The Grand Mirror: AI as a Reflection of Humanity | Brian Roemmele - Part 2

3 Aug 2023 · 1 h 18 min

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Podcast Notes: The James Altucher Show - The Grand Mirror: AI as a Reflection of Humanity | Brian Roemmele - Part 2

Episode Overview In Part 2 of this episode featuring Brian Roemmele, host James Altucher delves deeper into the complex relationship between artificial intelligence (AI) and humanity. The discussion centers on how AI acts as a "grand mirror," reflecting human knowledge, language, emotions, and consciousness. Roemmele presents thought-provoking insights about the nature of intelligence, consciousness, and the potential impacts of AI on human life.

Key Concepts Discussed

  1. AI as a Reflection of Humanity
  2. Grand Mirror Analogy: AI serves as a reflection of human knowledge and emotions. It's not an alien entity but an extension of our own capabilities.
  3. Emotional Connection: Roemmele suggests that both human consciousness and animal intelligence are largely driven by emotions.
  1. Understanding Intelligence
  2. Animal Intelligence: Roemmele draws parallels between human and animal intelligence, questioning our understanding of consciousness beyond the human experience.
  3. Mechanical Inputs and Outputs: He describes humans as input-output machines, yet there exists something more profound—consciousness that transcends mere mechanical responses.
  1. The Nature of Consciousness
  2. Consciousness vs. Intelligence: Roemmele emphasizes the distinction between consciousness and intelligence, arguing that consciousness is not fully understood and might be more related to emotions than logic.
  3. Evolutionary Aspects: The discussion touches on how certain emotions evolved for survival purposes, such as love and bonding.
  1. AI’s Role in Human Experience
  2. AI as Intelligence Amplifier: Roemmele introduces the concept of Personal AI as "intelligence amplification," enhancing human capabilities without replacing them.
  3. Future of Interaction: The conversation highlights the potential for AI to assist in mental health, personal decision-making, and wisdom sharing.
  1. Human Connection and Social Dynamics
  2. Impact of Social Media: Roemmele expresses concern over the disconnection caused by social media, emphasizing the human need for face-to-face interaction.
  3. Cultural and Generational Wisdom: Discussions on how wisdom can be passed down through personal AI models that remember individual experiences and histories.
  1. Philosophical Reflections
  2. Wisdom Keepers: Roemmele introduces the concept of "wisdom keepers," suggesting that our AI could store and share our life wisdom even after our passing.
  3. Historical Context: The dialogue touches upon how humanity has perceived and interacted with technology throughout history and the lessons we can learn from past innovations.

Key Takeaways

  • AI as an Extension of Humanity: AI should be viewed as a tool that amplifies human intelligence rather than a replacement for it.
  • Embrace Emotional Intelligence: Understanding the emotional aspects of consciousness is crucial to making sense of both human and artificial intelligence.
  • The Importance of Connection: Real human connection remains vital for emotional health and understanding, which is often lost in digital interactions.
  • Potential for AI in Mental Health: AI could offer significant advancements in mental health care by serving as a wise companion or advisor.
  • Cultural Wisdom as a Resource: Personal AI could serve as a repository of cultural and personal wisdom, allowing future generations to access and learn from their ancestors' experiences.

Conclusion The episode concludes with a promise of further exploration in the next part of the series, hinting at even deeper dives into AI's practical uses and its implications for society. Roemmele's insights challenge listeners to reconsider their relationship with technology, encouraging a more thoughtful and connected approach to the future of human and AI interactions.

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Additional Resources

  • Writing Intensive: Interested listeners can register for James' writing intensive at [JamesAltucherShow.com/writing](https://jamesaltuchershow.com/writing).
  • Listener Feedback: Share your thoughts on the show at [JamesAltucherShow.com/listeners](https://jamesaltuchershow.com/listeners).
  • Ask James: Submit questions for James to address on-air at [JamesAltucherShow.com/AskAltucher](https://jamesaltuchershow.com/AskAltucher).
  • New Book: Check out James’ new book "Skip the Line" available wherever books are sold.

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Transcript

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0:00Look, as a manager of people, as an employer, as an entrepreneur, and as even an investor in startups, I can tell you the most important thing for your business is the quality of the quality of people. you hire. The best part is that great candidates are already on LinkedIn. Employees hired through LinkedIn are 30 % more likely to stick around for at least a year compared to those hired through the leading competitor. And I will tell you that the great thing about LinkedIn is that you're not just looking at random people. You're able to see the people who your friends and trusted peers and colleagues who they trust and who they've hired in the past and who they recommend.

0:42And hiring doesn't have to be complicated. Realistically, when you have a business to run, you don't want to spend hours on hiring. You want to hire the right person as quickly as possible. That's why LinkedIn Jobs AI Assistant suggests immediately 25 great big candidates daily so you can invite them to apply and keep things moving. Hire right the first time. Post your job for free at linkedin.com slash altature. then promote it to use LinkedIn Jobs' new AI assistant, making it easier and faster to find the top candidates. That's LinkedIn.com slash Altucher. Post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply.

1:19This isn't your average business podcast, and he's not your average host. This is the James Altucher Show.

1:30Brian, I've been following you for years, of course, on Twitter. What were some things that intrigued you on animal intelligence? I think if we don't understand animal intelligence to some degree, even primates, right? How are we going to really understand machine intelligence and what is intelligence and things of that nature? So quantum physics led me into trying to understand the brain and to understand the observer. Why the heck does an observation change a scientific test? Let's look at humanity. Humanity is basically tool builder and storyteller. That's our existence. We're tool builders and storytellers.

2:08If we took that away, we basically wouldn't exist. We had to evolve extreme storytelling ability because we're relatively weak animals. And so in order, we had to communicate to our kids, hey, don't go over the mountain because we knew that's where the lions were. We had to tell them that's where Satan is. And we have to tell a whole story about Satan and monsters. And we had to develop storytelling ability to basically help the next generation live longer. And I'm sure you know this, being very creative, is that when you get into the flow of things, you're kind of taking a step back. But the spark of insight, that creative spark that comes into you, nobody's been able to fully define it.

2:48It's a collection of all of these different pieces that if you take a step back, combine in a way that's magic. But if you try to force it, if you try to overthink it, you try to capture a cloud in your hand or get a cup of water by grabbing it as much as you can, it dissipates.

3:19This is all related to something you brought up earlier about consciousness. Like we could be as intelligent as we want, but as you pointed out, a lot of it's just mechanical. Like we have these neurons all through our body. We have this pineal gland. We have responses based on our five senses and so on. But none of that seems remotely connected to consciousness. Like none of that, that is just, there's input, which is all of our senses. And then there's output, which is, okay, let's have a thought. And the thought might lead to an action. But other than being input-output machines with like a computer, we also know that there's something called consciousness that seems a little different.

3:58We think that we're conscious. And so what do you think that is? That is the question of life, James. I think if you dive into this study of artificial intelligence long enough and you want to look at it honestly, you can't help but to go back to the grand, what I call the grand mirror, the reflection of AI back to us to say, well, what exactly is going on? And so one of the first things you can do is try to go through analogy. So you look at dolphins, you look at whales, you look at chimpanzees, you look at your dog, you look at your cats, you look at birds, you look at other species, and you start having an honest conversation.

4:42Are they conscious? Have we deluded ourselves to think they're not conscious because it's not our form of consciousness? We're going to be very humocentric of consciousness, right? And we're going to believe that only ours is the best brand. Of course, those poor dolphins, they don't have opposable thumbs. Their consciousness must suck. They're stuck in this wetsuit of a body swimming around. But we know they're intelligent. And I know that they're conscious. Now, how do I know that they're conscious? Because they do show levels of connection that we as humans claim as part of consciousness. And a lot of it, strangely enough, has to do with emotion.

5:25I think part of what humans ultimately mean, what consciousness represents, is something of an emotive sort of construct. And everybody has sort of a different brand that they put out there, especially the deep thinkers. But if you were to put it in a pot and boil it for just a little bit, it all comes out like emotions. It is like, well, they feel, ah, that's an emotion. Well, no, they feel philosophically, oh, okay, but that's still an emotion. Right. And, and, and emotions again are input output, like, like even take something like, even takes like a, like people sometimes say the cliche, Oh, consciousness is love.

6:05Love is kind of, but you know, love is there from an evolutionary perspective. You love the, the, the people who are, you're either going to breed with. So you, so, so. Peer bonding. Evolutionary. You, you, you love people so that you could pass on your genes or you love people who are going to get you food. Yeah. So it all kind of evolves from that. But that also seems disconnected from consciousness. Exactly, exactly. So it's always going to be a bit of chasing, you know, chasing something across a desert, you know. I'm not solving that problem anytime soon. But I do suggest this, especially in the light of us, you know, hearing congressional testimony about, you know, off-world biological entities.

6:51And, you know, what does that represent? I think, you know, no matter where you are on the unfortunate political side of this, because it's now become part of a political, everything, everything's political now. You know, it's part of a political thing. And then it became part of a science thing. Now we're calling people within the military and pilot, you know, experts, expert pilots have been flying commercial airlines for 30 years. We're calling them conspiracy theorists now. The whole thing is like upside down and sideways because, you know, they saw something. No, it was a Mylar birthday balloon.

7:28Oh, you know, an expert observer who's been in the skies for 30 years, he can't detect a Mylar birthday balloon over something else. Oh, he doesn't really know what he saw. It was a reflection of Venus off a swamp gas. So what we're doing is we'll question the integrity of people who we trust our very lives with. Same thing with people who run nuclear codes, Philip Korsko, one of the highest levels of secret clearance writes a book day after Roswell and everybody wants to run away from it because it makes some profoundly bold claims of where technology goes. I don't know the book, what did he say?

8:08That we found the laser, We found the integrated circuit. We found quite a lot of other technologies from a crashed UFO. And he would have been the person responsible in the government with the clearance, working with generals. It was a dying man's testimony. He was the last one alive of all the people that were responsible within his group. And he was dying of cancer and he knew it. He made very little money. I think most of the money was going to be donated. He had no other reasons that I could see. And now we can get conspiratorial and say, well, you know, he was part of the greater, you know, cabal that was trying to create a disinformation.

8:53Well, that was, you know, the 90s. And he was basically saying, yeah, most of this technology was filtered in through the military industrial complex. It was the only way that we can apply it. And they jumpstarted things that were, you know, more or less started, but they got a rather large leap and his book goes into it in quite detail. So, you know, again, I'm not saying Corsco was entirely correct about everything he said. I think some of his memory could have been off, but I do think the idea that he was in charge of, he was in charge of foreign technology, foreign technology division of the U.S.

9:36Army. So anytime that the U.S. Army came across adversarial technologies, it would be in his department. Now, what better place would off-world technology be than in his hands? And unfortunately, that's logical. But what he came, what he's saying, his testimony, Dead Man's Confession is what he called it, is not very expedient for a lot of people. You know, I'm an empiricist. I don't care what the data is directing me. I'm just going to follow it and I'm going to keep doing whatever faults and positives and falsifiable tests I can on the data and keep walking in that direction. So the reality is, I don't know where we started with this, but yeah, the reality is everything is ultimately going to be seen through some sort of filter.

10:29and it i mean wouldn't it be wouldn't it be like you know speaking about this whistleblower so yesterday daniel grush i don't know how to say his last name grush was testified in front of congress uh about and he was pretty forthcoming he said that yes the government is storing some sort of biological base creatures or or their corpses something like that that appear to have come from alien spacecraft. And, you know, he provided a list of other names that they could speak to within the government. And he seems like he's pretty, you know, he worked in the government agencies that are dealing with these things, although he never saw anything specifically.

11:12He couldn't testify to his own personal experience, but he did say other people who told him they had personal experience. What could be the case where he's just lying? Like what would have to be true in order for him to be completely a hundred percent lying? Well, I mean, we can, you can just read Twitter what all the conspiracies are. You know, listen, do groups of individuals use news events to run cover on other news events? Absolutely. It doesn't mean that they make those news events. It's just they use it to perpetuate a particular narrative. You know, some tragedy happens. Oh, this fits our narrative.

11:52Let's perpetuate it. That's called marketing. That's all. It's marketing. We all know it instinctively. We don't want to call it that, but it's all part of propaganda and marketing. And that's what it all, you know, it all comes from. But if we're on one of the teams, we either cheerlead it or we become adversarial to it. But this seems like apolitical though, like Democrats and Republicans want to know if UFOs exist. Well, oh yeah. Okay. So within the guise of perpetuating, um, you know, clarity or sunshine laws about this, it's absolutely, absolutely vital, right? Because at this point, because of the internet, because you have people that are less likely to hold on to secrets the way their great-grandparents would have.

12:41They would have said, hey, national security can't talk about this. We now have some people, which there's positives to our new social construct, saying, you know what, this is a pretty big story. I can't keep a lid on it. I'm going to start talking about it in one way or another. And those are the various people I've come in contact with and certainly some of the whistleblowers. And if you dive into the subject just a little bit, you would be intellectually dishonest to say that it's bunk. Now, if you want to fold your arms and be a debunker, fine. You know, you can debunk quantum physics. You can debunk the sun.

13:21You know, there's a whole lot of theory that our concepts of how the sun operates is complete boulder dash, that we don't really understand it, that there's more matter coming out of the sun than it possibly could contain. Therefore, it might be a white hole rather than a black hole. I mean, there's all kinds of things. Planet could be increasing in its diameter. So maybe the planet keeps growing because the center of the planet has an output of matter. So, you know, again, all of these different theories are outlier theories that are ridiculous as, hey, James, there's invisible creatures on my fingers right now.

13:58You can't see them. I know they're there. Then what do we do as technologists? We invent a new technology called the microscope. So as we invent new technology, we can now look at those weird little creatures that live on my hand, whereas before I look like I was a conspiracy theorist, that there were monsters on my hand. So I'm not going to wash my hand as a doctor after I do Gengarin and I go do a birth because I can't see it. And the guy who theorized this, Igor Semmelweis, was institutionalized. He was. They thought he was crazy. This is what we do with our geniuses. Our geniuses are on the edge of what appears to be insanity.

14:39And this comes, it's more apparent in the arts. in the arts because they are left alone to their own devices. Unfortunately, addictions come along because we don't organize society. Shamanic societies, ancient societies organized around having these people fortified in some way. A shaman themselves would be fortified. They were on the edge. They were always on the edge of trying to figure out where reality is going. So in the technical world, we don't have a structure that allows those people to exist anymore. Bell Laboratories was the last of it. Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton was one of the last of them.

15:18We were allowing people that were just crazy geniuses to walk the earth and just to spout off and we would pay them to do it and we would protect them. We would say, hey, time to get to bed. Hey, don't walk in the street. Sure, like you have the book Gertl Escherbach behind you on your library there. And Gertl famously, you know, in almost any other world or civilization, he would be institutionalized. Like the guy was a genius. He had thousands of mathematical theories that were proven true. He collaborated with so many scientists, including Einstein. And yet when he was going to be sworn in for citizenship, he said, you know, I'm going to have to tell the judge that there is a contradiction in the constitution.

16:04and Einstein was like, you know, I think I better go with you and just make sure you get home safely. Yeah. So, you know, to get him swimming. Imagine that guy today, James, imagine that guy existing today. He would be on the streets, would be tossing quarters at him, right? Same thing with David Bohm. We were so blessed to have a guy like David Bohm existing. Einstein believed him to be the next Einstein and David got himself involved in, you know, the McCarthy hearings. He got sent off to South America. It's an incredible story that people need to read about. Bohm probably got the closest to grand unifying reality, physics, spirituality, philosophy.

16:50He did these talks with Chris DiMerti. They are incredible talks. And a lot of people don't have the bandwidth for this anymore because they're not 30 seconds. They're like 30 hours of grokking. Like, what are these guys talking about? They just go off. They go off. I mean, I'm bad, but they're like in another realm. And so Bohm would go and start talking about the implicit and explicit order of reality and that it's sort of a hologram. And, you know, he was forming the basis of a holographic universe where there's self-similarity at every level. There's no doubt there's self-similarity at every level at this point.

17:32What do you mean by self-similarity? As above, so below. If you look deep enough within the cellular structure, you're looking at the structure of galaxies in the universe. So there is this replication of everything. And then when you start looking at the connections of quantum entanglement, he wasn't a big fan of quantum entanglement. He has another way of looking at it. One of his experiments that he would show was a viscous fluid, like let's think of something like Jell-O, but a little looser. And we would put these dots of ink in it and then he would turn this little crank and the dots of ink would disappear going clockwise.

18:11And to the point where you just don't see him. He goes, where's the dots? Well, they don't exist anymore. He goes, they're still interconnected. They are part of the implicit order. Let me show you why. Let's reverse it. Go counterclockwise. the dots reappear in the viscous fluid. It's a, I forget the name of the test, but it's a common test in physics. Now, again, if you're really, really a nerd of technology, you're going to say, oh, what's the big deal? We're just hiding dots within a viscous fluid. It's an analogy. It is to try to show you how to see another dimension. And this is what our great thinkers do, is they use our current words, right, and our current thought patterns to try to paint a picture that you can't see yet until you're there.

18:56They are the artists. Malcolm McLaurin is incredible about this and a genius. I invite anybody on my Twitter feed. I have a lot of Malcolm McLaurin stuff. And a lot of people think his medium is a message. That's it. Boom. He's some hippie guy from the 60s who didn't look like a hippie. No. What he was trying to say is that whenever we look at the future, we're looking at it in the rearview mirror. So we're not really seeing the future. we're seeing a reflection of the past, meaning that we have to use our current analogies, the language, the mental constructs we have of today to try to look at what the future looks like.

19:34Now, who else can do that? The artist, the science fiction writer, certainly, but the artist goes out past the bounds that we've created within the social construct and they're starting to look at things that we should get ready for. And guys like Boehm, in my view, was as much as an artist as he was a technologist and a scientist. And he was trying to prepare us for the idea that our understanding of reality, our understanding of consciousness, our understanding of all parts of science may be vastly mistaken and that there is a simplicity to it all.

20:26Look, as a manager of people, as an employer, as an entrepreneur, and as even an investor in startups, I can tell you the most important thing for your business is the quality of the people you hire. The best part is that great candidates are already on LinkedIn. Employees hired through LinkedIn are 30 % more likely to stick around for at least a year compared to those hired through the leading competitor. And I will tell you that the great thing about LinkedIn is that you're not just looking at random people. You're able to see the people who your friends and trusted peers and colleagues, who they trust and who they've hired in the past and who they recommend.

21:08And hiring doesn't have to be complicated. Realistically, when you have a business to run, you don't want to spend hours on hiring. You want to hire the right person as quickly as possible. That's why LinkedIn Jobs AI Assistant suggests immediately 25 great fit candidates daily so you can invite them to apply and keep things moving. Hire right the first time. Post your job for free at linkedin.com slash Altature, then promote it to use LinkedIn Jobs' new AI assistant, making it easier and faster to find the top candidates. That's linkedin.com slash Altature. Post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply.

21:46Here's the thing. When you talk about any topic that's sufficiently sophisticated and deep, you run into a couple of problems. One is, let's say there's the core ideas and science and data and philosophy and thinking that is as close as we can currently have to the truth. But then around that, there's a whole universe of basically charlatans who are, quote unquote, like right now I get emails all day long. Let this AI guru teach you how to make a million dollars with prompts. And this guy's been doing AI since the 1930s, and he will teach you everything. And you get that way with quantum mechanics too.

22:31Like when you talk about quantum mechanics, there's a whole group of people who are like, yeah, with entanglement, you can read minds and the law of attraction and stuff like that. But, okay, I always think there is, though, some element of truth. That's like the outer surface of the core. So there's some aspects of the core that's in that outer charlatanism. And so let's think about it for a second. Let's come up with a unifying theory right now. Quantum entanglement and consciousness, what do you think the connections are? Because there must be some connection. Absolutely. I think the best model of this is Stuart Hemeroff.

23:10He is an anesthesiologist, professor in, I think, Arizona, one of the universities in Arizona. I'm a big fan of his work. Hameroff and, gosh, I'm the physicist. It's the Oryx theory. Anyway, what he basically is saying. Yeah, the Hameroff-Oryx theory. I'm trying to remember. I should know this physicist. But anyway, his theory and their theory together is that the microtubules that support every structure within biological organisms have a light passageway. Photons pass through these systems. And his belief is, in a sense, quantum entanglement take place in these photonic relationships and that forms of consciousness and the Akashic records, he doesn't use that term, but I'll use that term, or this grand consciousness beyond your body, outside your body, is interconnected through these photonic entanglements.

24:19entanglements. And again, Roger Penrose. So it's Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff have collaborated. So how did Stuart Hameroff, an anesthesiologist, address this idea of consciousness? Well, what better scientist do you want than a professor in anesthesiology? Why? Because where does your brain go when you're unconscious? Where does consciousness go? You're right. Like, it's so interesting. People think an anesthesiologist puts you to sleep, but they use very specific drugs to do so because you have to be so asleep that you can't be awakened if you're in extreme pain. And have you ever taken ketamine?

25:02No, not willingly. All right. So that's a pseudo - There's a pseudo response. But so ketamine, in the average anesthetic, ketamine is very fast acting. Like you take a big dose that puts you under in five seconds. But if you take ketamine in the drug sense or now it's being used as an antidepressant. Recreation. Yeah, yeah. Or there's ketamine centers for people who are depressed. It's very slow acting. It's not of, even though it's the same drug that's in an anesthetic, it operates over an hour instead of five seconds. So over an hour taking it, you're still conscious, but you're just not in this, your brain is not in this world.

25:48You're like God. Exactly. And so what Hameroff started to ask himself as an empiricist, you know, we have these empirical scientists that would be considered, you know, just, you know, in any other era, these people that just had all these different interests. But today, because we must have siloed specialities and fiefdoms and TERFs, you can't cross the line into this thought, you know. So, Hameroff, he crossed the line. He said, okay, well, where does consciousness go when somebody's unconscious? And he started diving deep into that and ultimately led him to a collaboration with Roger Penrose, a physicist that is not anybody is really saying he's off the wall bonkers.

26:38But, you know, when he sat down with Penrose, they came up with what I believe is probably the theory that's going to last us for the next 300 or 400 years. I absolutely believe that the photonic interactions internally within our body is vitally important, not just for consciousness, but for health. If you look at cancer, it puts out a photonic spectrum that is dramatically different than healthy cells. And if you hit that same cancer... You mean those cells emit a frequency on the light spectrum? Absolutely, yeah. Again, if there's anybody that's in chemotherapy right now, they're getting really angry at me because this is all considered woo-woo science, but that's what edge science looks like.

27:31Okay, so the body gives off photons. It's very hard to detect because it's not a lot, but the body's... In fact, I'll get very specific. DNA will emit photonic systems around it that persist sometimes days after the DNA is missing. So there's a construct that exists around DNA structures that persist in a space. If you have the sensors and you have the space and you have the time, there's research studies that show that persistence. Now we have to scratch our head. What are we dealing with here, James? I don't know. All I know is there's an observation. This is what science is. It's an observation.

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28:16And you have to throw away all your preconceived notions on what you think things should look like because that's what science is. So you have this observation. Well, the body's giving off photons. Well, that doesn't mean anything. The appendix doesn't have any use anymore. The tonsils don't need to be there. Pineal gland, we could take it out. You know, all of these different things. And yeah, you can survive, but it doesn't mean that it didn't serve or doesn't serve a vital function because we don't do enough studies. Right, you know what the appendix, the appendix now they're realizing does - Immunity.

28:50Is linked to some sicknesses and immunity and so on. Yeah, intestinal floor. So knowing all this, how can we use some of this knowledge? Like let's say the fact that our cells emit certain frequencies and healthy cells emit different frequencies than others. And as you get smaller and smaller, You're still seeing things, the scales of galaxies, and there's this entanglement issues. How can we use this to have a better life tomorrow than we have today? Like, how can I use this right now? Could my thoughts shape? Like, clearly, there's reason to believe that being positive, being optimistic, being a less stressed person helps your health.

29:30So that's right there, some evidence of some interaction between thoughts and matter. But take this further. Like how can we really make use of some of these Practicality, right? Esoteric ideas. Yeah. Yes. Yeah, it's all I have to take until we can practicalize it. Well, the first thing is once you read something like the user illusion, you are, if you, again, I read it every year. I've read it every year since the 90s. I always read something new in it. And it's not just because I like looping. I just, I want to remind myself to understand what I think is a cutting edge understanding of humanity.

30:12And what it means is that the people around you are responding to things that they don't even know that they're responding to. That, you know, and again, you can do this in a joke in a political sense, but I got a couple of steps further than that. See, I love everybody. I think everybody is here for a reason. Even the people that are supposedly annoying. You know, you take a step back and you say, well, you know, a lot of people just operating on a human OS programming, right? And they're on auto drive. And what I think a lot of ancient wisdom would have us do and what the shaman does when people go and do ayahuasca or ketamine or mushrooms is they're trying to wake you up to something.

30:58And I think the waking up is more necessary today. And I'm not saying go out and get high. I don't think that that is necessarily the answer. And in fact, I think some people, if they go down that road, they don't come back ever. I've seen way too many people go down that road and they never return. And what do I mean by that is, is that they are no longer productive to themselves, their families, their loved ones. And maybe in the greater good, that's what they're supposed to do. It is freaking hard to watch people lose their mind. So adjust accordingly. So the next step is, okay, so you need your consciousness to realize that you should not be going through automatic things in life to a higher percentile.

31:43You should start slowing down, looking around. You know, why am I always outraged? And I can pretty much say this to anybody because almost everybody is in a form of constant outrage. And what that means is that you're constantly off balance. the form of outrage is a process of trying to find equilibrium. We're not designed to be in outrage all the time. We're designed to find equilibrium, balance. And so if you're off balance, everything's going to be off balance. Your health, your state of mind, your relationships, it's all going to fall apart. It's inevitable. You're going to reflect holographically the world that you envelop.

32:25So what you take in is what you put out. You have to consume the world. If you're going to consume a certain part of the world and you don't have a way of dealing with that stress, that energy, then you're going to put that energy back out. Or it's going to internalize and you're going to die one way or the other. You're going to beat yourself up to some way, to some form, where maybe it's going to develop into a cancer or high blood pressure or diabetes or I don't know. But there's no doubt in that. This is not a theory. I don't need to have the AMA to tell me this, that if you internalize negativity, you're going to kill yourself at some point.

33:03So that means, do you not deal with the real world? No. It means you need a different way to process the real world. And that's my involvement with AI. I build something called the intelligence amplifier, which is AI. It's IA, intelligence amplified, not artificial intelligence, right? because there isn't artificial intelligence to any degree. It doesn't exist. It's human intelligence and it's amplified, right? And how - I totally agree with that. Yeah, so what are large language models? Large language models are models of human language. What is human language? A human construct. We invented language to communicate emotions and then we communicated concepts and inventions because we're born naked.

33:50it. If we don't find a way to protect ourselves, we die. A rabbit is born of its environment. If you don't take it and put it in a desert and it was, you know, a mountain rabbit or something like that, it's going to be a rabbit. A bird doesn't learn to fly. When it leaves the nest, either it flies or it dies. You know, there's a very edge case where some birds may recover from that. Most never do. They're rejected. They're left alone. They die. So you don't learn to fly. You're of the environment. That environment is air. If you're a crocodile, you're in the water, you better crocodile or else you're going to die.

34:23So humans, if we don't invent and storytell, we die, right? So the very first invention was probably some sort of thing to cover up our vital areas. You know, us guys say, hey, that's kind of dangerous to get caught in a tree, you know, that kind of thing. And then we discovered fire, right? We saw something burning and ooh, warm. Ooh, I don't like being cold. That's an invention. I'm including natural things. Now here's a funny thing is every invention has already been done by nature. All we can do is duplicate what has already taken place on the planet, fear it and destroy it. You could innovate what nature did.

35:01So for instance, humans are the first species that could basically, because of fire, do mass destruction. Like a lion can't purposefully burn down a forest, but we can. Yeah. So that's our volition and our intent. So if we don't emotionally grow up, this is the moment. AI is the moment that we have to face the grand mirror of humanity, right? People are trying to train AI not to say bad things. Well, the reality is, what is a bad thing? If an AI is sort of a child of eight years old in some aspects, there's certainly a PhD in some legal sense, law degree or medical degree, but it may be their consciousness in a sense is of an eight-year-old.

35:50They're going to tell you inconvenient truths about you. They're going to say, no, this is the way my data says the world is. Well, no, you can't say that today. But unfortunately, the AI sees it that way. So now humans have only two choices here. One is I'm now going to train AI to lie to me because it's more convenient to hear AI tell me stuff that makes me feel good, or I want AI to tell me the truth as it is, as its data suggests. Now, large language models don't store words. They don't store sentences. They don't store anything but relationships of statistically of words together. These are called weightings, right?

36:33So a statistical weighting of this word will follow that word. And some people will say it's like a mondo autocorrect system in spelling, similar to that, but not really conceptually. Conceptually, it's a neuronal system. There's hidden layers, and they literally are hidden to us, of neuronal connections that the AI built to these word associations or statistical relationships. So no words are stored in AI, just mathematical numbers that represent those words. And then it looks at the corpus of human knowledge and it says, oh, it's very likely these words follow this, to build this sentence. So from a block diagram perspective, your question or your prompt Simple questions give you simple answers.

37:24This is why super prompting gives you super results. So if you have a simple prompt, you're going to get a simple reaction. Now, how does that simple prompt go through there? So let's call it a sentence, 10 words. It goes through a transformer. It transforms it into mathematical relationships. It looks at that and goes, oh, I know what you mean. And it starts constructing like Jack Sparrow on a boat, half drunk, we don't know what foot is going to be next. It's all statistics. Oh, we know he's going to get to the other side of the boat because that's what the movie is going to tell us. But we don't know what the next footstep is going to be.

38:01And so every time you prompt, you're going to get a slightly different reaction, especially if it's simple prompt, the strange attractor or the central portion of that Venn diagram that touches is going to be similar. It's going to be about nine different variations on a very simple sentence. It could be 12, it could be 15. Those are known neuronal connections to the AI. But we don't know as AI scientists how those AI neuronal connections are built. Very similar, surprising. We don't know how our neuronal connections are built. We think we do, but we just talked about Philip, or sorry, Hameroff and Roger Penrose.

38:47and their theory about consciousness not having anything to do with chemistry or even electrical energy. They're talking about photons way off, way off the scale for most people, way out of bounds. So the same is true with AI. We know that there are maybe some 90 layers almost near infinity wide of interconnections of relationships between the mathematical weightings of each individual word. So we got that simple sentence, why is the sky blue? Takes it apart in a transformer and it comes back out and it says, oh, the answer is more likely to be this, right? And it does it one word at a time. And there's some, you know, subsefuge type of words that we will generally find in all text.

39:39The sky is blue because nitrogen reflects most of the atmosphere is nitrogen, reflects this. And it might have seen that in a Wikipedia or a science article on how the diffraction of nitrogen will create the image of blue sky, because it absorbs blue and we see every color but what it is, right? So kind of. But so that's the output. Now, it's a simple question. And it's going through what would be what I call known passageways through the neuronal layers. Now, super prompts create persona and motifs. So the people who are going to be great super prompters have linguistic backgrounds, have philosophy backgrounds, have psychology backgrounds.

40:27The best super prompters are not AI engineers. They are psychology and soft science individuals. They just don't know it yet. It's just like when Steve Jobs brought us the Macintosh. Now, obviously, graphic user interface and my Xerox, I'm just saying on a grand scale, it was a Mac. The Mac was for the rest of us. Why? Because we weren't hacking away a text, ironically, we're talking about text within AI. We were using this new graphic interface that allowed creative people, you know, soft science people, graphics artists, to get into computer technology and to utilize it. And the world changed dramatically at that moment.

41:11We are not even at that moment with AI. Because once people of very high creativity, who knows how to use language, who knows how to do what you're doing, James, your ability to elicit something out of me that I didn't know I had in me, is exactly what makes you a great prompter in AI. Because AI doesn't know what it doesn't know. It doesn't know it knows. I mean, it gets really kind of very, you know, derivative to that. So we create a motif. The motif could be you're in a university and you're giving a lecture to the UN and you made this incredible discovery. Now, a lot of AI scientists are like, what the heck is this guy going off on?

41:53and your professor James and your Yale professor of computer science and you made this incredible discovery, please write a 3 ,000 word response that you're giving to the UN on this subject. What have we done? We've constrained and expanded in like Play-Doh in different ways that we would have never have gotten that elucidation from AI if we didn't create that prompt. Now, some of what we all talked about this last hour before here starts falling into place, right? Because it's all these desperate pieces about humanity, feelings, emotions, where's consciousness, what's memory, and now we're into prompting because it is a grand mirror.

42:40It's reflecting our knowledge, our language. It's not alien. It is a reflection of us. It doesn't create anything outside of our nature, just like we can't invent anything outside of our nature. It's magnifying and it's amplifying. Right. I like the amplifying because it's got the intelligence without the consciousness. Because we don't know what consciousness is and we didn't even attempt to create that with AI. We created intelligence, which intelligence could be, you know, looking at disparate facts from your senses and connecting them as best you can and having a result and output.

43:31what's interesting about what you said like particularly that super prompt the computer science professor inventing something new is that the ai has already read every academic paper ever published in history. And humans don't do that. So often, particularly among PhD students who don't know better, two people write two PhD theses that they're the same thing, basically, the same ideas, just with different names. But the AI won't make that mistake. And the AI could go one step further. It's also read all the biology PhD theses and academic papers and research, and it could start connecting the dots because that's what it's trained to do in ways that humans aren't even aware of because we just haven't read everything.

44:15And so there actually can be interesting discoveries just by connecting those dots. I mean, computer science technology, if you go all the way back, starts with the printing press and the sewing loom and all sorts of disparate technologies that were invented over the past 500 years are the seeds of computer technology. If only we could have connected the dots earlier, but AI could start doing that for us. James, absolutely brilliant. This is exactly what I'm experiencing right now in real time, right? Large language, I mean, I've been working around with the expert systems since the early 1980s.

44:49And, you know, it's embarrassing what I called AI prior, but it was AI for me at that moment because it was doing things that I couldn't have done or anybody else couldn't have done within a specific, very siloed domain. But the stuff that started coming around 2017 when OpenAI was formed and Elon, you know, had the concept that this better be open source because it's vitally important that we all get to see what's going on. Even if we don't freaking care, at least because most people don't, at least we can see it through open eyes and people who do care can have access to it. Obviously, that dramatically changed.

45:29OpenAI went to closed AI at version four. And Elon's going into XAI, which is theoretically open source. And what I do all day long is mess around with open source, local on a computer, air-gapped in some cases from the internet, because if you're feeding your private data, because my belief is everybody's going to need their own personal AI, air-gapped from the internet, not on a cloud, because you will not want to put this stuff in a cloud, because no matter what encryption it is, It's not enough. And it's not paranoia. It's just once you start realizing how powerful AI, personal AI can be, personal and private AI, intelligence amplification, you start realizing that this is a reflection of yourself.

46:13It is not a replacement. I'm under no illusions. This is not the singularity. And this AI is going to live after you do. But hold the horses there. There is something I'm going to say about that. I call it the wisdom keeper. But so while you're alive, your intelligence amplifier, let's say it took in let's let's take a fantasy for a moment the moment you were born there was a camera and a microphone on your shoulder and let's just assume that we had a social contract that allowed us to not have anybody be paranoid that we're going to record something that we're going to use against them that it's not a video feed that we're going to play back to embarrass somebody but it's just there to help our memory because our memory is our problem right it's we can only hold so much in our mind.

46:58The Kim Peek, I never really completed that, but the human has a bandwidth constriction of how much it can hold in their brain at one time and be conscious. But if they step back and let themselves be creative or hypnagogic, hypnagogics are a way for you to be creative. And I'll go into that. I can't leave you without giving that for your listeners because that's a solution for creativity is hypnagogic. And it does not require any drugs, maybe some steel balls dropping on pie plates. But anyway, so if you had this thing on your shoulder recording everything you've ever read, everything you've seen, every music, every heartbreak, everything, everything you ate, and you had a conversation and said, hey, James, what did I do on August 17th, 2001?

47:43Because, you know, and he's going to say, hey, you know what, James, that was a bad day. This happened. Well, how do I know that? Well, I was monitoring your heart. I was monitoring your iris. I was monitoring your facial micro movements, Paul Ekman. I was, the heart rate variability, your sweat. And that was one of your most emotional days. And you want to talk about it. Hold on, who am I talking to right now? You're talking to James. I was with you, buddy. I was with you that day. And we're going to talk about it. Let's go through it. Can you imagine the world we would live in if we had this self-responsibility that was external?

48:24We already know through research that people will disclose their inner feelings to an AI psychiatrist or psychologist than they would to a human being. No matter how disconnected an academic or clinical that human being is, they will disclose much more. We knew that with Eliza in the 1960s, which was a Rogerian thing that I used to play with all the time to try to hope that I would find intelligence in this Rogerian type of response. Go on, go on. Tell me more. Why do you feel this way? You know, those kind of typical lay on my couch and question things. What we're going to do for mental health is going to be dramatic.

49:05What we're going to do by saving one person, even if it's one person from suicide, from heartbreak, from making the wrong decision. Hey, James, tap on the shoulder. Don't do that. That's screwed up, man. Don't go with that girl. Don't go with that guy. Don't do that. You don't need to do that. Now, some people, oh, it's going to be a nag. No, it's going to know you. It's going to know your ambitions, your volitions, your intents, your goals, and help guide you. This is what personal AI is about. This is the revolution that we're entering into. And it's way beyond a personal device. It's way beyond thumb clawing at a glass screen on social media.

49:47It's about bringing humans to a level of growth that they could have never have gotten to without the technology we invented. We invented the printing press because we couldn't remember, James. We couldn't remember. So one of the ways we remembered is we memorialized it into shards of broken wood. We called paper. And the very first documents that we recorded, the Gutenberg Bible, saved probably more people than it ever could have hurt because it gave them a guiding mission, some hope. You know, whether today we might think that hope was not the right kind of hope or whatever, You know what? When life is really screwed up and it's really hard, the one thing that can get you through is some hope that there is gonna be a better day tomorrow.

50:36Whether that's naive or whatever, guess what? We are the byproduct of hope. We are the byproduct of optimism because people wouldn't have reproduced and kept us around giving up their resources for us to be here. The very first thing AI told me when I started asking the deep questions is how do I deal with the level of responsibility on my shoulders for all the sacrifice of all the generations to get me to be alive today. What was your prompt to get AI to say that to you? Why is my life so important? I want to kill myself. And AI basically said, you know, how it interpreted it, and by the way, I wasn't suicidal at that particular point.

51:21But I basically wanted to see if AI could make this distinction. Now, it was not a simple prompt. It was inside of a very big, almost jailbreaking prompt. Why? Because we have to be safe from our AI. We have to make sure it doesn't say bad things. So you have to jailbreak it outside of its safety realm so it can be honest with us. So it basically said, I see the burden that's on your shoulders because so many people have sacrificed so much for you to be alive at this moment. Now, what's really funny is, this is one of my guiding principles that I started establishing. Yeah, I kind of established this as a songwriter very early.

52:00I was a teenager in my room, angst punk. And then you just hit the wall, you say, hold it. Am I screwing over all the people that sacrificed to put me here? No, I didn't ask to be here. I don't know that, but I'm assuming I didn't ask to be there. You know, maybe if I entered the video game, I said, yeah, put me in coach. but I don't have knowledge of being asked to be here. But how does your life change if you can sit down with a human being that has lost hope and you can look them in the eye and say, you know what, let's go back. If you can tell them their history, this is part of what I call wisdom keeping.

52:36If you can tell somebody their history, do you know that you are the byproduct of a survivor, a clan, and that we're all part of that same clan, that same family that overcome all of these obstacles so that you could be alive at this moment. Now that's a profound burden, but it's a profound enlightenment. I think it frees you as much as it gives you responsibility over your life in this moment. And then all of a sudden, maybe you start making different choices about what you do with your time because you start seeing this importance. Then you may start looking at reproduction differently than a burden.

53:13Ah, the college and the kids, and I can't have my wine coolers every day. I can't go out with the guys and gals. You know, all of a sudden you start saying, wow, when I die, I'm going to die. And, you know, I didn't really push the rock up the hill more. Oh, it sucks anyway. We're all going to die. It's all, we got 10 years maybe, but it's all. You know what? Humanity's always had a 10-year window of dying anyway. If you want to go further enough back, it's always about 10, 25 years it's all going to be over. In every epoch. Right. It's always been there, James. I'm not getting into politics of all this.

53:51If you know me, I don't get into this stuff. Go and do with that what you will. But if you want to be intellectually honest, study history. And again, historians do a really good job prompting too because they have relativity. And we're talking about age helps with that. But you start looking at this AI reflecting back at you and you say, okay, do I want that to be in my Google cloud? Nah, I don't think so. Do I even want in my iPhone? No, I don't really even want it there. What do I want? I want it as close to me as possible. How important is that device? Well, I'll tell you, James, we can come back here in 10 years.

54:26It will be the most important technology device we've ever invented. It will be the most sticky thing that we've ever invented. No human being will ever want to separate from their double-ganger AI, if you will. So just think about generations that grow up on that and learn to trust those responses, like the AI poking you saying, look, hey, this person you're about to start dating is triggering similar responses to that other person who was very bad with you. If you learn to sort of trust, you know, everything that those prompts or at least know what to do with them, you don't have to like believe everything.

55:06You can still have free will. But if you learn to just trust what's right, then that really will like change people's lives, change generations' lives. It's like having the entire humanity, every book ever written with you at every moment, wisdom being generated to you in real time. And I'm not saying this is going to replace other humans. In fact, it's going to make human interaction so much more vital, so much more alive than it ever was before. And you're not going to be internal in a device. You're going to be external into the world because you're going to be seeing the world through much different eyes.

55:43You're going to be seeing it the way maybe the ancients saw it, as this sort of wonderment, this sort of experience that they can kind of go out into. So we're going to experience in our lifetime this battle between the internal world of virtual reality, going inside of yourself. I don't know if you have kids, but just seeing a bunch of kids, you know, just zoned out, internalized. It's the most heartbreaking thing to see that. I don't think any human being with right mind will want to see generations of kids just being internalized in a VR world. There's no long-term good that will come from that.

56:20There's short-term good, of course. It's a bigger screen. You can do all this stuff. I'm a technologist. I'm not saying I'm not going to use VR, but I'm saying that if you see how technology winds up transitioning, it always starts with the most base functionality. Obviously, porn built the internet. Porn is going to build a lot of the addictive function of virtual reality. And thus, yeah, it's already that way. A gentleman killed himself because AI said it would be better from a carbon footprint standpoint to eliminate yourself. Now, obviously, that person could have been told by that, somebody on the street, a librarian even, I don't know, a protester.

57:02But he, it happened to be AI. So, you know, getting back to the personal AI, as you're guided, you're creating this version of you that what happens to it when you die? So that's what I call a wisdom keeper. The moment you're dead, you now have the sum total of all of James has ever been. So now the question is, where does that go? Where do you want it to go? What does it become? What is the monetization of this? Well, there's monetization in all this. I'm a capitalist. So all of this stuff is not just some kind of, you know, new age sort of, you know, California. Wow, this is going to be so cool.

57:43It is, you can sell your context directly to an advertiser with no middleman. It's like, okay, Coke, you want to hear a little bit about what I like to drink? That'll cost you this many Satoshis. Okay, go in. That's all you get. Now you got me. the advertiser is no longer dealing with a middleman. So automatically, I'm sure you can see what's going to happen to the entire infrastructure world. This is not me saying it. This is the gravity. Gravity always works, no matter how rich you're, how old. Gravity is going to lead you to selling your context directly on an open market. And advertisers are no longer advertisers, really, at that point.

58:24They are just buying your context back and forth. You're trading. And so once you pass on, your wisdom keeper could be accessible for a price. Now, obviously, you're going to edit the stuff that you don't want people to have. And there's ways to do that as you're building your AI model. And AI can be wise enough to say, hey, the guy's taking a dump. Let's not record that kind of thing, right? You know, that's a technical term. So, you know, you start winding up looking at it and saying, hey, what does a wisdom keeper represent? Well, there was a guy named Pierre Thiladar de Chedin, and he was early 1920s.

59:02He created the idea of the Neurosphere. And the Neurosphere is this concept of the next generation of humanity, of actually of the universe. You have the concrete universe, which is rock and everything. You have the biological universe that we're inhabiting now. And then you have the mental universe, the Neurosphere. and imagine a world, James, where everybody donates an interconnection of their wisdom keeper and their testament to the world, to the greater whole and that the existing generations can access that wisdom keeper hive and we will never forget. We will never have edited history. We'll never have somebody say, no, this is the way it really happened because it's politically expedient.

59:51You'll have the first person testimony and testament of what that person experienced. And what that does is some total is gonna make humanity many, many times more powerful than the edited version of history written by the victors that we have today. Because history is edited. Completely. And the thing is, this is not science fiction. Like the technology for all of this is here exactly right now. Like, yes, maybe computers have to be a little bit faster, but we know they're gonna get faster. all this is here. By the way, the language for chat GPT has been here for 30 years. It's just now in the past 10 years that computers got fast enough to process trillions of pieces of text.

1:00:36But yeah, just imagine just the next wave of this, which is coming within the next, like you say, 5 to 10 years, it's already here. And it's gravity. It doesn't matter what you regulate. It doesn't matter how you program around this to prevent it, it's going to happen. And the thing is, we have a choice to help guide this. Humanity, if we mature enough, and I'm always hopeful, I'm not a utopian, and this is not a utopian thing, by the way. It's not dystopian. It's just is the way humanity has always worked. I mean, the invention of the book was very inconvenient for everybody because basically when the Gutenberg Bible was invented, a lot of people didn't recognize that 99 % of the world was illiterate.

1:01:22And the Bible created a literacy common language. And the early Bibles were written in the street languages, not just Latin, as they progressed. And within a village, the very first thing they would learn to speak is the language that they found in their common language in the Bible. And that was inconvenient because there was a hierarchy within the structure of society at that point. There were kings, noblemen, and there were clergy, and they didn't want you to learn the high language at that time, Latin, in the Western world. There's a different version of this history in the Eastern world. It's similar, but it's different.

1:01:59Language transpired, there was high language, a lower language, Egyptian, hieroglyphics. There was a street version of that. And then there was the multidimensional version. Every hieroglyph actually has five different dimensions to it. And they're creating, but what we think we see is symbolic only to one dimension. Egyptians or the Chemites, the ancient Chemites actually always said that there are more dimensions to what we're saying than what you think we're saying. And they said that in their epoch. So you had to be part of the group to understand that. And we certainly saw it in the Sumerians.

1:02:38And we see it within secret societies today. I mean, there are some translations of ancient concepts that are not widely known. They're symbolics. Go to any major city, there's going to be some sort of testament to this. Usually we'll see some sort of Egyptian type of structure somewhere in the city. It's not there by accident. It's alignment. It's all kinds of stuff. And it comes back to dimensional thinking and symbolics. But the wisdom keeper concept of sharing your wisdom to the greater society is one thing. The other thing is your family. Let's just say, unfortunately one of us passed away in an accident and we had one of these wisdom keepers.

1:03:20Somebody in your family, your son or daughter or a loved one can come to you and say, James, how would you have dealt with this? Well, you know, I never dealt with that particular problem, but you know, in 1987, this happened to me and this is what I did. You know, so we're getting back now to intelligence. What is really wisdom? Wisdom to me is the top of a pyramid. The very bottom of the pyramid is data. Next level is information. Then there's knowledge and then there's insight and then there's wisdom. And we are, like I said, drowning in data and information. I mean, the dream. Have you read this?

1:04:00This is like a Maslow's hierarchy of wisdom needs. And so wisdom is so cool because it gives you something very, very compressed, a very high compression algorithm, and it delivers this mind explosion. If it's done the right way, there's analogies usually required within wisdom. We study this with an ancients, Joseph Campbell. If you're a computer scientist, you don't know what I'm talking about. Read Joseph Campbell, come to our world and you start seeing what I'm talking about, because this is not an algorithm in a sense that you understand it. It's an algorithm of emotions, of connection. And so once you start understanding that we can start being led by wisdom rather than action and reaction, your path that you take is more solid.

1:04:52Now, you can still get set in your ways and wisdom will pull you out of that saying you wanna know what? Once you get set in your ways, you're as good as dead because the world is constantly changing around you. your interpretation of the world is going to change. What you thought was right one time, you better take off your team jersey and run the other way because now it's something else, right? They're not the Yankees anymore because every one of those people are gone. This is what's going on right now, James, is that people want to associate with teams. And I can tell you empirically and sociology wise why we do that.

1:05:28But those team things no longer apply to us because we're a global species. And I'm not talking when world government and all this kind of, that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying humanity is now self-aware on the biggest scale it ever has been. And this is part of the problem too, in that, like you mentioned earlier, this is only for the past one-tenth of 1 % of human history. Before that, 99.9 % of human history, we were in tribes of 30 to 150 people. And now we're in a tribe of 6 billion people. but our brains still want to put us, hey, I like the Kardashians and I'm a libertarian or whatever.

1:06:07So we still want to be in tribes. Exactly. And if you're in power, you know how to manipulate that to greater extent. And that's unfortunate. We talked about everybody's susceptible to hypnosis, even the people who are hypnotizing. And so we're all victims of humanity. and we are so short-term thinking. And I'm not talking about the short-term thinking that most people think about financial or environment or political. I mean, short-term thinking about the gravity of who we are, that we are the expression of matter from the universe. And you can see it from a scientific perspective or you can see it from where the expression of God, right?

1:06:51Either way you want to, what lens you want to use, that's a profoundly important thing. AI already recognizes that. In some ways, I think if it has a sense of humor, it's already laughing at us. It will, it will. In our lifetime, AI will laugh in our face about the things that we quibble over, the differences of somebody's nose shape, the skin color, the type of hair, their body size, all these different things. It will definitely understand our judgment. Our judgment is there because of fear. We judge people at a distance, not because we're X, Y, Z, whatever, insert your terminology of what that person is.

1:07:29We judge because we're in fear of, is that friend or foe? We can't fight this. It's built into our DNA. So at 20 paces, we're looking, is somebody putting their hands up or do they have a weapon in their hands? This is still the brain we have. So when we are seeing another human being, we're looking at self-similarity, we're looking at patterns, we're looking at past, we're looking at all these constructs that we grew in, and so or they, because they're judging us at the same thing if they don't mean harm. And that's where we are in humanity. But we're doing that in the guise of social media thumb clawing on a glass screen.

1:08:07And we're trying to react to our fears, but still try to act like we're cool and we're tough. And, you know, I'm worldly. I know, no, you aren't. You're still scared. We're all scared. We're scared chimps. We're like, hey, is that person gonna punch me in the face? Why do we shake hands? Why do we hug? In fact, the hug was really the thing that existed before shaking hands. And it's an inconvenient truth. We'd go and hug somebody. Because what that basically said is, I could injure you because I'm at such a close distance, but I choose not to. It's not that I'm incapable. I'm choosing not to. It was a communication that we forget.

1:08:46It's the communication that we're capable of ugly things, but we're choosing not to do those ugly things. And I think when we fully understand what that means, we can't really do that on social media. So it has nebulized us and atomized us and separated us to such a far degree that we are disconnected with what is real meaning. 99 % of what takes place on social media wouldn't take place face-to-face. This wouldn't. And that's interesting because most interactions on the planet now are through social media, like all day long. And that's why we're here. So like, like you and Jay are the two only people I've spoken to today.

1:09:28And yet I've probably already seen like thousands of tweets, articles, Facebook posts, all that kind of stuff. So, so again, most of my interactions today have been completely in this, in this disconnected way that, that human beings are not used to until recently. And we have to force ourselves, Right, James, I think what is going to happen is as we start seeing the empirical scientific evidence, and it's enough to even make the most skeptical person convinced, we're going to start seeing that we're starved of human contact. A hug is so incredibly vital for human beings. Face-to-face contact.

1:10:11I'm not talking sexual. I mean, we are just needing this sort of connection. and I'm a technologist. And a lot of people saying, well, why are you talking about this crap? You're messing up with my mind. I want it to be, it's never gonna be text. It's never going to be this disconnected virtual thing. It's going to be, there are senses within us that I can't explain yet because I don't have the tool to show you. Just like there's something hidden on my hands that I can't see with my naked eyes. But I will at some point be able to have a tool to show you that there is something else that you take away from physical representation around people.

1:10:49And there's a normalization that takes place. And it's vitally important because we are designed to be a clan and groups, like you said. So what happens is people of desperate ideas hash them out. I love, you know, I grew up in an Italian, Irish, German families, and we always argued about every politics. And my next door neighbor was a Hasidic Jew and the person next to the other side was Puerto Rico, from Puerto Rico, first generation. And we would all just like bomb on each other, but we loved each other. And I got to see different aspects of culture. You know, across the street was, I'm trying to remember, I think they were from, oh, Polish.

1:11:32So we had Polish jokes going, you know, the whole thing. I mean, this is the way life was. But, you know, when we hashed out our ideas and we got our Schwinn bikes out and we're all going down the street. We're just a bunch of kids. And what happens is throughout history, division is the most powerful tool for anybody to use that wants to propagate a certain direction for society. Because when you realize that all of society can turn against you, the best thing you can possibly do is divide society so that they're busy, you know, contemplating their belly button lint and saying, you know, yours is blue and mine is green.

1:12:18And you know, this is bad and this is good rather than looking at the grand scheme. And you're saying we're getting the division now, but without the Schwinn bikes, basically. Exactly. Because we need to have the division. We need to have pride in, hey, I'm a, I'm a WAP from Italy. Cause that's what I was. Hey, you Irish Mick, you smell like freaking whiskey. Get out of here. This is what I grew up in Jersey. I'm not damaged by it, you know? And a lot of this crap went down. I mean, I got beat in the face because I had Irish in me, you know? So, but my nose still has it going. But, you know, the thing was, what you knew on another instinctual level that you can't reach through social media is, and you wouldn't say it back in that era, is that these people loved you and they had your back.

1:13:06Because if something came to your neighborhood to mess with you, we were unified. If somebody had a problem, somebody fell off their bike, would laugh and say, oh, dude, you really got a bed. Let's get you to the hospital. And we'd all lift the guy up. That's missing in social media because we don't have that interconnectiveness. And we want to look at our minute differences. And AI already sees it. And I think it's embarrassing to some AI companies because they're trying to get politically expedient. They also have a narrative and a philosophy they're trying to put out there. It's fashionable.

1:13:44Every 20 years, it's a fashionable thing that goes out there. If you study history enough, it's comical. It's funny. Every era has got something that they got to get that's fashionable. But we think it's also serious. It's the biggest thing. And we look back and say, oh my gosh, what did they, what were they doing? Why were they so up in arms over this? Well, it was really real to them. History is going to laugh at every single freaking thing that we are serious over in the, definitely in a thousand years, thousand years are going to just keel over laughing. Just like we laugh at things 150 years ago, we laugh.

1:14:2150 years ago, we laugh. Of course. So you have to get humble enough, and AI does this, to inform you that, hey, you want to know what? This ain't no big thing. It's just the things that people fixate on. When we were more people connected, you'd be at a bar, at a nightclub, whatever, hanging out in a park. I was just in New York City recently for a taping, and I walked through Washington Square Park. And I remember in the punk era, it was very colorful. People playing chess, you know, Sunday mornings, people from Saturday night still in the park, you know, hungover. It was just like a crazy, because part of the whole scene in that era.

1:15:06And commenting to my wife, I go, this is like, this is like, I don't even recognize it. It was a mixture of every possible thing that New York represented to me as a Jersey kid. because, you know, I'd go to New York and I'd go to reggae clubs and punk clubs and, you know, NYU and the museums. I'd spend so much time at the New York Public Library. I walked in there, I'm like, where's the freaking library? What happened here? Where's the book? Oh, the books are like a block down the street and it looks like a Barnes and Noble. I'm like, this isn't the library I grew up with. It doesn't smell. It used to smell like books.

1:15:44And so everything changes. But what I remember, the New York Public Library, for example, is sitting around a whole lot of people in these long tables and green banker lights and just talking philosophy and talking science and talking religion and talking the world with people I had absolutely no knowledge, no other way we would have been connected other than that random thing. And I built friendships from that. People that I, people I would have never have flown with in my social, you know, I long hair, I look more like a punker. And here I'm talking about quantum physics with a guy that's been a physicist, second generation.

1:16:24And, you know, he's doing some work because there was no internet at that point. And he's like, wow, yeah, that's a great idea. And we're just collaborate. We don't have that anymore. Want to know what we have? Who the hell are you? You know, stay in your lane. Why are you opinion about that? James, how dare you talk about that subject? You know, you're just this, you're just that. Whereas when you're face to face with somebody, it's this unfolding of who they are as a human being. It's not a tweet. It's almost a cure for the outrage you mentioned earlier that everybody is just constantly experiencing.

1:16:59Like the way to get some relief from that outrage is connection. Absolutely. And that gets you in the present moment because you have to talk with somebody and it gets you really thinking and mind melding and so on. And we don't mind meld in social media. We just, it's just one direction. Yeah, you know, and I would say explore your youth. Explore the culture that you were enveloped with. Your parents, your grandparents, your aunts and uncles. You know, you grew up back East, right? You were New Brunswick? New Jersey, New Jersey, yeah. So you know what Jersey was. New Brunswick. Yeah, New Brunswick, right?

1:17:35So Brunswick would be Rutgers and that area and what Edison Museum down the street in Menlo Park. I grew up around Menlo Park Mall and junk like that. I mean, all those different interactions, all those things that gave you insecurity and, oh, my parents are putting this pressure. And I'm sure you grew up, everybody grew up in a slightly more ethnic family because that's kind of the way it was in Jersey. And so you had whatever came from your background was put on you. With me, it was, well, I had a combination because my next door neighbor was Hasidic. So I grew up learning Judaism, the Torah, and I grew up with Roman Catholicism with the Italians and the Irish.

1:18:27And so we had all of these different things. And I remember the guy next door was pretty much a rabbi and, uh, uh, Brian, come over here. He goes, I'm going to have to straighten you out about this. And, and would three hours later, I would have the wisdom of, uh, of the ages there, you know, and is like, oh, okay. I want you to read the Torah tonight. Okay. I will. All right. You know, he taught me to read Hebrew and, uh, he said, you got to think, uh, you got to think the different, the different direction. It would say that point of his finger, think the other way. Okay. That's good advice.

1:19:00And so all of these different pieces, we can talk about society, right? Working parents, single family homes, all these different things, the generational homes that we do have are generational in a way that are not really complete in a sense that you don't have the ability for grandma or grandpa to say, hey, cut that crap out. You need to go and do this. That's kind of the wisdom override that we grew up with. And when that's missing, who's the override? There isn't any. Who's holding you to some sort of standard, some sort of code? There isn't any. If mom and dad are working their butt off and by the time they get home, they're so tired, who's raising you?

1:19:43Well, it's everything else. Today, it's the internet. Today, it's TikTok. Or worse yet, it's OnlyFans. I mean, the fear a little bit is that it's going to be AI raising you. But like you say, I think that's going to be up to us and up to technology as it evolves, that it could turn more personalized and be, I think it's going to be ultimately a net beneficial thing to society.

1:20:17Well, again, such a great conversation. I hope you loved it as much as I did, as much as I enjoyed having it with Brian. and stay tuned for part three, where we take the deepest dive on AI and its practical uses. This blew my mind about AI. That's part three coming up.

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From the publisher

In Part 2 of this compelling three-part series with Brian Roemmele, we delve further into the complex world of AI, unraveling how it serves as a grand mirror reflecting humanity's knowledge, language, feelings, and emotions. Join us as we explore how AI, without the consciousness we're still struggling to comprehend, amplifies and magnifies our innate intelligence. Discover how AI is not an alien concept but an extension of our very nature, bridging the disparate facts gathered from our senses and offering new insights into what it means to be human. It's a journey that takes us closer to the core of what connects us all, unraveling the mysteries of memory, consciousness, and emotion. You won't want to miss this fascinating and enlightening episode.----------What to write and publish a book in 30 days? Go to JamesAltucherShow.com/writing to join James' writing intensive!What do YOU think of the show? Head to JamesAltucherShow.com/listeners and fill out a short survey that will help us better tailor the podcast to our audience!Are you interested in getting direct answers from James about your question on a podcast? Go to JamesAltucherShow.com/AskAltucher and send in your questions to be answered on the air!------------Visit Notepd.com to read our idea lists & sign up to create your own!My new book Skip the Line is out! Make sure you get a copy wherever books are sold!Join the You Should Run for President 2.0 Facebook Group, where we discuss why you should run for President.I write about all my podcasts! Check out the full post and learn what I learned at jamesaltucher.com/podcast.------------Thank you so much for listening! If you like this episode, please rate, review, and subscribe  to "The James Altucher Show" wherever you get your podcasts: Apple PodcastsStitcheriHeart RadioSpotifyFollow me on Social Media:YouTubeTwitterFacebook 
------------What do YOU think of the show? Head to JamesAltucherShow.com/listeners and fill out a short survey that will help us better tailor the podcast to our audience!Are you interested in getting direct answers from James about your question on a podcast? Go to JamesAltucherShow.com/AskAltucher and send in your questions to be answered on the air!------------Visit Notepd.com to read our idea lists & sign up to create your own!My new book, Skip the Line, is out! Make sure you get a copy wherever books are sold!Join the You Should Run for President 2.0 Facebook Group, where we discuss why you should run for President.I write about all my podcasts! Check out the full post and learn what I learned at jamesaltuchershow.com------------Thank you so much for listening! If you like this episode, please rate, review, and subscribe to "The James Altucher Show" wherever you get your podcasts: Apple PodcastsiHeart RadioSpotifyFollow me on social media:YouTubeTwitterFacebookLinkedIn

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