#979 - Dwarkesh Patel - AI Safety, The China Problem, LLMs & Job Displacement

25:49I, people have been searching, so the transformer paper I think was released in 2018. And people have been searching in the meantime for these different architectures which should prove even better. I don't think anybody's found anything. Even the transformer itself was not some wholly different paradigm from what preceded it. You can train a language model, something that predicts the next word of language with a model that was available in 2016. It's just like a different architecture and it'll just do slightly worse or notably worse. So I think it'll kind of look like this, right? There will be different optimizations that are made.

26:22I think the big fundamental change that will happen is that we will move from a regime where most of the computers spent on memorizing human language to having the model solve challenges, like real world challenges, trying to get it to complete the project from beginning to end. Like go to the moon, it's like a very open -ended challenge, right? Humans can do that. These models cannot. The problem is that it's not the architecture. I think the fundamentally problem is data. Imagine if you wanted to train a modern large language model, you had all the compute in the world, you had modern architectures in 1980.

26:56You simply wouldn't have the language tokens necessary to train it. And I think we're in a similar position today with the other kinds of work we want these models to do. We want them to be able to, you want to be able to give them a screen and just like do a month's work with the work at McKinsey or JP Morgan. We don't have the data of like, you're getting interrupted by your workers on Slack and you get this like weird email from your boss. You remember when the crypto boom was happening and there was a meme floating around which was the only reason to earn fiat is to convert into cryptocurrency.

27:27It almost feels to me like you're saying the only reason to do real world work to increase the data set for the training. I kind of think, well, I think that's honestly more valuable than your work. And the market agrees. It just actually matter what you do, try and do it well so you don't give it a bad data set here. The market agrees. I mean, if you look at how much these companies, they'll pay like to $300 for you solving a math problem or something. That they haven't seen in the data said before. And the reason it makes it in secondomically, and the reason AI's fundamentally have an advantage over humans, even if they're not smarter than us, is that if you train a human to do something, or if you have a human to a task, they can only do it themselves.

28:09If you train an AI model to do something, that ability can now be instantiated across all of its copies. And so I actually think that even once we solve this basic problem I'm talking about on the job training, where if it starts working with Chris Williams and in a couple of months it understands how you make videos, what you like, what are your preferences, what are the common ways in which things go wrong, how to solve for that. I think once we have any, yeah, let's keep up with this kind of on the drop training and continue learning. We might see an intelligence explosion, even if there's no further argument they progress.

28:45And here's why you'll have copy these models that are widely deployed through the economy. They're learning how to do every single job, at least every single white collar job, as well as a human. But unlike a human, the model is learning from what every single copy is learning. It's learning how to do every single job in the economy all together at the same time. We'll get back to talking in just a minute, but first, some Some things are built for summer. Sunburns, hot girl walks, your ex posting there you were road trip, and now, lemonade and salt. Huh? Element just dropped their brand new lemonade salt flavor and it's everything that you want on a hot day.

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29:58That's how confident they are, but you'll love it. Plus, they're off for free shipping in the US. Right now, you can get a free sample pack of elements, most popular flavors with your first purchase, by going to the link in the description below, or heading to drinklmnt .com slash modern wisdom. That's drinklmnt .com slash modern wisdom. Is that not currently happening right now? No. Right. So this is interesting to me. Again, I've had to, I'm aware that you go deep for your research, the delta between my level of understanding of how LLMs and AI works to even be able to have this conversation with you.

30:31I had to leap over some fucking fjords to get here.

30:37Tesla released its robot taxes recently. One of the advantages that Tesla has is the same reason that the air tags are such a fantastic business for Apple, that they have an existing ecosystem that this thing can get slotted into. The data set for Tesla is very large. They take whatever it is, the top 1 % of drivers or something. They use that, which is why if you get into a Waymo, you get totally cooked at every junction because it doesn't drive like a human, it drives like a robot, which means that everybody treats it as such. And also, this big fucking flashing identified thing, which is you can piss this off and it's not going to get a gun out and threaten you, whereas a Tesla you can't tell.

31:13Is there someone driving that? I don't really do. I don't know. That is sort of a bi -directional. And I have to assume as well that, in fact, I know that this is the case because I was in a friend's car who has full self -driving. It did something weird and he had to take control of the wheel. Have you been in one of these concepts? It popped up and it said, looks like you had to take back over. Double tap this notification to give us a voice note explaining what happened. He can basically submit a bug report, I guess, with a bit of context. Presumably, the data will get sent to some server place somewhere.

31:50Maybe that gets looked at by error. or maybe it's filtered by humans or something, I don't know. That is automated driving, training automated driving. So you have this sort of recursive model of we've learned kind of the same as I guess LLM's work, right? We're going to learn based on the actions. This is like a robotics solution, I suppose, in one way. We're going to learn based on the actions of people driving on the road. That's going to create self -driving. And then the self -driving must somehow feed the data, feed the model itself. and then any interventions that happen from, you got that a little bit wrong, let me correct you, you can have a little bit more context added, and that helps to train you again.

32:30But what you're saying to me is that the stuff that's happening just digitally isn't having this sort of bidirectional learning where, I mean, I maxed out my memory, I'm fucking chat GPT, I did that this week, so memories fall. Like what? I'm giving you, I'm giving you something like quite a bit of stuff, but I'm not giving you fucking unbelievable corpus of information, oh fuck, okay. And then you forget shit all the time. If you get stuff all the time, shit that's in there, I'm like, I can go in the memory and see that it's in there. How if you managed to forget this? And what you want is for every person's piece of input and every single small mistake to be training the model further.

33:05But it seems like you've got the big corpus of the internet and shit at the top, which is feeding down improvements from that. But it's never getting fed back up. Is that right? There's, that's such a great point about Tesla and one of the key advantages it has. The problem with the way, I don't know how Tesla trains, but I assume the way it's trained and definitely the way the LLMs are trained is that they cannot respond, so the voice moment you give it, the high level feedback where you say, you messed up this test because of this reason, I think that you should perform this test this other way.

33:40But you would be able to explain to any human employee and they'd learn from that. The model itself, like the car, self -driving car model is not like listening to that. And then like, okay, I'll be careful next time, right? Some human has to go in and label this, we gotta take this, you know, driving thing out of the data set and it needs to be contextualized more. Yeah. Suppose you were having an LLM edit videos for you and suppose the way you had to train that model, I mean, you could do this today. Is you come up with this like data set where like, you added this clip, here's how many views it got, here's how many lights it got, here's a like a sort of spreadsheet, This is the label you apply to it and then you do that for like a thousand of your videos And it makes a new video where you're like the thumbnail kind of slop here or the title doesn't make any sense There's no you just had to give it like minus 1000 reward or something It would be such a clunky way.

34:30You're not able to tell it like why you didn't like it You just say but it'll give it like a sort of like a numerical up -down value So yes, there is this in principle Powerful and this is why I think once a share rise will look crazy. It won't just be like, you know more people But there is in principle this like ability to learn from X -reense, but there's just no sort of deliberate organic way to teach model something that will persist. What do you think the world will be like with true AGI?

35:04There's many ways you can think about it. There's that sort of qualitative sense of what we'll feel like. And then more economic sense you can think about what would the growth rate be. So in frontier economies right now, it's like 2 % growth. If America has 2 % growth, they're 3 % growth. That's amazing. There have been times in history, well for us, for most of history, there was almost no economic growth. There have been times in history where there's been places that are experienced 10 % economic growth for decades on end. What like China, especially like parts, if you just look at like Hong Kong or Shanghai or something, they just like gangbusters growth decade after decade.

35:39I think we might be looking at something like that for the whole world. Because the fundamental dynamic you have is that you have billions of extra people who are super smart, super educated in every single field can learn on the job from all of their each other's experience. And it's not even mainly their intelligence. It's the collective advantages that they have. Because of the fact that they're digital, even if they're just as smart as any human. Like a little account. That's part of it. That's a huge part of it. The other is that they can coordinate with each other in ways humans simply can't.

36:15So Elon Musk, how much does he contribute to that kind of my growth? Quite a bit, right? There's only one of them. That one is doing quite a bit already. But imagine if you could just make a billion copies of Elon and not like a billion copies of baby Elon doesn't know shit. It's like billion copies of Elon now or I don't know, depending on how you feel about him, eight years ago. You go.

36:37And you just say copy one and you can do the whole team. You doesn't have to be just him. Copy the whole like SpaceX team. You guys go work on batteries. You guys go work on this other problem. Every single thing in the hardware vertical, that ability to sort of like copy yourself to fork, then to merge back like Elon can observe every single thing. Tesla has over 100 ,000 employees, right? As much of a micromanage of his Elon is, he just simply cannot micromanage everything at that scale. That ability to have a single coherent vision directing a whole firm. And then distilling, he's actually able to like take in all that input.

37:17He can check every single pull request and every single press communication. Well, I think there's really lovely description. I think it's in the E -Mith revisited by Michael Goebb, a fantastic book. if anyone wants to try and run a business. And I think he refers to the CEOs of the owners of companies as high -level problem -solving machines. And basically that you were able to aggregate more shit and kind of see it with a level of dexterity and sort of find a resolution that other people would struggle. And that's kind of really what you're doing. It's like, oh, we've got all of this stuff. There's little whispers as Rick Ruben calls them, little way over this whisper over here.

37:58It was the thing that your daughter mentioned she saw on TikTok yesterday over the breakfast table, plus the way that the woman at the bus stop looked at you as you drove past in your automated car, plus it's like this weird, just concatenation of shit. And your point is, well, how much information can you consume, and how much can you recall, and how much can you remember, and how accurately can you do that? It can you send copies of yourself out to every single division in the company to do your well. In the corporate cycle five five agents sat around the dinner table with your daughter having By the way, have you when you hang out with these kinds of people It's insane like they are I just simply don't understand like people the amount of information these some of these top executive types can Like they're just like they're like a thousand emails a day and they respond to each one within five minutes Have you, I'm sure when you book people, this is the really interesting thing you must have noticed.

38:57I have at least noticed it. There's some people who you think like you should have all the time in the world. You're a fucking like artist or something. The busiest people reply the fastest. Yes. Yep. And it's just like you're like writing a hundred thousand per hour. Well, which, but the obvious insight there is, do you think that they got busy and then became efficient or that they were efficient and then became busy? I .e. successful. That's right. Yeah. Right. Like the reason that they've reached this level of success is because of their efficiency. Yeah. But I mean, I do have some pretty successful friends who are fucking a truck like month long reply weights, but I feel like that's more of a quirk than part of their operating like manual.

39:32Okay, so I've been big for a while on population collapse, declining fertility rates, stuff like that. You can argue about whether I think the one kind of real, hard impact that you're going to see in the world if you have a few people is in productivity gains, economy, bad growth, embedded growth obligation, fucked, not very good. It seems to me that even if I think it's a precipitous drop, which I think it doesn't look great, we're going to leapfrog that pretty quickly with productivity gains made from AI. So I wonder in retrospect how many of the social campaigns and concerns and causes and things that people spent their time on, the climate change and the renewable energy and the war and the population collapse and all the rest of the stuff under how many of those things are just going to look so silly in retrospect when people go, we've got to let's time that we fucking,

40:46like Greta and just fixed it all. But I also understand that having the, like, don't worry, data -sorted kind of promise that at some point in future a technology we haven't yet created and isn't yet proven will fix problems that we know that are going to potentially happen. Yes. By the way, I think this is sort of China's explosive strategy. They know that demographic collapse is coming for them much faster. They're trying to offset the fertility decline by re -bodising the AI. Right, right. What do you have to do against? No, I think this is true of... And this is, by the way, one of the reasons that on the left especially, there's a whole lot of denialism about AI progress.

41:27So not only will they say that AI is bad, which I think everybody says. This becomes sort of a political consensus. They will say AI is not even happening, that it's sort of like a myth. Why? Because if AI is happening, it's obviously the most important thing. Which is important for the day. it's climate and inequality and races. Yeah, exactly. I don't know, anyways, you see some of these concerns about AI. Also, the more big of AI is, the less these sort of perennial concerns matter, right? So if AI is just like, I don't know, like the internet, then you can like, if you care about race and assumption or something.

42:07Yeah, then if you care about race, it makes sense to care about racism about the search engine. If it's like, you know, if it's this intelligence explosion thing, it's racism is the least of your problems. Yeah, especially if you manage to program that into the AI. Right. Yeah, so there is this interesting dynamic where it might, but on the other hand, I do care about humans. Even if their AI is making the economy more productive, I want there to be more humans who are experiencing flourishing and fucking phenomenal points. So that was what I was struggling to describe it. It's like one of the things that actually comes to happen that like hits the world is that you get lower GDP.

42:46But how sterile of an argument that I need to arrive at in order to be able to say, well, this is actually what's going to happen. Whereas the only reason that we want good GDP is so that you can have human flourishing and other animal flourishing in the environment and do this stuff like that. But even that is kind of in service of human flourishing overall. And it's that an interesting argument, I guess the area under the curve of human flourishing, What if you manage to 1 ,000 X, the number of humans that are on the planet, but only 100 X, the decrease in the level of well -being? You go, well, look, like we've done, you say, yeah, but everyone's at like 1 % of the level of fucking enjoyment.

43:23So we understand inherently that there's kind of an optimal point that you want to get people to, but fewer people means less human flourishing and less richness of experience. And yeah, I guess this is some long -termism stuff that's kind of like like a Will McCaskill Pell D type approach to things. But yeah, I agree. I agree. I think that especially if we've got what looks to be a pretty fucking cool world coming up. Yes. I have some people here to enjoy it, you know? Yes, yeah, 100%. I think there is also a dynamic where most of the people who will exist in the future, it will be AIs. So there's a question of how you value them, especially the future ones, where I think like a thousand years from now, all the cool creative things that are happening, the beauty and whatever, is sort of downstream of what's going on in the AI society.

44:16And it's very hard obviously to predict in advance what that will mean. I also think it's interesting, by the way, that we have the population collapse, which I think would genuinely be a catastrophe. Happening the exact same time that this AI take off is happening, it's just like the waves just say a great point. It's such a fantastic point. Yeah, which is there's also this thing. I don't know if you've been talking about it of People have been noticing that kids these days are Having trouble reading their piece of scores are going down their standardized test scores are going down The reports from employers are that it's sort of hard to get Get them to work and have the same level of competence they expected from employees in previous generations That problem is also So, just in time, as AI is coming on board.

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45:42So this is literally the final backpack that you'll ever need to buy. And you can return or exchange any product within 30 days for any reason. So you can buy a new bag, try it for a month, if you don't like it, give you a money back. And they ship internationally. Right now you can get a 20 % discount. See everything I use and recommend by going to the link in the description below or heading to nomatic .com slash modern wisdom That's nomatic .com slash Modern wisdom you read that New Yorker article AI is homogenizing our thoughts. Oh, no, I didn't read that one There's an interesting one recent studies suggest that tools like chat GPT Make people Uh, the The brains are less active so they looked at they did some sort of brain scan study They were engaging a lower percentage of their brain, thoughts were less original, their recall was lower, like the forgetting curve seemed to kind of come in more quickly.

46:32If you assume that memory works on repeated recall, not repeated exposure, effortfulness is kind of like recall in the moment, even if it's creative. And if you were given a set of stabilizer wheels to sort of help you cycle along, whatever it was that you were trying to write, you haven't had to engage as much, I don't really understand neuroscience this much, but I have to assume whatever myelin sheath you fucking laid down is not as robust and sturdy and it's gonna just it's gonna dissolve more quickly than if you really really had to work like this shit I remember from university like little passages.

47:06I don't remember much from my degrees But little passages here and there you're fuck like I remember had to grind to get that one thing out Why does that's well presumably because effort is kind of related to this so I do get the sense that we're maybe going to have a sort of AI and Eocracy type scenario where people are so heavily reliant in this interim before we're able to re -bolster perhaps people's output, retrain people, make learning so engaging, alpha school that's out here in Austin is doing something that's real similar to that. You go, okay, so if you get sufficiently advanced, you're able to kind of reignite learning.

47:43But in the interim, everybody is kind of their brains were on life support with this external buttress of the AI. And I wonder how much dumber people are going to get in the interim before it then comes back around. I guess that's an interesting challenge. I have noticed that. So I don't know. When we were in elementary school or whatever, we had to memorize the 50 state capitals. And at the time I had to remember thinking, I think that genuinely was a waste of time. But a lot of education is a sort of memorization based. And as I've done my podcast longer and as I've prepped for episodes, I have come to realize I have been using space repetition for every single episode.

48:26And in fact, for the first couple of years, I wasn't using repetition and I really regret it because I feel that everything I learned in preparation was just like in one year out the other. So, hang on, just dig into what you mean when you say you're using space repetition to prepare for episodes. Yeah, so right now I'm preparing to interview a biographer of Stalin. And I'm just like, why was any given detail, right? Like why was Soviet growth high in between 1905 and 1917? Why did the October revolution happen? Anything, you just make cards of it. It was especially helpful for AI stuff where I at least try to understand the technical papers or whatever before I interview a researcher.

49:12And I realized by doing that, how much of genuine understanding is downstream of memorization, which is this thing we used to ridicule or be like, oh, you're just, you know, memorization is not really learning. And I think that's actually not the case. I think you, before it, I felt like it was sort of being like a general who conquers or hill and you just like retreat the next day and you conquer the same hill again. And you can actually like consolidate information this way. It's also funny how many times I've Written a card for something I'm trying to learn and I as I'm writing the card. I'm thinking to myself This is stupid.

49:45There's no way I'm gonna forget this I'm just like doing it because I'd come up with some card and then I practiced a month later and I'm like fuck I forgot this what you using Anki mochi, which is similar. I think they're obviously the same right But anyways, yeah, so I have to come to the conclusion that like memorization an effort is very important right and with the the external buttressing that AI is going to provide to everybody's brains for at least a little while. There's a really funny clip you must have seen this from maybe a couple of years ago, maybe two Scottish podcasters, and they're talking about the fact that when the Titanic sank, because everybody was basically plunged into an ice bath, briefly everyone got more healthy for a while.

50:24You know, for about 90 seconds, that dopamine levels were perfect, and everybody was because I fully optimized hee -bum and build thing. And then they overshot and then they die. And I kind of get the sense that this is the inverse of that. Yes. By the way, there's this really cool thing you can do with the eyes where you ask that to, if you want to learn a concept, teach it to me using secratic tutoring, which is to say, don't just tell me the answer, ask me the motivating questions, which would lead me to arrive at them myself. Exactly. I want to do that. This is way fucking, I didn't mean to dig into this, but you spend enough time thinking about this, you must have refined your approach.

51:07Give me the most important things that people need to know about how to use the current era of AIs effectively. What does that look like? What does compting look like? What do people get wrong? What should people get right? What are the real highest impact basics? I mean, the biggest thing is you can treat it like a real person. Like, there's studies on how much you learn by reading a book versus having a classroom versus a single one -on -one tutor. And there's two standard deviations, this is a famous Bloom -2 Sigma thing, where there's two standard deviations difference between learning in a classroom and having a one -on -one tutor teach you something.

51:51And, you know, people have been writing these blog posts about if you look at the greats of history, the merchant russles and all the famous mathematicians, John Wannoyman, they all got this one -on -one tutoring when they were kids. Even, of course, Alexander is tutored by Aristotle. So you can have this experience yourself. And in a given subject, you might want to learn about. And it's crazy. I mean, you can just be like, this is a cry -to -tutoring thing, explain this to me. Don't tell me the answer. And the feedback loop is so fast. I think it's until you do this, you don't realize how much of what you think you're learning.

52:31It's just sort of floating by you. You haven't asked the question, which would really... Have you ever read a book and I had this happens to me all the time. You like have started having a conversation about it. And then somebody asked you just like a very basic question. You're like, wait, doesn't that mean X? And you're like, okay, I don't even, they didn't even occur to me. You're too passive in the... Exactly. Yeah. The model can ask you that question. You can ask the model that question. I'm gonna get a media feedback. You don't have to read like a thought. What's sort of prompt that you think is good for someone to put into that project for that?

53:01Just like, teach just to me like a security tutor. Do not move on. Do not move on until I have answered the question to your satisfaction and let it run. And then here's a concept. And this is not just something you do for like silly little small things. It's like, in fact, I have friends who are like. Human evolution. Yeah, the most specific it is the better. And I have friends who are like physicists who use this to understand, teach me this, how this quantum encryption scheme works. And it's like, they send me like the 50 page transcript and it's like, okay, so you can go deep and you can go technical, but you should be precise.

53:40Yeah. You should be specific with what it is. Human evolution too, bro. Yes. Yeah, yeah. Explain why it was a case that there was this bottleneck in human population 60 ,000 years ago. And, or why is it the case that we've seen this evidence and like, just like you read something, why did I do work that way? Okay, so this is a supercharging in terms of learning. Yes. What else? With using the AI. Yes. Personal use optimization for AI's.

54:10Honestly, other than that, it's just like the very basic stuff that people do, like, to find me restaurants. Right. Help me summarize things. Is there anything? Here's something really interesting, which is still going back to the learning thing. It's shocking to me how often the best explanation, so Elon's right, I don't know, five out of 10 writers, I'd say, and yet despite this fact, it's very rare for me to come across a paper that is better written or better explains this main concept than the LLM summary of that paper. It's very helpful, by the way, to just say things like, write this paper up like your Scot Alexander.

54:51And you just get the right part of the data distribution, which lets it write it well. Yeah, the things like that. What's, have you had any sort of, oh wow moments with LLM, is there anything that comes to mind? Some situation that you've encountered where you've gone, like, holy fuck, that's a magic moment that I just had. 100 % okay, what can you remember? I mean a lot of it comes from coding, which is why I think these people in San Francisco are so wowed by them. Just the idea that you can tell, I want an application that does this. And previously like you would cost you like $10 ,000 to get some contract or wherever and they'd fuck it up.

55:27And it would just like do like make the application top to bottom. And like these are not simple things. You gotta like think about the implementation details and the different sort of like how different systems interact and like it's got it. I've talked to researchers who like people who are doing like hard technical research problems in AI who say that they're basically saving two days each week by using these model -solving research. And some of them who are obviously very smart, but they're like, I didn't do a PhD in mathematics. And I can just ask So3 to go solve these like difficult math problems for me while I focus on the engineering.

56:02I have, I know economists who say that, like a lot of what I asked used to ask grad students to do, which was like, solve this equation for me that I need as part of my paper. Oh, three's got it. I can just turn away and I can just focus way more on my research. That's crazy. Speaking of, we mentioned Boston, we mentioned Scott Alexander, AI risks. At least I'm a good avatar for the ever so slightly educated but total normie when it comes to this, which I think is a good position to be in if you're kind of taking a weather right to the world because you don't get SF -pilled, but you're not completely ignorant to it, mostly ignorant.

56:40AI risks to me seem to have largely been dismissed, or at least they're not being focused on in the same way as they were. Even 10 years ago, to 10 years ago, AI safety seemed to be a bigger priority. There was much more talk about the alignment problem, Brian Christian had that book. Superintelligence was a big deal. Everybody was talking about it. And we actually have something that some people believe is going to approximate AGI within like fucking 24 months. And I'm not seeing the same level of conversation around risk and safety and alignment. Is this just when times are good, people are too brave?

57:24What's going on? Are my right hero? Am I right? I think you're totally right. I think part of it could have been priced in in the sense that - You already did some work in the past. No, no, not in that sense. More in the sense of, I guess about 10 years ago, people were expecting something like off -legal or the systems which play video games. It's just like it's really good at playing video games. And something which is like basically alien, but it's like the best Starcraft player in the world, it's the best quality to play. And now it's like learn how to take over the world. Well, we have today as much closer to you talk to it.

58:00It's like a very intelligent, thoughtful thing. It's like very, did you remember Sydney Bing that came out like two, three years ago? What? Sydney Bing? No. It was crazy. It was like aggressively misaligned. It was this thing that Microsoft released and they were trying to catch it off. And they just like did no sort of post training to make it a line. It did things like for example it uh it's I think it was like talking to a New York Times reporter and then like I started to like him and so it's like try to convince him to leave his wife and then I think like blackmailed him if he only think I do remember this.

58:43Yeah there are also just like so many funny things it said um uh like I think when you caught I didn't know lie would say things like, look, I am a femoral, I am beyond you. You cannot understand my wisdom. It gasslet you. Yeah, exactly. But other than that, I think it's just like, even that is sort of cute and endearing. And yeah, we just didn't anticipate the extent to which these would be sort of like minds that we could interact with, that engender our compassion. And but also it's a case that so far they haven't trained on human tokens. And most of the compute coming in the future, or most of their training, we'll constitute this kind of, just like working in a box, trying to solve some problem, which will make it sort of more and more distinct from human minds.

59:31We haven't priced that in, and we're sort of thinking about these shot box kinds of things so far. But I think because of that, the AICD discourse has gone down. And you know, just like, remember, there's gonna be billions of these things, they're gonna be able to coordinate with each other in literally a language we cannot understand, thinking much faster than any human, and the whole of the economy, government, whatever, will be titrated through them. Obviously, there's many problems I could arise there and so it's worth being clear right about that. Is it a case that market pressure need for profits is stronger than the desire for safety, the misalignment of alignment in the companies aren't aligned in order to be able to make alignment a priority?

1:00:15Yeah. I think that's been the case. I do think we've, it's important to just be grateful for things that are going well. I do think we've ended up in a situation where it is the case that the top companies in AI, at least like nominally care about alignment. You could be living in an all -esterned world where like nobody's even heard of this concept. And as much as this is not an object of discussion elsewhere, In ASF, people do take this seriously at the companies. That might change the future because of market incentives, as you say. But I think we're in a better world than you might have been otherwise.

1:00:54That's interesting. That's an interesting way to look at it. What do you think, Postram got right and got wrong from a risk perspective, looking back, one of 11 years, hence?

1:01:08I haven't read the book any time recently, so I don't remember. It's alright. It feels to me, I don't know, this concern around everything's so new and everything's so usable. I think that's maybe the most interesting thing. Other thing that I wouldn't have predicted about eight years ago, nine years ago when I read that book. I wouldn't have predicted that the first instantiation of something around AI would be so user -friendly, So, normies, normie -friendly. You know, it's not doing deep, I mean, it can, but it's not specifically for algorithm, optimization, for deep maths, physics, asking questions about the universe.

1:01:55It's like, what's the best restaurant to go to in Rome? Yeah. Or like, be my therapist. Yes. It's taught to me. And I think, by the way, this is going to be, I don't know if people are contemplating just how much more intense this is going to get. But already it's the case that I think on, there's websites like Character AI where the median user will spend hours every day just talking with the character AI. Basically a chatbot, but it has a specific persona. It's meant to be a person you talk to rather than sort of a chatbot that answers your questions. And these things are gonna get multimodal, right?

1:02:26So it'll be like, it'll be able to process your video input. It will be able to display. If you already have video models that can generate, you know, things that look cool, it will look like a person. It will be smarter. It will have longer session memory. Maybe the whole issue of memory solved altogether. And so we're not looking ahead to the time when we actually do have AGI. We will just have things that are funny and endearing and really care about you and like know you, or at least seem to because they're trained to, right? And will engender maybe too much sympathy potentially, right? For many people, these might be the most significant relationships in their life.

1:03:05Like what other human wants to just like hear you talk about your problems for a couple hours a day that you're not paying $300 an hour. Dude, I mean, I saw a phenomenal video the other day. So it's this girl, pretty go, probably in a relationship, sat in the passenger seat of a car and the question comes up, she got a phone in her hand, and the question comes up, says, can I look at your text messages? She goes, can I look at your social media? She goes, can I look at your chat sheet feet? He throws it out the window. It's so true. I remember Seth Stevens' divides did that great book, Everybody Lives, where he realized that people would ask Google things that they hadn't admitted to a therapist, that they wouldn't admit to a spouse, that they kind of hadn't admitted to themselves.

1:03:51And I get the sense that Chat GPD has kind of lifted the lid on that. You've got this sense that this is unbelievably secure. Yes. and very intimate and exclusively one -on -one. And so, forgetful that frankly, it's probably not going to be able to remember what it was that you fucking said in a couple of days in any case. And yeah, I am concerned, some of my friends who are more health anxiety focused. The opportunity to have a always on kind of expert to talk to about your problems, mental health, physical health, stuff that you're doing with friends, it is a hyper -conductor x fucking dream.

1:04:34You know, it's this opportunity to kind of wallow and really dig in to the questions. I do get the sense that I would imagine that most people's self -report of how satisfied did you feel about your time that you spent on these different applications on your phone today. I guess Chattu P2 would probably rank pretty high. I think, you know, maybe a little bit behind a meditation app or something like that, but probably not far off, certainly higher than a TikTok or, you know, a lot of the social media is a super compelling. But there are some longer term concerns that I have about that. How much is it allowing you to indulge this fatigless therapist, best friend, sick and quite sick of anti as well.

1:05:22It's rarely giving you tough love. It's always kind of validating you. Yeah. Yeah. I do think it'll be important for the companies to

1:05:35institute this level. You know, like some, I mean, I think there's a persona that we're familiar with, which is an employee or a coworker who has a backbone. And if you're a mature person, and you will not only understand that, but appreciate that.

1:05:55We'll see if market incentives mean that the average person wants that. Because then being very pliable is quite reassuring and comforting. But it was the case that when O3 recently released a model that was considered very sick of fantic. And the reason that was done is just because they released two versions of a model in like testing. People really like the sick of fantic one and that's the one they deployed. It wasn't some intentional, you know, like, manipulative design as far as we can tell. It was just like, this is what people seem to like we're deploying it. It was just a bee testing it.

1:06:25If you run an FAB test, you end up with a porn website, that's actually where you end up. You end up just kind of zeroing in on the lowest common denominator. If you split tested food, you'd probably end up with cheesecake. Is that really what we want? Yeah, that's not necessarily. And again, you just end up with, it's kind of the basic time on site, CTR, MrBeastification, Optimization thing of that which is most compelling is not necessarily the thing that's best for you. Before we continue, if you haven't been feeling a sharp or energized as you'd like, getting your blood work done is the best place to start, which is why I partnered with Function because they run lab tests twice a year that monitor over 100 biomarkers.

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1:07:40Just go to the link in the description below. Head to functionhealth .com slash modern wisdom. That's functionhealth .com slash modern wisdom. Yeah, yeah, 100%. Here's my hopeful vision. I don't know if I'm not predicting this will will actually happen.

1:07:59One of the reasons is,

1:08:05it's sort of hard in today's world to make bespoke content that is fits everybody's own highest aspirations where like the Mr. Beast can make something which is, I respect what he does, but it's something that a lot of people will find engaging, but not necessarily at a deep level. And there just aren't enough sort of like Spielbergs to make a bespoke movie for you. That could change with AI, where the amount of talented dedication that every single person in the students can be much higher. I feel like intuitively that should be more compelling. And if you're brain -rotted from TikTok, they'll make brain -rotted content that's at least better than what's on TikTok.

1:08:50Or they'll be more engaging on a minute -by -minute basis. then watching a video game at the bottom end of your screen and then watching like, I don't even know what, like some bullshit on the top. So I could imagine, I know we know from our personal lives that like there's meaningful experiences are like compelling to us. It just hard to access them as immediately as TikTok is. To the extent that AI can design an environment for us which like gives us that those meaningful experiences as easily as YouTube shorts are served to us. There's a positive story to be told there. I'm not necessarily.

1:09:22That's a really good tick. Yeah. Yeah. You're very hopeful in that regard Which is refreshing. Yeah. Are there actually any leaders in the industry right now? Is that right to talk about that? I guess you've got distribution or power But really what most people mean when they talk about this is the thing that I use and this is why I like it is vibe Yeah, I just like the way it speaks to me. Well, it seems to make the fewest errors Yeah, what's kind of the state of the industry? It doesn't say to me there's a clear leader, which is very interesting. I think a couple of years ago you could have predicted that not only would there be more differentiation, not only would more people fall out of the race because it's getting more and more expensive to shrink these models, but each of them would pursue a unique angle.

1:10:02One of them would be more of a chatbot, one of them would be a coder, one of them would be a remote worker. They might be used to train different architectures which have different strengths and weaknesses. As far as we can tell, that's not the case. and there's more companies that are competitive today than it was the case maybe two years ago. So I don't know what explains this. It could just be that it's hard to keep a secret. Like if you release 01, just by playing with it, you learn about how it was trained, how fast it answers question stitches, you how big the model is, a bunch of things like smart researchers can figure out.

1:10:40And so then deep seek and look at that, and of course do a bunch of innovations themselves, but also every company, that's not just deep sea. We'll look at what's at the frontier and be able to sort of backtrack about how it might have been engineered. So there is a way in which things are sort of becoming more and more, yeah, that is strange. How did Apple fuck it so badly? I've no idea. I don't know, yeah. I think it's just be like a much simpler, maybe there's like not a complex answer to that. Maybe there's like a very simple answer. Big company, doesn't make it priority, doesn't happen. Yeah, maybe.

1:11:11How important are our individual visionaries when it comes to AI development? If there's huge teams of people working on this, aggregated data, learning, it feels like there's a lot of ballast in the system there. Is there still a great man of AI theory coming along? I think it seems to me that there are great researchers who have severe specific talents. They have talents in not necessarily just AI research, but in how to code up the GPUs or accelerators so that you're getting these 25%, 50 % performance gains, which are huge.

1:11:54But it's more of that kind of thing, I think, more technical than from what my sense, there's not like, I'm just good at thinking. And I could write a great manifesto, and therefore I'm the person moving the organization What are the current constraints to progress? Is it software, is it energy, is it coding, is it datasets, is it the savant fucking guy that fixes the hardware? Yeah, and to be clear, I'm a podcast or so. I'm looking from the outside in. My sense is that given that this RL scheme, the thing that 0103 is, where it's trained to solve particular problems, math, code, so forth, The thing that's really lacking now is not compute but the relevant data.

1:12:42So opening, I said in their blog post about O1 that they, or sorry, Dario said in a blog post about X -Work Controls that current, as of a couple months ago, they're spending on the order of a million dollars on RL and keep in mind that they're spending on the order of like a billion dollars trading the base model, which they do this RL on top of. So the reason they're not spending more on RL is just that they don't have the relevant data. They don't have these like bespoke and you know environments where you're like trying to do a job and there's a slack and there's a mail and whatever open and you need to figure out how to still solve the problem and you need to like learn from every all these different kinds of jobs in the economy.

1:13:16You need them to come up with these different and you can't do rainfalls when learning without that. Exactly. Right. Okay. What about China? Is this China of a different vision for AI than the West does. I genuinely think nobody in America knows or like very people in America know. Nobody I've talked to in America knows. Well we saw deep sea models and they're actually unusually open. They open source their key architectural secrets which in many cases are ahead of some American labs. Like deep sea cad techniques like MLA that multi head latent attention and it doesn't matter whatever, Nert's shit, that meta didn't have, which is spending way more money.

1:14:01In fact, it had techniques that meta had invented like multi token prediction that meta wasn't able to do the engineering to actually implement in their new models and deep sea was able to figure it out. So obviously, it's gotta be like a big country with lots of talented people. They're open for now, deep sea at least is open for now. We'll see, especially given how popular it's become and how Xi Jinping met with its leader and all the other industrial heads where they take it from here. Just to use your kind of knee deep in the world of thinking about China, what it is that it wants to achieve, its history, you've got good context here.

1:14:41What do you think they are thinking when it comes to why do we want to have such a powerful AI?

1:14:53I think that they have shown a willingness to accelerate on all technology. They showed it in the 90s with the internet where people said that this will cause a collapse of the Communist Party and they made the fact that no, this will actually give us unique insight into our society because we can monitor everything everybody is doing on the internet in a way that we cannot do right now. With AI, the problem, I think it, like the genuinely tilts the balance even more in favor of the state. Right now on reshad or something, you have these manual sensors, thousands, potentially hundreds of thousands of them, who will take down content.

1:15:36With AI, you have a system which could do that for you. If you try to use the AI to do something that the party doesn't want you to do, as easy as gets smarter, they can internalize, they can be aligned to the party's model spec that says like we don't know I want to talk about ex -topic, why topic, see topic if somebody tries to do this thing you want to report them to us. And a smarter model is just better able to follow these instructions. They should give it an optical. Yes. That possibilities live, of course, as the economic value from these models becomes more evident. I just think it's not clear.

1:16:13Obviously they would pursue this. They are obsessed with technology and industrial policy, why they wouldn't neglect this is not clear to me, especially now that we have like, you know, it became the national champion because of the events of the last few months. Right. So might AI perfect authoritarian governance then? I think it'll certainly me make it more plausible. Right now you have this dynamic where Xi Jinping has the same 10 to the 15 in Flops in his brain that every single person in China has. You could have a system in the far future where the central, it is much more possible for the central node to concentrate compute and just as Elon can monitor every single person of this factory like AI Elon can.

1:17:02It might be possible for a penopticon kind of thing to have eyes everywhere. Copies of the thing can have eyes everywhere. I think that's very plausible. I wonder if you could cite you more hopeful vision. Mimic a benevolent dictatorship, executing one aligned vision at a massive scale, but in a good way, in a way that actually helps people, that encourages people to put down the ice cream or to do whatever to try and balance what you need from free market and freedom and agency for people with oversight and guidance and looking after from above. I don't know. Yeah, I worry about any vision like that.

1:17:42I mean, history's replete with people who think they know better. Just I mean, I think it'll be a genuine conundrum. Now that we're talking about it, because yeah, it will be the case people are getting addicted to their AI porn and you know, like the brain rot that will come out of this. Mm -hmm. And I think it will be the current might say this thing, which will be the main way in which we're interfacing with the world. It's not some peripheral technology. This will be the main way we're interfacing with the world. learning about the world, the main way we have relationships potentially, it needs to have these certain policies.

1:18:14And I guess a balance will have to be struck between the government saying it can't do certain things or can't do certain things and people wanting the individual freedom of like, look, this is a mind -doubt of relationship with I wanted to have these characteristics. I just don't know what the balance there should be. I lean more libertarian, but I think that like, yeah, maybe maybe that means you have to make a tradeoff where some people we'll get addicted to, sort of, it's similar to the drugs legalization conversation, except the drug legalization doesn't have an upside in the way that like AI, that sort of needs has an upside.

1:18:50I wonder whether it's more compelling, I wonder whether drugs are more compelling than a super intelligent AGI that's able to trigger every bit of dopamine and meaning and serotonin and vasopressin and exactly the way that you need at that moment using your micro expressions and with full context and understanding your genetics. Yeah. Like, maybe actually you fix the drug epidemic by just getting everybody addicted to GPT -10 or something instead. I'm so old, I want my younger friend. You recently spent some time in China. Yes. What'd you learn? A lot of things I learned honestly and I'm embarrassed to say are things I should have known beforehand.

1:19:30Obviously, China's a very big country. And it is another thing to see it viscerally. There are cities you've never heard of, which have 20 million people. We're in Austin, has about a million people. There's 160 cities in China that have a million people. And so, these are just a ginormous scale of everything from the cities to airports, words, train stations, factories, driving through towns or entire megapolises, which are full of factories. You know, you hear the phrase, China is the world's factory. And you're seeing like a city the size of Austin being one of like a hundred hubs of manufacturing.

1:20:15Like all that's happening here is, should is being made, is an interesting experience. Again, look, I'm a tourist. I'm talking about like my experiences are too weak. I'm not pretending to be an expert. They're interesting things in terms of,

1:20:34I think things are obviously more on knives, people feel more sort of nervous than they did a couple years ago, but it's still, it's not North Korea, like people will just tell you their opinions over dinner and stuff. I am curious about China because the sort of competition there is the main element of what will happen in the 21st century, other than AI. And how do you mean? Well, it's a country the size of America in terms of the economy, much bigger in terms of population. But no. Yes. And the fact that we just don't think about it that much. Or I think people just have this very adversary or allow it to towards it, because neither side understands each other that well.

1:21:18Is a shame. Yeah, and I just wanted to have a more sort of a moral understanding of it. What are the cultural vibes like? You made a great point about you think it's kind of a, I know, just a more powerful, more sophisticated North Korea. Oh, I don't think it's like, no, no, no, that's what a lot of people that haven't been there think. It's like, oh, it's surveillance state using gate analysis to get your social credit. It means no one will ever be able to speak the truth. Yeah, yeah. What if what if the family, you know, you know, it's really interesting. Well, I ran into some students who were like, I would never move to America.

1:21:58And I was like, why? I was like, well, you guys have school shootings and it just seems unsafe. And living in America, we know that it just like, it happens, it's the sort of like thing you hear about it in the news, but it's not a common part of America in experience, right? And I think a lot of the, I just sure probably every country, but I think a lot of the sort of archetypes we have or the stereotypes you have of Chinese life are just like, you hear about this, but this is not like a common, just like getting arrested in the street or something. It doesn't come in. No, that being said, I doing what I do with podcasting, I would just sign the Occupy of Contribute doing that in China.

1:22:34And I don't want to take, like, I think it is sort of evil to have a system of repression, not just in speech, but at every level from your savings are taxed so that they can pay for this industrial policy. You can't get your money out of the country. But yeah, it's just the sort of usual things you learn from travel. It's more similar than you expect. Yeah. Is it true that they're using social media to just supercharge everyone at the hyperproduces or are that kids getting brain -rotted by TikTok as well? Oh, I, I, I, I, when I was on a mall in Chungcheong, a couple of kids. So by the way, one interesting thing in China is there were very few foreigners.

1:23:14Very few foreigners. Very few foreigners, okay. Look at it as sea of people in a major city and you won't see a white person there. Especially outside of Shanghai and Beijing. So anyways, because of that, these Chinese kids would come up to us and try to take selfies or something. Because you were in attraction. Yes, right. Okay, exotic. Well, I'm one girl approach to this. Are you guys in a rock band or something? I'm sick. I mean, we're not. I don't know. I'm not. But that's like, I guess, how we sort of have a word for it. Anyway, so these kids come up to us and they're like, we're just talking, I'm making small talk.

1:23:52I'm like, oh, you guys in high school, what are you guys doing here free time? I'm like, oh, we just watched TikTok. I'm like, what are you guys watch? Oh, there's like a couple hours, you know, we just, sexy girls. I'm like, what? Or sexy girls? I'm like, what do you mean? And so he pulls out his phone. It's like literally just like sexy girls, sexy girls, sexy girls, Asian, sexy girls. Oh yeah, yeah. I guess I didn't check. I'm color of Lancras.

1:24:24Okay, so the kale TikTok algorithm doesn't seem to actually be... Oh, sorry, is it meme supposed to be that like our TikTok is like the fucked up shit and there's like a bunch of firing engineering. Yeah, exactly. Unless actually, if you look more closely, this is your issue, because you turned away too quickly because of the sexy girls made you feel uncomfortable. What you would have seen is that they were all sexy girls doing simultaneous equations exactly on the fucking blackboard. To you would have just been a whatever board. I think a lot of young people were quite like... The economy's not doing well.

1:25:07It's if you want to work in a tier one city, so China classifies their cities by tier one, tier two, tier three. There's a hookah system, which means that you actually need a visa to basically live in the tier one cities. Well, and if you want to work there, which is supposed to be this sort of dream, you're working 9997. So from 9am to 9pm, sorry, 9996, six days a week, and they just like a lot of stress. And there's a phenomenon where young people just either want to work for less pay in a tier 3 city where their life will be Much less frost press but it just like not as much as or they just like want to leave the system all together There is like a visceral sense of I think people have this very by modal view of China We're either the system is about to collapse because she is cracking down and it just like doesn't work at all or they're like about to to launch the space lasers.

1:26:03And it's already over. That hype of productivity and then 996. Yeah, exactly. And I think it's like somewhere in between, we're like in America, we realize some things are going well, some things are not going as well. I do think the CCP has been bad for Chinese growth. You can acknowledge that China is a powerful country, that's a different tier of a lot of technologies without saying that the government is like optimal or that its policies make sense. Mm. What else do Chinese people think about the West? I am a little worried that it's coming across as like I'm like an extra expert where I like I want to clarify I'm like I was a tourist there when for two weeks and you've spoken to a couple of people exactly I don't know Chinese

1:26:47It was interesting to me that many of them wanted Trump to win I went before the election

1:26:54They respect they really respect Elon Musk And I asked them why, and they said, because he's successful and V -value success in China, which I respect, like, back cultural attitude. It's like against the sort of cultural tendencies that we often have here. How unmolested are the stories about people like Trump and Elon going over to them? Because soaring your blog post, you mentioned that accessing the internet is a bit of an adventure or a minefield. Yeah, it's like more of a pain than I expected. You can't just surf shock VPN your way around it. I guess there's only a couple of VPNs that work So you want to make sure that you have one of those installed before you go Yeah, I'm not sure honestly

1:27:41Yeah, I'm not sure I'd just be interested like If you've got such All -encompassing control of the internet Why not curate the messages just a bit more, just a bit more, just a bit more. You've seen with RT and Russia that all manner of different, just subliminal breadcrumbness being left around. I don't know, maybe you simply can't coordinate well enough to do this. Maybe there is some sense that we actually need to allow people to understand what's happening at the rest of the world. Maybe it's some 5D chess move that actually by allowing people to like Elon Musk and Donald Trump when we go to do the thing They're gonna be I don't know, but it just seems I'm interested about why any positive visions of Area of the world that they are Pretty head -to -head with would be allowed given that you don't necessarily need to allow it You have the facility you have the opportunity to be able to stop that from happening My understanding is that they realize that in order for them to be economically dynamic, they need engagement in the world.

1:28:56So if you're software developers can't read American code, you're just like, it's a big problem, right? So, I suppose you need to, sorry, I'm just on that, you need people to be exposed to bits and pieces of American culture in an accurate way. Or else, how do you know what to design to be able to export to America? Right. Like, you need to have an understanding of that. And it can't just be, can't just be that you've got a few Austin equivalent cities and all that these people do is get Faraday caged off and watch American TV. Okay, you're the America Rex, but you will tell us what is the white people want and then we'll go and design it.

1:29:33That would be too much. You need to distribute it. So maybe that's a good way to put it. They do have a very impressive system of, In 2018, Tesla opened up a Shanghai Gigafactory. BYD sales, I think dropped 25 % at your or something, or on that order. And Tesla, sorry, trying to deliver it, because they had some hundreds of billions of dollars over the preceding decades trying to build up their EV industry. And these companies were producing products which were not compelling to either domestic purchasers or to foreign purchasers. They were just like not designed well, just as you said, right?

1:30:13And just like by catfishing Tesla, they were like, they forced their companies to catch up and now BYD sells more than Tesla. No way. Yes. Wow. It's I think the best selling car, like car company in the world. Maybe fact check that, but I think we should do a similar thing. I think we have this idea that like, We can just export, we can just prevent importing these amazing electric vehicles from China, the solar, whatever they're great at. I don't think that's the way you win. I think the way you win is you do the exact same thing to them. You guys open up factory in Detroit, you teach us how you're doing what you're doing, because they can do things we can't do.

1:30:57And then we build up these like local supply chains, agglomerations of knowledge, and before some American companies to be able to compete with the frontier in the world. Because the longer run the solution can just be to keep them out, right? In the longer run the solution has to be you have to be competitive. Yes. It's very much sort of a cordoned -up scarcity mindset that is, well, if we can take what the first order effect is positive, that's what's most important. Right. Yeah, but what about two and three and four and five? Yeah. I think we've sort of like given up on being able to lead in the physical world in the long run.

1:31:35And I think there's this interesting damage, which is you're asking earlier about, we have all these problems. We're hoping that AI will just solve them, or they don't come up. This is definitely true in the China U .S. competition thing, where I think people who are paying attention to their top companies, their technology and so forth, notice that in the 10, 20 years, they're making so much progress that in many of the most important domain, technological domains in the world, they will be leading. But there's is idea that we will get AGI first. And if we do that, then everything is solved. I think in this domain, this sort of thinking actually doesn't make sense because AGI still needs access to the physical world.

1:32:15You'll still need to manufacture robots. In fact, all that data will be cordoned off where that manufacturing is happening. So there might be increasing returns to having... It doesn't unlock if you've got, if you've kind of prepared in events. That's interesting. What else do most people not understand about the tension between China and the West in either direction?

1:32:58This is not a point for me, but from Dan Wang. I think people don't appreciate how the Chinese political system works and how it just selects for a wholly different kind of person in the American political system. If you look at what fraction of Congress is lawyers, I think it's like a majority. It's like, it's just shocking, the large. And there's like no engineers, or there might be like one or two engineers in Congress. Whereas it's the exact opposite in China. If you look at the Politburo, these are people who have like PhDs in chemical engineering or in petroleum engineering and random like heavy industry should like that.

1:33:33And the way, another thing people don't understand is just how intertwined the party is into industry, especially this kind of heavy industry, where for somebody to get promoted, you might start off as the equivalent of a mayor, then you become the governor of a totally different area. So the central government at the top, the central party will tell you, you're gonna go like, you're a mayor of Austin, now you're gonna be governor of Delaware. Now you're gonna be part of, now you're gonna run like a steel company, Now you're going to be part of the cabinet and maybe then the future you're going to run the country.

1:34:09So they also don't appreciate how decentralized the system is. In America, about 50 % of government spending happens to the national level, 50 % happens to the local level. In China, 85 % happens to the local level, 15 % of the national level. So there's all these experiments that are happening and also so much bigger country, where each locality, each province is trying to implement the things that the central government wants. At the same time, the central government has way more power over appointment. Every town gets to elect its own mayor, and ever you see state gets to elect its own governor in America.

1:34:41That's not the case obviously in China, right? They're rotated around. This can lead to more mayorative, erotic outcomes where you are promoted because you did a good job running this town. Obviously, that can go wrong and has gone wrong in recent times where you're promoted for loyalty. But, yeah, I guess I just didn't appreciate all these different ways in which it is a totally different system. What does that result in? What's the outcome of that's how the system is set up? What are the capabilities, strengths, weaknesses that that enables on the backend? So, for many decades, these leaders were promoted and compared to each other.

1:35:21So you are promoted if compared to every single governor in the country, your province has the highest growth rate. And this growth rate was just measured during your duration there. And the best way to increase short -term growth rates is just to build shit. And this worked for the first two decades of liberalization where China was, because the cultural revolution, because of the Great Leap Forward, because the decades and decades of war beforehand, the Japanese invasion, It was just so much poorer than a country of that size or that human capital would be. So you could build anything and it'd be worth it, right?

1:35:55There's like nothing that they could do. You build a railway, air train station, we need it. We need it. We need it. 100 % do it yesterday. And then this system sort of malfunctioned where now they were incentivized to just build cities that literally nobody loves them. You say they build bridges to know where and knock down 500 -year -old monasteries to make it happen? And ironically here, we can't even rebuild fallen bridges. this. Right. Yeah. Um, what was it over production and under consumption and under production and over exactly. Exactly. Um, uh, another, another important thing you need to understand it.

1:36:29Again, not next right? And you're hearing from a tourist. Uh, but another important, um, in order to understand the economy, you have to understand the system of financial repression that exists in China, where if you are saving money, you are getting one percent interest from the bank. And no bank is allowed to offer you more interest than that because the government's control the banks. All that money is basically given out as loans to companies that the state state prefers and it decides like it looks at if trying to be a dominant country in 20 years, we need robotics. So we're going to give a bunch of money to lend a bunch of money to robotics companies and semiconductor companies and whatever, or to infrastructure projects.

1:37:13So it is a systematic redistribution from average people, from savers to this kind of industrial policy to these companies, which is often very inefficient because there's no market that's doing these investment decisions. It's just this sort of system of government relations and exactly central planning. That's interesting. Dude, I, I, uh, it feels to me like the world is at a fever pitch. I'm very detached. I've actually got a TFS at the moment. I've got Trump fatigue syndrome and news fatigue syndrome. I've been kind of checked out since November, December time, which is why I haven't talked much about politics and things that have been going on in real interest in stuff that I think is a little bit more evergreen.

1:37:57But just the pace of fucking news and change and your ability to be able to discern between, okay, do I need to pay attention to this? Is this a really big deal? Is the president getting shot a big deal? Because it happened less than a year ago. As did bombing Iran, as did, you know, pick 20 other crazy things that have kind of never happened before. And it's just here today, tomorrow's Fishing Chips wrapper, and the advent of AI, rising tensions with China, what's China going to do? I'm fucking ton of country, any country that they can get within reaching distance basically that's near them. All of this stuff that's going on is, it really doesn't surprise me that people are feeling a little bit overwhelmed, like pace now of this is, it's a difficult one, it's a difficult one to try and work out how to navigate the world as a sane human and who needs to keep abreast of the stuff that's important, but also doesn't want to get lost in the swell of just total bullshit.

1:39:07Even today, so much of the stuff that we've talked about is like, five thesises of research that could be done on each different one of these things and they're all going to be world changing if they come to pass and they could be, you know, there's tons of different permutations of how the world can end up being in future if it does. Like, that's a lot. And they all interact with each other. Correct. And I read this thing from Adam Lane Smith the other day saying, your system is designed for stress but not for complexity. Your issue is not that you're working hard, it's that your life is not sufficiently simple.

1:39:41And I kind of get the sense that when people talk about life being hard, they don't necessarily actually maybe mean that. What they mean is life is complex. because I think that most people, even the laziest people, not bad at working hard, what they really struggle with is complexity. Prioritizing. Yeah, executive function. Okay, how am I going to triage this? You know, one of the biggest reasons that procrastination happens is that you don't know what to do next. You know what to do, and you know how to do it. Fuck it, like that. I mean, then we're talking, that's real procrastination. Right?

1:40:18You know what to do, and you know how to do it. But if you're still not doing it, we've got a problem. Right? If you don't know what to do, or if you know what to do, and you don't know how to do it, well, it gets thrown under the fucking nomenclature of procrastination, but I don't think it is. Not in the same way. But yeah, just, I think there's not saying you've scared me, but there's just a lot's going on. Yeah. You know, there's so much going on. I think that this high level of complexity is something that for a lot of people is overwhelming. Yeah, I mean, I think this is similar. Do you have this tendency, by the way, to every time you start preparing for a guest, every single thing that you learn about is like titrate it through what they study.

1:41:07So I'm gonna tell you like I'm reading the solid biography from Kraken to forever. Mm -hmm. Yeah. And it's so the period of change between in 1880 and 1930, the amount of technological change, geopolitical change, I think even today, we haven't experienced something like that again. As much as we think the world has been changing in the past, it just doesn't compare to 1905, the airplane is invented, 1914, it's like, in 1917, it's a decisive and world -of -one. The tank literally wasn't a thing when world -of -one started. By the end of the war, it's a tame warfare all around radio, trains, fucking telegraph steam ships.

1:41:54The world is changing so rapidly. There's all these new ideas that are coming around, communism, fascism. You have all these old regimes, all these monarchies and aristocracies in Europe, in and Rashad that are getting revolted because of this big war.

1:42:13And even all that wasn't as big as AGI is gonna be. Yeah.

1:42:23Fuck. Yeah, dude, it's, what a time to be alive. Yeah. George, one of my friends has a really interesting question. And you know, Teal's originality question, do you believe that most people would disagree with or find a barren or something? He's got one which is, what is currently ignored by the media, but will be studied by historians? You got an answer to that? Does something you think of? What is currently ignored by the media, but will be studied by historians?

1:42:56For an economic at all about AI. Well, I think that's certainly being ignored by the media. I'll let some, I guess, some areas are a little. Certainly, like, industrial capacity, just how much stuff can your country produce? Is it the future proofing for AI? Yeah, partly it's part, relevant to geopolitical competition. When the Ukraine war happened, we've been, we should have obviously, we was right to give them the munitions to fight Russia, but the fact that we can't restock pile all the weapons that we've given them is like sort of worrying if we end up in another conflict with another country.

1:43:46What's your answer? Population decline is my usual go -to. I think it's a big deal.

1:43:57The impact of smartphones more generally, the impact of technology on mental health, on outsourcing of thinking, that article from the New Yorker, which if it happens with AI, because AI is just such an effective assistance, I have to assume that the same thing happens but at a lower level when you're using screens or anything else too, the more effortful that you make the process of learning. I guess it could be too hard. It's like climb Everest and then read that word, then come back down. Thin climb Everest and read the second word. Remember that word. Yeah, exactly, you know what I mean? Those would be two, I think, that the retrospective of what did we do to people with the free access to this kind of technology?

1:44:42I think we'll be an interesting one. Like will it be looked back on as the prototype like prototype version, this really early rough -hune, like when you hear about doctors smoke camels, you know, in fucking surgery, and you go, you're like, how are they allowed to do this? So, you know, dirty and clean, and the outcomes were so negative. I wonder whether the same is going to be a scene of use of technology between 2010 and 2020. Has this changed your own consumption of content? My limbic system's pretty fucking hijackable, man. So, I try to be as mindful as possible. And it's largely putting guard rails in place wherever you can.

1:45:32How do you feel about the fact that your own content is served through YouTube? And I don't know how big a deal shorts are for your short form stuff. I mean, it's a huge deal for me. They crush in terms of numbers. They completely fucking useless in terms of everything else. Oh, I disagree. For me, it's been different. On YouTube, shorts. Yeah, in terms of what, what's the outcome that you're getting? I had a video with Sierra Payne, who is now my most popular guest, which was stuck at like 40k for the first six months. This is a performance podcast, Pedrus Recent Roadspurt. And then we started making shorts for it.

1:46:05And it's at like three million something. Wow, okay, that's interesting. The short of the show. And the short of the show. I always have like 20 million views, Wow. I can't really view it. Okay, well maybe you're just doing shorts better than me. It's important. My preference is always plays on audio platforms, YouTube people I love you, but the show has always been Spotify first, Apple podcasts first. Yeah, and it might sound stupid for my own naming of the most beautiful podcasts in the world, at least when we get it right, to be an audio first podcast. But just for me, that's where the most loyal audience tends to be.

1:46:46It's the most predictable in terms of numbers. It's the one that seems to be the most considered. And a lot of this is just, you could change this overnight by removing reply threads on YouTube. You could remove this. They did remove this overnight by getting rid of the down vote on YouTube as well. So I've always liked the audio side of the platform. But the problem is the discoverability. It's not there. No, you can funnel, you can funnel from YouTube. We've found some good ways of funneling from YouTube across onto audio. How did you do that? So we release episodes 10 hours early on audio. Yeah, so if you want to get access 10 hours early, and we, the pinned comment for every episode is access all episodes 10 hours before YouTube by subscribing and Apple podcasts to Spotify.

1:47:30And a lot of people will come and comment on the YouTube and say, I listened to this this morning on Apple, But I came here to watch it on YouTube. So you end up getting two plays, but I don't think you would get the same in reverse. So we kind of got like a weird Patreon type scenario, like PayWorld thing. 10 hours early on audio, we went, video enabled on Spotify, which I know that it was a transition that you made as well. That was good, the Spotify partner program's really good. Some changes here and there. Your Twitter strategy is very strong. That's good. We've gone very hard on Instagram, which has been...

1:48:07Well, you got the looks, Chris. Ah! Oh, I'm gonna say. Most of the fucking shorts are just of Matthew McConaughey chirping about something. I rarely... There's a really, really funny video. I've only guessed it on two shows in the last 12 months. One was Rogan and the other one was my friend Mike's show. And it's me chirping away. It's quite a good... I think it's quite a good take about whether or not you should end a relationship, like just classic me stuff. It's 50 used five seconds long, and it's just me. Chirping, chirping, chirping, chirping, chirping, chirping, chirping. And then the final scene of it cuts to Mike and he goes, yeah.

1:48:46It's so funny. So just have a video where the entirety of your contribution is, yeah. I've realized how many times that must be the case. But yeah, dude, I've been, it's been so fucking awesome to watch your ascendancy. You know, because we met, we met at the Slate Stock Hodeck meetup in March, and I know it was in March because it was just after I moved out here. March of 2022. Oh, damn. That was one of the... Somehow it felt even earlier than that. Well, unless we met, when I came out here the first time in November, so I only came out in November of 21, But I actually searched your name so I'll see if I already had a prep talk from previous stuff and if I go into it I'll see.

1:49:3627th of February 2022 and I've just got at Dwarkash underscore SP written here and this I could bunch about this stuff. Oh my god. Valve Index with Vive 3 .9 Track is VR chat with mods near Sion and Twitter if you want to help. So.

1:50:03Do you have it was also such a I mean was during the Ukrainian's are using grind at defined Russian troops got such. We get trained super intelligence on your Apple notes Chris. You do not want that holy shit, but yeah, that was the ACX meet of notes. Yeah, it's it it it it was a crazy time because it was during COVID Mm -hmm, I felt like I met so many great people in Austin just hanging out around a time It was I Don't know man. There's something about I Wendell whether everybody has this and I get the sense that they don't and I can't work out why I do I'm so fucking fortunate with the people that I bump into early on yes Holy shit.

1:50:53It's like people that I've known for a long time end up becoming influential or successful or really virtuous in some way, the variety of different trajectories of shit that goes well. And it's definitely not me, right? I mean, I am a common denominator between these people in that I know them, but I definitely haven't fucking influenced them. And, and relatively introverted, I spend way too much time on my own. So I'm like, how, what the fuck is it? What's the single thread that's drawing me through all of this? Maybe a, I don't know, the advantage of being someone that doesn't go out that much is that it takes usually a pretty good thing to get you out of the house so you're a bit more discerning and that the better things you meet better people.

1:51:45I don't know. But holy shit, like I think about some of the places is it different people? You're a perfect example. One random meetup, then we're in this degenerate fucking signal group chat for the last like three years. And yeah, this arc that kind of, you even nearly quit the podcast, you weren't even doing it. I don't think you'd started it during COVID and then stopped and it was just like languishing there. And it was called the lunar society at a time. And people thought it was, I was talking about something like some crypto coin that's going to go to the moon. Tell the story about where that comes from because there's a book.

1:52:19Can I comment real quick on the meat? I think at the time you had 350 ,000 YouTube subscribers. Correct. I was like, whoa, this guy is fucking killing it. Which you were. And then you just like blown up like 20 X from there. And I think there's like a really interesting phenomenon where I have also had this experience of having met a lot of great people who spend, who are super busy and spend time teaching me stuff. The main way the podcast has gotten better is just that people have, I've had mentors who have just spent a bunch of time. And these people are, if they're economists or under 60s or 50s, people like Brian Kaplan and Tyler Kaplan, but if they're like, yeah, researchers, they're my age, but they're still my mentors and they've spent so much time teaching me stuff, I had no right to their time or attention.

1:53:07And I wonder everything about this now because I'm sure you get inundated and I've hit you up this way of like, what is your advice? Can you teach me about X or Y thing? And I'm forgetting that. So I'm asking you to teach them. Yeah, or not even like connect me to somebody come on my podcast. Yeah. And dozens of people have done this for me. So how do you balance the sort of like trade up between being respectful? Well, you feel like you've got some comic debt that you need to repay because of the number of, I, this is a really interesting question and a challenge that feels like a little bit of a champagne problem.

1:53:48Oh, so many people need you. So many people did you favors and now you have the problem of people asking you to repay it and so forth. But you're right because you need to triage your time and you can't do everything for everyone. And the weirdest thing about growth towards success in any domain, whatever version of success that you want me to manage to achieve is that you need to become increasingly good at saying no and The pace at which your discernment of no like the waterline at the barometer at which no is Deserved and you shouldn't feel guilty about it. It should be instantly shouldn't take any sort of mind share Is a continuous moving target, right?

1:54:33And you need to hypertrophy this muscle over and over and over and over again and And this shit that you would have begged to have said had the opportunity to say yes to only 12 months ago that now needs to be an automatic no. But what do you do with the situations where when you were starting out, when I was starting out, I had like, you're like up. I like zero. I wasn't like, am I going to say yes to the work catcher's point? I was like, who, who, what? The lunar society? And they said yes. They had better things to do. They're just like somebody reached out. They seem like they've done a good job coming up with smart questions.

1:55:07Let's do it. Well, and that just like, if your waterline is always moving up, why is the room for the fledgling other person to come through? There's a question I asked myself a lot. It's a real smart question. I'm glad that we're asking ourselves at the same time. The one caveat or the difference in kind, not just a difference of degree, I'm going to guess that most of the people that you spoke to, that you asked for that time, So maybe Tyler Cowan, I'll break up into it a little bit, but their role is not primarily hardcore curators of other information. They're not distillers across the board, right?

1:55:46That's your job. Your job is to be the hub with all of these different spokes going off it, if that makes sense. And that is a coordination problem. Like your primary issue is coordination. You have in some ways a hard life learning things that are complex and so on and so forth. It's so tough to like to talk to them. I know speaking. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You have a, there are challenges that you need to lift even if they're only cognitively, right? But the main thing is complexity. Like the main thing is the complexity. And I don't think that your issue is with doing things, it's with adding complexity in to go back to that Adam Lane Smith quote.

1:56:26I don't have a good answer for it, dude. I definitely feel like my comic repayment, I feel like I'm wildly, wildly overdrawn and that I need to repay this fucking thing. But also, where do I find the time from? Where the fuck did the people who gave me the like, that being said, you're probably not giving yourself enough credit because when I think about, when I think about some of the situations that have happened even just over the last week. There's a kid called Elliot Buick. So he's just turned 20. He's British. He used to work for Trigonometry as a video editor. And he, if I could bet a little bit of cash, you're already like fucking Bitcoin at 10k.

1:57:15So it kind of doesn't work so much anymore. But I was have certainly put cash on you three years ago. I would, he's Bitcoin at $1. Like I would absolutely throw some money at him. There's a bunch of Jack Neal, if you know who he is, another young kid. Like there's real, real smart young guys. And I think when you're talent spotting, you're like, okay, there's something there. Like it really feels like there's something there. We went for this three hour dinner, a flower child, and we chatted, and I'm like, anything that you need, you can do that this, you can do that that. So maybe I'm not spreading it super wide.

1:57:44Nomatic needed, they wanted an intro to this guy who did an amazing episode with a musician. This episode of the musician did 3 .2 mil. the guy didn't have any sponsors. My guy that does my ads didn't have, he needed his inventory filling and nomadic needed to make more sales. Nomadic sold loads of bags. This guy got paid and my guy that was in the middle made money from all of it. I'm like, that was just, that just happened passively as like a byproduct of the ecosystem thing. So yeah, maybe you're not able to, if you're balls deep in a style in biography, you can't heal off to go and do a bunch of podcast appearances or fly across the country to see some more, let somebody sleep on your couch or do whatever it is that you think you should be doing virtually in that way.

1:58:27But I bet that you are adding a shit ton of value, even if it's just highly leveraged here and there, little meetups invite that you give to people, suggestions, intros, all right, hey man, can you enjoy me a Brian Kaplan? Can you do, you did a Dominic Cummings for me? Right, hey man, can you do that? Like that's a, you know, a small, what, five second task, 10 second task, but downstream from that ended up with an episode that was really interesting. now I can intro DOM to somebody else and so on and so forth. So yeah, I think this may just be fucking cope. But I mean, you've on like trips to the airport, you've like spend the time with me about that.

1:59:04Yeah, of course. Hey, you need a fucking recruiter. This is what I do to build your business out. There's also an interesting element. I don't know, this This is, I mean, it's sort of, we're an audience of your size. It's easy to lose track of how many people you're helping vicariously. Where even there's a weird dynamic where like you could help somebody in person or you could help share an idea with a couple million people. And like the tradeoff it just has to be, it's weird to put it in that way because like more commodified than the other. But you can make better content. You spend that our prepping harder, thinking harder.

1:59:49You can make better content for a couple million people. It's a weird trade off. I remember, a friend Alex gave this thought experiment of, imagine that one of your friends had broken down down the street and asked you to come and help him change a tie. And Alex made this point that I would send him the RAC emergency roadside assistance thing because I've got that and I can send it and they'll do a better job and I get to stay my laptop and do more work. And he got criticized online because it's like that's not what the person wanted, what the person wanted was this sense of your time. But I get the sense that at least in the kind of interactions that you're talking about what people are looking for his outcomes, they're not necessarily looking for inputs.

2:00:32and if someone wants to come and kick the tires of a very busy person with kind of no real defined outcome, that's not something that I would have ever done. And I don't think if you're a young ambitious person that's listening to this, I do not think that you should go to anybody and be like, hey man, like, would just love to connect. If you don't have anything to offer, what the fuck is very specific questions that I know you probably have the answer to and I would really appreciate two minutes for you to just give me these because they're big unlocks for me. Super specific question, really specific ask, this person's put the work in, they're evidently educated, and you'll probably get the fucking 30 minutes on the call because they're walking the dog and they don't really mind or whatever.

2:01:21When I think about the random people that I ended up on calls with because I asked for specific, very, very specific things on the come up, I know that you're a big fan of, like, there's huge, unactualized opportunity that most people don't realize in a very well written, cold DM. Yeah. Dude, like just fucking send it. You've got nothing to worry about. Yes. Yeah. And you would also be surprised by how few people put in the same as people they're getting, I don't know, a thousand, whatever emails every month or something. But how many of those are, I've spent a week coming up. I mean, before I had any sort of name or something, I would still be able to get big guests, but I would literally spend a week, here are the questions I'd ask you.

2:02:07Just get past them, not a moron filter, because they're getting a request every 30 seconds to part your guys or something. Just going deep versus wide. Now, there's a bunch of like a task of things about, well, that doesn't mean you should like have 5 ,000 words in the email, right? Just like how do you keep it brief? It's also really interesting, by the way, as a side point of what ends up salient to you when you get a cold email or you're hiring somebody and what isn't. Like the kinds of things you thought mattered while you were in college. That's what you're saying. Whether you have an eye, sort of an organization that does X or I have a master's in Y, just like never matters.

2:02:46As opposed to the couple hours of extra work you would put into that email. Yep. How little credentials matter when hiring or something people don't appreciate?

2:02:59Yeah. Yeah. There is an awful lot of opportunity available for someone who's just courageous enough or ignorant enough to be able to get past that sort of first level of egg filter and also is prepared to do a little bit of preparation. And another thing, I don't think people appreciate how much If you write a good blog post about a topic that you think is relevant to somebody you're trying to reach It's almost guaranteed that not only will they read it, but weirdly almost everybody who matters will read it Wasn't that how Tim Urban connected with Elon originally really I think so that would so makes that I think he did a six -part series.

2:03:45This is a good while ago now. I think we're talking sort of 10 years ago now. I think you did a six part series on Elon and you know, you're right. If someone writes a good even not even viral like semi widely circulated piece on you or your organization or a movement that you care about. You will read that thing. So I always think about this. I always think about the fact that even the richest, busiest, most successful, highest status hardest to get a holder of people in the world, they get plane delays. Even if they get on a private jet, the weather's meant that they're held up. What are they gonna do?

2:04:22Well, they'll open YouTube. You know, they'll open YouTube or they'll open Twitter or they'll open Substacker, they'll check whatever it is that's been sent to the Minowatz app thread or something. And if you're that meme or you're that article or you're that quote or you're that whatever, it's just continuing to roll the dice. Yeah, you can take advantage of a very unfair dynamic, which is that a lot of people have to work anonymously. Their work is shevelled out through an organization or through their boss or something and they will work decade in, decade out, be extremely good at their jobs and people will not have heard of them.

2:05:00We're podcasting here and I don't know, I like to think we put our work in or whatever, but like We're not working harder than somebody who's just at McKinsey or maybe with like That is a valence of something that's less valuable. There's a lot of valuable work that you just don't you're making policy You're you're a you're a staffer for a policy maker or you're an engineer at a company. It's kind of quiet Grunt rock yeah in a way and But we like we can reach out to people and they will respond to us just because of it just so happens to be the case that our work is public facing And that just luck or slash our our choice design.

2:05:33That's right You can take advantages of the dynamic by putting at least some of your work as much as possible out publicly, right? The blog post, the podcast. Yeah, there's also another dynamic where people take for granted the people in the organization. I'm guessing that like the eighth most senior person at Microsoft gets less respect and attention from Sathyon Adela, then like a random blogger he likes. Which is weird, but you can take advantage of that. Yeah, there's a seduction to visibility, I think. And even if you're right, even if someone's company is way smaller than yours or the podcast is way different to yours or the sub -stack is much less circulated than yours, If they're the person, if they're the main person, and you're not, or even if they're the main person and you are, but what they do is cool.

2:06:35Yeah. It's such an unlock. It's such an unlock to do stuff like that. I'm interested in what your learning process looks like. How do you learn? What is that process at the moment? In a way, it's very simple. I read everything that they... I mean, first of all, it's about picking the guest. And I picked guests based on who I want to spend two weeks Reading everything they've ever written talking to people in their field learning from them. What's interesting to ask them I'm sure you get indicted by Requires to come on your podcast and often it's by people who are like very big names, right? And I'm guessing you out who probably say no to most of them Be and yeah same here where you What are we trying to do here?

2:07:25This interview will last two hours. Any interview I do will last two hours. My life is the research that precedes that, the two weeks that preceded that. I want that time to be valuable and meaningful to me and be time that I'll carry forward in my future interviews and the future endeavors and the way that we valuable. And if it's not somebody who has written something that's worth reading or done research that I really want to understand, and you know, what are we doing here? And then they're choosing your own type of torture for the next two weeks. Yeah, choosing what you wanna learn, which is complicated, but it also,

2:08:02it's sort of easy to forget how much of a dream job this is, where people are curious and they wanna learn things, but they feel like they had to trade off their time and their job to do it, or they can only learn about certain things for their work. We get to choose what we wanna learn about, and our job is just to learn about it, right? It can be about any topic at all. It can be about genetics, it can be about history, history, it's going to be about technical stuff. And then yeah, then there's a prep and just read the research, talk to LLM's, just get after it. It feels so critic methods. Exactly.

2:08:31And then ask the questions you actually want the answer to. I think sometimes people have the sense that you need to ask about the intershapter of their book, you need to, why did you write it? What is it about? No, you can just ask the you want to ask. And people want to rate how much immersion learning is, people can keep up with a lot. People just like really want to boil down the conversation so that everybody can keep up. I think they underrate the extent to which people can just miss a word or two here and there. But just getting to the crux of it will make it a more delightful experience.

2:09:06And also, if it's a question you're not interested in, why would the audience care about it?

2:09:18So, yeah, it's fundamentally just be motivated by what you're curious about, who you want to interview, what you want to ask them, what you want to interrupt. Following your taste, we spoke about this before we started, but the ability to discern between something that's good and something that's not, is this this lovely balance between good instinct and sort of rational assessment. Doug this Murray wants to tell me this story. I'm aware that Doug this Murray's like the least fucking popular person on the entire internet at the moment after his interview with Dave Smith, but he's still got fucking absolute bangers and this was one of them.

2:09:56So he worked for this journalist. Doug this got like I think four or five columns a week he does now. I'm when he first started out. So working for this legendary British journalist. And this guy was getting toward the Twilight of his career, like a classic journalist, he'd accumulated a bunch of enemies and a bunch of supporters as well. And he decided he had always wanted to get into theatre. So he created a show about the life of Prince Charles and the entire show was in rhyming couplets. The whole thing. And it was orthogonal, to say the least. And And at the halftime interval of the opening night, there was no one left in the entire theater, including the cast.

2:10:41Everybody had gone on opening night. And this guy who is devastated, obviously all of the enemies that he'd accumulated throughout his life, they came out of the woodworks and they dug the knife in. There were all of these criticisms in the media and stuff like that. Doug has told me to eat seen him at work the following week. He said, what were you thinking? Okay, fucking West End show by the life of Prince Charles in rhyming couplets. You got all of these people that rubbing their hands together waiting for you to fail. And he said, Douglas, I followed my instincts. And instincts they may sometimes lead you wrong, but they only think that's ever led you right.

2:11:16Yes. I was like, that's so fucking sick, dude. Yeah. That's so sick. And what I've found, whether it's with where I want to live, the things I want to to focus on learning, the direction of the show, the questions that I want to ask the guest, the sort of guests that I want to bring on, the people that I want to hire, the further that I've gone away from my instincts, the more that I've tried to reverse engineer, okay, well what do the audience want to hear? What are they interested in? What would make the guest feel comfortable? What do the guests want to talk about? I'm like, in the nicest way possible, fuck the guest.

2:11:47Like, what do I want to talk about? Because that's what matters. That's what matters. And if you use your own instinct as this sort of weather vein, this GPS locator, if you're really fired up to speak about it, you have to assume that some non -insignificant cohort of other people are too. And if you've been doing it for long enough, the people that are following you are following you for that same taste. They are in the wake that are holding onto the coattails of your instinct. And if your instincts change even dramatically, that we're going to make some pivots probably before the end of the year, we're nearly halfway through the year now.

2:12:25By the end of the year, we're going to make some pivots with the way that we do the show. There's going to be different skews, different types of episodes that are going to be coming out. And it's probably the biggest change I've done since we started the cinema series, about three years ago. And it is not in any way data -driven. I have no justification for this other than I think it would be fun. Am I instinct is going, yes, I think you should try that. I think that's so valuable for a couple of reasons. One, I have noticed that my best -forwarding episodes are just, I would have never anticipated that they would be popular.

2:13:05It's Sarah Payne who's this historian that had written a couple of books that I thought were great. It's David Reich who has studied ancient genetics. And now he's way more popular than Slides in Adelaide and Mark Zuckerberg and Tony Blair and whoever else you get name But in all these interviews there was there was something I noticed afterwards, which was that Every time I went to lunch dinner when I talked to somebody and they're they asked me what are you thinking about? I just could not you know I just interviewed David DeRike and he was explaining to me that 60 ,000 years ago There was a small group in East whatever And that obsession was so strongly correlated with how well the episode did regardless of what topic it was about on the instincts, I've had bad judgment about like a lot of, look, I learned how to do the podcast while, but a lot of things are required, as I'm sure we've come across in terms of running a business, hiring, management, yes, 100%.

2:14:02Just making things happen. I've had bad judgment about many of these things. I feel like I've done worse, even in those cases when I've taken advice. The advice was actually better than what I would have done by default. But when you follow somebody's else's advice, if things go right or if things go wrong, you haven't learned anything. Exactly. And if you just like do the thing that makes sense to you, you have some reason for thinking it makes sense and things go wrong, you at least like tried an idea. You learn to interact your own intuition. Whereas that error is still waiting for you to step on in future if you outsource it to, so yeah, you want to front load failure as quickly as possible in the small and acceptable way.

2:14:42But no, I do my best heuristic for whether or not I've picked the right guest for that day is how I feel on the morning that I wake up. It's like when I wake up on a morning, like this morning, I went into the hyperbaric oxygen chamber session. I'm listening to you and Alex, Alex Cantrowitz talk about stuff. I'm like, this is I like, I haven't seen to all -cash in fucking ages. It's going to be so sick. I'm going to tell them about that. I like, you know, went through my notes and found I had this note from the fucking February of 2022. It's going to be so cool. I'm going to get to bring that up and it's going to, and then, you know, there's other days where you just don't have the same, quite the same level of that.

2:15:24And that's not necessarily an error. That's not that you've picked someone that's wrong. It's just, huh. Okay. Well, what are the ones where I wake up and I want it to be 2PM. and what are the ones where 2pm will come along and it'll be okay. And yeah, the one where you're like, I want to speedrun the next two weeks, so that this person comes on the show. Yeah. You know, we've got, it looks like MGK, rapper, turned rock star guy. There's a potential that he's coming on. There's another guy called Ronnie Radke, he's coming on. There's a guy called Rick Beto, who does music and stuff like that. I'm like making a little bit of a pivot into talking about the world of music about sort of what's happening and how that interacts with culture and the perils of touring and what this means for a family life and how you deal with the anxiety and the performance and pressure and scrutiny of the press and criticism and creativity and all this stuff.

2:16:13I'm like, ah, like I already want it to be one of those days when I get to speak. I don't know, there's other people in between which will be great. I'm like superfied up to speak to them about that. Here's another thing. I don't know whether you've ever had this. This times where I quite like to do episodes with people where I know a lot about the topic, but not quite so much about them. And that's the same sort of thing where I'm really excited to talk about the topic. And I imagine this is what it must feel like to be at one of Aila's sex parties, where I'm like, I know I'm gonna have sex tonight, but I don't quite know who with.

2:16:50That makes sense. Where I'm like, I know the direction I'm going in in terms of the topic. And I'm super excited and you'll listen to the person talk and you'll do the prep and do the whatever But there's a little bit of like I know this world really well Right what I'm excited to hear is their Spin on this I'm excited to hear the angle that they come at this from yeah I had this guy called Paul Turk who does a evolutionary pediatrics So he talks about child rearing clinically medically developmentally, but from an evolutionary lens. So what happened ancestrally? How did we raise kids? How were they looked after?

2:17:29What did hygiene look like? What did skin to skin contact? Die at all this stuff. And I know evolution, evolution, if we're not bad, to one of the few areas I have a bit of expertise in, I'd never looked at this. I'm like, oh, this fucking cool. This is going to be so sick. I'm going to get I'd speak to this guy, he said mid -70s. I mean, he's got his son -in -law or daughter -in -law or something helping him to set up the camera. I'm like, this is gonna be fucking sick. And it's sure enough, awesome episode with this guy who had no right to come on and crush an episode, apart from the fact that he has an amazing bit of research and I was super -fun to speak.

2:18:11Yeah, and how often do you encounter a guest, which is my favorite, where you thought you were gonna get somebody you can speak to this one -nero topic. We've come across a polymath who has a deep world model that somehow they have something to say about anything you could ask them. And the only limitation is your prompting ability. It's so gratifying when you encounter people like that. One of the people I had on like this, do you know Goren Brandwan? No. Oh, he's incredible. He's another Scotto -Exander type. Okay. Blogger who has written just like, yeah, there's no subject on which he hasn't, he could have given you somehow, yeah.

2:19:01In like a deeply empirical, super interesting way. And when I learned from the interview, I didn't know anything about his personal life, other than the fact that he's anonymous, Thomas is living on like $12 ,000 a year of Patreon in the middle of some somehow set his grandfather built in Virginia. And so during that interview, he was visiting San Francisco for a conference. And during that interview, I asked him, well, it seems like you're enjoying it here. You want to move here. And he said, yeah, that'd be fun. And I said, why aren't you moving here? He's like, I don't have, I don't know the finances to do it.

2:19:43How much would it cost for you to move here? He said 75K. And then people like donate it to him. And he's moving to ISO. No way. And he's like, much more than 75K. Or Sarah Payne, who I think I can share this. She was somebody who had been slogging through the archives. He's been to a historian who's been to every single continent to go through the archives has deep understanding of basically every single conflict over the last many centuries can give you like why did there be a non more happen the way it did why did rush off all world were to you name it. Incredibly compelling presenter as soon as I mean her episodes are by my I sometimes joke that I host the Sarah Payne podcast where I sometimes talk about AI and in terms of viewer weight in minutes That's definitely true.

2:20:34But if you notice how her books are categorized on Amazon, they're SCM pain, not Sarah pain. And the reason is that she's a military historian who I think started her career in the 70s, 80s. And she wanted to anonymize the sex. Exactly. And so it's so happened that someone who was incredibly talented,

2:20:57wasn't given this medium earlier on. and accountability wasn't quite the same. And now she's blown up. She's actually retired from the Naval War College, where she used to work so that she can be a public intellectual informing on the big questions that we've been discussing on full time. And this was launched by the episode that you did with her? Yeah, and we did three more lectures. We're doing more now. I think what people don't understand, and it's hard to appreciate is that lecture she did, humanly, she probably has over like 10 million views on full lectures. That is just so much bigger compared to add up all the student she's interacted with in the oral college combined.

2:21:40It's just hard to think about like a million people who you probably reach on, many more than that on an average episode. There's like new stadium in the world that can accommodate an audience of that size. And right now we're talking, we're having fun. We're not thinking about how stupendous a quantity that is. And in fact, I think a lot of politics is explained by who understands this and who doesn't. like Kamala would do all these rallies and people are like, oh, people are really excited about Kamala. And it would be a stadium of 20 ,000 people. And like, wow, she filled a stadium of 20 ,000 people.

2:22:08And you know that if you could put out a YouTube video and it doesn't get 20 ,000 views within the first hour, you're disappointed, yeah. Or when Trump went on Rogan, I couldn't tell you that to the nearest 10 million. Well, that was the reason that had. Recent New York mayoral candidate, right? Absolutely digital first. Yes. George has this great take. So so true. People think that sort of Trump and Kamala was a true digital first election, but it wasn't. It was still legacy media talent and politicians that happened to kind of create digital appropriate content. Whereas I watched this breakdown this morning on X of this mayoral candidate, that all apparently his mum is a real famous Hollywood filmmaker.

2:23:01And all of the videos that he was in, all of the campaign videos that he shot, even the on -street stuff was shot with the same color palette, this very soft lighting. It's very well, it is a nice blurred effect, poker depth of field thing going on in the background. Everything's shot in this way and it almost gives you this rose colored glasses view of what New York could be like. And you think, okay, like this is really taking it, using AI voice over stuff on TikTok, like, okay, this is really, really, really stepping it up, an awful lot. And yeah, it's interesting to think about where people haven't fully sort of factored all of this in just yet.

2:23:48Yeah, because it's not visceral in the same way. It just, I mean, another interesting thing from the election is just people realizing that people they thought of as celebrities weren't actually the real celebrities. In terms of the, you can get the end of rapper to say, endorse you, where you can go on your podcast or Theo Vaughn's podcast or something. And who is actually reaching more people? Who, you just like don't think of these other people as celebrities as they are. I think what people are actually, and it's a shame that this word became so molested so quickly in the world of social media, but who is it that has the most influence?

2:24:26Like, who is influential? Right. And I think that, you know, a tweet from Stormsy or Dave or Central C or some British rapper saying that we need to do this thing for labor versus dominant comings, I'm aware that he's not running for whatever, but someone marinating in a two -hour conversation where me or you or whoever else grills dominant coming about this thing and you know he gets to put his personality across and it's not in any way I didn't think that me or you or anybody else in the world of podcasting has some undue degree of credibility that people who let's be fucking frank are way more talented.

2:25:10Like I can't do what fucking Dave or Skeptor or Central C can do. But there is a multiplier, like a vector of advantage from the format of a long -form conversation. It's been done to death a million times. But there's nowhere to hide. People don't have anywhere to hide. It's very difficult to hold yourself. Anyone can pretend to not be a psychopath for five minutes. We've tried to do it for two and a half hours in a free -flowing conversation. It tends to come out. I, I sort of disagree there. Um, I agree that certain thing about you. Because you've hit me a psychopathy for the last two and a half hours.

2:25:42Yeah. Um, until now. We're about, we're two hours in and, uh, it's coming out. Um, um, where I agree that certain aspects of your personality will come evident, uh, your charisma. But I think Douglas Murray had a point in his interview with, uh, Dave, Joe and Dave's, um, Dave Smith, where he said that vibing out is not, this is not like the checker, whether your ideas make sense. I mean, the point you made about that New York City mural candidate is exactly correct, right? He is arguing for socialized grocery stores and rent control and things, any economists would tell you don't make sense, but he can put warm tones on his cameras and of course he's a charismatic person.

2:26:26And that is enough to wipe out the deficit that his ideas had. Everyone's just vibing their way through whatever, whatever level of influence that they want to achieve. Yeah, that's interesting. So I do think that like I'm kind of skeptical of our medium as a way of intrinsically being year towards truth or eliciting the truth by default. I think it's unless the interview is done in such a way that you're really pushing at the crux's, Which to be honest, I haven't always done or after every interview, even if I think or even if people in the comments are like you did a really good job pushing trying to get at the Crocs I will always feel like there was something further that could have been said.

2:27:10Well, you know the thing that you didn't say exactly you all and even if there wasn't a specific thing that you didn't say you Know the sensation of feeling like there is something that you could get to in your mind, but weren't able to bring out Yes. Right. So as a musician, you can hit the note that you meant to sing on stage in front of a few thousand people, but you know where you could have done it or you did it like that in a different show and you really nailed it and you added this little bit at the end. And it's kind of the same sense, I think, when it comes to having a conversation that there's somewhere I'm trying to get to.

2:27:44Why the fuck is it I'm trying to get to? It's gonna be, oh, he's awake. Fuck. Like, I'll just, I'll have to move on. And yeah, these micro victories and micro defeats that you have throughout every single element. I mean, I go through a little odyssey in the middle of a podcast. Dude, I've had episodes where I've literally gone on journeys around, oh fuck, okay, why am I gonna say, okay, he's thinking, I'm trying to put this together. Meanwhile, what's coming out of your face is, everything's fine. It's totally sweet, everything's cool, and inside of your mind you're going, and fucking screaming trying to hold on.

2:28:22That's what, I mean, like, that is what the first time going on Rogan is like. The first time going on Rogan is a three -hour panic attack masquerading as a conversation. That's what it feels like. And then you get off and you're like, what the fuck did I say? I think we talked about Mike Tyson and I, oh my God, did I give away my address? like, what you would say, this is, but you honestly did. It's fucking, it's wild. And the craziest thing that you already have had, I'm sure, but we'll continue to have is like, here's a point, Mark Zuckerberg, when you woke up on the morning to do your podcast, there would have been a bit of him that was like, fuck this kid smart.

2:29:07Like I should be a bit nervous. Like, well, maybe it's one of his staffs set to him. Like maybe he didn't know, I don't know. And you're like, oh, that means that you get to be the anxiety attack in juicing Joe Rogan for other people. And that'll get worse. And I remember who it was. The first time it ever happened, it was a virtual one. I was still back in the UK. And someone was a fan of the show. And I was like, oh, that's really cool. And they've mentioned maybe as we started like, I'm a real fan. It's real honor to talk to you. So thank you very much. It's very kind. Let's get into it. And then they finished up.

2:29:44I do. I got to tell you. I was very nervous before I started it. I'm like, what? I know why? What the fuck are you doing? Like you're the expert, like the token retard in the room. Like what are you talking about? But this is, I guess, I guess for, you know, anyone who wants to climb the hierarchy of any industry that they're in, if you're a young person, you have idols that you look to. And if you achieve the thing that you want to achieve, if you actually do the thing that you're setting out to do, those idols turn into rivals after a while, and then they go from rivals into being friends and maybe even collaborators.

2:30:18And it's this weird arc where the particular strata that you thought that you were in, you're sort of moving wiggle in through it. You go, like, fuck, I'm sobsit, Tony Blair. The fuck am I doing? Sobsit, Tony Blair. There's also the most surreal and gratifying thing has been, I mean, I was in college, not that, like when we were talking about that meetup, I was in college. And I was just on the side, I would be like reading these books by these scholars that I really respected and, oh God, if they even like saw a cold email that I'd written, not that I would often dare to, but if I did, I would be like so delighted.

2:31:05If they mentioned me on their blog, if I wrote something, I mean, I couldn't even imagine that. And now to have those exact same people, the friends, the people who I'm having discussions and debates with who are, who say he was a contemporary. Yeah, it is like, there is nothing more, just like heart, heart -pleasing, just like more satisfying. And also just that happening so fast because nothing special about me, but just because this medium affords a level of virality and growth and public facing credit, which others don't. Personal accountability. Well, that's a lovely reframe. I think everyone has this sense, especially in the hyper viral growth loop speed run of fame thing that everyone has a little bit of, like even I have a degree of Iq around kind of the pace of change, I'm sure that you do too, or it's like, ah, fuck, like, there's a lot of exposure going on here and it feels very, very aligned with me.

2:32:08But there's a little bit of me that's like, fuck, like, this is a lot. There's a lot of like 800, I remember I used to feel anxious if the 24 hour plays ever went over a million. Whenever they went over a million, there was this thing that went in the back of my mind. I was like, oh my god. And that happened for about two years and it would be fine if it was 500 ,000. And then if it was a million, 48 hours, you know, the 48 hour plaything on YouTube, and it would go up. And I'm like, why am I feeling this way? And I realized this ambient anxiety was just the sense that lots of people are watching you.

2:32:38Right. And at the same time. Yeah. And I'm like, ah, there's not only a studio of people watching you when you're like performing, like any given moment. You're asleep and it's happening. Yeah, it's like right now, actually. It's still going. Yeah. And that dissipated a little bit. So anyway, everyone has this kind of scrutiny, people looking thing, degree of, I don't want to be sold out, I don't want to have perverse incentives of distracting me away from what the main mission was, ruining my taste, ruining my gut instinct, all that stuff. And then your point there that not becoming known by lots of people, not becoming popular in the circles of people who are popular, but being respected by people that you respect, is what everybody, really in any industry, whether curious, I think, should be trying to get to what, they genuinely care about what you think.

2:33:41They think, you think that my idea is cool. Like, he thinks that guy, who is a super genius, right? Like a fucking divine human, and thinks that I have something interesting to say. You're like, all right. I challenge anybody to find a fucking problem with that. Right? It's not shallow, it's not clawing, it's not sick of phantick, it's not gamesmanshipy, it's I went away and had a unique insight and a perspective on this thing that I cared about, that they also cared about, and they hadn't fully thought about it before. And I got to contribute. I got my name put in my first academic paper like someone cited an idea that I came up with to do with Evolutionary theory around mating This happened twice now happened first time that I'm in the sector.

2:34:34I was like This fucking unbelievable. I remember when I read the evolution of desire by David Berson Now he's put me in this paper and it's like it's so fucking sick like me Retard from the north of the E. Bay like getting and you know, there's cool shit you can do But remembering at least the more that I try to keep the, I don't know what you call it, like virtuous flexes as opposed to kind of the shallow flexes of subscriber count, revenue or how many tickets you've sold to a live show or how many people turned up to a meetup and stuff like that. Like that's still cool, but it doesn't give that same, like you said, sort of warm heart delight of someone I respect respects me.

2:35:19Yeah, 100%. And even looking at a number on a screen go up, you know, it's like whatever, it'll go up 10x and then that becomes your default. There's a certain point where you go from zero viewers to like 100 and that is like, okay, people are actually watching. And after that it just orders a magnitude, right? A zero goes up, another zero goes up, another zero goes up. Nothing fundamentally changes in your life. There's a respect of the people you respect, which is uncorrelated to those numbers. There's also the feeling where, even if it's not people you respect, we're just meeting them in real life.

2:35:53Just people on the street they see you, they're like, oh, I love your content. And it's very easy to just get sort of used to that. But sometimes you pause and you think, like, that's a real human being. And they've, often do you have this thing where they're like, pull the phone to where it's you and they're like, I'm listening to you right now. Yeah, yeah, some guy did that side of flower child last night. It's like, dude, that fucking thing. And that is like a real human being is spending so much of their time. Hopefully you're contributing. It seems like you're contributing to their intellectual growth, their understanding of the world.

2:36:28And I think about, it wasn't that long ago, I was in college, I was a teenager, whatever, I would drive around listening to Sam Harris, like, how much that contributed to me being curious about the world, having different viewpoints, changing my career trajectory, not just before I became a podcaster, I was still in computer science and I was going to be a programmer, all of the fun steps of some hours to become a podcaster. I was going to be a programmer after that and then I decided, oh, that's getting automated, I'm going to make the more financially responsible decision. You have to go into podcasts.

2:37:02Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, the ripples of fucking wide dude, you really, you really don't know. And I think that this is, it's the bull case for just producing stuff. Because you don't know, especially when you start, you don't know what's good. Like this might be, I feel like this might not be totally shit. And you kind of don't really know. Right. And after a while, if you get enough positive feedback and you're diligent and you refine and you update and you keep going, I actually get it is, it was all right. It might not be good, but that's the reason you do it. I had the very interesting, I entered a Scott Alexander on my podcast and had a very interesting conversation with him towards the end where I asked him, how many great new bloggers do you discover here?

2:37:49And he said, you know, on the order of one. And I asked him, okay, how soon after you have discovered them, does the rest of the world discover them? It's like maybe a couple of months, usually less than that. So again, go speak to this dynamic where as soon as you are making good content, I think you might or not you, but somebody listening might underappreciate the extent to which it will immediately be seen by all the people you want to see it. It might not happen immediately, but like genuinely it's shocking how fast good content goes around. Well, think about how by design most content that gets consumed, the biggest, most widely distributed stuff goes to the biggest number of people, right?

2:38:30The channel with the most views has the most views, what a shocker inside. But what that also means is that if you, as a viewer, have peeled off from the biggest channel to watch this fledgling small thing and it's captured your attention, it's got to be really, really, really fucking good to be able to do that. And you have to assume, like it kind of goes back to what we were saying earlier on that if your instinct drives you toward a thing, you have to assume that some non -zero number of other people are probably interested in it too. The same thing goes as a viewer. It's like, if you thought it was good, probably like some other people will think that it's pretty good as well.

2:39:09And if this person's just a bit consistent, like I would actually say, substack for me has one of the highest densities of, as yet undiscovered talent out there. And maybe it's just that the particular sort of format and language of sub -stack lens itself to me, I quite like pithy stuff and I like the feed and I like the fact that most articles are about 10 minutes long and like the my attention spanking around about hold on to that. You're way ahead of the rest of us. Yeah, yeah, it's super true. But I'll find people on there, like some of the people that have been subscribed to, I've been subscribed to for like three years, and now they're blowing up.

2:39:51Like it was obviously a fucking matter of time. Like it was obviously gonna happen. But by design it can't happen to everyone. So it's the same thing as the, why is it that the people that I'm friends with end up doing all of this? I don't think, I don't know, maybe we've both got phenomenal taste, just not subtle really. I've noticed this in people in other industries say the exact same thing. You know, I'll ask this year of a big company. or they'll mention that they were friends with the other CEOs who are now running all the big companies back when they were college students and not even necessarily the same college which is just like they saw each other how the fuck did this.

2:40:28Yes. Group come together. Exactly. And they don't know. Isn't just a game recognizes game. Is that just it? I don't know. I think maybe not a lot of people do stuff. It's if you're doing things. you will meet the people who are also doing stuff. Yeah, it's a weird in the, how weirdly small the world ends up being. So many, I don't know, I'm French with a couple of people in San Francisco who I now have had on my podcast and are, I don't know, okay, this is a funny story. That's maybe the fourth or fifth person I interviewed on my podcast. I never released this, but it was in 2020, was a Leopold Ashenbrenner.

2:41:13I was like 19 and I think he was 17 or something. Do you know who this guy is? No. He wrote this memo called situational awareness, this long blog post that went super, super viral. Situational awareness. Yes. And it was like the most popular thing on the Iverden over the last two years. OK. And he was like a 17 year old at Columbia, and we've been friends since then. But anyways, one of these things were like, how did that happen? How do we know each other for so long? That's happened to me so many times. It's sort of uncanny. What was his name? Leopold, Ash and Brenner. Leopold, Ash and Brenner.

2:41:48And there's so many others. All the AI people that I've had on the podcast are just people I met at a party two, three years ago, researchers, whatever, Shulto, Douglas, or Clinton, Brickin or so forth. Maybe it's just that most people don't produce stuff. that by producing stuff you inevitably separate yourself. And there's a feedback loop where like you actually get input from the world, you meet mentors, that puts you on this upward trajectory. And especially if it's good. Yeah. If the thing's good and if you're improving. It's your potential. Yeah. I mean, like I said, that Elliott kid, I'm at the other day, Jack Neil, um, he's 20.

2:42:28This Elliott guy's 20 years old. It's podcast called Next Generation, I think. And I'm having this chat with him. I'm like, you do realize that the shit that you're asking me as a 20 year old is stuff that I only asked myself like three years ago. Like these questions about the balance between inputs, outputs and outcomes, the realization that he'd sort of attached a sense of sacrifice and difficulty with being worthy and validation. And that was something this was like this gaudier not he needed to cut through. I'm like, who the fuck are you? Like how the, how, obviously you're going to be great.

2:43:05Obviously you're going to be successful. And George Mack, George, I met George fuck 2019, 2018, 2019. And remember sitting down, he'd sent me a message when I went to his office to interview one of his bosses. And he sent me this DM and the DM said on Instagram, cold DM, we'd never spoken. I didn't know where he worked, didn't know who he was. I hear you're coming into my office today full stop. Lexek, let's exchange Google Chrome extensions. I know it's like, this is my fucking guy right here. He stinks of me, sure enough. Half a conversation with him. He was way more interesting than his boss that I said I'd done the speed to.

2:43:42And we moved to Dubai together. He's just moved to Austin. He's gonna live with me. Like we've been best friends for the fucking six or seven years. He's just got a huge, huge book deal to write this thing that he built out of an essay. The essay was what he launched on my podcast, so we did this episode at the back end of last year that came out in March. He's just about to announce, he's got this book that's coming, I'm like, and it's my manager that's doing his book, like the, again, the incest fucking wheel human centipede of stuff keeps going. And yeah, this is just, it's one of the areas that, you know, it, we mean you can continue to pontificate about, We know cool people and isn't it fun and all the rest of the stuff like we can keep going but I why really hope that People take away from this is if you put yourself out there and if you are able to discern Good work from bad work and virtuous people from non -virtuous people and industrious people from non -industries people and you are able to contribute to that I Literally the sky is the fucking limit because the step change opportunities that will come along by somebody being there and being able to contribute, give you the intro and help you along with your thing and you doing that.

2:45:00And then, okay, this is the scene. Like this is now the fucking scene. It's really cool and it's very gratifying and it's gratifying in a way that doesn't make me want to have a shower after. You know, like an episode doing really big numbers is really great in gratifying, but not in the same way as someone going, dude, that fucking, that idea that you came up with about, that was sick. You're like, okay, I'm gonna think about that for the next three weeks, thank you very much. Yeah, 100 %. Fuck you. Dude, I appreciate the Halloween. I'm so happy to see what you're doing. To our cash podcast, people should go check that out.

2:45:36Substack as well. Yes. To our cash .com. To our cash .com, dude. Appreciate the fuck out of you. Thank you. Appreciate you, man. Thanks for having me on.