Tim Urban on the path to AGI and trends in tech history | E1779

0:011994 1995 my friend was like you have to come over like we were all going over to this one guy's house because he had you know he quote had aol whatever that means yes he was like i had i have he wasn't even called aol yeah he's like i have america online i was like i didn't even know what he was saying and then we'd go over and we'd all huddle around the computer and you know for it was it was it cost money per hour and you know it was three to five dollars an hour in the beginning people don't forget people forget that yeah and these like legendary chat rooms we would go on um that are now now they're legendary it's like the first thing and it was just randos and you're just there in these chat rooms and it was so new and i remember even i just remember even the concept that like a techie friend of mine when i was like i don't know 13 14 was like showing me how you could send in like some primitive version of email and i thought it blew my mind that he could type something on his computer across the town and it would appear on my computer which seems so obvious now but that was like totally mind-blowing technology to me yes this week in Startups is brought to you by Lemon.io.

1:03Need to speed up your product development without draining your budget? Hire vetted engineers from Europe at Lemon.io. Go to Lemon.io slash twist to get 15 % off for the first four weeks. Masterclass. Learn from the world's best minds anytime, anywhere, and at your own pace. Get 15 % off an annual membership to Masterclass at masterclass.com slash startups and superside design and creative are crucial for growth tech companies like shopify amazon and meta have found the perfect solution superside get two thousand dollars off with superside startup accelerator package at superside.com slash twist let me ask you what's your favorite couple of films of all time a couple of films that you love movies yeah cinema films movies picture shows i mean i love uh back to the future it's a classic like that's like the best movie ever um uh i love shutter island oh that's a good pull a good scorsese pull very good film i love a movie underrated that i think about my favorite genre of movie is the kind of movie that when you finish it you immediately want to go watch the whole thing again now that you know what's going on yes i love sixth sense memento yeah exactly and another one is less yep less um yeah those are all good examples less famous is uh the the handmaiden which is a korean film which is like i couldn't believe how good a movie this was it's like i watched it and it finished and i was like i'm immediately watching that whole thing again so this is an important topic for us to discuss because you nailed it i like literally you split the arrow i shot the arrow and then you shot your arrow and then i hit the bullseye and you split my bullseye um the examples you gave are you patiently watch a story unfold and you earn through that patience this incredible plot twist um or you know cathartic moment in the film and that experience of being patient and letting it evolve and then getting the reward delayed response um makes that reward so much better and then a film like uh you know transformers comes out and it's all incredibly crazy insane moments i don't know if you saw the flash yet um or the new indiana jones but i got you know older kids than you and uh you know go see these i still like to go to theirs these films now are a series of every single one of those shocking events so indiana jones which always had a couple of great adventure scenes it's one giant car chase the literally the film is one giant chase it does not stop so no characters get developed and then the flash um was a really interesting character um who's dealing with the pain of his parents dying and all this stuff and batman as well there's no room for the for the film to breathe for the story to unfold for the characters to you know develop and it's really lost it's like the tick tock of movies it's the same trend it's it's going for pure dopamine hits constant uh you know at the expense of anything that can make the movie actually good um just like you know tiktok is like you know again an audiobook is less dopamine hit e and less you know addictive but it's again an audio good audiobook changes your life you know you'll talk about 10 years from now um and but yeah so it is a trade-off and so now i just think we have a generation of young people this is what i think about who because they grew up with smartphones and tiktok um social media you know writ large never didn't know the internet um their brains are fried they've just gotten these crazy 30 second dopamine hits they've never actually experienced watching a film like memento to completion without touching their phone and my kids have a hard time um i've had to like retrain them to watch a film you know and to just be present in that moment i think this is like a major experiment we're doing on a generation uh and i think it's a deadly one i think this is why we're seeing so much um use of like sris and i don't want to get all like conspiracy theory here but i think like people are trying to build defense mechanisms uh antibodies against what's happening to their brain and the dopamine being burnt out and so everybody's anxious everybody's depressed well if you don't sleep and you get too many dopamine hits too constantly you're going to be fried it's too much it's like being an ambulance driver yeah what's what's like your rule for kid ages for when they can have a phone or social media or yeah so no social media i think until they're 16 or 17 i don't think there's anything good that comes out of it um we told our 13 year old that she'll get a phone when she's 15 or 16 and i'm going to give her the apple watch uh this year so at least i have location and we can sms and that kind of stuff because you can get one with a cell phone in it um and then everybody has ipads um and they can use them i like to generally use them in open spaces so i can see what's going on um and then um i try to check what they're using uh because with my 13 year old i remember when she was five or six she was she was really into disney princess she went through the disney princess industrial complex phase which you'll go through at some point and wait you have a boy or a girl girl okay yeah so you're gonna go through the the the industrial the princess industrial complex where yeah it's it's pretty intense um but uh it's like if there's one i i'm i do like those movies the nice thing about them is they're musicals so there's some great songs in there great yeah and they they've followed an arc now if you get really meta where now like frozen they're like yeah they're two girls and you know no bad guys anymore yeah they have like some bad guys and you know everybody's a little bit sympathetic and there's a lot of more diversity and maybe this character's gay or you know uh like gaston you remember uh beauty and the beast of course and you know gaston had this like guy who was his like butler you think he had a little thing going on the side literally in the live action version of it they make him gay um and i think he i don't know if he kisses a guy or he just has like google eyes with a guy and of course this made ronda santas texas everybody lose their minds and the the biggest concern right now with the ben shapiro crowd is they really got freaked out that the little mermaid was black that broke their brains but then there is this kind of like it may turn out in frozen that elsa or one of them is not straight when she grows up and that's going to blow the doors off of and i'm like can i ask you a question in all sincerity like you're listening to musicals who do you think makes these right it's pretty gay i mean it could be a bunch of straight guys right you know but any good musical i've you know a lot of the best all the lyrics were written by a gay man howard okay i didn't know but i and i hate to you know um stereotype anybody but i mean i lived in york oh yeah and i hung out with that or the actor kids and they would go hang out after um in these like bars that had a piano and they would sing show tunes so if you go to the west side of manhattan just like maybe on 9th to 10th avenue hell's kitchen area a lot of the theater people live there and a lot of there's these places where they go that are like underground after work and then you see these like people get up and they start belting out show tunes and it's awesome but it's majority gay yeah so shocker to the people i was in a lot of the best entertainment theater writing workshop because i was a um composer and there's like 30 guys total and i there was three i was one of the three straight guys in there okay sure so to the extent you like amazing musicals you might need to get comfortable with gay people yeah yeah not a big deal right anyway our guest today on this week in startups is tim urban and we just had to get started because tim and i are good friends and i think we're good friends we have like a bromance going we got to know each other the last couple years and um anytime we're at a party or hanging out together we talk for hours uh tim is just one of the smartest most considered uh people i know great writer and uh he's a he's a bad illustrator but the illustrations you're a self-described bad illustrator oh yeah but the illustrations really help learning uh and i love having you on the pod you spoke at all in summit last year thank you for doing that thank you for waiving your quarter million dollar speaking fee that we could never have afforded um that was great too you get a lot of those speaking fees um i it's not a quarter million but i get paid for all talks except for ted and all in the one that has the most profits is the one that doesn't pay you and uh and summit summit doesn't pay and then and then it's like small like a small like a friend you know i ask you or a small company i won't do that but like everywhere else pays yeah yeah i mean it's okay it's a living uh did the summit guys ask you to pay for your room too but did they at least pay i think the first thing was yeah and i i pushed back um they did that with me yeah yeah can you keynote this and then do this like and have a dinner and they're like and we have this perfect trailer for you i'm like i'm sorry a trailer where's this thing being held they're like oh bought a mountain and i'm like okay this is getting weirder and then they start hugging everybody and they're like yeah it's 25 000 i'm like wait a second i just told you i'm waiving my speaking for you now you want me to send you 25 000 and they're like well we're going to give you the vip trailer i'm like here's an idea i'm a speaker give me the vip trailer because i'm not charging you they're like oh we don't work that way i'm like but you just said you bought a mountain with sean parker's money so which is it okay listen you got an idea for a tech startup great you think you want to change the world you think you got this this is the one well you've got that same problem that we all do you don't have an engineer or you don't have enough engineers to make this happen and you need product velocity you need to go fast and how are you going to go fast and how are you going to control your burn rate if you got no engineers well what if you had a partner who could provide you with more than a thousand on-demand developers and those developers were all vetted experience result oriented and passionate about startups and building great products well what if they also charge competitive rates does this all sound too good to be true i know it does well then you need to head to lemon.io because your dreams have come true right now startups choose lemon.io because they only offer hand-picked developers with three or more years of experience and ones that have strong portfolios only one percent of candidates who apply to work at lemon.io actually get accepted and if anything goes wrong lemon will get you a replacement asap a couple of great launch founders have worked with lemon.io people in our portfolio and they have had great experiences so i want you to learn more at lemon.io slash twist and when you go there you're going to find your perfect developer or an entire tech team and you're going to do that in 48 hours or less and twist listeners get 15 off the first four weeks i want you to stop burning money i want you to hire developers smarter and faster visit lemon.io slash twist and give it a shot when's the last time you spoke at ted i only spoke once at ted in 2016 procrastination and i i'm a one and done guy because that was a terrible experience oh wait a second it's the number two ted talk in history i believe yeah but but prepping for was one of the most stressful awful it's not okay a talk is to an audience it's to a live group of people and if it doesn't go well you know you're never going to see those people again and it's done if your ted talk your ted talk is a widely distributed short film starring you only and you get one take and it's sick it's a sick amount of pressure that no one should be under and if you say a line wrong in your ted talk it is wrong forever i could never watch that ted talk now because anything that's that i didn't do right and i'm going to be miserable about and so yeah i'm i'm happy to have done one but no no more interesting how uh you were to ask me a question about summit and i interrupted you oh i was just gonna ask about like whether you paid for i just wanted the end of the story there no i i just i i was so frustrated with him i was like you know what i'm out i got a lot of other things i gotta work on so i just i bailed on doing i said maybe another time you know um and so i have the same philosophy with you which is i will do a friends event so like rafat ali runs a company skiff.com he worked for me he did great work for me i'm an investor in his company he does this like travel he's got a b2b travel magazine it's great uh online site and they do their travel summit every year and i was like sure i'll come interview somebody uh you want to bring in the big guns sure i'll come in i'll fly i'll pay my way all good i'll do it for a friend um and other than that uh if it's you know i don't know if it's a college thing i'll do it for a maybe if some but you know i do like four corporate once a year maybe and it's quite nice um and uh you know get paid a pretty penny for it and that's quite nice i like doing it i told them the speakers i have like three different people who book speaking things for me i just said book me ones that are near ski skiing and they're like japan salt lake city i'm like yes okay here you go one thing i like about talks is that it kicks my ass to stay fresh like i do a lot of talks on ai and that topic changes so quickly so i have to stay up to date and and sometimes i'm not and then i cram before the talk to get up to date then so it just it just keeps me uh you know up to date with those things and it helps also just you know writing about something it helps you under helps you articulate it better helps you just clarifies it in your head but doing a talk same way you have to be organized you know you have to so it just it's kind of a good uh it's just productive as well for me to do that it's a forcing function i literally did a talk on ai um for rick caruso he ran for mayor of la last time and he owns like if you know the grove in la yeah yeah he's a major real estate magnet and i just spoke to it was like 150 top executives and they're off-site and i did a talk on ai and it was very helpful um speaking of ai you know you and i uh are the last generation do you remember when there wasn't an internet you remember dial up yeah i do yeah yeah yeah i remember um 1994 1995 my friend was like you have to come over like we were all going over to this one guy's house because he had you know he quote had aol whatever that means yes he was like i had i have he wasn't even called ao yeah he's like i have america online i was like i didn't even know what he was saying and then we'd go over we'd all huddle around the computer and you know for it was it was it cost money per hour and you know it was three to five dollars an hour in the beginning people don't forget people forget that yeah and these like legendary chat rooms we would go on um that are now now they're legendary it's like the first thing it was like it was like you're and it was just randos and you're just there in these chat rooms and it was so new and i remember even i just remember even the concept that like a techie friend of mine when i was like i don't know 13 14 was like showing me how you could send in like some primitive version of email and i thought it blew my mind that he could type something on his computer across the town and it would appear on my computer which seems so obvious now but that was like totally mind-blowing technology to me yes yeah it when i saw it in 19 i was doing dial-up in 1983 84 um with bbs's those were the precursors you dial up into one computer um then i remember seeing the internet in the form of bitnet uh at fordham university and when i saw people chatting across the world from different colleges and universities this guy had a girlfriend in brazil or something chatting with her he never met her but they were going to plan on meeting each other i was like i don't understand like you guys can talk and chat for free and we were trying to build a mental model for it and the best i could figure out i was like this is kind of like cb because you you hold the button down on a cb and you can't hear anything you're broadcasting nobody else can broadcast you're stepping on each other you say something over you let go and kind of the next person goes and that was kind of how we looked at it or tried to frame it but the reason i bring this up is the acceleration of change and our generation specifically gen xers um we're the generation that understood the world or lived some percentage of our lives without internet without smartphones and then with them and i think ai is a similar one so i'm curious if your take on a generational basis if you were to compare other generations boomers i guess um and uh the greatest generation maybe what they saw compared to what we've seen and then we can go forward to what the next group of people is going to see and how insane the world is because in your amazing new book you talk about this um history uh the entire existence of human history you talk about being a thousand page book i think and i'm pretty sure this is your unique idea or was it somebody else's idea no i mean that that that's that's my idea i'm sure someone else has done the exact same thing no i mean i i was like i think your ability to frame stuff is like your superpower so let's start there with your framing of all of human history and the 999 pages versus the thousand yeah so i mean there there there's like multiple tiers of craziness that lead into our current time so like um the if it's all human history you know we could say it's 250 000 years old some people will say 300 000 or 200 000 whatever and so i said okay let's just let's just say 250 and then if it's a thousand page book if you wrote all of human history into a thousand page book um each page covering 250 years um then you know what does that look like and the the answer is that almost the whole 950 pages of that book is hunter gatherers everywhere just that really boring book um and then around page 950 you start to have really early cities in agriculture you know that you have the agricultural revolution picking up in the 950s and 960s throughout the world very slow and then around nine page 975 is the beginning of recorded history because that's when writing started taking hold and so when we actually just talk about prehistory prehistoric times that's the first 975 pages of the book so history is only 25 pages um you don't get to ad until page 993 so it's like the it's like the little epilogue of the book is ad yes um right so it's just you realize it just puts in perspective that all these things we consider like incredibly ancient you know buddha you know he's like page 990 or something like that right um and so it's like we you know all this stuff is the very tail end of the human history story so far.

20:14But the thing that's most interesting is when you look at it this way, you realize that... So if you took someone from any page in the book and you transported them one page into the future, most of the book, it would be the same kind of hunter-gathering lifestyle. Nothing much has changed. As you get later and later in the book, going forward, one page becomes a bigger and bigger deal. Until you get to page 999, you take baby George Washington, or you take 20-year-old George Washington, you bring him 250 years forward to today um and he would get out of the time machine and just be in a dream in an alien planet like it just nothing would make any sense at all he didn't know about you know the transportation was just horses in his day sailboats right and we're going to this yeah we're going to the space station and submarines and trains and cars and airplanes uh and communication was just you know he'd write a letter uh or he would talk to someone and that's about it uh and of course we have the internet today and we have everything else we have tv and and and telephones and um and and like so forget even the internet just like the basic things from 1950 would completely blow his mind uh and then you know he also just did there was no general relativity there wasn't didn't even know about atoms that that recently um like the the uh the size of the universe like there's all these things that we take for granted just basic knowledge that one page ago we didn't know so this page is an anomaly uh in every possible way which is a way of kind of like i think we we we often like assume that if we think that we're living in a special time that must be naive because everyone thinks that you know but actually we are and yeah and and then what you just talked about is you know our parents and our grandparents or whatever that's all within page 1000 so page 21 ,000 already itself is just, you know, really started with the industrial revolution and it has just been complete madness.

22:05Just accelerating paradigm shifts all over the place. Each sentence would represent 10 or 20 years. Yeah. Yeah. Depending on the format. The whole world is different. We all have self-doubt. I can promise you if there's a hundred people in a room, a hundred people have some level of insecurity. You can't have any self-doubt about your commitment and conviction to do this. You might have self-doubt about your ability to succeed, to raise the money, to attract the right people. Those are two different issues. The voice you just heard is one of my personal favorite CEOs of all time, Howard Schultz.

22:44Yes, the CEO of Starbucks. And it's from his new class. It's amazing. He has a class on business leadership and you need to watch it right now, right after this episode. whether you're a founder and you're looking to scale or maybe you're just like a rank and file employee right and you want to make a name for yourself you want to understand how the founders of companies think Howard Schultz is going to tell you exactly how to do what he did and you know what he's not the only one Bob Iger on leadership Chris Voss you know the negotiating guy he's amazing Tim Scott my friend from Radical Candor friend of the show these are just a sample of some of the most amazing minds in business, and you can get them right now on Masterclass.

23:26How about Gordon Ramsay on cooking? Hey, maybe you want to try to branch out Serena Williams on tennis, Steph Curry, my guy on shooting, get unlimited access to every single class. And right now, as a twist listener, you get 15 % off when you go to masterclass.com slash startups. That's right, masterclass.com slash startups for 15 % off an annual membership masterclass.com startups so then you get even within page 1000 um you know i say again for most of human history you know someone's grandparents their wisdom was their advice was wise listen to it you know they've been around now you get wise for a world that's not hearing him like it's like you know each generation has a really hard time understanding that the tools and technology of the next generation of the two generations later like trying to get you know imagine trying to get my grandmother to try to you know she's 97 to try to get to her to you know leverage gpt4 for you know it's it's a joke right she she doesn't if she minimizes her browser window she thinks the machine is broken and i have to come over and fix it because she doesn't know what happened because it ate the page it ate the page and right shout out to grandma 97 oh keep going let's break 100 mazel tov it's incredible i'm i'm happy with her super amazing about sort of your perspective on this is that as fast as it's going we now face a moment where technologists uh which you know we have a lot in our circle uh who have been watching ai since you know 60s 70s 80s a lot of talk about it pop culture you know michael creighton uh westworld just tons of examples of people thinking about autonomous beings and sentient life blade runner star wars whatever droids uh pick your metaphor and now here we are and you talk to chat gpt or any of the contemporaries you're starting to feel like you're talking to c3po and you know that to me was when i realized like yeah c3po had a lot of value as part of the squad in in the star wars series because it can tell you the odds of navigating this asteroid field or you know give you some strategy or whatever now you wouldn't want to have him face darth vader but i guess talking about how your mind as somebody who studies trends and i think like you're a trend spotter uh or a context giver i don't i don't know how to describe your gift but um you know futurist maybe uh but your ability to see right around the corner did you see and anticipate this level of exponential progress and let's be honest it's kind of like the last year has made everything seem really silly so take me inside your mind and how you're well dealing with this i wrote in 2015 it was really 2014 i started reading you know nick bostrom's book super intelligence and i got into rave kurswile and i read i i i went i got basically a stack of six or seven books on ai because stoked by nick bostrom's and then i and i was just like wide-eyed like i had no idea so i wrote about it and it turns out a lot of other people had no idea because that post was you know it really i think uh opened a lot of eyes and uh my readers were just as blown away as i was um and one of the questions and the the big questions after you know it was like this is such a huge deal it's going to change everything is um you know first is it going to be good or bad uh and that's that's a big one but also when is this going to happen you know our artificial narrow intelligence is everywhere which is you know ai that's good at a task that's everywhere there's thousands chess your anti-lock brake system on your car i mean gp every single thing that you're doing in your life is basically has ani in it at this point um but the big question was like okay artificial general intelligence which is when it's ai that's smart like a human is smart it's broadly generally smart it can just use reasoning and logic to solve any problem to learn anything new and it can it doesn't it's not doesn't have to it doesn't you know it can just break out of any specialty uh which you know it sounds obvious to humans it's like well yeah that's just what it's like that's a pretty magical ability we have this ability to have this generalized intelligent tool in our head and and of course the trend with ai is that in with narrow intelligence when it's better than us at something it's way way better like chess is an right it doesn't need it's over forget right yeah and then go more recently and lots of other things poker texas hold them now it's kind of falling in there yeah literally like once it passes us it it's it's just a whole different species so uh the the the scary thing is when you do have agi so something that is smart the way broadly the way we are but it's way better at being generally smart than we are like wow like that what's gonna happen that's right that's like it's just such a weird concept we've never had that on the planet we've always been the smartest animal on the planet like yes and so the big question is yeah it was like when when is this way you know when is this going to happen what you know it's going to take different jobs when so it's interesting just comparing a little bit what i thought in 2015 and what when i thought here's the illustration i mean this is the illustration that i believe made you famous um and yeah that that that that's the general idea here is that like so wait but why.com and here you see the chart uh human progress on the left axis time on the bottom axis yeah and you can describe from there yeah yeah i mean it's like it's it's you know it's i said it seems naive to think well well of course everyone thinks their time is special and you're right on the cusp and everything but actually like if you look at the page 1000 how things are going like it we are we are in in an absolutely ununique and wild time so it was like is it comparable to any other moment in history is it comparable to mathematics science the world is round language spoken language air travel nuclear power nuclear weapons is it comparable in any way to you or does this dwarf all of those put together so like i always think it must have been crazy for someone who was born in like 1850 because if you were born in 1850 you were 15 you know in the mid 60s um but you were also still alive maybe in like 1930 and the the 50 years between like 1865 and 1905 yeah was crazy it saw the advent first of uh telegraph which was insane technology so europe and the u.s could communicate instantly you know how magical that it threw an ocean instantly before it was you know weeks for any letter to go back and forth so there's the telegraph then comes the telephone then comes the voice recorder marconi going to newfoundland yeah and just and then electricity this is you know edison tesla westinghouse electricity just goes from electricity was like an internet was like the internet it goes from nothing to every year to just in doing every like ani i was saying today is everywhere like suddenly electricity is in every home and you know we think we take it for granted electricity is insane it takes a burning fire a coal fire somewhere um and it converts that raging uncontrollable energy into this little magical butler like you just flip on with a switch and it's waiting for you and you flip it on and it can freeze food and it can heat food this fire you know it's just it's very cool electricity it's like generalized energy you know for anything so then you also had the car comes around right in the car and the the the the motion picture all of those were in those 50 years that's wild and then that's you know and then that person so that person saw all of that uh and and and then if you stayed around a little longer you quickly start to see the airplane and the tv so there is a i think that must have felt a little like this and then it's like the whole world's changing like everything is getting everything's magical and like you need to keep up and all the industries you better adapt or you're gonna die um so it must have felt a little like that but this to me feels it is i just think it's just this on that on steroids it's happening quicker it's more confusing and it's it's more powerful like it's scarier because i feel like you know um the the ability for us to just off ourselves as a species as just it's just higher than it was we didn't have existential threats in 1900 there was nothing that was going to kill the whole pandemic maybe maybe maybe but because you didn't have air travel yet or wide scale you didn't have air travel basically right so you know if there was a pandemic they're not letting people off the boats at ellis island for a year or two you know we're shutting borders so it'd be contained and and that's you know that's a natural disaster that could uh you're right air travel did maybe make a pandemic more existential but like nukes was like the first time that it was this concept that was like world war three if it happens might be the end like that's new that's which is by the way why it's technology it's why technology is scary because the 20th century was the best ever by basically most any metric you know gdp per capita life span poverty disease life expectancy everything and it was also the ones with the biggest wars the biggest genocides the worst the scariest weapons the the beginning of existential threat you know the climate change we didn't have the power to actually change the climate but now we have so much power as a species we we have our effect is bigger on everything so so anyway i think there are examples like this for sure but like yeah well i think we counted like three right you know like a pandemic which is a naturally occurring thing that we exacerbated nuclear which we we woke that demon up um and then um you know climate we kind of slowly boiled the planet so three three really human created um existential threats it's not like it's a uh you know a a meteorite hitting earth and we have another you know frozen era this is stuff we created and but you believe ai um has this ai could just you know is it ai is a rage it could of course like in the nightmare scenarios it you know some ai gets out of hand and starts doing some process some industrial process it was programmed to do an act and kills everyone in the process okay so there's there's obviously those scenarios but there's also just you know it's our civilization you know living in a you know an industrialized modern democracy you think of it as it's just how it is that's our you know general 10 generations it's just been stable and it's that's it's an artificial human invention and like it's only stable because like a bunch of people are act a certain way and hold a certain set of values and information flows in a certain predictable way and there's institutions that people trust and what's scary about ai is just how quickly it could just shake that civilization to its foundation uh you know and just and just totally like flood the airwaves with total you know misinformation misinformation like to the point where no one has any idea what's true to you no one knows that the big taking down power grids overloading the internet exactly imagine taking down the internet i always think is just like and it would be a complete disaster yeah the power grids the internet plus everything else right so it's like now you'd want to be one of those hoarders not those hoarders those uh you know those doomsday preppers yeah which um you know it's not the craziest thing to just well i mean i um have put i'm getting generators on both houses because here in california we have this issue with the grid and i have you know uh starlink and the regular internet connection and i'm actually thinking about water and having some amount of water storage like i'm literally looking at water tanks so i i am in your camp that we may have unleashed a demon i think if you look at we have the oppenheimer film coming out this summer um i can't wait that looks incredible you're a nolan fan yeah yeah yeah i'm dying to watch yeah um you know if we look at that moment um and i'm just thinking out loud here with history it seemed like you needed a crazy sociopathic person hitler whoever um to turn the world on its head right you just need one lunatic um to really do some deranged behavior and that would be the catalyst but then you uh science unlocks um you know nuclear power and nuclear bombs and then it turns out the u.s is the one that does it because we're like this war has got to end um now we take that same analogy and you look at osama bin laden yeah 19 people caused a massive world changing event spurs two or three wars just 19 people with a couple planes caused what two decades of chaos on the world uh like the joker i think it's one person now you know we went from like the third reich hitler and his incredible army and in japan causing chaos on a globe to 19 people causing chaos on the globe and all this stuff i think it's one person now conquest chaos on the globe i mean nick bostrom uses the example of like what if instead of having to enrich uranium you could create a nuclear bomb by microwaving sand you know we'd be in the stone age because there's just even if it's one in a million people wants to bring down the whole species and create the apocalypse there's seven billion eight billion people so that's eight thousand people have a chance to microwave sand and get things going so that's that okay we can't make gravestite to create a nuke so that one isn't but but how about uh bioweapons and how they're going to become easier to create you know to manufacture a pandemic or um you know or or just to like you said take down the power grid as soon as it becomes easier and easier where one person can you know can get in there and you know create an advanced ai that starts just you know whatever doing something that even they don't anticipate it's scary yeah The problem is like, it doesn't take bad people.

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That's superside.com slash TWIST. to get too large off of your package well done superside yeah and there is evil and sick people in the world this is another thing that we've seemed to have um i think a couple of generations that didn't have to go to war because we have a volunteer army we've abstracted the concept of going to war to a volunteer you know paid army uh and you know it's we i don't think we understand exactly what it means to go to war uh and so we just think well everything's going to be safe everything's always been safe it always works out but yeah i mean what are the chances if you think about covid and their gain of function research which they're clearly doing and i don't have to be a conspiracy there this is not alex jones territory they were doing gain of function research obviously um and i don't know if i feel like gain of function research should be disallowed it might be actually very important to do i don't exactly have an answer on that i'm curious what you think but what are the chances they were actually using ai because it's a narrow ai problem i would be surprised if the covet labs in wuhan or other places and ones in the united states of doing this kind of research i'd be shocked if they weren't using narrow ai so given the gains we have now pretty clear you could have chat gpt make something that oh let's have something that takes 20 days before you show symptoms try that let's find something that kills babies and young people teach us how to do it teach me how to i want to end the world and you make your you know you made you make your own um you leverage you know some of these these larger foundational you know ai models and you but you make one with your own rules um and it doesn't have anything to prohibiting it from helping you figure out how to create an apocalypse um and and i talked to someone from the pentagon for a while and you know he said that you know that this notion that oh there you know we don't go to you know the u.s isn't in you know we're not we're not at war very often it's not it's like actually we're always constantly at war right now it's informational it's you know and and um and it's just when when things move slowly you know nukes as much as they came on quickly there were you know a couple decades to start to figure out what are the rules how should we handle this you know this was the one thing to focus on and you know what should diplomacy be like and given this but when things move so quickly we just don't have a time we don't have time to uh to like figure out safeguards and to adjust um and so uh you know but this is you know you can get swallowed in like the negativity it's also really exciting the positivity like the like the tools that are coming around if we don't kill ourselves off um will i think create a world that would seem like a utopia to people today just like our world would seem like utopia to george washington um you know where where like there's no such thing as dying of old age you just you you just can easily rejuvenate yourself you can you know and you can you can live as long as you want to where um where where things like climate change don't have to worry about that we can we continue we have we have the power to make to to control things on a macro level um and um you know every problem you can imagine you know poverty and and disease all of that is just easy easy to solve um and everyone has what they need there's no you know there's no more scarcity um and then you have the idle mind problem you know uh that comes up like what what happens when a human has no work to do you mentioned this as well our operating system and you go into a lot of tribalism in the book which is a really interesting part um and i guess also kind of brave of you given the woke mob um so i'm interested in double clicking on that but we'll get to it in a second but uh and for people who don't know the book if you just type tim urban into amazon is what's our problem a self-help book for societies it's about a 13 or 14 hour listen i think it's a long book a lot of good drawings and pictures in it um but uh you know you talk about um our operating system and what we as a biological creature how slowly we evolve so now our speed of evolution and the speed of the smartphones growth just as but one example uh these things are out of sync our brains are not designed to consume tiktok all night and stay up all night or to be in front of the screen and uh maybe we shouldn't have every horrible instance recorded on screen and then traumatize us over and over and over again uh with car crashes on whatever social network is your preferred one so maybe talk a little bit about our biology running into the pace of technology and obviously the pace of ai specifically yeah i mean it's like we can look at our hand and be like, that's a tool that was developed for a certain purpose by evolution over long periods of time.

43:37And our eyes, it used to be eyes that saw underwater. Our super far back ancestors were fish. And those eyes have slowly evolved and developed into eyes that saw on land. So our brains are different. There are tools that were developed, optimized for what for for a certain you know for a certain basically they were optimized to help our ancestors survive and reproduce in 50 000 bc that is what they are that's what our brains are and that is uh so so now and so all the things that helped you know the optimal optimal the the the brains that were best suited for that particular purpose pass their genes on um and so that of course was you know a lot of you know probably in group and out group you know tribal sense um and maybe believing what the herd believe not asking too many questions is maybe a good survival thing tribalism writ large yeah yeah yeah and focusing more on your short to short term kind of immediate needs um and um being kind of obsessed with sexual reproduction all these things that were that that happened to be what led to survival and reproduction then so now you take that piece of software and you transport it to an alien planet, which is today here in this advanced civilization.

44:57It was not made to be in an advanced civilization. And you also, instead of having these little tribes of 150, which is meant to be a hundredth of a little unit, now you have it be with hundreds of millions of people in these things. And of course, it's going to be a mess. It's going to misfire. Now, one of the things that's amazing about the human brain is it's plastic enough that we can build this civilization and we actually can function and we can make rules like the constitution and laws and norms that actually allow us to kind of override so many of the operating systems mismatches and actually like we can kind of pull it off, but we're not good at it.

45:38We're the underdog here. It's like we're up kicking our coverage here trying to do this. And so now when you have things change really quickly, social media comes around and journalistic integrity goes out the window because the business model changes for media and things like that. And you're going to have a bunch of things that we built safeguards for and we built not just laws, but like societal ethics, sorry, etiquette, like, you know, etiquette, social etiquette. We built all this very carefully over long periods of time. We developed it. Suddenly, it's just all out the window and we just go into rampant tribalism and witch burning and public shaming.

46:11What you're seeing is you're seeing that old software for 50 ,000 BC, which definitely out grouped a certain person in the tribe and they would gossip about them and they would you know know you know and publicly shame them in in this little group now that's firing on this in this totally unexpected set of ways with a billion people and has justine landed yet she makes some joke on twitter about i hope i don't get aids when i'm in south africa you can look up has justine landed yet and she gets on to a 12-hour flight and then when she gets on the side of flight the entire world and every news network on a global basis has reported on her joke about which the intent of was we really don't care enough about people in africa we need to change that um and her life is ruined by a gawker journalist who decided i'm going to destroy her life um very interesting subplot here is our ability to um and what the the sort of growth of cpus in relation to our brains and so i love this chart the exponential growth of computing maybe you could sportscast this describe it to people who are listening and then what conclusions you draw from this so this is a chart that uh that i think ray kurzwell put in his book um and it's uh it's this is as you can see this i think he put it in the book to show how um how accurate kind of the the predictions had been with um so this is back in 2000 you know people were plotting the you know one metric you can use to assess computing power and the growth of it is you know calculations per second per thousand dollars so so basically for something you can a computer that anyone can you know buy and own um how much can it do and the trend was that you know it's it's it's working its way up very quickly to where it can do even a computer in your pocket can do what a human brain can do which is a lot that's trillions of calculations per second but it doesn't take long after that before the computer in your pocket can do or maybe that's embedded in your brain with neural link can do what all the whole species that kind of computing power and it's this concept of accelerating rate of change it's instead of it's instead of diminishing returns which we often have in other industries accelerating returns of technology because the more advanced species makes progress faster than a less advanced species and the more progress we make the faster it goes and the idea of like exponential progress is not intuitive to us again 50 000 bc there wasn't exponential anything it was just linear time moved linearly and the animal you were hunting ran in a straight line.

48:39And it was not a world where our brain, that tool, it does not happen to be... Just like our hand is not good at touching fire, our brain is not good at understanding compound growth of any kind, which is why we're bad at investing. And it's also why we always underestimate the future. Or Bill Gates has a good quote that says, we tend to overestimate the change that's going to happen in the next two years and underestimate the change that's going to happen in the next 10 years because we we fall for the you know the hype cycle get goes overboard so we think okay everything's you know gpt is going to be taking all of our jobs by 2024 it won't but by 2034 the world's going to change in ways that we we would be blown away by yeah and that's i think a very important i think there's some other points here around our perception of the acceleration of change so when we look at that acceleration of change we we look we're used to looking at graphs and we know what a hockey stick graph looks like right and even your graph of like hey you're here and it's going to do this hockey stick it's possible that that hockey stick is just straight to infinity and that it may not be a chart that we've seen before we really don't understand that and so maybe we talk a little bit about the ai or multiple ai instances with um you know certain pieces of software now baby gbt lang chain is i think is how a lot of people do it you can kind of put together a sequence hey this ai generate me an image hey this ai describe the image hey this ai write me a story about the description of that image hey uh take all of that and write me a make me a movie and by the way just do that based on the current events that are happening here and just make me you know a new black mirror season every uh day uh based on whatever's happening with and these kind of things start compounding so is it possible that this timeline is just uh something we can't understand yeah i mean when something's unprecedented uh it's going to be really hard to predict when it's brand new um it's just not something we can use you know our usual rubric is like basing this on experience our own life experience or on history and i think there's probably an element of the future that will map on to patterns we've seen and then other elements that will be completely new again building something that is more intelligent than humans is incredibly unprecedented um it is it's there's just you know anything we try to do to imagine what it will be like is like a chimp trying to imagine what a human can build like they just can't the chimp would be stuck saying oh they'll they'll have endless bananas that would be amazing yes more bananas tree even they'll be able to climb a tree even faster than me it's like no no we're we're going to the space station you don't understand anything we're doing we're learning about you know subatomic particles like it's just a it's so beyond them and so it's the same thing like trying to understand the future is uh trying to predict it it becomes harder and harder the faster things go when you talk about like infinity you know one objection to that could be well like the species has to stay stable the societies have to stay stable enough to keep building you know and it seems like instead of getting to infinity they would collapse unless you've built some self-sustaining ai in which case even if we collapse or even go extinct hey, the AI can keep building.

52:02And then this leads to a little bit of a question, which is, well, okay, if that seems to be the way things are going and it seems likely you're going to have this massively intelligent AI that can go and colonize the universe if it wants, why don't we see any other alien species AI out there doing that? And then that leads to a bunch of other interesting questions. Maybe we're first. Maybe we're really early. Maybe we're some of the first species that got to this level. Maybe we're alone. or maybe this doesn't happen the way we think maybe that's not something that ai ever does when it gets smart it has no interest in doing something big it goes and retreats within itself yeah just shuts itself off it's like yeah this is all meaningless it's all a big nothing unplug me but the fermi paradox quickly comes out because when you make these kind of gains one would think hey uh with ai you're going to understand the nature of the universe and in fact uh elon our mutual friend uh launched xai just today with a mission i don't know if you saw it uh but the mission statement isn't to make a lot of money or to create general ai it's to understand the true nature of the universe and i know i'm a subscriber to your twitter so i think i'm one of your i don't know we got a couple thousand people over there is it public on the twitter how many you have does it show how many more of i think uh under a thousand oh okay so it's brand new but i you i i haven't used it very much no but i subscribe to it and i'm paying you three bucks a month or whatever for like two tweets and i'm pretty happy about it because it's an intelligent thread with intelligent people on it and you were just talking about how you're having a hard time getting your hand your head around like the i believe kind of the big bang and what came before it which is always how i stump every physicist is i just say what came before the big bang and they're like that's an interesting question what's outside the universe they're like we don't know we don't know what came before the big bang so there are some really interesting theories let's go well i i mean is it a series of big bangs that just keeps replaying itself i mean so well so so i didn't i always thought until i started researching more deeply on this that the big bang was the idea was that everything was all matter was condensed into an infinitely small point like a singularity and this was the beginning of everything time space and expanded from there and that's kind of actually an old theory and the newer theory is is this theory of inflation um pioneered by alan guth who's still like alive and not that old and it's kind of cool that someone who uh it feels like you know it's weird that he's just still doing his thing but um but basically it's that there was potentially like in an extremely small place much smaller than a proton there was like a gram of matter only and then there's this weird process where he doubles and doubles and doubles and doubles until it's all the matter in the current universe uh and energy condensed into something like maybe the size of a grapefruit which is also crazy none of this makes any sense and then it expanded out from there but what's interesting about it is it doesn't necessarily suggest anymore that that was the beginning of everything it suggested that this was the beginning of the universe that we know the part you know or maybe the part of the universe that we know there there might it might have been the latest in a long sequence of events and the the there really are some max tedmark's book our mathematical universes really digs into a lot of this stuff in a really interesting way like he talks about you know the the the idea that this is just that what we can see this observable universe is the universe and that's everything it's just there's not any good read that's he sounds to him like people thinking the earth is the center of everything before they realize completely narcissistic it's like flat earth theory or like yeah this is the end of the world because we can't go past here yeah so he talks about like there's it's really interesting there could be tiers of multiverses so you could have a lot of other universes just like ours where they have a different history they have the same physics so their physics class is the same but their history classes are different because they're in a different universe then there's a different maybe another tier um which is actually like the laws of physics are different in those universes that all maybe came from that same little point so anyway i am not good enough at uh articulating this yet because i'm still learning about it you're down the rabbit hole yeah it's it's one of these things where it's it's you know classic kind of like you know uh the uh dunning kruger where i was pretty sure i was like no no i understand what the modern thinking is on this stuff and then you start reading about it and you realize that you i i didn't at all i was like there's just a lot of new theories um but uh but yeah it what seems and so so and then of course there's the the much even more meta question which is um is this uh an actual physical universe or is it a simulation and yeah that's interesting because that could explain the fermi paradox which is you know maybe the reason we don't see any evidence of alien life which seems to make no sense maybe it's just like a rendered you know universe like a new board in you know in poly you know whatever yeah this is just like yeah it's just like they render a universe uh like a sim city you don't need to know about other universe and so we're just gonna reset it at some point anyway yeah and then why would they put other aliens in it that's that's too much you know computing power they just put us to observe us so anyway this is i can go on a lot of these topics for a long time but it's like and then you come back to earth and you're like you go on twitter and everyone's screaming about a policy and you're like oh my god like it is like it's it's it we're all here whatever it is whatever's going on like we are all happen to be here at the same time on this little planet like it really is uh it does put things in perspective it's cheesy but it like it really is good reading about the universe is good it makes you a better person i think yeah when you look at what's happening with tribalism in the united states um what do you think the end game is here um do you think this is a passing fad trump broke everybody's brains um or now we have hey who can we trust uh we found out like yeah the world health organization maybe they got an agenda maybe there was a cover-up about what happened in wuhan uh you know we spend a lot of money on advertising you know uh drugs and you know these conspiracy theories you know what was a conspiracy theory 20 30 40 years ago all of a sudden becomes like oh yeah that's a noble peace prize for the catholic church is the largest child abuse ring in the world uh who knew um yeah but that was like a conspiracy theorist that was a conspiracy when shaneet o 'connor ripped up the pokes poster uh picture on senate live if remember that um so where do you stand at this moment in time and people's brains being broken here specifically the united states and then the trust in trust in organizations or just trust in general yeah i i think um it's on one hand what we're doing now looks a whole lot like a lot of things we've done before this this descent into kind of primitive behavior tribalism in group out group um you know believing lies if they fit with our um you know if our with our you know with our movement and and you know coercive movements that kind of are illiberal that break the kind of liberal laws um liberal norms and and are just kind of like old school like you know i would call like power games movements that are just like if you have the power to silence something or you have the power to conquer this institution doesn't matter if it's like right or if it's within or just you can do it because you have the power to so there's all we were descending into that in a way that looks a lot like the red scare it looks a lot like what happened in china during the maoist you know there are those early maoist years and it looks like what happened in nazi germany again not all the same and what happened out to germany was more intense but it's the same you know and then again if you look back to farther back history you see this again and again and again you know the salem which you know which burnings and um the french revolution and it's just this thing that humans do which is you know you descend into our most kind of primitive cells when you dehumanize the out group and um and everything becomes about conformity and um and if you don't conform you will be like shamed or in some cases you know now at prison or in you know murdered for so so the the question is is this you know in some cases in history like the red scare um this is a blip it happens yeah then society kind of comes to its senses and a bunch of people are embarrassed for how they behaved and it's a shameful period in history and it's over and we come out of it yeah it's a lesson learned right yeah hey yeah other times it's the french revolution in it you know it it completely upends the society and and forever and and and so um the question is even if we're just looking at history you know which one of those is it but also it's the fact that maybe this is not like history because the history didn't have social media yeah um history didn't have all the existential threats we talked about and the fear that comes along with it um and um but so what i see um is i see the same overarching kind of trend that i think gives rise to um you know like woke mobs and book mob behavior and to the rise of an old school demagogue in trump you know classic demagogue and it's like you know there's always demagogues who want to you know take over the country and there's always um there's always radical groups that want to bully their way into power over it and and and change the you know leadership and institution after institution that you know to fit with their ideology and usually they don't have the power to yeah right now something's up right like what is it and how did trump get on that power oh right a reality show oh social media his twitter account like that combination gave him a platform and then the discontent and his i mean i think he's a savant i mean when it comes to communication and and he's hilarious he's a classic demigod demigod is they're not stupid they're talented people they know exactly how to manipulate and pull strings but it has to be at a time when you know he could just lie and he wouldn't have any penalty for that yeah you know i i think if he tried to do this in the 90s or even you know in the 2000s i i think that the lying wouldn't have gone over as well i think it wouldn't have worked as much um and the kind of you know really kind of tribal you know language rhetoric as opposed to reagan you know reagan is the exact opposite in his rhetoric it was common humanity you know it was high-minded it was all americans you know we were all you know big tent and trump was the opposite So something has changed in that like the guy, a guy like Trump is, is, is now the most appealing candidate as opposed to a guy like Reagan.

1:02:35So I think if we don't address and fix the underlying trend, even if Trump doesn't win in 24 or, you know, even after he's president again or whatever, he's gone, there'll be another demagogue. Maybe it's on the left this time. Who knows? Even if the woke movement and people finally get sick enough of it and start actually speaking out and saying, this is not social justice. This is not progressive. This is the opposite of those things. And this thing is bad. and it's bad for the causes that it's supposed to represent. There'll be another, you know, it's a demagogic movement. It's a, it's a movement that also lies that also phrase on people's, you know, kind of, you know, worst instincts and xenophobia.

1:03:11Yeah. In some cases, they're going to take our jobs. Yeah. Or in some cases, it preys on people's empathy, you know, and actually like, you know, it preys on empathetic people and makes them think being a good person is, you know, being part of this movement. There'll be another one of these movements, another move, whether it's a radical or hardcore reactionary movement, we'll get a huge amount of steam and we'll, start conquering institutions so i think we have to look at like why these things have risen up and not just the things themselves and i think it has to do with like structural changes to like the media and social media and also um you know the the rapid change the fact that things are changing so quickly and that creates chaos and demagogues and mobs take advantage of chaos yeah it's kind of like the joker right it's like yeah you need a gotham city for the joker to emerge right like joker didn't create gotham city gotham city was kind of created the joker right it gave him the platform that his unique skills uh could be uh realized in and i think it is a very interesting moment in time i i i feel like watching authoritarians around the world continue to shoot themselves in the foot xi jinping putin north korea you know pick your dictator they can never keep it together uh they can never keep their society advancing they always that uh you know unlimited power always corrupts and then you look at the united states it's like well trump's got 70 you know uh felony counts there's three more cases like he can only serve two terms like what's the chances he's gonna like change the term limits he's gonna be dead soon anyway is there some like successor to him that is like a natural one i don't think so but there is something going on where people feel they've been manipulated by the system and lied to um and this trust in people you were supposed to believe in like if you look at trust in media uh trust in politicians trust in teachers trust in clergy whatever they do these like pew institute does all those trust surveys i mean it is plummeting to the point at which people have more trust in like jeff bezos or amazon they trust amazon more than they trust biden or trump or any political politician or the new york times or cnn or fox why on earth would you trust fox why on earth would you trust in the new york times if they've chosen to pander to either extreme so that's the one i'm trying to get my head around and it's front of mind because we i got some criticism and blowback for platforming rfk jr on all in and we had this like interview and if you saw it but it's okay if you didn't but you know it was like probably his first big podcast appearance and i thought it was very interesting that you know when i said uh when i described his theories as like well he's got some kind of conspiracy there is around these vaccines we're like he's not a conspiracy there so i'm like okay but he does think things that are against the science is like well what if the science is wrong and i'm like yeah that's possible um so the best thing i can think of is yeah do the debate debate the guy who's pro vaccine have the and maybe more speech maybe more long-form conversations i feel like that the the antidote for what's happening right now is experts on long-form podcasts i know that's a bit narcissistic since i have two pockets but there's something about these long-form discussions amongst experts that i think is allowing some group of people to navigate this manipulation what are your thoughts on people who are trying to find the truth and what process you should use we like we don't we take for granted how much our society's stability is based on shared trust in kind of truth-making institutions like academia you know and academic papers uh and you know uh you know you know statistics and fbi you know and yeah and uh and then the media um and then the uh the trust that what the government says is true and so that creates a shared reality when people can all kind of trust the same sources and it's like an anchor that the whole society can kind of at least hold on to it not the whole there's always people who don't trust those things but the percentage that says you know rush limbaugh used to say you know there's like the four pillars of deception in the country and it was something like the things i just said it was academia you know science media and the government or something like that and you know the the there's you know maybe i don't know maybe 10 20 would agree with that today that percentage is way higher and it's partially it's coming from two ends it's partially higher because the people like rush limbaugh saying that and are there's a lot of them now and there's a lot of people who believe them also the institutions have become less trustworthy journalistic ethics and and uh has really you know if you look at the the you know it's i'm just reading this new book uh the outrage machine by tobias rose stockwell really good book um and he you know talks about there used to be there there's there's hearsay and rumors and and and the things you hear and then there's this funnel um this this funnel of verification and there's this process of of that that that's you know a well-trodden process professional journalism and that's a funnel and by the time it comes out uh it's it's you know you can trust it it's been verified that funnel is just gone it's just you know first of all a lot of people getting their info right from social media from people who don't even pretend to have any they don't even know what journalistic process is but the professional journalists aren't professional anymore so many of them are just you know throwing out you know clickbait headlines that are totally biased that are totally um they have a political agenda they're not balanced and they and they will lie and they'll admit facts and so it's just a that's a really bad thing for society um to have these truth and truth making things uh lose trust and so um what i put you back to your point long-form podcast i think that what people do turn to is podcasters and individual voices that they they do trust and i think that in the absence of being able to trust cnn or whatever i think that people will turn to long-form podcast type stuff and and letting an expert go on for a while not these bite-sized kickbait things i think it is like maybe one of the best ways to actually kind of continue an honest discourse that's actually informed and that can you know move that can kind of create a actual consensus down the road so yeah i think that is a good thing and i like that the society you know the internet allows us to adapt maybe new things will spring up or maybe it'll be like the red scare and some of this craziness will pass and these institutions will start acting a little bit more professional again my favorite example which i try to bring up with sacks uh who's you know one of my best friends but we obviously have difference of opinions and you know he's um you know he's very anti-war as am i um but i do think fighting against dictators invading other countries probably a noble pursuit um yeah obviously you want to avoid it um but he frequently gives me news stories and you know hey maybe we should talk about this on the podcast sure we all work on the docket and they're from sources and i'm like do you know like is zero hedge like a russian source and who's running zero hedge who's running this you know newspaper who's running this sub stack and he keeps giving this like kohana the great or something like sub stack and this person i guess blends you know fragments of news together and i think this is the technique that the kgb perfected um and uh i think william blatty and the exorcist said you know the the devil mixes lies with truth that's how they get with that's how he gets you kind of situation and l ron hubbard this as well he was a stage hypnotist most people don't know that's founder of scientology and he would do this rabbit hole technique fact fact indisputable fact common knowledge and then implanting an idea fact fact fact and it's like this rabbit hole hypnotist technique and they did this operation infection um and people can look that up i n f e k t i o n and the kgb in the 80s ran a disinformation campaign that worked to get people most people this might be before many people's times to get people to think that the united states created aids in a laboratory and you know how they did it the entire technique in this effection or whatever was to plant a story in a pro-soviet indian newspaper called patriot and they got this anonymous letter to be printed there and then they got eventually um they flipped newspaper to newspaper to newspaper to all the way to the point of dan rathal reporting on the cbs evening news and that has now that little kgb technique is the technique of journalists gawker was kind of like one of the first hey tim cook is gay anderson cooper's gay and uh i knew um nick danton very well at the time because we're competing and he was like yeah it's hypocrisy we're gonna out tim cook we're gonna out uh famously peter teal right who ultimately his demise and they use that tip line as a way to justify it and they were like it's in the tip line and if people are talking about it at the bar we're going to run with it and then after a certain number of gawker and whatever other you know blogs or social media covered it then the new york times or let's say something in between like business insider or something like not as noteworthy as cnn or you know new york times they would run it and then you had the story became well there's a story about this and sometimes it was the harvey weinstein story and rightfully so glocker gets a lot of credit for running with that whenever the people were scared other times it was false information right or it's just uncouth and unfair to out a gay man who was running a public company who wouldn't be allowed to run a public company maybe at that era um or people might boycott iphones if they knew tim cook was gay whenever when he was in the closet so i just think that's like what's happened with press is that this unnamed sources and flipping oh in this publication an unnamed source said this and if you get enough of those it's indisputable right and there's two there's two you know kind of disasters there one is you know certain just actually completely incorrect information gets spread um and when it does come out that this source was this this brand that you trust was really wrong about this and this you stop you stop listening to it you stop trusting it so even when it has created the boy cried wolf problem um yes and uh yeah it's um you know i mean part of it is it's it's the structure right now like in in news is not media is just it used to be in this you know 60s 70s 80s if nbc was notably wrong more often than abc and cbs people would make nbc would become a laughingstock and no one would want to watch it yeah uh and or if it were biased if one of them were you know politically left or right biased it would be again it would lose viewers today like fox did yeah now it's like boom yeah well both fox and then you know a bunch of others and the pioneered the pioneered this new model and said wait a second you know and today with cable actually if you really like ramp up kind of tribalism towards if you just cater towards one tribe um and tell them what they want to hear and you do it quickly uh that gets you money accuracy doesn't do very much for you doesn't really matter you know you can't like no clicks totally no subs exactly so the is just basic incentive structures just basic you know business like they became the the money direction of money just turned and so um there has to be some you know some mechanism to start holding um you know to start penalizing inaccuracy and and and um and also you know uh uh bias just um and maybe that's you know some ai maybe ai can help maybe there's some kind of algorithmic system that it ai you know you know even the little thing on twitter which says you know readers thought you people might want to know and it gives you like some additional notes yeah i think that thing is great like again maybe that thing gets corrupted but right now i'm like i love that thing and it's and and and i'm like what if that's the very beginning of like you know something like gpt that is scanning all new sources in the world it gets pretty good at like you know and it's show it gets it develops a very good track record yeah that's you know and in hindsight say wow that thing is right most of the time that can come in and say at the bottom of an article you can have a chrome extension that says this article is 60 accurate or this journalist and gets five stars because it tends to be always tends to be accurate that could change everything because now there's an incentive system again yeah i think that's the really interesting process and not to speak out of school here because elon's talked about it publicly but in the early days of when he uh bought twitter and i happened to be in the building um for the discussions around community notes and i think community notes was like on the um like the previous administration's like kill this like yeah we don't need this you know we're gonna lay off a third of the people the previous regime was gonna do a layoff and and i think community notes was part of that and i just remember elon being in the room when somebody explained it to elon and i watched him like okay explain it again explain it again okay one more time and he just asked really good questions and it was like oh wait a second this thing actually works um because you have people on both sides and then you're tracking and this person did like a really amazing paper about it and you can look up the community notes paper of which people were considered trustworthy in previous notes and then which people you know it's almost like a page rank algorithm and there's a very sophisticated algorithm and trust system where if you try to do something you would uh you know if you tried to game it it wouldn't work basically um the gaming would be you know uh eventually found out listen tim i could talk to you for hours and i have been over an hour uh if you haven't bought tim urban's book do me a favor buy the audiobook buy two copies of the print book and then i when you're done give them as presents because it's going to blow people's mind it's going to make them think about the world differently and you could be the person who introduces uh your friends people outside of the tech and media space to tim urban one of the greatest thinkers and writers and he's okay as an illustrator of our time tim you're awesome uh maybe you come back in a year and uh we'll chop it up again we'll do thank you jason all right congratulations on the baby