to be a lot of AI work being done is kind of this ominous feeling of like The fight is on Yeah Like there's this beautiful Silicon Valley nature like birds of chirping and this giant building And it's like the beast has been awakened.

44:24Yeah, and then like all the big companies are waking up to this they have the compute but also the little guys have Uh It feels like they have all the tools to create the killer product that uh and then there's also tools to scale if you have a good idea If you have the page rank idea so there's several things that is page rank paid there's page rank the algorithm And the idea and there's like the implementation of it and I feel like killer product is not just the idea like the transform It's the implementation something something really compelling about it like you just can't look away something like The algorithm behind tiktok versus tiktok itself like the actual experience of tiktok that just you can't look away They feel like somebody's gonna come up with that And it could be google but it feels like it's just easier and faster to do for a startup Yeah, so so the startup the huge advantage the startups have is they just they there's no sacred cause There's no historical legacy to protect there's no need to reconcile your new plan with existing strategy There's no communication overhead there's no you know big companies big companies They've got pre -meeting's planning for the meeting then they have then they have the post meeting and they recap then they have the presentation of board then they have the next rounds meetings Yeah, and that's the meetings that's the elapsed time when the startup launches its product right so so so there's a timeless right yeah So there's a timeless thing there now yeah, what the startups don't have is everything else right so startups they don't have a brand They don't have customer relationships.

45:48They've got a distribution. They've got no you know scale. I mean sitting here today They can't even get GPUs right like there's like a GPU shortage startups are literally stalled out right now because they can't get chips which is like super weird Yeah, um they got the cloud Yeah, but the clouds run out of chips Right and then and then and then to the extent the clouds have chips They allocate them to the big customers not the small customers right and so so so the small companies lack everything other than The ability to just do something new yeah, right Um and and this is the timeless race and battle and this is kind of the point I tried to make in the essay which is like both sides of this are good like it's really good to have like highly scale tech companies They can do things that are like at staggering levels of sophistication It's really good they have startups that can launch brand new ideas.

46:28They ought to be able to both do that and compete They neither one ought to be subsidized or protected from the others Like that's that's to me that's just like very clearly the idealized world It is the world we've been in for AI up until now and then of course there are people trying to shut that down But my hope is that you know the best outcome clearly will be if that continues We'll talk about that a little bit, but I'd love to linger On uh Some of the ways this is going to change the internet So I don't know if you remember, but does it think all mosaic and does the thing called nescape navigator So you were there in the beginning What about the interface to the internet?

47:01How do you think the browser changes and who gets to own the browser We got to see some very interesting browsers Uh, Firefox. I mean all the variants of Microsoft internet explorer edge and now chrome um The actual And he seems like a dumb question to ask what do you think will still have the web browser So I uh, I love Evan eight year old and he's super into like minecraft and learning to code and doing all this stuff So I like my course like this very proud I couldn't bring sort of fire down from the mountain to my kid and I brought him chat gpt and I hooked him up Yeah on his on his on his on his laptop and I was like you know, this is the thing It's gonna answer all your questions and he's like okay And I'm like, but it's gonna answer all questions and he's like well of course like it's a computer Of course it answers all your questions like what else would a computer be good for dad um, and never impressed Not impressed in the least two weeks pass um, and he has some question And I say well have you asked chat gpt and he's like dad being is better And why is being better is because it's built into the browser Because he's like look I have the microsoft edge browser and like it's got being right here And then he doesn't know this yet But one of the things you can do with being in edge is there's a setting where you can use it to basically talk to any web page Because it's sitting right there next to the next to the next to the browser and by the way to include pdf documents And so you can in in in the way they've implemented an edge with bang as you can load a pdf And then you can you can ask a questions Which is the thing you you can't do currently in in just chat gpt so they're you know, they're They're gonna they're gonna push the the the mel i think that's great You know, they're gonna push the melding and see if there's a combination thing there Google's rolling out this thing the magic button Which is implemented in either put in google docs, right?

48:41And so you go to you know google docs and you create a new document and you You instead of like you know starting to type you just you know say it press the button and it starts to like generate content for you Right like it is that the way that'll work Is it gonna be a speech UI where you're just gonna have an earpiece and talk to it all day long You know is it gonna be like these are all like this is exactly the kind of thing that I don't this is exactly the kind of thing I don't think is possible to forecast I think what we need to do is like run all those experiments And so one outcome is we come out of this with like a super browser that has AI built in that's just like amazing Yeah, they're look there's a real possibility that the whole I mean look there's a possibility here that the whole idea of a screen And windows and all this stuff just goes away because like why do you need that if you just have a thing that's just telling you whatever you need to know And also so there's apps They can use you don't really use them you know being a Linux guy and windows guy Um There's one window the browser that with which you can interact with internet, but on the phone you can also have apps So I can interact with Twitter through the app or through the web browser and um, that seems like an off these distinction, but why have the web browser in that case if one of the apps Starts becoming the everything app.

49:53Yeah, that's right. What do you want starting to do with Twitter? But there could be others that could be like a big app that could be a Google app that just Doesn't really do search, but just like Do what I guess a well did back in the day or something where it's all right there and it changes um It changes the nature of the internet because the Where the content is hosted who owns the data who owns the content how what is what is the kind of content you create? How do you make money by creating content or the content creators? Uh all of that Or you could just keep being the same which is like we're just the nature web pages changes in the nature of content But there will still be a web browser because uh web browsers are pretty sexy products It just seems to work Because it like you have an interface and we know into the world and then the world can be anything you want And as the world will evolve there could be different programming languages.

50:50It can be animated Maybe it's three -dimensional and so on Yeah, it's interesting. Do you think we'll still have the web browser? Every every every every every medium becomes the content for the next one So They you know they will be able to give you a browser whenever you want um, oh interesting Yeah, yeah Another way to think about it is maybe what the browser is maybe it's just the escape hatch Right, which is maybe kind of what it is today Right, which is like most of what you do is like inside a social network or inside a search engine or inside You know somebody's app or inside some controlled experience, right?

51:20But then every once in a while there's something where you actually want to yeah jailbreak you want to actually get free The web browser is the effute to the man you're a lot of that's the free internet Yeah, back back the way it was in the 90s So here's something I'm proud of so nobody really talks about here's something I'm proud of Which is the web the web the browser the web server is there. Oh, there's still back or compatible all the way back to like 1992 Right, so like you can put up a you can still you know what the big breakthrough the web early on the big breakthrough was it made it really easy to read But it also made it really easy to write made it really easy to publish and and we've literally made it so easy to publish We made it not only so you use easy to publish content It was actually also easy to actually write a web server Right, and you can literally write a web server in four lines of broke code And you can start publishing content on it and you could set whatever rules you want for the content Whatever censorship no censorship whenever you want you can just do that as long as you had an IP address Right, you could do that That still works Like that still works exactly as I just described So this is part of my reaction to all of this like you know all this just censorship pressure and all this you know These issues around control and all this stuff which is like maybe we need to get back a little bit more to the wild west Like the wild west is still out there now they will try to chase you down like they'll try to you know People who want a sensible try to take away your you know your domain name and they'll try to take away your payments account And so forth that they really don't like what you what you're saying But but nevertheless you like unless they literally are intercepting you at the ISP level like you can still put up a thing And so I don't know I think that's important preserve right like Because because because I mean one is just a freedom argument but the other is a creativity argument Which is you want to have the escape hatch so that the kid with the idea is able to realize the idea because to your point on page rank You actually don't know what the next big idea is No nobody called their page and told him to develop page rank like he can have that at his own and you want to always I think leave the escape hatch for the next you know kid or the next Stanford grad student to have the breakthrough idea and be able to get it up and running before anybody notices You and I both have a history so let's step back We've been talking about the future.

53:14Let's step back for a bit and look at The 90s you created mosaic what browser the first widely used what browser tell the story of that Hot and how did it evolve into that skip navigator this early days So full story so um Remember born I was born a small small child um Well actually with the yeah, let's go there like what what did you what would you first fall in love with computers? Oh, so I hit the generational jackpot and I hit the gen X kind of point perfectly as it turns out so it's born in 1971 So there's this great website called wtf happen in 1971 Dot com which is basically 1971. It's when everything started to go to hell and I was of course born in 1971 So I like to think that I had something to do with that.

53:56Did you make it on the website? I have I don't think I made it on the website, but you know, hopefully somebody needs to add this is this is where everything Maybe I contributed with some of the trends um That they uh that they do every line on that website goes like that right so it's all it's all it's all a picture disaster But um but there was this moment in time where because the you know sort of the apple you know the apple two hit in like 1978 And then the IBM PC hit in 82 so I was like you know 11 when the PC came out um and so I just kind of hit that perfectly And then that was the first moment in time when like regular people could spend a few hundred dollars and get a computer Right, so that I just like that that that resonated right out of the gate Um On the other part of the story is you know, I was using an apple two That used a bunch of them, but I was using apple two and of course it's set in the back of every apple two And every mac it said you know designed in kupertino California and I was like wow kupertino must be the like shining city on the hill like Wizard of Oz like the most amazing like city of all time I can't wait to see it of course years later.

54:49I came out to Still like a valiant with the kupertino and it's just a bunch of office parks I had low rise of properties So the aesthetics were a little disappointing, but you know, it was the the vector uh right of the creation of a lot of this stuff Yeah, so so then basically by so Part part part of my story is just the luck of having been born at the right time and getting exposed to PCs then the other part is The other part is when elgor says that he created the internet he actually is correct uh in in a really meaningful way Which is he sponsored a bill in 1985 that essentially created the modern internet created what is called the NSF net at the time Which is sort of the the first really fast internet backbone And you know that that bill dumped a ton of money into a bunch of research universities to build out basically the internet backbone And then the super computer centers that were clustered around The the internet and one of those universities was university bill and i probably went to school And so the other stroke I like that I had was I went to Illinois basically right as that money was just like getting dumped on campus And so as a consequence we had at on campus, and this is like you know 89 90 91 We had like you know, we were right on the internet backbone We had like t3 and 45 at the time t3 45 megabit backbone connection Which at the time was you know wildly state of the art We had crazy computers We had thinking machines parallel super computers.

56:03We had silicon graphics workstations We had macintoshes We had we had next cubes over the place We had like every possible kind of computer you could imagine because all this money just fell out of the sky Um, so you were living in the future. Yeah, so you quite literally it was yeah like it's all it's all there So we had full broadband graphics like the whole thing and it's actually funny because they had this This is the first time I kind of it sort of tickled it back in my head that there might be a big opportunity in here Which is you know, they embraced it and so they put like computers and all the dorms and they wired up all the dorm rooms And they had all these you know labs everywhere and everything and then they they gave every Undergrad a computer account in an email address And the assumption was that you would use the internet for your four years at college And then you would graduate and stop using it And that was that right yeah, and you would just retire your email address It wouldn't be relevant anymore because you'd go off in the workplace and they don't use email You'd be back to using fax machines or whatever Did you have that sense as well like what what you said the the back your head was tickled like what was your What was exciting to you about this possible world?

57:02Well, if this is so useful in this container If this is so useful in this container environment that just has this weird source of outside funding Then if if it were practical for everybody else to have this and if it were cost effective If everybody else to have this wouldn't they want it and the Overwhelmingly the prevailing view at the time was no, they would not want it This is esoteric weird nerd stuff right that like computer science kids like but like normal people are never gonna do email Right or be on the internet, right? And so I was just like wow like this is actually like this is really compelling stuff Now the other part was it was all really hard to use and in practice you had to be a basic the s You know basically had a had a bs cs undergrad or equivalent to actually get full use of the internet at that point Because it was all pretty esoteric stuff So then that was the other part of the idea which was okay.

57:43We need to actually make this easy to use So what's involved in creating like in creating Graphical interface to the internet. Yes. It was a combination of things So it was like basically the web existed in an early sort of described as prototype form And by the way text only at that point I wanted to look like what was the web? I mean whoa and the key figures like what was it? What was it like? It made a picture it looked like JGFTT actually It was all text yeah And so you had a text -based web browser Well actually the original browser Tim burners leave the original the original browser both the original browser and the server actually ran on next next cubes So these were this was you know, so the computer Steve jobs made during the interim period when he during the decade long interim period when he was not an apple You know, he got fired in 85 and then came back in 97 So this was in that interim period where he had this company called next and they made these literally these computers called cubes And there's this famous story they were beautiful But they were 12 inch by 12 inch by 12 inch cubes Computers and there's a famous story about how they could have cost half as much if it had been 12 by 12 by 13 So Steve was like no like it has to be so they were like $6 ,000 basically academic workstations They had the first city round drives Yeah, which were slow.

58:54I mean it was the computers are all but unusable They were so slow, but they were beautiful. Okay, can we actually just take a tiny tangent there sure of course The 12 by 12 by 12 They're just so beautifully encapsulated Steve jobs idea of design can you just comment on What you find interesting about Steve jobs what about that view of the world that dogmatic pursuit of perfection in how he saw perfection in design Yes, I guess they say like look he was a deep believer. I think in a very deep way. I interpret it I don't know if you ever really described it like this, but the way it interpreted is it's like it's like this thing It's actually a thing in philosophy It's like aesthetics are not just appearances aesthetics go all the way to like deep underlying under underlying meaning right?

59:39It's like I'm not a physicist one of things I've heard physicists say is one of the things you start to get a sense of when a theory might be correct Is when it's beautiful right like you know, they're right and so so there's something and you you feel the same thing by the way and like human psychology Right, you know when when you're experiencing all right, you know, there's like there's like a there's a simplicity to it when you're having an Interact with somebody there's an aesthetic It was like home comes over you because you're actually being fully honest and try to hide yourself right so there so it's like this very deep Sense of aesthetics and he would trust that judgment that he had to do down like you even even if the engineering teams are saying this is This is too difficult even if the whatever the finance folks are saying this is ridiculous The supply chain all that kind of stuff.

1:00:22This makes this impossible to mature. We can't do this kind of material This has never been done before it's so on so forth. He just sticks by it. Well, I mean who makes a phone out of aluminum right like And nobody else would have done that And now of course if your phone is made out of aluminum white You know how crude what a kind of caveman would you have to be to have a phone is made out of plastic like right? So like so it's just this very right and you know look It's there's a thousand different ways to look at this But one of the things is just like like these things are central to your life like you're with your phone more than you're with anything else Like it's in your it's gonna be in your hand.

1:00:54I mean, you know, you know This he thought very deeply about what it meant for something to be in your handle. They long. Yeah, well for example a here's an interesting design thing like he he never wanted it is my understanding as he never wanted an iPhone to have a screen larger Than you could reach with your thumb one handed and so he was actually opposed to the idea of making the phones larger And I don't know if you have this experience today, but let's say there are certain moments in your day when you might be like Only have one hand available and you might want to be on your phone. Yeah, and you're trying to like Said to text you your thumb can't reach the send button.

1:01:25Yeah, I mean, there's pros and cons right and then there's like folding phones I would love to know what he thought and things about them But I mean is there's something you could also just link on because he's one of the interesting figures in the history of technology what makes him What makes him as successful as he was what makes him as interesting as he was would made him So productive and important in In the development of technology he had an integrated worldview So the the the the properly designed device that had the correct functionality that had the deepest understanding of the user That was the most beautiful Right like it had to be all of those things right it was he basically would drive to as close to perfect as you could possibly get Right, and I you know, I suspect that he never quite you know thought he ever got there because most great creators You know are generally dissatisfied you know you read the council later on and they can all they can see are the flaws in their creation But like he got as close to perfect each step of the way as he could possibly get With the with the constraints of the of the technology of his time And then you know look he was you know sort of famous in the Apple model is like look they they will you know This this headset that they just came out with like you know, it's like a decade -long Project right?

1:02:32It's like you're in there just gonna sit there and tune and tune and polish and polish and tune and polish and tune and polish until it is as perfect as anybody could possibly make anything And then this goes to the the way that people describe working with him was which is you know, there was a terrifying aspect of working with him Which is you know, he was you know, he was very tough But there was this thing that everybody I've ever talked to work for him says that they all say the following which is he We did the best work of our lives when we worked for him because he set the bar incredibly high And then he supported us with everything that he could to let us actually do work of that quality So a lot of people who were at Apple spend the rest of their lives trying to find another experience where they feel like they're able to hit that quality bar again Even if it in retrospect we're doing it felt like suffering.

1:03:12Yeah exactly What is that teach you about the human condition, huh? So look is so I take exactly so the Silicon Valley I mean look he's not you know George Patton in the you know in the army like you know, there are many examples in other fields you know that are like this Specifically in tech it's actually I find it very interesting There's the Apple way which is polish polish polish and don't ship until it's as perfect as you can make it And then there's the sort of the other approach which is the sort of incremental hacker mentality Which basically says ship early and often and iterate and one of the things I find really interesting is I'm now 30 years into this like There are very successful companies on both sides of that approach right um like that is a fundamental Difference right and how to operate and how to build and how to create that you have world class companies operating in both ways And I don't think the question of like which is the superior model is anywhere close to being answered Like and my suspicion as the answer is do both the answer is you actually want both They leave you different outcomes software tends to do better with the iterative approach Hardware tends to do better with the You know sort of wait and make it perfect approach But again you can find examples in in in in both directions also the jurors still out on that one Uh, so back to mosaic so what Uh It was text -based Tim Berners -Z What there was the web which was text -based but there were no I mean there was like three websites There was like no content there were no users like it wasn't like it wasn't like a catalytic it had in there By the way, it was all because it was all text there were no documents there no images there no videos there were no Right so so it was it was and then if you in the beginning if you had to be on a next cube You need to have a next cube both to publish and to consume so So there were six thousand bucks.

1:05:00He said they're really mutations like yeah six thousand dollar PC They did not sell very many But then there was also There was also FTP and there was used nats right and there was you know It doesn't other basically way there's ways which was an early search thing There was go for which was an early menu based information retrieval system There were like a dozen different sort of scattered ways that people would get to information on on the internet So the mosaic idea was basically bring those all together make the whole thing graphical make it easy to use Make it basically bulletproof so that anybody can do it And then again just on the luck side it so happened that this was right at the moment when graphics when the gooey sort of actually took off And we're now also used to the gooey that we think it's been around forever But it didn't really you know the the Macintosh brought it out in 85 but they actually didn't sell very many Macs in the 80s It was not that successful of a product It really was when you needed windows 3 .0 on PCs and that hit in about 92 And so when we did mosaic in 92 and 93 so that sort of it was like right at the moment when you could imagine actually Having a graphical user interface to right at all much less one to the internet How old did windows 3 sell so there was that really big that was the big bang the big operating graphical operating system Well, this is the classic.

1:06:11Okay. This Microsoft is operating on the other So Steve Steve Apple was running on the polish until it's perfect Microsoft famously ran on the other model which is ship and iterate and so in the the old line in those days was Microsoft Race version three of every Microsoft product. That's the good one right And so there are if you can you can find online windows one windows to nobody use them. Yeah Actually the original windows the in the original Microsoft windows the windows were not overlapping And so you have these very small very low resolution screens and then you had literally It just didn't work.

1:06:40It wasn't ready yet. Well, and windows and you five I think was a pretty big leap also that was a big leap too. Yeah, so that was like bang bang And then of course Steve and then when and then you know in the fullness of time Steve came back Then the max start to cough again. That was the third bang and then the iPhone was the fourth bang Such exciting time and then we were off to the races because nobody could have known Will be created from that well windows 3 .1 or 3 .0 windows 3 .0 to the iPhone was only 15 years Right like it that ramp was in retrospect. It's the time it felt like it took forever But that in historical terms like that was a very fast ramp from even a graphical computer at all on your desk to The iPhone.

1:07:18I was 15 years Did you have a sense of what the internet will be as you're looking through the window on a sec like Like what you like there's just a few web pages for now So the thing I had early on was I was keeping at the time what This disputes over what was the first blog, but I had one of them that at least as a is a is a possible At least a runner up in the competition and it was what was called the what's new page Um, yeah, and it was it was like a hard wired in it. I had distribution Unfair advantage. I was they were put right in the browser I put it in the browser and then I put my resume in the browser.

1:07:52Yeah, so it was hilarious, but um But um, I was I was keeping the Not many people get to get to do that so um, no The uh Good call and early days. Yes. It's so interesting. I'm looking for my about about oh Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, um So um So the West New Page I would literally get up every morning and I would every afternoon And I would basically if if you wanted to launch a website you would email me And I would list it on the West New Page and that was how people discovered the new websites as they were coming out And I remember because it was like one it literally went from it was like one every couple days To like one every day To like two every day But we're gonna be doing it.

1:08:37So you're doing it so that that blog was kind of doing the directory thing So like what was the home page? Uh, so the home page was just basically trying to explain even what this thing is that you're looking at right but basic basically basic instructions Um, but then there was a button there's a button that said what's new and what most people did was they went to Probius reasons went to what's new Yeah, but like it was so it was so mind -blowing at that point Just the basic idea and it was just like you know, this is basically the internet But people can see it for the first time the basic idea was look, you know, some you know It's like literally it's like an Indian restaurant in like Bristol, England has like put their menu on the web and people were like Wow Because like that's the first restaurant menu on the web.

1:09:15Yeah, and I don't have to be in Bristol And I don't know if I'm ever gonna go to Bristol and I don't like Indian food and like wow Right, um, and it was like that the first web the first streaming video thing was a it was in another England Then some Oxford or something um some guy put his coffee pot up as the first streaming Uh, video thing and he put it on the web because he literally it was the coffee pot down the hall Yeah, and he wanted to see when he needed to go refill it But there were you know, there was a point when there were thousands of people like watching that coffee pot Because it was the first thing you could watch Well, but right isn't uh, we able to kind of infer You know, if that Indian restaurant could go online.

1:09:54Yeah, then you're like they all will yeah, exactly So you felt that yeah, yeah, yeah, no, you know, look, it's still a stretch right it's still a stretch Because it's just like okay, it's you know, you're still in this zone, which is like okay, is this a nerd thing? Is this a real person thing? Yeah, um, by the way, we you know, there was a wall of skepticism from the media Like they just like everybody was just like yeah, this is the great. This is just like bomb This is not you know, this is not for regular people at that time Um, and so you had to think through that and then look it was still It was still hard to get on the internet at that point, right?

1:10:21So you could get kind of this weird bastardized version If you run a well, which wasn't really real or you had to go like learn what an ISP was Um, you know in those days PCs actually didn't have TCP IP drivers come pre -installed So you had to learn what a TCP IP driver was you had to buy a modem you had to install driver software I have a comedy routine. I do some it's like 20 minutes long describing all the steps required to actually get on the internet And so you had to you had to look through these practical Well, then and then speed performance 14 form modems Right like it was like watching you know glue dry um like and so you had to you had to There were basically a sequence of bets that we made where you basically needed to look through that current state of affairs And say actually there's gonna be so much demand for it once people figure this out There's gonna be so much demand for it that all of these practical problems are gonna get fixed Some people say that the anticipation makes the The destination that much more exciting do you remember progressive jpegs?

1:11:17Yeah, do I Do I so for kids for kids in the audience right for kids on you used to have to wash an image load Like a line of the time, but it turns out there was this thing with jpegs where you could load basically every fourth You could load like every fourth line and then and then you could go to sweep back through again And so you could like render a fuzzy version image up front and it would like resolve into the detailed one And that was like a big UI breakthrough because it gave you something to watch Yeah, and you know there's applications in various domains for that Well, it's a big fight if there's a big fight early on about whether there should be images in the web But that reason for the sexualization No, not not explicitly that that did come up, but it wasn't even that it was more just like all the serious and the argument went to Purist basically said all the serious information the world is text If you introduce images you you basically gonna bring in all the trivial stuff You're gonna bring in magazines and you know all this crazy.

1:12:10I was just you know stuff that you know people You know, it's gonna distract from it. It's gonna go take take the way from being serious being frivolous Was there any duma type arguments about The internet destroying all of human civilization or destroying some fundamental fabric of human civilization Yeah, so it was those days it was all around crime and terrorism So those arguments happened You know, but there was no sense yet at the internet having like an effect on politics or because that was it was way too far off But um there was an enormous panic at the time around cyber crime There was like enormous panic that like your credit card number would get stolen and you'd use life savings to be drained And then you know criminals were gonna there was oh um when we started one of the things we did we one of the the the net scape browser was the first widely used Piece of consumer software that had strong encryption built in It made it available to ordinary people and at that time strong encryption was actually illegal to export out of the US So we could feel that product in the US we could not export it because it was classified as a munition So the net scape browser was on a restricted list along with the Tom Hock missile Is being something that could not be exported So we had to make a second version with deliberately we encryption to sell overseas with a big logo on the box saying do not trust this Which it turns out makes it hard to sell software When it's got a big logo that says don't trust it And then we had to spend five years fighting the US government to get them to basically stop trying to do this But but because the fear the fear was terrorists are gonna use encryption right to like plot you know all these all these things And then you know we we responded with well actually we need encryption to be able to secure systems The terrorists and the criminals can't get into them.

1:13:42So that was anyway that was the night that was the 1990s fight So Can you say something about some of the details of the software engineering Challenges required to build these browsers. I mean the engineering challenges of creating a product that hasn't really existed before that can have such almost like limitless Impact on the world with the internet So there was a really key bet that we made at the time which is very controversial Which was court of court of how it was engineered which was are we optimizing for performance or for ease of creation And in those days the pressure was very intense to optimize for performance because the network connections were so slow And also the computers were so slow And so if you had mentioned the progressive JPEG is like If if there's an alternate world in which we optimize for performance and it just you had just a much more pleasant experience right up front But what we got by not doing that was we got ease of creation And the way that we got ease of creation was all of the Protocols and formats were in text not in binary And so HTTP is in text by the way and this was an internet tradition by the way that we picked up But we continued it HTTP is text and HTML is text and then every else if everything else that followed is text As a result and by the way you can imagine purest engineer saying this is insane You have very limited bandwidth.

1:14:57Why are you wasting any time sending text? You should be encoding the stuff into binary and it'll be much faster and of course the answer is that's correct But what you get when you make a text is all of a sudden well the big breakthrough was the view source function So the fact that you could look at a web page you could hit view source and you could see the HTML That was how people learned how to make web pages Right it's so interesting because the stuff we take for granted now Is uh, man That was fundamental to the development of the web to be able to have HTML just right there all the ghetto mess that is HTML All the sort of almost biological like messiness Of HTML and then having the browser try to interpret them as yeah exactly show something Reasonable well, and then there was this internet principle that we inherited which was emit What was it emit cautiously emit conservatively interpret liberally?

1:15:44So it basically met if you're in the design principle was if you're if you're creating like a web editor It's gonna emit HTML like do it as cleanly as you can But you actually want the browser to interpret liberally which is you actually want users to be able to make all kinds of mistakes And for it to still work Yeah, and so the browser rendering engines to this day have all of this Getty code crazy stuff where they can they're resilient to all kinds of crazy HTML mistakes And so and literally what I always had in my head is like there's an eight -year -old or an 11 -year -old somewhere And they're doing a view source.

1:16:11They're doing a cut in page and they're trying to make a web page for their eternal Or whatever and like they leave out a slash and they leave out an angle bracket and they do this and they do that and it still works It's it's also like that I don't often think about this but You know programming, you know c++ c++ all those languages list The compiled language is the interpretive language is python pearl all that they the brace have to be all correct Like everything has to be perfect brutal And then you forget All right It's systematic and rigorous let's go there But you forget that the The web with JavaScript eventually Uh, and HTML is allowed to be messy in the way for the first time I Messy in the way biological systems could be messy it's like the only thing computers were allowed to be messy on for the first time It used to offend me so I grew up in unit It's I I worked on units I was a unit of for all the way through this period And so and it used to drive me bananas when it would do the segmentation fault in the cordump file Just like it's like you know, it's like literally there's like an error in the code the math is off by one And it cordums yeah, and I'm in the cordump trying to analyze it and trying to reconstruct what and I'm just like this is ridiculous Like the computer ought to be smart enough to be able to know that if it's off by one.

1:17:28Okay fine And it keeps running And I would go ask all the experts like why can't it just keep running and they explain to me well because all the downstream repercussions and blah blah And I'm like this still like You know, this is a Reforcing the human creator to live to your point in this hyperliteral world of perfection And I was just like that's just That's just bad and by the way, you know what happens with that of course just what what happened with with coding at that point Which is you get a high priesthood You know, there's a small number of people who are really good at doing exactly that most people can't and most people are excluded from it And so actually that that was where that for there's where I picked up that idea was um Was like no no you want you want you want these things to be resilient error in all kinds And this this would drive the purist absolutely crazy like I got attacked on this like a lot because yeah I mean like every time I you know all the purists who are like into all this like markup language stuff and formats and codes and all this stuff They would be like you know, you can't you're you're encouraging bad behavior because Also, they wanted the browser to give you a segfault error anytime there was Yeah, yeah, they wanted to be a cop right they wanted Yeah, that was a very and any any any properly trained a credential engineer Would be like that's not how you build these things that's such a bold move to say no, it doesn't have to be yeah Now like I said the good news for me is the internet kind of had that traditional ready But we but having said that like we pushed it We pushed it way out, but the other thing we did going back to the performance thing was we gave up a lot of performance That initial experience for the first few years was pretty painful But the bet there was actually an economic bet which was basically the demand for the web would basically mean that there would be a surge and supply of broadband We because the question was okay.

1:18:58How do you get how do you how do you get the phone companies which are not famous in those days for doing new things At huge cost for like speculative reasons like how do you get them to build up broadband? You know spend billions of dollars doing that and you know you could go meet with them and try to talk them into it Or you could just have a thing where it's just very clear that's going to be the fact that people love that's going to be better If it's faster and so that that there was a period there and this was this was fraught with some peril But there was a period there where it's like we knew the experience was sub optimized because we were trying to force the emergence of demand for broadband Sure, which is in fact what happened?

1:19:31So you had to figure out how to display this text HTML text So the blue links and the purple links, I what in there's no standards is there standards at that time So you still is Well, there's like there's applied implies standards right and they You know, there's all these cousin you features that are being added with like CSS with like what kind of stuff a browser should be able to support Features with the languages with the JavaScript and so on but you You're sending standards on the fly yourself Well, at this day if you if you create a web page that has no CSS style sheet the browser will render it however it wants to Right, so this was one of the things there was this idea This idea at the time and in how these systems were built which is separation of content from format or separation of Yeah content from appearance And that's still people don't really use that anymore because everybody wants to determine how things look and so they use CSS But it's still in there that you can just let the browser do all the work.

1:20:31I still like the like Really basic websites But that could be just old school kids these days with their fancy Responsive websites that don't actually have much content but have a lot of visual elements Well, that's one of the things that's fun about chat, you know about chat gpt. It's like back to the basics Back to just text yeah, right and you know, there is this pattern in human creativity and media where you end up back at text And I think there's you know, there's something powerful in there Is there some other stuff you remember like the purple links there were some interesting design decisions that to kind of come up That we have today or we don't have today that were temporary So we made I made the background great.

1:21:12I hated reading text on white Backgrounds so I made the background great everybody can read you're great No, no, no, no, that's that decision. I think it's been reversed But now I'm happy though because now dark mode is the thing so So it wasn't about Gray was just you didn't want to wait back on stream my eyes strange interesting And then there's a bunch of other decisions. I'm sure there's an interesting history of the development of HTML and CSS and hollows and Interface and JavaScript and there's this whole Java applet thing Well, the big one probably JavaScript CSS was after me so I didn't that was not me, but um JavaScript was the big JavaScript maybe was the biggest of the whole thing that was us And um and that was basically a bet It was a bet on two things one is that the world wanted a new friend and scripting language And then the other was we thought at the time the world wanted a new backend scripting language So JavaScript was designed from the beginning to be both front -end and backend And then it failed as a backend scripting language and Java one for a long time and then Python Perl and other things PHP and Ruby, but now JavaScript is back and so I wonder if everything in the end will run on JavaScript It seems like it is the and by the way, let me give a shout out to to Brendan Eich was the basically the one man inventor of Of JavaScript if you're interested to learn more about Brendan Eich It's podcast previously Exactly So he wrote JavaScript over a summer and it I mean, I think it is fair It is fair to say now that it's the most widely used language in the world and it seems to only be gaining and in In its in its range with option in the software world There's quite a few stories of somebody over a weekend or over a week or over a summer writing some of the most impactful revolutionary pieces of software ever Well, look that that should be inspiring.

1:23:02Yes, very inspiring. I'll give you another one SSL So SSL was the security protocol that was us and that was a crazy idea at the time Which was let's take all the native protocols unless wrap them in a security wrapper That was a guy named Kip Hickman who wrote that over a summer one guy Um, and then look today sitting here today like the transformer like at Google was a small handful of people and then you know The number of people who have did like the core work on GPT. It's not that many people It's pretty small handful of people um, and so yeah, the pattern in software repeatedly over a very long time has been it's a Jeff Jeff Bezos always had the two pizza rule for teams at Amazon, which is any team needs to be able to be fed with two pieces If you need the third pizza you have too many people and I think that's I think That's I think it's actually the one pizza rule.

1:23:47Yeah, further further really creative work. I think it's Two people three people Well, that's you see that was certain open source projects like so much is done by like one or two people Like it's it's so incredible and that's why you see that gives me so much hope about Do a resource movement in this new age of AI where um You know just recently having had a conversation with with Mark Zuckerberg of all people who's all in on open source Which is so interesting to see And so inspiring to see because like releasing these models it is scary It is potentially very dangerous and we'll talk about that but it's also If you believe in the goodness of most people and in the skill set of most people and the desire to do good in the world That's really exciting because it's not putting it these models into the central S control of big corporations The government so on it's putting in the in the hands of a team team age kid with like a Dream in his eyes.

1:24:44I don't know that's um That's beautiful and look this dot AI ought to make the individual coder obviously farmer productive right by like you know a thousand X or something And so you ought to open source like the not just a future of open source I have the future of open source everything we ought to have a world now of super coders right who are building things as open source of one or two people that were inconceivable you know five years ago You know the level of kind of hyper productivity. We're gonna get out of our best and brightest I think it's gonna go way up. It's gonna be interesting.

1:25:13We'll talk about it But let's just to linger a little bit on that escape That's kept was acquired in 1999 for 4 .3 billion by a well What was that uh, what was that like? What was what was some memorable aspects of that? Well, that was the height of the dot com boom Bubble bust. I mean that was the that was the frenzy If you watch a succession that was the that was like what they did in the first season with uh With gojo and then merger with the with their is so it was like the height of like one of those kind of dynamics and so you recommend Succession by the way I have a more of a yellowstone guy Yellowstone's very American.

1:25:49I'm I'm very proud of you. That's I That is I just talked to Matthew McConaughey and I'm full on texting at this point good. I hurtly proof um and He will be doing the sequel to the yellowstone. Yeah, very exciting anyway. Okay. Wait So that's rude interruption by me Now by way of succession Uh, so that was at the height of the deal making and money and just the fur flying and like craziness and so yeah It was just one of those it was just like I mean as the entire landscape thing from start to finish was four years Um, which was like for for one of these companies. It's just like incredibly fast You know, it went public 18 months after we got me for founded which virtually never happens So it was just this incredibly fast kind of meteor streaking across the sky And then of course it was this and then there was just this explosion right that happened because then it was almost immediately followed by the dot com crash It was then followed by hell well by time Warner which again is like the succession guy's gonna play with that Was turned out to be a disaster steel um, no one of the famous you know kind of disastrous in business history um and then um And then you know what became an internet depression on the other side of that But then in that depression in the 2000s was the beginning of broadband and smartphones And web 2 .0 right and then social media and search and never it sass and everything that came out of that so Hey, what did you learn from just the acquisition?

1:27:07I mean, this is so much money What what's interesting because I must have been very new to you That these software stuff you can make so much money. There's so much money swimming around I mean, I'm sure the ideas of investment was starting to get born there. Yes. Let me get let me lay out lay it So here's here's a thing I don't know if I figured out them but figured out later which is um software is a technology that it's like a you know The concept of the philosopher stone the philosopher stone and alchemy transmutes lead into gold and Newton spent 20 years trying to find the Philosopher stone never got there nobody's ever figured it out Software is our modern philosopher stone and in economic terms it transmutes labor into capital Which is like a super interesting thing and by the way like Karl Marx is rolling over in his grave right now because of course that's complete refutation of his entire theory Tristus labor in a capital which is which is as follows is somebody sits down in a keyboard and types of bunch of stuff in And a capital asset comes out the other side and then somebody buys that capital asset for a billion dollars like That's amazing.

1:28:10Right. It's literally creating value right out of thin air right out of purely human thought right Um, and so that that that's there are many things that make software magical and special but that's the economics I want to look Marx would have thought about that Oh, he would have completely broke his brain because of course the whole the whole thing was he was you could You know that kind of technology is inconceivable when he was alive It was all industrial air stuff and so the any kind of machinery Necessarily involved huge amounts of capital and then labor was on the on the receiving end of the abuse Yep Right, but like software and software a software engineer is somebody who basically transmutes his own labor into action national capital asset Creates permanent value Well, in fact, it's actually very inspiring um that's actually more true today than before So when when I was doing software the assumption was all new software basically has a sort of a Parabolic sort of life cycle right so you ship the thing people buy it at some point Everybody who wants it is bought it and then it becomes obsolete and it's like bananas nobody nobody buys old software um these days Minecraft Mathematica, you know, Facebook Google You have the software assets that are you know, have been around for 30 years that are gaining in value every year Right, and they're just they're being a world of workraft right salesforce .com like they're being at every single year They're being polished and polished and polished and polished they're getting better and better more powerful more powerful more valuable More valuable so we we've entered this era where you can actually have these things that actually build out over decades Which by the way is what's happening right now with like sheep PT Um, and so now and and this is why you know, they're there is always you know sort of a constant investment frenzy around software is because you know When you start one of these things it doesn't always succeed, but when it does now you might be building an asset that builds value for You know four or five six decades to come You know if you have a team of people who have the level of devotion required to keep making it better And then the fact that of course everybody's online, you know There's five billion people that are a click away from any new pieces software So the potential market size for any of these things is you know, nearly infinite It must have been surreal back then though.

1:30:08Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. This was all brand new right yeah back then This was all brand new these were all you know brand new Had you rolled out that theory and even 1999 people would have thought you were spoken crack So that's that's emerged over time Well Let's now turn back into the future you wrote the essay why AI will save the world Let's start the very high level what's the main thesis of the essay? Yeah, so the main thesis on the essay is that what we're dealing with here is intelligence And it's really important to kind of talk about the sort of very nature of what intelligence is and Fortunately, we have a we have a predecessor to machine intelligence, which is human intelligence And we've got you know observations and theories over thousands of years for what what intelligence is in the hands of humans And what intelligence is right?

1:30:54I mean what it what it literally is is the way to You know capture process analyze and synthesize information solve problems But the observation of of intelligence in human hands is that intelligence quite literally makes every thing better I mean by that is every kind of outcome of like human quality of life whether it's education outcomes or success of your children For a career success or health or lifetime satisfaction By the way Prepensity to peacefulness as opposed to violence Prepensity for open -mindedness versus bigotry Those are all associated with higher levels of intelligence smarter people have better outcomes than almost as you write In those every domain of activity academic achievement job performance occupational status income creativity physical health longevity learning new skills managing complex tasks leadership entrepreneurial success conflict resolution reading comprehension financial decision making understanding other's perspectives creative arts parenting outcomes and life satisfaction one of the More depressing conversations I've had and I don't know why it's depressing Really think through wise depressing, but on IQ and the G factor And that that's something in large part is genetic And it correlates so much with all of these things in success in life And say all the Inspiration stuff we read about like if you work hard and so on Damn, it sucks that you're born with the hand that you can't change.

1:32:32What if you could? You're saying basically a really important point. I think it's a uh, and your articles won't It really helped me It's a nice added perspective to think about listen human intelligence the science of intelligence is shown scientifically That it just makes life easier and better The smarter you are and now let's look at artificial intelligence and if uh, that's a way to increase the The some human intelligence then it's all going to make a better life Yeah, that's the argument and certainly at the collective level we can talk about the collective effect of just having more intelligence in the world Which which will have very big payoff But there's also just at the individual level like what if every person has a machine, you know, and it's a concept of augment Englebar's concept of augmentation You know, what if everybody has a an assistant and the assistant is you know, 140 IQ And you happen to be 110 IQ And you've got you know something that basically is infinitely patient and knows everything about you and is pulling for you in every possible way wants you to be successful and anytime you find anything confusing or want to learn anything or have trouble understanding something or want to figure out what to do in a situation Right when I figure out how to prepare for a job interview like any of these things like it will help you do it And it will therefore the combination will effectively be you know, well effectively Reasier raise because it will effectively raise your IQ will therefore Raise the odds of the successful life outcomes and all these areas so people below the The type of that 140 IQ You'll pull them off towards the 140 IQ.

1:34:12Yeah, yeah, and then of course, you know people at people at 140 IQ will be able to have a peer right to be able to Community which is great and then people above 140 IQ will have an assistant that they confirm things out to and then look God willing you know at some point these things go from future versions go from 140 IQ equivalent to 150 to 160 to 180 Right like Einstein was it nest made it to be on the order of 160 You know, so when we get you know 160 AI like will be you know, went one assumes creating Einstein level breakthroughs and physics and And then at 180 will be you know Garing cancer and developing work drive and doing all kinds of stuff And so it is quite possibly the case This is the most important things ever happened the best things ever happen Because precisely because it's a lever on this single fundamental factor of intelligence Which is the thing that drives so much of everything else Can you still man the case that human plus AI is not always better than human for the individual you may have noticed That there's a lot of smart assholes running around Sure, yes, right and so like it's smart There are certain people where they get smarter you know, they get to be more arrogant right so they know there's one huge flaw Although to push back on that it might be interesting because when The intelligence is not all coming from you, but from assist from another system that might actually increase the The amount of humility even in the assholes one would hope Yeah, um, or it could make assholes more assholes.

1:35:33Yeah, that's I mean, that's that's for psychology to study Yeah, exactly another one is The smart people are very convinced that they you know have a more rational view of the world and that they have a easier time seeing through conspiracy theories and hoaxes And right, you know sort of crazy beliefs and all that There's a theory in psychology, which is actually smart people so for sure people who aren't as smart are very susceptible to hoaxes and conspiracy theories But it may also be the case that the smarter you get you become susceptible in a different way Which is you become very good at marshaling facts to fit preconceptions Right, um, you become very very good at assembling whatever theories and frameworks and pieces of data and graphs and charts You need to validate whatever crazy idea is going in your head And so you're susceptible in a different way Right, uh, we're all sheep but Different colors some sheep are better at justifying it right um, and those of you know those are the smart sheep right Um, so yeah, look like it I would say that's look like there are no panacea I'm not an I'm not a utopian There are no panacea in life.

1:36:31Um, there are no like you know, I don't believe they're like pure positives I'm not a transcendental kind of person like that, but you know, so yeah, there are gonna be issues And you know, look smart people and other people maybe so you could say about smart people is they are more likely to get themselves in situations that are You know beyond their grasp, you know, because they're just more confident in their ability to deal with complexity and Their their eyes become bigger. They're cognitive eyes to come bigger than they're stomach You know, so yeah, you could argue those eight different ways Nevertheless on net right clearly overwhelmingly again, if you just extrapolate from what we know about human intelligence You're you're improving so many aspects of life if you're upgrading intelligence So there'll be assistance at all stages of life So when you're younger this for education all that kind of stuff from mentorship all of this and Later on as you're doing work and you develop the skill and you're having a profession You have an assistant that helps you Accel that profession so at all stages of life.

1:37:24Yeah, I mean look the theories augmentations This is the deagle birds term for the deagle bird made this observation many many decades ago that you know Basically, it's like you can have this oppositional frame of technology where it's like us versus the machines But what you really do is you use technology to augment human capabilities. Yeah, and then by the way That's how actually the economy develops that's that's the economic side of this But that's actually how the economy grows is through technology augmenting human human potential um And so yeah, and then you basically have a proxy or you know or or And you know a sort of prosthetic, you know, so like you've got glasses.

1:37:56You've got a wristwatch You know, you've got shoes. You know, you've got these things. You've got a personal computer You've got a word processor. You've got Mathematica. You've got Google This is the latest viewed through that lens the AI is the latest in a long series of basically augmentation methods To be able to raise human capabilities It's just this one is the most powerful one of all because this is the one that goes directly to but what they call fluid intelligence which is like you Well, there's a two categories of folks that you outline that The worry about or highlight the risks of AI and you highlight a bunch of different risks I'd love to go through those risks and just discuss them brainstorm Which ones are serious and which ones are less serious?

1:38:39But first the the Baptist and the bootleggers what are these two interesting groups of folks? who uh Who who worry about Defective AI and human civilization or say they do say oh okay Yes, I'll say they do the Baptist worry the bootleggers say they do yeah So the Baptist in the bootleggers is a metaphor for economics from it's called development economics And it's this observation that when you get social reform movements In a society you tend to get two sets of people showing up arguing for the social reform And the the term Baptist and bootleggers comes from the American experience with alcohol prohibition And so in the 1900s 1910s There was this movement that was very passionate at the time which basically said alcohol is the evil and it's destroying society By the way, there was a lot of evidence to support this There were very high rates of very high correlations then by the way and now Between rates of physical violence and alcohol use almost all violent crimes have either the perpetrator or the victim are both drunk Almost all if you see this actually in the work almost all social harassment cases in the workplace It's like at a company party and somebody's drunk like it's it's amazing how often alcohol actually correlates to actually just dysfunction at least two domestic abuse And so forth child abuse and so you had this group of people who were like okay This this is bad stuff and we shot a lot and and those were quite literally Baptist those were super committed You know hardcore Christian activists in a lot of cases There was this woman whose name was Carrie nation Who was this older woman who had been in this, you know I don't know disastrous marriage or something and her husband had been abusive and drunk all the time and she became the icon of the Baptist Prohibitioness and she was legendary in that era for caring and acts And doing you know completely on her own doing raids of saloons and like picking her acts to all the bottles and sex Yeah, and so true believer an absolute true believer And with absolutely the purest of intentions and again There's a very important thing here which is there's you could look at this cynically and you could say the Baptist are like delusional You know the extremists, but you can also say look they're right like she was made, you know, she had a point Yeah, she wasn't wrong about a lot of what she said Yeah, but it turns out the way the story goes is it turns out that there were another set of people who very badly wanted to Alcohol in those days and those were the bootleggers which was organized crime This stood to make a huge amount of money if legal alcohol sales were banned And this was in fact the way the history goes is this was actually the beginning of organized crime in the US This was the big economic opportunity that opened that up And so they went in together And then they didn't go in together like the Baptist did not even necessarily know about the bootleggers because they were on their moral crusade The bootleggers certainly knew about the Baptist and they were like wow This is these people are like the great front people for like, you know, it's good beer shenanigans in the background And they got the full static passed right and they did in fact ban alcohol in the US and you'll notice what happened Which is people kept drinking It didn't work people kept drinking That bootleggers made a tremendous amount of money And then over time it became clear that it made no sense to make it illegal and it was causing more problems And so then it was revoked and here we sit with legal alcohol 100 years later with all the same problems And you know the whole thing was this like giant misadventure The Baptist got taken advantage of by the bootleggers and the bootleggers got what they wanted and that was that The same two categories of folks are now sort of suggesting that The development of artificial intelligence should be regulated 100 % yeah, it's the same pattern The economist will tell you it's the same pattern every time like this is what happened in nuclear power This is what happened in which is another interesting one But like yeah, this is this happens dozens and dozens of times Throughout the last hundred years and and this is what's happening now And you write that it isn't sufficient to simply identify the actors and impure their motives We should consider the arguments of both the Baptist and the bootleggers on their merits So let's do just that risk number one We'll AI kill us all yes, so What do you what do you think about this one this this what do you think is the core argument here That the development of a GI perhaps better said will destroy human civilization No, first of all you just did a slight a hand because we went from talking about AI to a GI Is there a fundamental difference there?

1:42:56I don't know what's a GI I was AI what's in I know what AI is AI is machine learning What's what's a GI? I think we don't know what the bottom of the well of machine learning is or what the ceiling is Because just To call something machine learning or just to call something statistics or just to call it math or computation doesn't mean You know nuclear weapons are just physics. So it's it To me it's very interesting and surprising how far machine learning is no, but we knew that nuclear physics would lead to weapons That's why the scientists of that era were always in sub this huge dispute about building the weapons This is different agent is different as machine learning Lee do we know we don't know but this is my point It's different we actually don't know but and this is where you the slight hand kicks in right this is where it goes from being a scientific topic to being a religious topic And that's why I specifically called out that because that's what happens They do the vocabulary shift and all of a sudden you're talking about something totally that's not actually real Well then maybe you could also As part of that define the Western tradition of millennia and ism.

1:43:54Yes into the world Apocalypse apocalypse cults um apocos cults. Well, so We live in we of course live in a Judeo Christian but primarily Christian kind of saturated You know kind of Christian post -Christian secularized Christian, you know kind of world in the west And of course quarter Christianity is the idea of the second coming and and in the revelations and you know To Jesus returning in thousand thousand year, you know utopia on earth and then the you know the rapture and like all that stuff You know, we don't we you know we collectively, you know as a society We don't necessarily take all that fully seriously now So what we do is we create our secularized versions of that we keep we keep looking for utopia We keep looking for you know basically the end of the world And so what what you see over over decades is that basically a pattern of these sort of of these of these of Of this this this is what cults are this is how cults form as they form around some theory of the end of the world And so the people's temple cults the Manson cult the heavens Kate cult the David Koresh Call it you know what they're all organized around is like there's gonna be this thing that's gonna happen It's gonna basically bring civilization crashing down And then we have this special elite group of people who are gonna see it coming and prepare for it And then they're the people who are either going to stop it or failing stopping it They're gonna be the people who survived to the other side and ultimately get credit for having been right Why is that so compelling do you think like um because it satisfies this very deep need We have for transcendence and meaning That got stripped away when we became secular yeah, but what why is a transcendence involved the destruction of human civilization Because like how like how plausible it's like a very deep psychological thing because it's like how plausible How plausible is it that we live in a world where everything's just kind of all right Right how exciting is that right that's we want more than that but that's the deep question I'm asking Why is it not exciting to live in a world where everything's just all right does it I think You know most of the animal kingdom would be so happy with just all right, you know because that means survival Why we uh maybe that's what it is we why are we conjuring up Things to worry about So CS Lewis called it the god shaped hole So there's a god shaped hole in the human Experience consciousness soul whatever you want to call it where there's got to be something that's bigger Then all this There's got to be something transcendent.

1:46:08There's going to be something that is bigger right bigger the bigger purpose of bigger meaning And so we have run the experiment of you know, we're just going to use science and rationality and kind of you know Everything's just going to kind of be as it appears and uh Large number of people have found that very deeply wanting and have constructed narratives and by this is a story the 20th century Right communism right was one of those communism was a was a form of this not CSM was a form of this Um, you know some people um, you know, you can see movements like this playing out all over the world right now So you could start to kind of devil a kind of source of evil and we're going to transcend beyond it Yeah, and the the military and the military is kind of when you see a military and call it They put a really specific point on it which is end of the world right there there is some change coming And that change that's coming is so profound and so important that it's either going to lead to utopia or hell on earth Right um and it is going to and then you know, it's like what if you actually knew that that was going to happen Right, what would you what what would you do right?

1:47:08How would you prepare yourself for it? How would you come together with a group of like -minded people? Right? How would you what would you do would you plan like cash as the weapons in the woods? Would you like you know I don't know if it's create underground bunkers Would you you know spend your life trying to figure out a way to avoid having it happen? Yeah, that's a really compelling exciting Idea to uh to have a club over to have a to have a To have a little bit of trouble like you get together on a side any night and drinks of beers and talk about the The end of the world and how are you the you are the only ones who have figured it out And then and then once you lock in on that like how can you do anything else with your life?

1:47:41Like this is obviously the thing that you have to do and then and then there's a psychological effect You alluded to there's a psychological effect or if you take a set of true believers and you leave them to themselves They get more radical Like because they stay self - radicalized each other that said yes, it doesn't mean they're not sometimes right Yeah, the end of the world might be yes correct like they might be right. Yeah, but like we have some pamphlets for you The it's I mean there's I mean we'll talk about nuclear weapons because you have a really interesting little moment that I learned about In your essay, but you know sometimes it could be right Yeah, there's where it was still you would develop be more and more powerful technologies In this case and we don't know what the impact it will have on human civilization Well, we can highlight all the different predictions about how we'll be positive But the risks are there and you discuss some of them Well, the steel man the steel man is the steel man actually the steel man and his reputation are the same Which is you can't predict what's gonna happen right you right you can't rule out that this will not end everything Right, but the response to that is you have just made a completely non -scientific claim You've made a religious claim not a scientific claim there how does it get disproven?

1:48:45There is and there's no by definition with these kinds of claims. There's no way to disprove them Yeah, right um and so there's no you just go right on the list. There's no hypothesis There's no testability of the hypothesis. There's no um way to falsify the hypothesis There's no way to measure progress along the arc Like it's just all completely missing and so it's not scientific and well, I don't I think it's completely missing It's it's somewhat missing so for example the the the the people that say I was gonna kill all of us I mean they usually have ideas about how to do that whether it's the paperclip maximizer or You know it escapes There's mechanism by which you can imagine and killing all humans models and To you can't disprove it by saying there is um There's a limit to the speed of which intelligence increases Maybe show that uh Like the sort of rigorously really described model Like how it could happen and say no there here's a physics limitation There's a physical limitation to how these systems would actually do damage a human civilization And it is possible they will kill 10 to 20 % of the population But it seems impossible for them to kill 99 % it was practical counterarguments right so you mentioned basically what I described is the thermodynamic counterargument Which is no sitting here today.

1:50:08It's like we're with the evil aji I get the gpus Yeah, cuz like they don't exist So you're gonna have a very frustrated baby evil aji who's gonna be like trying to buy a video stock or something to Get them to finally make some chips Right so the the the series format that is the thermodynamic argument Which is like okay? Where's the energy gonna come from? Where's the process are gonna be running? Where's the data center gonna be happening? How is this gonna be happening in secret such that you know? You know so so that's a practical counterargument to the runaway aji I think I have a but I have an in we can argue that and discuss that I have a deeper objection to it Which is it's this is all forecasting.

1:50:38It's all modeling. It's all it's all future prediction. It's all future hypothesizing It's not science Sure, it is not it is it is it is the opposite of science so the pull up Carl Sagan extraordinary claims require a sturdener proof Right these are extraordinary claims the policies that are being called for right to prevent this are of extraordinary magnitude That and I think we're gonna cause extraordinary damage And this is all being done in the basis of something that is literally not scientific. It's not a testable hypothesis So the moment you say as gonna kill all of us therefore we should ban it or that we should regulate all the constant that's when starts getting serious or start you know military air strikes and data centers.

1:51:16Oh boy, right and like Yes, once gets starts Well, so it starts getting real. So here's the problem. Millionaire in cults. They have a hard time staying away from violence It's so fun If you're on the right end of it They have a hard time avoiding violence. The reason I have a hard time avoiding violence is if you actually believe the claim Right then what would you do to stop the end of the world? Well, you would do anything right And so and this is where you get and again if you just look at the history of a millionaire in cults This is where you get the people's temple and everybody killing themselves in the jungle And this is where you get Charles Manson and you know sending in me to kill kill the pigs Like this is the problem with these they have a very hard time to run the line at actual violence And I think the I think in this case there's there I mean they're already calling for it like today and you know Where this goes from here as they get more worked up like I think it's like really concerning Okay, but that's kind of the extremes.

1:52:12You know the extremes of anything. Oh, I was concerning It's also possible to kind of believe that AI has a very high likelihood of killing all of us But there's and therefore we should maybe consider uh, slowing development or regulating so not violence or any of these kinds of things But it's saying like all right, let's let's take a pause here You know you the biological weapons nuclear weapons like whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa This is like serious stuff we should be careful So it is possible to kind of have a more rational response right if you believe this risk is real believe Yes, so is it possible to be have a scientific approach to the the prediction of the future I mean we just went through as a covid.

1:52:58Yeah, what do we know about modeling Well, I mean what do we learn about modeling with covid? Uh, there's a lot of lessons they didn't work at all They worked poorly the models were terrible the models were useless I don't know if the models were useless or the People interpreting the models and then the centralized institutions that were creating policy rapidly Based on the models and leveraging the models in order to Support their narratives versus actually interpreting the air bars and the models and all that kind of stuff What you had with covid my view you had the covid is you had these experts showing up They claimed to be scientists and they had no testable hypotheses whatsoever They had a bunch of models Um, they had a bunch of forecasts and they had a bunch of theories and they laid these out in front of policymakers and policymakers freaked out and panicked right And implemented a whole bunch of like really like terrible decisions that we're still living with the consequences of Um, and there was never any empirical foundation to any of the models none of them ever came true Yeah, to push to push back there were certainly Baptist and bootleggers in this in the context of this pandemic But there's still a usefulness to models, no I so not if they're not mean not if they're reliably wrong right then they're actually like anti useful right they're actually damaging But what would you do with the pandemic?

1:54:07What do you do with the with they add with any kind of threat? Don't you want to kind of have um Several models to play with as part of the discussion of like what the hell do we do here? I mean do they work Because they're an expectation that they actually like work that they have actual predictive value I mean as far as I can tell with covid we just saw out the policymakers just sia up themselves into believing that there was substance I mean look the scientists the scientists were at fault. This the quote unquote scientists showed up So I had some insight into this So there was a remember the imperial college models out of London were the ones that were like these are the gold standard models Yeah, so a friend of mine runs a big software company and he was like wow This is like covid's really scary and he's like you know He contacted this research and he's like you know Do you need some help you've been just building this model on your own for 20 years?

1:54:50Genies and could you give you like us our coders to basically restructure it so it can be fully adapted for covid and The guy said yes and sent over the code and my friend said it was like the worst spaghetti code he's ever seen That doesn't mean it's not possible to construct a good model of pandemic with the correct air bars with a high number of parameters that are Continuously many times a day updated as we get more data about a pandemic I would like to believe when a pandemic hits the world The best computer scientists in the world the best software engineers respond aggressively and As input take the data that we know about the virus and it's an output say here's Here's what's happening in terms of how quickly spreading What that lead in terms of hospitalization and death and all that kind of stuff Here's how likely how contagious it likely is Here's how deadly likely is Based on different conditions based on different ages and demographics and all that kind of stuff Here's the best kinds of policy it feels like you can have models Machine learning that Like kind of they don't perfectly predict the future but they they they help you do something because there's pandemics that are like Uh Meh they don't really do much harm and there's pandemics you can imagine them They could do a huge amount of harm like they can kill a lot of people so You should probably have some kind of data driven models that keep updating That allow you to make decisions that base like where how bad is this thing?

1:56:19Now you can criticize How horrible all that went with the response to this pandemic? But I just feel like there might be some value to models So to be useful at some point it has to be predictive right so and so and and so The easy thing for me to do is to say obviously right Obviously, I want to see that just as much as you do because anything that makes it easier to navigate through society through a wrenching You know risk like that is how that sounds great You know the the harder objection to it is just simply you are trying to model a complex dynamic system with eight billion moving parts like Not possible very tough can't be done complex systems can't be done Machine learning says hold my beer, but well is possible.

1:56:56No, I don't know. I would like to believe that it is Yeah, I would put it this way. I think where you and I would agree is I think we would like we would we would like that to be the case We are strongly in favor of it I think we would also agree that no such thing with respect to COVID or pandemics no such thing But at least neither unri think or where I'm not aware of anything like that today my main worry with the response to the pandemic is that Same as with aliens is that even if such a thing existed And it's possible it existed the The the policy makers were not paying attention like there was no mechanism that allowed those kinds of models to percolate Oh, I think we have the opposite problem during COVID.

1:57:34I think the policy makers I think that these these people with basically fixed science had too much access to the policy makers Well, right and what but the policy makers also wanted They had a narrative of mind and they also wanted to use whatever model They fit that narrative to help them out so like it felt like there's a lot of politics and not enough science Although a big part of what was happening a big reason we got lockdowns for as long as we did was because he scientists came in with these like Doomsday scenarios that were like just like completely off the hook scientists and quotes that's not quote quote unquote scientists not Okay, there's give love so here's science that is the way out science is a process of testing hypotheses Yeah, modeling does not involve testable hypotheses, right?

1:58:12Like I don't even know that my I actually don't I don't even know that modeling actually qualifies the science Maybe that's a side conversation we could have some time over a beer. It's a really interesting But what do we do about the future of you? What what so number one is when we start with number one humility Goes back to this thing of how do we determine the truth? Number two is we don't believe you know, it's the old I've got a hammer everything looks like a nail, right? I've got oh, I this is one of the reasons I gave you I gave a lesson book Which the topic of the book is what happens when scientists basically stray off the path of technical knowledge and start to weigh in on politics and societal issues This case philosophers pull along this case philosophers But he actually talks in this book about like I'm starting to talk about the nuclear age and Einstein talks about the physicists Actually doing doing very similar things at the time the book is when reason goes on holiday philosophers and politics by Nevin and it's just a story.

1:59:02It's a story There's there are other books on this topic, but this is a new one. It's really good This is just a story of what happens when experts in a certain domain decide to weigh in and become basically social engineers and And political you know basically political advisors and it's just a story of just uniting catastrophe Right, and I think that's what happened with COVID again Yeah, fun this book a highly entertaining and eye -opening read filled with amazing anecdotes of irrationality and craziness by famous recent philosophers It definitely actually read this book. You will not look at Einstein the same.

1:59:29Oh boy. Yeah I'll destroy my hearing most people not be a hero of yours anymore I'm sorry, you probably shouldn't read the book. All right, but here's the thing The AI the AI risk people they don't even have the COVID model At least not that I'm aware of no like there's not even the equivalent of the COVID model. They don't even have this spaghetti code They've got a theory and a warning and a this and that and like if you ask like okay. Oh, here's here's I mean the ultimate example is okay. How do we know right? How do we know that an AI is running away? Like how do we know that the fume takeoff thing is actually happening and the only answer that any of these guys are given that I've ever seen is oh It's when the loss rate the loss function in the training drops Right, that's when you need to like shut down the data center, right?

2:00:12And it's like well, that's also what happens when you're successfully training a model like Like what what even is this is not science This is not that anything. It's not a model is not anything There's nothing to arguing with it. It's like you know pushing jello like there's what do you even respond? So just push back on that. I don't think they have Good metrics of yeah, wonderful is happening, but I think it's possible to have that like I just just as you speak No, I mean it's possible to imagine that could be measures been 20 years No, for sure, but it's been only weeks since we had a big enough breakthrough in language models We can start to actually have this the thing is the AI doomer stuff Didn't have any actual systems to really work with and now there's real systems You can start to analyze like how does this stuff go wrong?

2:00:59And I think you kind of agree that there is a lot of risks that we can analyze the benefits outweigh the risks in many cases On the risks are not existential Yes, well, not in the food not in the food paper clip So let me okay, there's another slide of hand that you just alluded to. There's another slide of hand that happens It's very good at this light of hand thing Which is very not scientific so the book super intelligence right which is like the Nick Boshner's book Which is like the origin of a lot of this stuff which was written in or whatever 10 years ago or something So he does this really fascinating thing in the book which is he basically says I there are many possible routes to machine intelligence to artificial intelligence and he describes all the different routes to artificial intelligence all the different possible everything from biological augmentation through to you know that all these different things Um one of the ones that he does not describe is large language models because of course the book was written before they were invented and so they didn't exist In the book he just he describes them all and then he proceeds to treat them all as if they're exactly the same thing He presents them all is sort of an equivalent risk to be dealt with in an equivalent way to be thought about the same way And then the risk the quote unquote risk that's actually emerged is actually a completely different technology than he was even imagining And yet all of his theories and beliefs are being transplanted by this movement like straight on this new technology And so again like there's no other area of science or technology where you do that Yeah, like when you're dealing with like organic chemistry versus inorganic chemistry You don't just like say oh with respect to like either one basically Maybe you know growing up and eating the world or something like they're just gonna operate the same way like you don't But you can start talking about like as as we get more and more actual systems That start to get more and more intelligent you can start to actually have more scientific arguments here Like you know high level you can talk about the threat of autonomous weapon systems back before we had any automation In the military and that would be like very fuzzy kind of logic But the more and more you have drones that are becoming more and more autonomous You can start imagining okay, what does that actually look like and what's the actual threat of autonomous weapon systems How does it go wrong and still it's it's very big we start to get a sense of like All right It should probably be illegal or wrong or not allowed to do like Mass deployment of fully autonomous drones that are doing Areal strikes.

2:03:15Oh, no, I'm large areas. I think it should be required right so that's uh I think if you're required that only Aerial vehicles are automated Okay, so you want to go the other way I want to go the other way So that okay, it's obvious that the machine is gonna make a better decision than the human pilot I think it's obvious that it's in the best interest of both the attacker and the defender and humanity at large if machines are making more of these decisions and not people I mean people make terrible decisions in times of war But like there's uh there's ways this can go wrong too, right? Well, it's the worst go terribly wrong now But this goes back to the hope this is that whole thing about like the self -driving just the self -driving car need to be perfect versus does it need to be better than the human driver Yeah, does the automated drone need to be perfect or does it need to be need to be better than human pilot at making decisions under enormous amounts of stress and uncertainty Yeah, well the on average the the worry That AI folks have is the runaway you're gonna come alive right then again, that's the slight of hand, right or look not not come alive No, well, that's again you become the loose control last but then they're gonna develop goals of their own They're gonna develop a mine of their own.

2:04:20They're gonna develop their own right no more more like a Chernobyl style meltdown like Just bugs in the code accidentally You know force you like the results in the bombing of like large civilian areas, okay to degree that's not possible um In the in the current military strategies. I don't know trope by humans Actually, we've been doing a lot of mass bombing cities for a very long time And a lot of civilians died a lot of civilians died and if you watch the documentary the fog of war McNamara spends big part of it talking about the fire bombing of the Japanese cities Yeah, bring them straight to the ground Right the devastation in Japan the American military Fire bombing the cities in Japan was But see considerably bigger devastation than the use of nukes, right?

2:05:06So we've been doing that for a long time We also did that to Germany by the way Germany did that to us right like That's an old tradition the minute we got airplanes. We started doing indiscriminate bombing So one of the things that we're still doing it the modern US Military can do with technology with automation but technology more broadly is a higher and higher precision strikes Yeah, most and so precision is obviously and this is the the the J -dam right? So there was this big advance this big advance called the J -dam Which basically was trapping a GPS transceiver to to a to an unguided bomb and turning it into a guided bomb And yeah, that's great like look that's been a big advance But you get and that's like a baby version of this question, which is okay?

2:05:41Do you want like the human pilot like guessing where the bomb's gonna land or do you want like the machine like I didn't the bomb to destination That's a baby version of the question the next version of the question is do you want the human or the machine deciding whether to drop the bomb Everybody just assumes the human's gonna do a better job for what I think are fundamentally suspicious reasons Emotional psychological reasons I think it's very clear that the machine's gonna do a better job making that decision because the human humans making that making that decision are Got awful just terrible.

2:06:05Yeah, right? And so so yeah, so this is the this is the thing and then let's get to the there was gonna One more slight of hand. Yes, it was in okay, please I'm a magician you could say one more slight of hand these things are gonna be so smart Right that they're gonna be able to destroy the world and wreak havoc and like do all this stuff and plan and do all this stuff And evade us and have all their secret things and their secret factories and all this stuff But they're so stupid That they're gonna get like tangled up in their code and that's the they're not gonna come alive But there's gonna be some bug that's gonna cause them to like turn us all into people like That they're not gonna that they're gonna be genius in every way other than the actual bad goal And it's just like and that's just like a like ridiculous like discrepancy and and and and and you can prove this today You can actually address this today for the first time with LLM's which is you can actually ask LLM's to resolve moral dilemmas Yeah, so you can create the scenario, you know that that that that that that that that that that that what would you as the AI do in the circumstance And they don't just say destroy all humans destroy all humans They will give you actually very nuanced moral practical trade -off oriented answers So we actually already have the kind of AI that can actually like think this through and can actually like you know reason about goals Well, the hope is that AGI or like a very super intelligent systems have some of the nuance that LLM's have and the intuition is they most like the will because even These LLM's have the nuance Uh, LLM's are really this is actually worth worth spending a moment on LLM's are really interesting to have moral conversations with and that I just as I didn't expect I'd be having a moral conversation with the machine in my lifetime Wait, and let's remember we're not really having a conversation with the machine where we're having a conversation with the entirety of the collective intelligence of the human species Exactly.

2:07:45Yes, correct But it's possible to imagine autonomous weapons systems. They're not using LLM's But if they're smart enough to be scary Where are they not smart enough to be wise Like that's the part where it's like I don't know how you get the one without the other is it possible to be super intelligent without being super wise Well, you're it's again, you're back to that I mean then you're back to a classic autistic computer right like you're back to just like a blind rule follower I've got this like core is the paperclip thing I've got this core rule and I'm just gonna follow it to the end of the earth and it's like well But everything you're gonna be doing to execute that rule is gonna be super genius level that humans aren't gonna be able to counter It's just it's a it's a mismatch in the definition of what the system is capable of Unlikely, but not impossible.

2:08:27I think but again here you get to like okay like No, I'm not saying when it's unlikely, but not impossible if it's unlikely that means the the fear should be Correctly calibrated. It's certainly claims required. It's certainly proof well. Okay, so one interesting sort of tangent I would love to take on this because you mentioned this in the essay about nuclear which was also I mean you don't shy away from a little bit of Of a spicy take so Robert Oppenheimer famously said now I am become death the destroyer of worlds as he witnessed the first detonation of a nuclear weapon on July 16th 1945 and you write an interesting historical perspective Quote recall that John Vaughan Neumann responded to Robert Robert Oppenheimer's famous hand -regging about the role of creating nuclear weapons Which you note helped and world war two and prevent world war three With some people confess guilt to claim credit for the sin And you also mentioned that Truman was harsher after meeting Oppenheimer He said that don't let that crybaby in here again Real quote by the way from Dean from Dean, that's a Boy because Oppenheimer didn't just say the famous line.

2:09:42Yeah, he doesn't spend years going around basically Moaning him you know going on TV and going into going into the White House and basically like just like doing this hair shirt You know thing self, you know, this sort of self critical like oh my god. I can't believe how awful I am So he's the he's widely considered Perhaps of the because of the hanging ring is the father of the atomic bomb Um, yeah, this is this is a vinymous criticism of him as he tried to have his kick needed to like he he wanted to in in so Invite vinymann of course is very different kind of personality and he's just like yeah screw this is like an incredibly useful thing I'm glad we did it.

2:10:15Yeah, well vinymann is as widely um Credit as being one of the smartest humans of the 20th century The certain certain people everybody says like this is the smartest person I've ever met when they've met him Anyway, that doesn't mean smart doesn't mean wise So the guy I would love to so can you make the case both foreign against the critique of Oppenheimer here because we're talking about nuclear weapons Boy do they seem dangerous? Well, so the critique goes deeper and I let I left this out here's the real substance I left it out because I didn't want to dwell on a nooks in my paper But here's the deeper thing that happened And I'm really curious this movie coming out this summer I'm really curious to see how far he pushes this because this is the real drama in the story Which is it wasn't just a question of our nooks good or bad.

2:11:02It was a question of should Russia also have them And what what actually happened was Russia got the American invented the bomb Russia got the bomb They got the bomb through an espionage they got American and you know They got American scientists and foreign scientists working on the American project some combination of the two Basically gave the Russians the designs for the bomb and that's how the Russians got the bomb There's this dispute to this day of Oppenheimer's role in that If you read all the histories the kind of composite picture and by the way when we now know a lot I actually about Soviet espionage in that era because there's been all this declassified material in the last 20 years that Actually shows a lot of a lot of very interesting things But if you kind of read all the histories that you kind of get is Oppenheimer himself probably was not a He probably did not hint over the nuclear secrets himself However, he was close to many people who did Including family members and there were other members of the Manhattan Project who were Russian Soviet SS and did handover the bomb And so the view that Oppenheimer and people like him had that this thing is awful and terrible and oh my god And you know all this stuff You could argue fed into this ethos at the time that resulted in people thinking that the Baptist thinking that the only principal thing to do is to get the The Russians the bomb And so the the moral beliefs on this thing and the public discussion and the role that the inventors of this technology play This is the point of this book when they kind of take on this sort of public intellectual moral kind of thing It can have a real consequences, right?

2:12:26Because we live in a very different world today because Russia got the bomb Then we would have lived in had they not gotten the bomb Right the entire 20th century second half of the 20th century would have played out very different Had those people not given Russia the bomb and so the stakes were very high then The good news today is nobody sitting here today I don't think worrying about like an analogous situation with respect to like I'm not really worried that some Altman's gonna decide to give you know The Chinese the design for Day I although he did just speak in a Chinese conference which is interesting But however, I don't think I don't think that's what's it play here But what's it play here are all these other fundamental issues around what do we believe about this and then what laws and regulations and restrictions And we're gonna put on it and and that's where I draw like a direct straight line And anyway, and my reading of the history on nukes is like the people who were doing the full hair shirt public This is awful.

2:13:12This is terrible actually had like catastrophically bad results From from taking those views And that's what I'm worried is gonna happen again But is there a case to be made that you really need to wake the public up to the dangers of nuclear weapons when they were first dropped like really Like educate them on like this is extremely dangerous and destructive weapon I think the education kind of happened quick and early like how it's pretty obvious How we dropped one bomb and destroyed entire city Yeah, so 80 ,000 people dead and yeah And look the new but I don't like the reporting of that you can report that in all kinds of ways You can you can do all kinds of slants like wars horrible wars terrible You could do you can make it seem like nuclear the use of nuclear weapons is just a part of war and all that kind of stuff Something about the reporting and the discussion of nuclear weapons resulted in us being terrified In awe of the power of nuclear weapons and that potentially Fed in a positive way towards the The game theory of mutual issue or destruction.

2:14:15Well, so this gets to what actually how let's get to what actually happened Devils have to get here. Yeah, sure of course. Let's get to what actually happened then kind of back into that So what what actually happened? I believe and again I think it was a reasonable reading of history is what actually happened was nukes then prevented World War 3 And they prevented World War 3 through the game theory of mutually assured destruction had nukes not existed Right, there would have been no reason why the Cold War did not go hot Right, and then they're in then you know in the military planners at the time right thought both on both sides thought that there was gonna be World War 3 on the planes of Europe And they thought there was gonna be like 100 million people dead right it was like the most obvious thing in the world to happen Right, and it's the dog that didn't bark right like it may be like the best single net thing that happened in the entire 20th century Is it like that didn't happen?

2:14:55Yeah, actually just on that point You say a lot of really brilliant things. It hit me just as you were saying it I don't know why it hit me for the first time, but we got two wars in a span of like 20 years Like we could have kept getting more and more world wars and more and more ruthless And actually you could have had a US versus Russia war you could have By the way, you have it there's another hypothetical scenario the other hypothetical scenario is the Americans got the bomb the Russians didn't Right, and then America's the big dog and then maybe America would have had the capability to actually roll back there in curtain Right, I don't know whether that would have happened, but like it's entirely possible Right and and and the act of these people who had these moral positions about because they could forecast They could model they could forecast the future of how the technology used made a horrific mistake Because they basically ensured that the Aaron curtain would continue for 50 years longer than it would have otherwise like And again, like these are counterfactuals.

2:15:50I don't know that that's what it would have happened but like The decision to hand the bomb over was a big decision Maybe by people who were very full of themselves Yeah, but so me as an America me as a person that loves America I also wonder if US was the only ones with the new clue weapons um That was the argument for handing the but that was the was the guys who the guys who handed over the bomb that was actually there more I would probably not handed over to I would be careful about the regimes you handed over to Maybe you give it to like the British or something Like Like a democratically elected government Well, if there are people to this day who think that those bias obvious bias did the right thing because they created a balance of terror as opposed to the US having just and by the way Let me let me balance of terror.

2:16:40Let's tell the full version of the story as John Vennheim is a hero of both Yours and mine the full version of the story is he advocated for a first right so when the US had the bomb And Russia did not he advocated for he said we need to strike them right now Strike Russia. Yeah Yes, but no, I mean yes because he said world war three is inevitable Um, he was very hardcore Uh, he's he his his theory was um his theory was world war three is inevitable We're definitely going to have a world war three the only way to stop world war three is we have to take them out right now And we have to take them out right now before they get the bomb because this is our last chance Now again, like is this an example of philosophers and politics?

2:17:20I don't know if that's in there or not, but this is in the standard by no, but it is it meaning is that yeah This is on the other side so so most of the case studies most of the case studies in books like this are the crazy people on the left Yeah The monument is a story arguably of the crazy people on the right Yes, stick to computing John Well, this is the thing and this is this is the general principle is going to take the fact our core thing Which is like I don't know whether any of these people should be making any of these calls Yeah, because there's nothing in either von Neumann's background or Oppenheimer's background or any of these people's background that Paulifies them as moral authorities.

2:17:49Yeah, well this actually brings up the point of N .A .I Who are the good people to to reason about the morality the ethics the outside of these risks outside of like the more complicated stuff that you Your agree on is you know This will go into the hands of bad guys and all the kinds of ways they'll do is is interesting and dangerous um is Dangerous in interesting unpredictable ways and who is the right person who are the right kinds of people to make decisions how to respond to it Is it tech people? So the history of these fields. This is what he talks about in the book the history of these fields is that the the competence and capability and intelligence and training and accomplishments of senior scientists and technologists working on a technology And then being able to then make moral judgments on the use of their technology that track record is terrible That track record that track record is like catastrophically bad um and people just to look at the people that develop that technology are usually not going to be the right people Well, why would they so the claim is of course they're the knowledgeable ones, but the problem is they've spent their entire life in a lab Right, they're not Theologians But so what you find what you find when you read when you read this when you look at these histories what you find is they generally are very thinly informed on history Sociology on on on theology on morality ethics They tend to manufacture their own worldviews from scratch.

2:19:11They tend to be very sort of thin They're not remotely the arguments that you would be having if you got like a group of highly qualified theologians or philosophers or You know Well, let me sort of as the devil's advocate takes a simple whiskey say that I agree with With that but also it seems like the people who are doing kind of the ethics departments in these tech companies go Sometimes the other way. Yes Uh, they're not nuanced on the on history or theology or this kind of stuff It almost becomes a kind of outraged activism towards Directions that don't seem to be yeah grounded in history and humility and nuance.

2:19:59It's again drenched with arrogance So definitely not sure which is worse. Oh, no, they're both bad. No, yeah, so definitely not that neither so but the I guess This is a hard yeah, it's a hard problem. This is our problem. This goes back to where we started Which is okay? Who has the truth and it's like well? You know like how does society's arrive at like truth and how do we figure these things out and like our elected leaders play some role in it You know, we all play some role in it Um, there have to be some set of public intellectuals at some point that bring you know rationality and judgment humility to it Yeah, those people are few and far between we should probably prize them very highly Yes, so celebrate humility in our public leaders So getting to risk number two will AI ruin our society Short version as you write if the murder robots don't get us the hate speech and misinformation will And the action you recommend in short don't let the thought police suppress AI Well, what is um This risk of the effect of misinformation a society that's going to be catalyzed by AI Yeah, so this is the social media.

2:21:08This is what you're just alluded to is the activism kind of thing that's popped up in these companies In the industry and it's basically from my perspective It's basically part two of the war that played out over social media over the last 10 years Um, because you probably remember social media 10 years ago was basically who even wants this who wants to Who wants a photo of what your cat had for breakfast like this stuff is like silly interview And why can't these nerds like figure out how to invent something like useful and powerful And then you know certain things happened in the political system and then it's sort of the polarity on that discussion Switched all the way to social media is like the worst most corrosive most terrible most awful technology ever invented And it leads to you know terrible the wrong you know politicians and policies and politics and like and all this stuff and and that that all got catalyzed into this very big kind of angry movement Both inside now side the companies To kind of bring social media to to heal and that got focused in particularly on two topics so -called hates beach and so -called misinformation And that's been the saga playing out for the last for the last decade And I don't even really want to even argue the pros and cons of the sides just to observe that that's been like a huge fight And has had you know big consequences to how these companies operate Um Basically that same those same sets of theories that same activist approach that same energy is being transplanted straight to AI And you see that already happening.

2:22:18It's why you know chaggbt will answer let's say certain questions and not others Uh, it's why it gives you the canned speech about you know whenever it starts with as a large language model I cannot you know basically means that somebody has reached in there and told that it can't talk about certain topics Um, do you think so that is good? So it's an interesting question um, so a couple of several observations So so one is um the people who find this the most frustrating are the people who were worried about the murder robots So and in fact the the ex so -called ex -risk people right they started with the term AI safety the term became AI alignment when the term became AI alignment is when this switch happened from where we're just gonna kill us all Don't we're worried about his vision misinformation?

2:22:57Sure The AI ex -risk people have now renamed their thing AI not kill everyone ism Uh, which I have to admit is a catchy term and they are very frustrated by the fact that the he's either the sort of activist driven hate speech misinformation kind of thing is taking over which is what's happened is taking over the AI ethics Field has been taken over by the hate speech misinformation people Um, you know, look Would I like to live in a world in which like everybody was nice to each other all the time and nobody ever said anything mean and nobody ever used a bad word and everything was always accurate and honest like that sounds great Do I want to live in a world where there's like a centralized thought police working through the tech companies to enforce The view of a small set of elites that they're going to determine what the rest of us think and feel like absolutely not That could be a middle ground somewhere like Wikipedia type of moderation.

2:23:40There's moderation of Wikipedia That it's somehow crowdsourced where you don't have centralized elites Uh, but it's also not completely just a free for all because uh, the if you have the entirety of human knowledge at your fingertips You can do a lot of harm Like if you you have a good assistant that's completely uncensored they can help you build the bomb. They can help you um, mess With people's physical well -being right if they because that information is out there on the internet And so they're presumably there's it would be You could see the positives in um Sensing some aspects of an AI model when it's helping you commit literal violence.

2:24:27Yeah, and there's a section later section of the essay where I talk about bad people doing bad things Yes, right which which and then there's this there's a set of things that we should discuss there Yeah, um what happens in practice is these lines as you alluded to this already these lines are not easy to draw And what what I've observed in the social media version of this is like the way I describe it is the slippery slope is not a fallacy It's an inevitability the minute you have this kind of activist personality gets in a position to make these decisions They they take it straight to infinity like they they it goes into the crazy zone like almost immediately and never comes back Because people become drunk with power um, right and they look if you're in the position to determine with the entire world Things and fields and reads and says like you're gonna take it And you know elan has you know ventilated this with the Twitter files over the last you know three months And it's just like crystal clear like how bad it got there now yeah reason for optimism is what elan is doing with the community notes Um, yeah, so community notes is actually a very interesting thing uh, so what what elan is trying to do with community notes um is he's trying to have it where there's only a community note When people who have previously disagreed on many topics agree on this one Yes, that's what that's what I'm trying to get at is like there's there could be Wikipedia like models a community notes type of models where allows you to Essentially either provide context or sensor in a way that it's not Resistus libuslob nature now.

2:25:44There's another power. There's an entirely different approach here Which is basically um, we have a eyes that are producing content We can also have a eyes that are consuming content yeah, right? And so one of the things that your assistant could do for you is help you consume all the content Right and basically tell you when you're getting played So for example, I'm gonna want the AI that my kid uses right to be very you know child safe And I'm gonna want it to filter for him all kinds of inappropriate stuff that he shouldn't be saying just because he's a kid Yeah, right and you see what I'm saying is you can implement that you could you could Architech.

2:26:11So you could say you can solve this on the client side right you solving on the server side gives you an opportunity to dictate for the entire world Which I think is where you you take the slipper slope to hell There's another architectural approach which was just to solve this on the client side. Yeah, certainly what I would endorse It's a a risk number five will AI lead to bad people doing bad things I can just imagine language models used to do so many bad things, but the hope is there that you can have A large language models used to then defend against it by more people by smarter people by More effective people skilled people all that kind of stuff Three three -prone argument and bad people doing bad things So um so number one right you can use the technology defensively and there's a we should be using AI to build like broad spectrum Vaccines and antibiotics for like bioweapons and we should be using AI to like hunt terrorists and catch criminals and like we should be doing Like all kinds of stuff like that And in fact, we should be doing those things even just to let go get like you know Basically go eliminate risk from like regular pathogens that aren't like constructed by an AI.

2:27:07So there's there's there's the whole Uh, there's a whole defensive set of things um second is we have many laws on the books about the actual bad things Right, so it is actually illegal to be a crime you know to commit crimes to commit terrorist acts to you know build pathogens with the intent to deploy them to kill people And so we have those we don't we actually don't need new laws for the vast majority scenarios We actually already have the laws in the book On the books the third argument is the minute and this is sort of the foundational one that gets really tough But the minute you get into this thing which which you were kind of getting into which is like okay But like don't you need censorship sometimes right and don't you need restriction sometimes?

2:27:41It's like okay What is the cost of that? Um and in particular in the world of open source right um and so um is open source AI going to be allowed or not If open source AI is not allowed Then what is the regime that's going to be necessary legally and technically to prevent it from developing Right and here again is where you get into and people have proposed that these kinds of things you get into I would say pretty extreme territory pretty fast Do we have a monitor agent on every CPU and GPU that reports back to the government what we're doing with our computers Are we seizing GPU clusters to get beyond a certain size like and then by the way how are we doing all that globally?

2:28:19Right and like if China is developing an LLM beyond the scale that we think is allowable are we going to invade Right and you have figures on the AIX risk side who are advocating and you know potentially up to nuclear strikes to prevent You know this kind of thing and so here you get into this thing And again, you know, maybe you could maybe say this is you know You could even say this is what good bad or indifferent or whatever but like Here's the comparison of the news the comparison of the news is very dangerous because one is just news for just Just about although we can come back to nuclear power But the other thing was like with news you could control plutonium right you could track plutonium and it was like hard to come by AI is just math and code Right, it's in like math textbooks and it's like there are YouTube videos to teach you how to build it and like there's open source Already opens first, you know, there's a 40 billion prior to model running around already called Falcon online that anybody can download And so Okay, you walk down the logic path that says we need to have guard rails on this and you find yourself in a Deteritarian totalitarian regime of thought control and machine control That would be so brutal That you would have destroyed the society that you're trying to protect and so I just don't see how that actually works So yeah, you have to understand my brain is going for Full steam ahead here because I agree with Basically everything you're saying when I'm trying to play doubles out of here there because okay You highlight the fact that there is a slippery slope to human nature the moment you sense there's something You start to censor everything uh The alignment starts out sounding nice, but then you start to align to uh the beliefs of some Select group of people and then it's just your beliefs.

2:29:57This the number the number of people you're lying to smaller smaller as that group becomes more and more powerful Okay, but that just speaks to the people that censor are usually the assholes and The assholes get richer I wonder if it's possible to do without that for AI the one way to ask this question Is do you think the base models the base the baseline foundation models should be open sourced Like what where the Mark Zuckerberg is saying they want to do so I look I mean, I think it's totally appropriate the companies that are in the business of producing a product or service should be able to have a wide range of policies That they put right now just again.

2:30:37I want a heavily censored model for my year old Like I actually want that like I would pay more money for the ones more heavily censored than the one that's not right And so like there are certainly scenarios where companies will make that decision Look an interesting thing you brought up the or is this really a speech issue One of the things that the big tech companies are dealing with is that content generated From an LLM is not covered under section 230 Which is the law that protects internet platform companies from being sued for the user -generated content And so it it's actually yes, and so there's actually a there's actually a question I think there's still a question which is can big come can big American companies actually feel gendered of AI at all Or is the liability actually going to just ultimately Commit them that they can't do it because the minute the thing says something bad And it doesn't even need to be hate speech it could just be like an enact you could hallucinate a product You know detail on a vacuum cleaner, you know, and all of a sudden the vacuum cleaner company sews For misrepresentation and there's any symmetry there right because the the LLM is going to be producing billions of answers to questions And it only needs to get a few wrong to have loss has to get updated really quick here Yeah, and nobody knows what to do with that right um so anyway like they're they're they're big There are big questions around how companies operate at all So we can we talk about those but then there's this other question of like okay the open source So what about open source and and my answer your question is kind of like obviously yes the models have there have to be full open source here Because to live in a world in which that open source is not allowed is a world of draconian Speech control human control machine control.

2:32:07I mean, you know black helicopters with jack booted thugs coming out repelling down and seizing your GPU like Territory well no no I'm a hundred percent serious That's you're saying slip whistle blows these days no no no no no no that's what's required to enforce it Like how will you enforce a ban on open source? No, you could add friction to it like hard to get the models good people will always be able to get the models But it'll be more in the shadows right the leading open source model right now is from the UAE is like the next time they do that What do we do? Yeah, like oh, I see you're like a 14 -year -old in Indonesia comes out with a breakthrough model You know we talked about most great software comes from a small number of people some kid comes out with some big new breakthrough and quantization or something And has some huge breakthrough and like what are gonna what are we gonna like Invade in Indonesia and arrest him.

2:32:54It seems like in terms of size models and effectiveness of models the big tech companies Will probably lead the way for quite a few years and the question is of what policies they should use The kid the kid in Indonesia should not be regulated, but should Google meta Uh Microsoft open a I be regulated well, so the but this goes okay, so when does it become dangerous? Yeah Right is is the danger that it's quote as powerful as the current leading commercial model or is it that it is it is just at some other Arbitra threshold yeah, and then by the way like look how do we know like what we know today is that you need like a lot of money to Like train these things, but their advances being made every week on training efficiency and you know data all kinds of synthetic You know look, I don't even like this synthetic data thing we're talking about maybe some kid figures out of way to auto -generate synthetic That's gonna change everything yeah, exactly and so like sitting here today like the the breakthrough just happened right you made this point like the breakthrough just happened So we don't know what the shape of this technology is gonna be I mean the big shock the big shock here is that You know whatever number of billions of parameters basically represents at least a very big percentage of human thought Like who would have imagined that?

2:34:05And then there's already work underway. There was just this paper that just came out that basically takes a GPT 3 scale model and compresses it down to run on a single 32 course CPU Like who would have predicted that? Yeah, um, you know some of these models now you can run a Raspberry Pi's like today. They're very slow, but like you know, maybe they'll be up You know, proceed you've real performed you know like It's math and code and here we're back and here we're back You do math and code it's math and code it's math code and data. It's bits marks just like the way at this point I don't know what to do with this you guys created this whole internet thing Yeah, yeah, I mean I'm a huge believer in open source here So my argument is we're gonna have to see here's my argument as a my argument I'm full argument is AI is gonna be like air is gonna be everywhere like is this is just gonna be in text It already is it's gonna be a textbook some kids are gonna grow up knowing how to do this and it's just gonna be a thing It's gonna be in the air and you can't like pull this back anywhere you can pull back air And so you just have to figure out how to live in this world, right?

2:35:01And then that and then that's where I think like all this hand ringing about AI risk is basically complete waste of time Because the the effort should go into okay, what are what what is the defensive approach? And so if you're worried about you know AI generated pathogens the right thing to do is to have a permanent project warp speed Right and funded lavish lead was let's do a Manhattan let's talk about man Brothers those two Manhattan project for biological defense Right unless build a eyes and let's have like broad spectrum vaccines where like we're insulated from every pathogen Right and that what what the interesting thing is because it's software A kid in his basement teenager could build like a system that defense against like the worst the the worst I mean it and to me Defense is super exciting It's like I if you believe in the good of human nature For the most people want to do good to be the savior of humanity is really exciting Yes Not okay, that's a dramatic story, but like to help people to help people Yeah, okay, what about just the jump around what about the risk of will AI lead to crippling inequality?

2:36:04You know because we're kind of saying everybody's life will become better Is it possible that the the risk get richer here? Yeah, so this is actually ironically goes back to Marxism So because this was the cut it said the core claim of Marxism right basically was that the owner the owners of capital would basically On the means of production and then over time they would basically accumulate all the wealth The workers would be paying in you know and getting nothing in return because they wouldn't be needed anymore Right he Marx is very worried about what he called mechanization or what later became known as automation And that you know the workers would be emiserated and the capitalist would end up with with with all and so this was one of the core Core core principles of Marxism of course it turned out to be wrong about every previous wave of technology The reason it turned out to be wrong about every previous wave of technology is that the way that the self -interested owner of the machines makes the most money is by providing the production capability in the form of products and services to the most people the most customers is possible Right, the largest and it is one of those funny things where every CEO knows this intuitively and yet it's like hard to explain from the outside The the way you make the most money in any business is by selling to the largest market you can possibly get to The largest market you can possibly get to is everybody on the planet And so every large company does is everything that it can to drive down prices to be able to get volumes up to be able to get to everybody on the planet And that happened with everything from electricity it happened with telephones it happened with radio it happened with automobiles It happened with smartphones it happened with the PCs It happened with the internet It happened with mobile broadband It's happened by the way with Coca -Cola It's happened with like every you know Basically every industrially produced you know go to service Yeah, people want you want to drive it to the largest possible market and then as proof of that it's already happened Right, which is the early adopters of like chat gbt and bang are not like you know exon and Boeing They're you know your uncle and your nephew Right, it's just like for you see they're freely available online or it's available for 20 bucks a month or something But the you know these things went this this technology went mass market immediately And so look the the owners of the means of production the whoever does this And I've mentioned these trolling dollar questions There are people who are gonna get really rich doing this producing these things But they're gonna get really rich by taking this technology to the broadest possible market So yes, they'll get rich, but they'll get rich having a huge positive impact on yeah making that making the technology available to everybody Yeah, right and again smartphones same thing So in that there's this amazing kind of twist in in business history, which is you cannot spend $10 ,000 on a smartphone Right, you can't spend $100 ,000 you can't spend a meal like I would buy the million dollar smartphone Like I'm signed up for it like if it's like suppose a million dollar smartphone was like much better than the $1 ,000 smartphone Like I'm there to buy it it doesn't exist.

2:38:36Why doesn't it exist? Apple makes so much more money driving the price further down from a thousand dollars than they would try and harvest Right, and so it's just this repeating pattern you see over and over again Where the and and what's what's great about it? What's great about it is you do not need to rely on anybody's enlightened Right generosity to do this you just need to rely on capitalist self interest Uh, what about a I think in our jobs Yeah, so very very similar thing here. There's sort of a there's a core fallacy Which again was was very common in Marxism, which is what's called the lump of labor fallacy And this is sort of the fallacy that there is a only a fixed amount of work to be done in the world And if the in it's all being done today by people and then if machines do it There's no other work to be done by people Um, and that's just a completely backwards view on how the economy develops and grows Because what happens is not in fact that what happens is The introduction of technology into production process causes prices to fall As prices fall consumers have more spending power is consumers have more spending power They create new demand that new demand then causes capital and labor to form into new enterprises to satisfy new wants and needs And the result is more jobs tire wages New wants and needs the the worries that the the creation of new wants and needs at a rapid rate Well, I mean, there's a lot of turnover and jobs so people will lose jobs Just the actual experience of losing a job and having to learn new things and new skills is painful for the individual One of the things one is the new jobs are often much better Um, so it actually came up that there was this panic about a decade ago on all the truck drivers are gonna lose their jobs Right and number one that didn't happen because we haven't figured out a way to actually Finish that yet, but yeah, but the other thing was like like truck driver like I grew up in a town That was basically consistent of a truck stop right and I like knew a lot of truck drivers And like truck drivers live a decade shorter than everybody else Like they it's a it's a it's actually like a very dangerous like they get like literally they have like higher racist Kin cancer and on the left side of their on the left side of their body from from being in the sun all the time The vibration of being in the truck is actually very damaging to your physiology And there's actually perhaps partially because of that reason uh, there's a shortage yeah of uh People who want to be truck drivers.

2:40:42Yeah, like it's not it's not like the question always you want to ask somebody like that Is do you want you know, do you want your kid to be doing this job and like most of them will tell you no Like I want my kid to be sick and it cubicle somewhere like where they don't have this like where they don't die 10 years earlier And so so the new jobs number one the new jobs are often better But you don't get the new jobs until you go through the change and then to your point the the training thing You know, it's always the issue is can people adapt and again here you need to imagine living in a world in which everybody has the AI assistant capability Right to be able to pick up new skills much more quickly and be able to have some you know be able to have a machine to work with the argument their skills It's still going to be painful, but that's the process of life.

2:41:17It's painful for some people I mean there's no like there's no question it's painful for some people and they're you know, they're yes It's not again, I'm not a utopian on this and it's not like it's positive for everybody in the moment But it has been overwhelmingly positive for 300 years I mean look the concern here the concern the concern this concern has played out for for literally centuries And you know, this is the sort of Luddite, you know, the story of the Luddites Um, that you may remember there was a panic in the 2000s around Outcercing was going to take all the jobs. There was a panic in the 2010s that robots are going to take all the jobs um In 2019 before COVID we had more jobs at higher wages both in the country and in the world than at any point human history And so the overwhelming evidence is that the net gain here is like just like wildly positive And most most people like overwhelmingly come out the other side being huge beneficiaries of this So you write that the single greatest risk this is the risk you're most convinced by The single greatest risk of AI is that China wins global AI dominance and we the United States and the West do not Can you elaborate?

2:42:19Yeah, so this is the other thing Which is a lot of this sort of AI risk debates today sort of assume that we're the only gaming town Right, and so we have the ability to kind of sit in the United States and criticize ourselves and do you know have our government like You know beat up on our companies and we're figuring out a way to restrict what our companies can do and You know, we're gonna, you know, we're gonna ban this and ban that restrict this and do that And then there's this like other like force out there that like doesn't believe we have any power over them whatsoever And they have no desire to sign up for whatever rules we decide to put in place And they're gonna do whatever it is they're gonna do and we have no control over it at all And it's China and specifically the Chinese Communist Party And they have a completely publicized open, you know Plan for what they're gonna do with AI and it is not what we have in mind And not only do they have that as a vision of plan for their society, but they also have it as a vision and plan for the rest of the world So their plan is what surveillance Yeah authoritarian control So authoritarian population control You know good old fashioned communist authoritarian control And surveillance and enforcement And social credit scores and all the rest of it And you are gonna be monitored and metered within and in shiv everything all the time And it's gonna, you know, it's basically the end of human freedom and that's their goal and you know They justify it on the basis of that's what leads to peace and you're worried that the regulating In the United States will call progress enough to where The Chinese government would win that race.

2:43:45So their plan. Yeah, yes And the reason for that is they and again, they're very public on this They have their plan is to proliferate their approach around the world And they have this program called the digital Silk Road, right? Which is building on their their Silk Road investment program And they've got there they've been laying they've been laying networking infrastructure all over the world with their 5G Right work with their company Huawei So they've been laying all this fabric but financial and technological fabric all over the world And their plan is to roll out their vision of AI on top of that and to have every other country be running their version And then if you're a country prone to you know authoritarianism You're gonna find this to be an incredible way to become more authoritarian If you're a country by the way not prone to authoritarianism You're gonna have the Chinese Communist Party running your infrastructure and having back doors into it Right Which is also not good What's your sense of where they stand in terms of the race towards Superintelligence as compared to the United States?

2:44:35Yeah, so good news is they're behind but bad news is they You know they must to say they get access to everything we do So they're probably a year behind at each point in time but they get you know downloads I think of basically all of our work on a regular basis through a variety of means And they are you know, we'll see they're at least putting out reports of very competitive Just put out a report last week of a of a GP2 3 .5 analog They put out this report forget what it's called but they put out this report of this LM They did and they did you know the way when open AI you know puts out they they they one of the ways they test You know GPT is they they run it through standardized exams like the SAT right just how you can kind of get trust Martinez and so the Chinese report they ran their LM through The Chinese equivalent of the SAT It includes a section on Marxism And a section on Mao's say tongue of thought It turns out their AI does very well on both of those topics So like this this alignment thing communist AI right like literal communist AI right and so their vision is like that The you know, so you know you you can just imagine like you're a school You know you're a kid 10 years from now in Argentina or in Germany or in Who knows where in Indonesia and you ask day I'd explain to you like how the economy works and it gives you the most cheery upbeat explanation of Chinese style communism You've ever heard right so Like the stakes here are like really big well my as we've been talking about my hope is not just with the United States But we just the kitten is basement the open source of LM.

2:46:04So I I don't know if I Trust large centralized institutions with super powerful. Yeah, I No matter what their ideology is a power corrupts You've been investing in tech companies for about let's say 20 years and About 15 of which was with Andreessen Horowitz What interesting trends in tech have you seen over that time? Just talk about companies and just the evolution of the tech industry I mean the big shift over 20 years has been that tech used to be a tools industry For basically from like 1940 through to about 2010 almost all the big successful companies were pixel shovels companies So PC database smartphone, you know some some some tool that somebody else would pick up and use Since 2010 most of the big wins have been in applications So a company that starts a you know, it starts in an existing industry and goes directly to the customer in that industry And you know the early examples there were like Uber and Lyft and Airbnb And then that model is kind of elaborating out So the AI thing is actually a reversion on that for now because like most of AI business right now is actually in cloud provision of Of AI APIs for other people to build on but but the big thing will probably be an app Yeah, I think I think most of the money I think probably will be in whatever yeah your AI financial advisor or your AI doctor or your AI lawyer or you know Take your pick of whatever the domain is And they're and what's interesting is you know, we the valley kind of does everything we Our entrepreneurs kind of elaborate every possible idea and so there will be a set of companies that like make AI Something that can be purchased and used by large law firms And then there will be other companies that just go direct to market as an AI lawyer What advice could you give for startup founder?

2:47:53Just haven't seen so many successful companies so many companies that fail also What advice could you give to a startup founder someone who wants to build the next super successful Start up in the tech space the Googles the apples the twitters Yeah, so the great thing about the really great founders is they don't take any advice So if you find yourself listening to advice, maybe you shouldn't do it But that's actually just to elaborate on that If you could also speak to great founders. Yeah, like what what makes a great founder So it makes a great founder is super smart coupled with super energetic coupled with super courageous I think it's some of those those three and intelligence passion and courage the first two are traits and the third one is a choice I think courage is a choice Well, because courage is a question of pain tolerance, right So how how many times you want to get punched in the face before you quit?

2:48:52And Here's maybe the biggest thing people don't understand about what it's like to be a startup founder is it gets it gets very romanticized And even when even when they fail, it still gets romanticized about like what a great adventure it was but like The reality of it is most of what happens is people telling you know and then they usually follow that with your stupid Right, no, I will not come to work for you And I will not leave my cushy job at Google come work for you. No, I'm not going to buy your product You know, no, I'm not going to run a story about your company. No, I'm not this that the other thing And so a huge amount of what people have to do is just get used to just getting punched and and and the reason people don't understand This is because when you're a founder you cannot let on that this is happening because it will cause people to think that you're weak and they'll lose faith in you Yeah, so you have to pretend that you're having a great time when you're dying inside, right?

2:49:37Just a sure misery, but what why do they do it? What do they do? Yeah, that's the thing. It's it's like it is a level this is actually one of the conclusions I think is it I think it's actually for most of these people on a risk adjusted basis. It's probably an irrational act They could probably be more financially successful on average if they just got like a real job and in a big company But there's you know, some people just have an irrational need to do something new and build something for themselves And you know, some people just can't tolerate having bosses. Oh, here's a fun thing is how do you reference check founders?

2:50:04Right, so you call it you know normal way reference checker tie hiring somebody as you call the bosses They're at their you know, and you find out if they were good employees and now you're trying to reference check Steve jobs Right, and it's like oh god, he was terrible. You know, he was a terrible employee. He never did what we told him to do. Yeah So what's a good reference? If you want the previous boss to actually see there They never did what you told them to do that might be a good thing well ideally ideally what you want is I will go I would like to go to work for that person He worked for me here and now I'd like to work for him now unfortunately most people can't their egos can't handle that So they won't say that but that that's the ideal what advice would you give to those folks in the space?

2:50:42They've intelligence passion and courage So I think the other big thing is You see people sometimes you say I want to start a company and then they kind of work through the process of coming up with an idea And generally those don't work as well as the case where somebody has the idea first And then they kind of realize that there's an opportunity to build a company and then they just turn out to be the right kind of person to do that When you say idea do mean What long term big vision or do mean specifics of like product? I would say specific like specifically what yes specifics like what is because for the first five years You don't get to have vision you just got to build something people want and you got to figure out a way to sell it to them Right, it's very practical or you never get to big vision So for the first of the first part you have an idea of a set of products of the first product that can actually make some money Yeah, like it's got a word first product got to work by which I mean like it has to technically work But then it has to actually fit into the category and the customers mind of something that they want and then and then by the way The other part is they have to want to pay for it like somebody's got to pay the bills And so you got to figure out how to price it and whether you can actually extract the money Yeah, so usually it is much more predictable Success is never predictable, but it's more predictable if you start with a great idea and then back into starting the company Um, so this is what we did you know we had most like before we had that skate the Google guys had the Google search engine working at Stanford Right, um, the um, uh, you know, yeah, actually there's tons of examples where they you know Pierre Omadier had eBay working before he left his previous job So I really love that idea of just having a thing the prototype that actually works before you even begin to remotely scale Yeah, by the way, it's also far easier to raise money, right?

2:52:14Like the the ideal pitch that we receive is here's the thing that works would you like to invest in our company or not? Like that's so much easier than here's 30 slides with a dream, right? And then we have this concept called the idea maze which our biology us for no Boston came up with when he was with us So so so then there's this thing this goes to mythology, which is um, you know, there's a mythology that kind of you know These these ideas, you know kind of arrive like magic or people kind of stumble into them. It's like eBay with the pest dispensers or something um The reality usually with the big successes is that the founder has been chewing on the problem for five or ten years before they start the company And they often worked on it in school Or they even experimented on it when they were a kid And they've been kind of training up over that period of time to be able to do the thing.

2:52:59So they're like a true domain expert And it's sort of sounds like my mon apple pie, which is yeah, you want to be a domain expert what you're doing But you would you know The mythology is so strong of like oh, I just like had this idea in the shower right now. I'm doing it like It's generally not that no because it's what that maybe in the shower you had the exact Product implementation details, but yeah, usually you're going to be for like years if not decades thinking about Like Everything around that Well, we call it the idea maze because the idea maze basically is like there's all these permutations like for any I for any idea there's like all these different permutations who should the customer be what shape forms the product have and how should we take it to market and all these things um, and so um The really smart founders have thought through all these scenarios by the time they go out to raise money Um, and they have like detailed answers on every one of those fronts because they put so much thought into it um, the sort of the the sort of more haphazard founders haven't thought about any of that and it's the detailed ones who tended to do much better So how do you know what to take a leap if you have a cushy job or happy life?

2:54:06I mean the best reason is just because you can't tolerate not doing it right like this is the kind of thing where if you have to be advised and doing it you probably shouldn't do it Um, and so it's probably the opposite which is you just have such a burning sense of this has to be done I have to do this. I have no choice. What if it's gonna lead to a lot of pain? It's gonna lead to a lot of pain I think that's what if it means losing sort of social relationships and damaging your um Relationship with love the ones and all that kind of stuff Yeah, look so I like it's gonna put you in a social tunnel for sure, right?

2:54:36So you're gonna like I you know There's this game to complete on Twitter, which is you can do any Whiff of the idea that there's uh basically any such thing as work -life balance and that People should actually work hard and everybody gets mad But like the truth is like all the successful founders are working 80 hour weeks and they're working You know, they form very very strong social bonds with the people they work with they tend to lose a lot of friends in the outside Or put those friendships on ice like that's just the nature of the of the thing Um, you know, for most people that's worth the trade off, you know, the advantage You know, maybe younger founders have is maybe they have less, you know, maybe they're not You know, for example, they're not married yet.

2:55:07I don't have kids yet. That's an easier thing to bite off Can you be an older founder? Yeah, you definitely can yeah, um, yeah Many of the most successful founders are second third fourth time founders. They're in their 30s 40s 50s Um, the good news of being an older founder is you know more And you you know more about what to do, which is very helpful the problem is okay Now you've got like us bousin a family and kids and like you've kind of go to the baseball game and like you can't go to the base You know, and so it's getting Life is full of difficult choices. Yes, can't reason Uh You've written a blog post on what you've been up to uh, you wrote this in October 2022 Uh, quote mostly I try to learn a lot For example, the political events of 2014 to 2016 make clear to me that I didn't understand politics at all referencing maybe some of this this book here um So I deliberately withdrew from political engagement and fundraising and instead read my way back into history And as far to the political left and political right as I could So just high level question.

2:56:06What's your approach to learning? Yeah, so it's basically I would say it's it's uh, I'm an auto -diadect um, uh, so it sort of goes is going down the rabbit holes Um, so it's a combination I say I kind of alluded to it in that in that quote. It's a combination of breadth and depth Um, and so I tend to yeah, I tend to I go broad by the nature of what I do I go broad, but then I tend to go deep in a rabbit hole for a while read everything I can and then come out of it And I might not I might not revisit that rabbit hole for you know another decade and in that blog post that I recommend people go check out you actually list a bunch of different books that you recommend on different topics on the American left and the American right Uh, it's just a lot of really good stuff the best explanation for the current structure of our society and politics You give to recommendations for books on the Spanish Civil War six books on deep history of the American right comprehensive biocracy these at all Hitler Uh, one of which I read and I can recommend six books on the deep history of the American left So American right American left looking at the history to give you the context um biography of uh, Vladimir Lenin two of them Uh, on the French Revolution actually I have never read a biography on Lenin maybe that they'll be useful Everything's been so marks focused the Sebastian biography of Lenin is extraordinary Uh, pictures Sebastian okay, yeah, so it's still useful to read yeah, it's incredible I actually think it's the single best book on the Soviet Union So that the perspective of Lenin is might be the best way to look at the Soviet Union versus Stalin versus Marx versus Very interesting.

2:57:36So two books on fascism and anti -fascism By the same author Paul Gottfried Brilliant book on the nature of mass movements and collective psychology the definitive work on intellectual life under totalitarianism the captive mind Uh, the definitive work on the practical life under totalitarianism Uh, there's a bunch. There's a bunch and the single best book first of all the the list here is just incredible But you say the single best book I have found on who we are and how we got here is the ancient city by new madenas fostal de coolangus I like it What's uh, what did you learn about who we are as a human civilization from that book?

2:58:16Yeah, so this is a fascinating book this one's free, but it's a free by the way it's it's it's a book in the 1860s You can download it or you can buy printouts up prints of it, but um it's uh, it was this guy who was a professor at the Sorbonne in the 1860s And he was apparently a savant on uh, antiquity on Greek and Roman antiquity um and in the reason I say that is because his sources are 100 % Original Greek and Roman sources So he wrote a basically history of western civilization from on the order of 4 ,000 years ago to basically the present times entirely working on Fresh original Greek and Roman Roman sources Um, and what he was specifically trying to do was he was trying to reconstruct from the stories of the Greeks in the Romans He was trying to reconstruct what life in the west was like before the Greeks in the Romans Which was in this in this in the civilization known as the the Indo -Europeans um and the short answer is and this is sort of circa 4 ,000 you know 2 ,000 BC to you know sort of 500 BC kind of that 1500 year stretch for civilization developed And his conclusion was basically cults There were basically cults and civilization was organized into cults and the the intensity of the cults Was like a million fold beyond anything that we would recognize today like it was a level of um all encompassing belief and uh an action around religion Um, that was at a level of extremeness that we wouldn't even recognize it um Uh, and and so specifically he tells the story of basically there were three levels of cults The family called the tribal cult and then the city called as as society scaled up And then each cult was a joint cult of uh family gods which were ancestor gods and then nature gods Um, and then you were bonding into a family a tribe or a city was based on your adherence to that religion Um people uh who were not of your family tribe city worship different gods which gave you not just the right with the responsibility to kill them on site Right, so there were serious about their cults hardcore By the way shocking development I did not realize as a zero concept of individual rights like even even up through the Greeks and even in the Romans They didn't have the concept of individual rights like the idea that as an individual you have like some right It's just like noop right and you look back and you're just like wow That's just like crazily like fascist and a degree that we wouldn't recognize today But it's like well they were living under extreme pressure for survival And you in you know the theory goes you could not have people running around making claims individual rights when you're just trying to get like You're tried through the winter right like you need like hardcore command and control And so and and actually what if through modern political lens those cults were basically both fascist and communist They were fascists in terms of social control and then they were communist in terms of economics Mm -hmm But you think that's fundamentally that like pull towards Cult is within us.

3:01:01Oh, so so my conclusion from this book so so so so the way we naturally think about the world we live in today Is like we basically have such an improved version of everything that came before us right like we have basically We figured out all these things around morality and ethics and democracy and all these things and like they were basically Stupid and retrograde and we're like smart sophisticated and we've improved all this I after reading that book. I know believe in in many ways the opposite which is no actually We are still running in that original model. We're just running in an incredibly diluted version of it So we're still running basically in cults It's just our cults are at like a thousand third a millionth the level of intensity right and so our so just as take religions You know the modern experience of a Christian in our time even somebody who considers some devout Christian is just a shadow of the level of intensity If somebody who belonged to a religion back in that period and then by the way we have conspired goes back to our AI discussion we we then sort of endlessly create new calls Like we're trying to fill the void right and the void is a void of bonding Okay, living in their era like everybody living today Transport in that era would view it is just like completely intolerable in terms of like the loss of freedom in the level Basically, fascist a control however Every single person in that era and he really stresses this they knew exactly where they stood They knew exactly where they belonged.

3:02:17They knew exactly what their purpose was They know exactly what they needed to do every day They know exactly why they were doing it. They had total certainty about their place in the universe So the question of meaning and question of purpose was very distinctly clearly defined them absolutely overwhelmingly Undisputably undeniably As we turn the volume down on the cultism. Yes, we start to The search for meanings that's getting harder and harder. Yes, because we don't have that we are we are ungrounded We are we are we are uncentered and we and we all feel it right and that's why we reach for you know It's why we still reach for religion.

3:02:47It's why we reach for you know We people start to take on you know, let's say you know a faith in science. Maybe beyond where they should put it You know, by the way like sport steams are like um, you know They're like a tiny little version of a cult and you know, if the you know, Apple key notes are a tiny little version of a cult Right You know political, you know, yeah, and there's called you know, there's full blown cults on both sides of the political spectrum right now Right, you know, operating in plain stuff. But still not full blown oh paired us to what it was compared to what it used to mean We would today consider a full blown, but like yes, they're they're at like I don't know A hundred thousand through something of the intensity of what people head back then so so we live in a world today that in many ways This more advanced and moral and so forth and it's certainly a lot nicer much nicer world to live in but we live in a world That's like a very washed out.

3:03:28It's like everything has become very colorless and gray as compared to how people used to experience things Which is I think why we're so prone to reach for drama It's we there's something in us deeply evolved where we want that back And I wonder where it's all headed I usually turn the volume down more and more Uh, what advice would you give to young folks today Uh, in high school and college how to be successful in their career how to be successful in their life Yes, so the tools that are available today, I mean our just Like I sometimes you know board. I sometimes board, uh, you know Kids by describing like what it was like to go look up a book You know to try to like discover a fact and you know in the in the old days The 1970s 1980s and go to library and the card catalog and the whole thing You go through all that work and then the book is checked out and you have to wait two weeks and like like To be in a world not only where you can get the answer to any question But also the world now, you know the a world where you've got like the assistant that will help you do anything help you teach learn Anything like your ability both to learn and also to produce is just like I don't know a million fold beyond what it used to be I have a blog post.

3:04:28I've been wanting to write um, it was I call out where where are the hyper productive people Um, like the question right like with these tools like there should be authors that are writing like hundreds of thousands of like outstanding books Well, with the authors there's a consumption question too But yeah, well, maybe not maybe not you're right But so the tools are much more powerful getting much more part of the musicians. Yeah, right? Why aren't musicians producing a thousand times a number of songs right um like what like the tools are spectacular So what uh what's the explanation and by way of advice like What is motivation starting to be turned down a little bit or what I think it might be distraction distraction It's it's so easy to just sit and consume um that I think people get distracted for production But if you wanted to um, you know as a young person if you wanted to really stand out you could get on like a hyper productivity curve very early on There's a great uh, you know the story there's a great story in Roman history of plenty of the elder who was this legendary statesman And I died in the visuvius eruption trying to risk his friends, but um he was famous both for being a Basically being a polymath but also being an author he wrote apparently like hundreds of books most of us have been lost But he like wrote all these encyclopedias And he'd literally like would be reading and writing all day long no matter what else is going on And he so he would like travel with like four slaves and two of them were responsible for reading to him and two of them were Responsible for taking taking dictation And so like he'd be going across country and like literally he would be writing books like all the time and apparently they were spectacular We there's only a few that have survived, but apparently they were amazing There's a lot of value to being somebody who finds focus in this life Yeah, like when and there are examples like there are you know, there's this guy judge was this named Posner Posner um who wrote like 40 books and was also great federal judge You know there's a or friend biology.

3:06:15I think it's like this. He's one of these you know where he sees his output It's just prodigious and so it's like yeah, I mean with these tools why not and I kind of think we're it We're at this interesting kind of freeze frame moment where like this these tools are not everybody's hands And everybody's just kind of staring at them trying to figure out what to do. Yeah, the new tools. We have discovered fire Yeah, and trying to figure out how to use it to cook. Yeah Uh You told Tim Ferris that the perfect day is caffeine for 10 hours and alcohol for four hours You didn't think I'd be mentioning this did you Uh, it balances everything out perfectly as you said so perfect uh So let me ask what's what's the secret to balance and maybe too happiness in life?

3:06:54Um, I don't believe in balance. So I went I'm the wrong person asking you to elaborate why you don't believe in balance I mean, I maybe it's just and I look I think people I think people are wired differently. So I think it's hard to generalize uh this kind of thing But I'm I am much happier and more satisfied when I'm fully committed to something So I'm very much in favor of all lane of imbalance. Yeah imbalance and that applies to work to life to everything Yeah, now and now I happen to have whatever twist of personality trace lead that in non destructive dimensions Including the fact that I've actually I now no longer do the 10 -4 plan.

3:07:26I stop drinking to do the caffeine but not the alcohol So there's something in my personality right I Whatever maladaption I have is inclining me towards productive things not on productive things So you're one of the wealthiest people in the world What's the relationship between wealth and happiness? Oh Money and happiness. So I think happiness I don't think happiness is the thing Too straightforward. I think satisfaction is the thing That's that just sounds like happiness, but turn down a bit no deeper So happiness is you know a walk in the woods as sunset on ice cream cone I kiss um The first ice cream cone is great.

3:08:06This out thousandth ice cream cone Not so much at some point the walks in the woods get boring most the distinction between happiness and Satisfaction I think satisfaction is a deeper thing which is like having found a purpose and fulfilling it being useful So just uh Something that permeates all your days just this general contentment of Being useful that I'm fully satisfying my faculties that I'm fully delivering right on the gifts that I've been given that I'm You know net making the world better that I'm contributing to the people around me Right and then I can look back and say wow that was hard, but it was worth it I think generally it seems to lead people in a better state than pursuit of pleasure pursuit of quote unquote happiness.

3:08:49Does money I think of do with that? I think the founders of you founding fathers in the US through the self -kilter when they used the phrase pursuit of happiness I think they should have said pursuit of satisfaction. They said pursuit of satisfaction. We might live in a better world today Well, you know, they could have elaborated a lot of things They could have tweaked the second memo. I think they were smarter than realized states like you know what? We're gonna make it ambiguous and let these these humans figure out the rest these tribal cult like humans figure out the rest Uh But money empowers that so I think and I think they're I mean look I think Elon is I don't think I'm even a great example But I think Elon would be the great example this which is like, you know, look he's a guy who from every every day of his life from the day He's starting to make him money at all.

3:09:29He just plows in into the into the next thing And so I think I think money is definitely an enabler for satisfaction Money applied to happiness leads people down very dark paths Very destructive avenues Money applied to satisfaction. I think could be it gives a real tool I always lived by the way. I was like, you know You know, it's the case study for behavior with the other thing that So he's really made me think his Larry Larry page was asked one time what his approach to philanthropy was And he said oh, I'm just my philanthropic plan is just give all the money to Elon Right uh, well, let me actually ask you about Elon.

3:10:04What what are your um you've interacted with quite a lot of Successful engineers and business people. What do you think a special body? Elon we talked about Steve jobs what What do you think a special about him as a leader's an innovator? Yeah, so the the core of it is he's a he's he's back to the future So he is he is doing the most leading edge things in the world but with an with a really deeply old school approach And so to find comparisons to Elon you need to go to like Henry Ford and Thomas Watson and Howard Hughes And Andrew Carnegie, right? Lee was Stanford John T. Rockefeller right you need to go to the what we're called the bourgeois capitalists like the hard core business owner operators Who basically builds you know, it does basically built industrialized society um Vanderbilt um and it's a level of hands -on commitment um and depth um in the business coupled with an absolute priority Towards truth um and towards um Kind of put science and technology Town to first principles that is just like absolute just like unbelievable absolute He really is ideal that he's only ever talking engineers like he does not tolerate Yes, he loves push it to us anybody I've ever met He wants ground truth on every single topic um and he runs his businesses directly day -to -day devoted to getting into ground truth in every single topic so uh You think it was a good decision from Dubai Twitter.

3:11:35I have developed a view in life did not second guessey on musk I know this is gonna sound Crank crazy and unfounded but well I mean uh he's got a quite a track record I mean look the car was a crazy. I mean the car was I mean look He's done a lot of things that seem crazy starting a new car company in the United States of America The last time somebody really tried to do that was the 1950s and it was called Tucker automotive and it was such a disaster They made a movie about what a disaster it was Um and then rockets like who does that like that's there's obviously no way to start a rocket company like those days are over and then to do those at the same time So after he pulled those two off like Okay fine Like this is one of my areas of like I uh whatever opinions I had about that That is just like okay clearly or not relevant like this is you just you at some point you just like put on the person Any general I wish more people would lean on celebrating and supporting versus deriding and destroying oh yeah I mean look he drives resentment like it's a resentment like he is a magnet for resentment um like his critics are the most miserable Like resentful people in the world like it's almost a perfect match of like the most idealized, you know technologist, you know of the century coupled with like just his critics are just bitter as can be I mean it's it's sort of very darkly comic to watch Well, he uh he fuels the fire of that by being an asshole on twitter at times And which is fascinating to watch the drama of human civilization given our cult roots Just fully on fire He's running a cult You could say that very successfully So now now there are cults have gone and we search for meaning What do you think is the meaning of this whole thing?

3:13:16What's the meaning of life Mark Andreessen? I don't know the answer to that um I think the meaning of uh of The closest I get to it is what I said about satisfaction So it's basically like okay, we were given what we have like we should basically do our best What's the role of love in that mix? I mean like what's the point of life if you're yeah without love like yeah So love is a big part of that satisfaction Anyway, look like it taking care of people is like a wonderful thing like it you know a mentality You know There are pathological forms of taking care of people, but there's also a very fundamental, you know kind of aspect of taking care of people Like for example, I happen to be somebody who believes the capitalism and taking care of people are actually they're actually the same thing Um, somebody once said capitalism is how you take care of people you don't know Hmm right um right and so like yeah, I think it's like deeply woven into the whole thing Um, you know, there's a long conversation to be had about that, but yeah Yeah, creating products that are used by millions of people and bring them joy in smaller big ways And then capitalism kind of enables that Encourages that David Friedman says there's only three ways to get somebody to do something for somebody else Love money and force Yeah Love and money are better.

3:14:28Yeah, that's a good ordering We should bet on those try love first if that doesn't work the money And then force well don't you try that one? Um, Mark you're an incredible person. I'm been a huge fan. I'm glad to finally got a chance to talk I'm a fan of everything you do everything you do including on twitter It's a huge honor to meet you to talk with you. Uh, thanks again for doing this awesome. Thank you Lex Thanks for listening to this conversation with Mark and reason to support this podcast Please check out our sponsors in the description and now let me leave you with some words from Mark and reason himself The world is a very malleable place If you know what you want and you go for it with maximum energy and drive and passion The world will often reconfigure itself around you much more quickly and easily than you would think Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time