Transcript of #2521 - Aravind Srinivas New

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The Joe Rogan Experience.

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What's happening? Good to see you.

You too. Thanks for having me.

My pleasure.

Yeah.

How many podcasts have you done?

I don't know. I don't know the count, but maybe tens.

Well, when we were talking, we were talking in the lobby, I was like, this dude would be a good guest because we were talking about ancient Hindu scriptures where you were talking to me about something that sounds like a nuclear bomb. Yeah.

And I was like, oh, the Brahmastra. I need to know more about this. Yeah. So the Brahmastra is part of the Mahabharata. I mean, you've talked about Mahabharata in a bunch of different—

Yeah, the Ramana and yeah.

Yeah. So the Mahabharata is one of the two Hindu epics. The other one is Ramayana. But Mahabharata is more interesting. It's more complicated. It's like a lot of different stories. Interleaved together. And the Brahmastra is the equivalent of the hydrogen bomb.

And how is it described?

It's described as a weapon of like mass destruction, going to annihilate like human population, should not be used at any cost. There's like a moral contract, like you clearly have to be like, you know, violating so many things at a deeply moral level to even like wield it. And it's not actually a lot— it's not actually accessible to most warriors. There's probably like 2 warriors in the world in, in, in that era who were allowed to use it. And, and it has to be passed through special access, like a teacher has to like pass it on to you, the secret to use it. Almost like a new— think of it as like the equivalent of the nuclear code, right? And Arjuna had it, this particular character in Mahabharata called Arjuna. He was allowed to use it. And then this other person was this— basically Arjuna had a teacher named Drona, and Drona had a son named Ashwatthama. And Ashwatthama was always jealous of Arjuna. Arjuna was not Drona's son, but he was his model disciple. And so Drona passed on the secret of the Brahmastra to him.. And Drona's son also wanted it, but because it was his son, he also passed on the secret to his son, even though the son wasn't as good as Arjuna.

And during the war, Arjuna and Drona fought on the opposite sides. It's just, you know, circumstances. And his dad died, Ashwatthama's dad, the teacher died in the war. And so the son got mad and like unleashed the Brahmastra, and Lord Krishna had to come and save the planet to not get that destruction force.

How old is the Mahabharata?

Again, there's a lot of different opinions on this, so I don't actually know for sure. My understanding is it's at least 1,500 to 2,500 years old. Like, 1,500 years ago is the minimum. 2,500 years ago is the maximum. So it happened in some period in that 1,000-year time frame between that. And there's still like, it's still unclear if like a lot of it is just like, you know, been mythologized and what actually happened was just a war between kins. There were two groups of people, the Pandavas and the Kauravas. And, you know, each side thought they were fighting for their own rights and justice, but at the end of the day, you can crudely understand it as like essentially fight for the kingdom. Basically, they were like, there was a previous generation and two brothers, and both the brothers had a bunch of kids, and those kids were warring to get the next in line. And that ended up being like a massive war, and a bunch of other allies fought on each sides.. And so many amazing weapons were used as part of the war. And a lot of these weapons are like extremely, like describe an extreme level of detail that is pretty incredible.

Like there's a lot of detail around like targeted weapons. So you could precisely identify a target and just shoot at that. And then a lot of—

Does it explain like what the weapon is?

Yeah, so there's one weapon called the Divyastra where you can just specifically target any particular person or group, and it would just automatically direct itself and do it, almost like a semi-autonomous weapon. And then Lord Krishna had this weapon called the Sudarshan Chakra. It's basically a discus, and then you can just release it and it will go and specifically identify somebody and chop off their head and come back to you, right? It self-directs itself. So my, what I was amazed by is how interesting it is in terms of all the autonomy in the weapons, semi-autonomy or autonomy, where the weapons could just be directed at people or like directed at, you know, a group of soldiers and it would just go and do its job and come back to the wielder. And there were so many different astras, Divyastra, Varunastra, Nagastra, Brahmastra is obviously the ultimate, the hydrogen bomb equivalent. And all of these are like described in a lot of detail and like who has access to it. And of course it's mythologized. So it's described as this, like these arrows in your, like back of your shoulders, but you could understand it as like, you know, somebody having just access to a lot of weapons.

And then whoever was powerful would go capture and colonize and like gain power. And Essentially a fight between a group of cousins. That, that, that's the bottom line of that story.

Now, if we think of history as this linear progression from caveman to us, yeah, and we hear about autonomous weapons that were written in the Mahabharata somewhere around 2,000+ years ago, we go, well, mythology. Yeah, but if not, if there's been some sort of rise and fall of civilization, if there has been catastrophic whatever it is, asteroid impacts, shifting of the poles, whatever it is that's caused great disasters, you can imagine that these people are remembering a time where there was some sort of very advanced civilization. And this is what they're describing. Like, if you knew for a fact that there had been a great advanced, technologically advanced civilization, when we have evidence that they had some technology, like the Pyramids of Giza and stuff, like, how did you do that? I don't know. There's some technology involved, right?

Yeah.

We don't have evidence of the technology, but if we did, if we knew for a fact, you would look at the Mahabharata and go, oh, this is history. They're just explaining it in a kind of crude contemporary way for the time. Arrows instead of, you know, semi-autonomous drones with exploding heads on them.

Yeah.

I mean, that's what we have now. All those things that they're describing— hydrogen bomb, semi-autonomous and autonomous drones. I mean, they have autonomous fighter jets now. Like, they don't need people anymore. Like, this— we're in that area right now. So when you read about something like that from the Mahabharata, you go like, okay, what was really going on?

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Wieso Steuer bis zum 31. Juli abgeben. Exactly. Yeah, I mean, that's always been my fascination with those epics and the level of detail with which they described all these weapons and who had access, different levels of access, the status required to have access, and how it was used in the wars, different formations of the soldiers. Like, they had all these, like, crazy formation structures, like forming the army like a lotus, forming the army like a, you know, there's something called a chakra viha, like literally like it has to have concentric circles. So you cannot like actually get into the innermost circle without going through the outer circles. And then you can get killed by each of the flanks whenever you're trying to enter in. And the secret of how to actually break into these vihas, vihas means formations, was only known to a few people. And it's incredible, like you could say, okay, like somebody had to be extremely skillful to have that sort of like visualizations and imaginations of describing story like that. And obviously like Tolkien has done an amazing job with "Lord of the Rings," you know, in creating so much detail.

At the same time, like a lot of it actually coming true in real life in some form again, Not exactly the same weapons, but similar style. Makes you wonder, was there actually something around then? And people have tried excavations in all these areas. There's like two main areas in the Mahabharata. Hastinapur was the name of the kingdom. And people have done excavations around there and have like found some artifacts that might date back to those years. But there are also some details that are described in the epics that don't quite align with reality. For example, all the men, all the main warriors in that era were described as like very tall, very big, 7, 8 feet, whatever, you know, I don't even know exact numbers. But our history studies by archaeologists also say that people who lived in those years in those regions were probably not more than 6 feet tall. So it's not clear exactly like what happened, what was correct, what was not correct. And, you know, we just have to keep probing more. But I find the idea fascinating to think of like what could have existed in sacred texts that was only partially communicated to the next generation and having a lot of like reinterpretations.

Another thing that is very interesting to think about is Vedic math. So basically Vedic math is like a, branch of mathematics that, you know, some people in India are grown up learning. Like I read it myself too. And some people actually practice it just to be sharper at mental math for doing their exams, like GMAT and things like that, GRE. And it has like a line in the Vedas that says, oh, like 1 from the last digit, 2 from the first digit, whatever, you know, so many different ways of multiplying. 2 different numbers like 97 times 96, or like subtract the last 2 digits, put it in the right, multiply the first digits, put it in the left. That's the result. And then you wonder like, oh wait, the Rig Veda is so old, it's as old as, it's the oldest sacred text out there. How is it describing computation? That feels very unreal. Like, do they actually know or understand advanced forms of computation? Even back in those days.

And, uh, and how old is Rig Veda?

Um, I don't exactly know how old it is.

Why don't we put that into Perplexity?

Yeah, let's do that.

Let's find out.

Yeah, yeah, it is technically the oldest sacred text out there.

And so what's interesting is, I wonder how old the stories were by the time they were written down. Like, how much of it is relayed person to person for years and years, just like the Bible, before it's ever actually written down. Scholars usually date the composition of the Rig Veda to about 1500 to 1200 BCE. So its oldest layer is roughly 3,200, 3,700 years old today. Like, I If there really was, like, every ancient culture has a story of a flood. Everyone, they all have an apocalyptic story.

Mahabharata had the same thing.

Was it?

Mahabharata had the same thing where there was a big, like, almost like a tsunami-like thing. I don't exactly know what it was called, but that was the collapse of Lord Krishna's kingdom, Dwarka. After the war, a lot of people died, but some people survived and even those who survived got wiped out by a calamity or like some kind of like a fight among themselves. And most of the people who participated in that era actually died.

Here it is, the primordial— how do you say it? Manu? Yeah, Manu flood. Classic Hindu great flood myth where the righteous King Manu is warned by a divine fish about an imminent deluge that will destroy humanity. He builds a boat, loads it with his family. It's like Noah and the Ark. It's the same thing with seeds and animals. Ties it to the horn of the god in fish form, which tows the boat to safety until the waters recede and the world is repopulated. They all have the same story. Yeah, that's what's really crazy.

There is a, there is a concept in Hindu philosophy called the yugas.

Mm-hmm. I'm reading a book about it right now.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So there's like different yugas and yugas are like thousands of years. And the concept is that the yugas keep cycling around. And so like we are in the Kali Yuga right now. And before that it was a Dwapara Yuga. That's when most of Mahabharata happened. And before that it was a Treta Yuga where the Ramayana happened. And before that there was another yuga.

What is next after Kali Yuga?

No, there is nothing next after Kali Yuga. It goes back to the first one. I forget the name of the first yuga.

Because the interpretation that I'm reading is that we're not in Kali Yuga anymore, and that Kali Yuga ended in the 1900s and Dwapara Yuga started then.

No, no, we are in Kali Yuga right now.

100%.

100%.

So why do people have different interpretations? Like, is there a— Is that true? Yeah, there's like a guru interpretation. There's like one specific guru that has this interpretation that Kali Yuga ended in the 1900s.

Okay.

And that we're moving on.

Interesting.

Yeah. But I don't know who's right because it's an enormous cycle, right? The cycles of humanity.

Yeah. Thousands of years.

Yeah.

Thousands of years. And so— Yeah. So these are the four yugas.

And so why do people have different interpretations? Let me tell you the book I'm reading.

Yeah.

See if this book is discredited, young Jamie. It is, it's by a guy named David Steinowitz, Stein, Steinmetz, David Steinmetz. The book is called The Yugas.

Interesting.

Yeah, I mean, the problem is when someone's got their own interpretation or some guru's interpretation, it doesn't totally align It's hard to know who's right and who's wrong. Yeah, keys to understanding our hidden past, emerging energy age, and enlightened future. Yeah, so that— go back up to that again. So this is in the description, see what it says? That where it says, in 1894, an Indian sage gave Gus an explanation not only for our hidden past but for the trends of today and for future enlightenment. So there's like one guy's interpretation that this guy is going off of.

I guess the difference might be that he thinks the yuga cycle is 24,000 years, whereas I think it's probably much longer than that.

Yeah. Um, 4 yugas together is 4,320,000 years. You know what's really nutty?

Yeah.

One of the really nutty things is, um, both in the ancient Sumerian texts and in some of the ancient Egyptian texts there's depictions before the flood of people who reigned for thousands of years as kings.

Yeah.

And it's common. It's not— it's— and it's also, they're referenced multiple times in different scripts that are from different parts of what was Sumer at the time.

Yeah.

It's really weird because they take it as established history once it gets to a certain age, once they get into like whatever the age is where they can verify that this person was the king for a certain period of time. But It's all in the same text as people that reigned for 6,000 years.

Yeah.

It's really—

And then one event just wipes out the whole thing. Yeah. And I mean, this is also somewhat like tangentially related to the Fermi paradox. You know, like if you assume all these things are happening on Earth itself, that entire civilizations are getting wiped out, And like we always wonder, you've explored this topic the most, and where are the aliens? Right. And there are different arguments that like, okay, like the reason we haven't quite found that is because the Great Filter exists. And there is like one entertaining theory that I like, just for the sake of entertainment is almost all civilizations end up advancing technologically a lot. And either a calamity wipes them out or like they build some misaligned AGI and then AGI wipes them out. And because of that, they never actually like end up being visible to us. Or the other theory is that like, they're like, we haven't quite built the Von Neumann probes to actually go find them. And both of them are plausible. And, um, it, it, you know, the, there's, there's no clear way to like know unless we actually like send out enough probes.

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Yeah.

And one of the things about this, the crazy ages that comes from the Sumerian text and from, um, the ancient, uh, The hieroglyphs that depict the, uh, Zeptet— uh, how do you say it? Zepteti? No, how am I saying that? What is that text, that ancient, uh— remember we talked about it with Zahi Hawass and he denied its existence? Zeptepi, is that it? Either way, you're dealing with these kings that reigned for thousands and thousands of years. Well, you know, David Sinclair is in the middle of this research now that they're working on life extension drugs, like, that are actionable. Yeah, yeah, that's it. Zeb Tepi.

Yeah, I've heard.

Um, so these— but this is what's so weird. If they look at hieroglyphs, they get to a certain point and they're like, oh, Khufu, he was real. This guy was real. All these people were real.

Yeah.

But then they get back to these guys that reigned for thousands of years, they go, oh, that was just horseshit. Yeah, but, but why is it that all these people have these stories that align with this timeline that's pre-flood? It's all like the same story.

Yeah.

And then if you're talking about these ancient Hindu scriptures that are discussing technology that seems remarkably similar to technology that we have today.

Yeah. The Vimanas are flying cars, basically.

And probably what we're going to have 100 years from now or whatever it is, or we could have gone that way in the past.

And it's very entertaining to think of like, let's say something happens to us, right? I don't want anything to happen to us, but let's say something happens to us and Would people really believe we were like launching reusable rockets?

Right. Or making FaceTime calls to people in Australia?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Like even fundamental things like all we're doing today. I think it's all like incredible. Like there's a lot of things that could be just technological ideas or maybe people actually had it and the knowledge of it was lost and it's not been documented. It's not been passed along. And so we are skeptical if they ever had it.

Yes.

And so we end up reinventing it in different forms again and again and again, and we keep cycling through this process.

Well, it also could be that this is the natural progression of human curiosity. The human curiosity and ingenuity always moves into these very particular ways, like, what's the best way to defeat my enemies?

Yeah.

If we're always going to be territorial primates, we're always going to want to defeat our enemies. We're always going to want to protect ourselves from being invaded. So we're going to make better and better. Just with technological innovation, it just goes down the same path. Oh, we figure out bullets. Oh, we figure out nuclear bombs. Well, we figure out we don't even have to use an actual plane. We can use an autonomous drone and that delivers it and then scale upwards and onwards and AI and, and then also life extension. So if these people were able to make the pyramids, like, you know, there's a lot of speculation as to the timeline of the pyramids, but let's just say they really built it 2500 BC. Let's just say back then, what the fuck were they using? Like, what were you— what did you do? How did you get these stones down from the mountains that were 500 miles away? This one— how about that one? Yeah, we were gonna get to that for sure. There's a ton. No, thank you. It's good. Good as any. How about these temples that they find in India that are carved entirely out of one piece of stone?

What did you do? How did you do that? How long ago did this happen? How many of them were buried and then they had to uncover them and then like figure out like, what is this? Who made it? There's no timeline. No one really knows. There's no evidence of tools that were capable of doing this kind of work back then. And they're huge and beautiful and perfect, and they have like acoustic properties, and the geometry is fucking fantastic. Yeah, it's nuts.

It's not just that, all of these temples were actually just built, uh, not just that, they were specifically— the locations for them are picked out so that you get the right, uh, seismic vibrations over there in terms of like, uh, proximity to the ocean, the gravitational waves from the sun and the moon. People actually made that level of like, look at this, man.

Imagine the undertaking of carving that temple out of the side of a fucking giant piece of rock. Yeah, you screw up one thing and it's over.

There's no simulations. You just have to like build it.

Well, what did they have? This is the question. Like, imagine today if we had to do this. Look, it's possible. This is a possible endeavor. It can be done.

Yeah.

But imagine what kind of technology would we have to need to map it out, to make sure that it was all precise, that it all align— I mean, it's precise within like millimeters from point to point, and everything is done out of one piece of stone. Like, what did they do? Was it chisels? Did you do that with chisels? That's crazy! How many times you have to sharpen your fucking chisel? That's nuts! Or do you have something completely different? Because some of the more intricate ones— see if you can find these— some of the crazy ones inside these temples, there's sculptures that are three-dimensional and they're carved like inside of the sculpture. So there's like an outer area and then there's these, all these openings, and then inside it's highly detailed. Like, how'd you even reach in there? It just says they use chisels and hammers, and I don't think that's —possible. And careful geometric planning. It seems to be people trying to do that. They see it like this is how much work someone could do in like 12 hours with a hammer and they get nowhere, let alone like perfect and looking good.

Yeah, it's nuts, man. And there's a lot of evidence of stuff like that all over the world, which is really weird. You have the stuff in Peru, like Sacsayhuaman, when you look at these stones and it looks like they're melted into place and they're 900 tons. What did you do?

Yeah, how did he even get it up there? How'd you— where'd they get it?

How'd you get it there? How'd you align it perfectly? Built in only 18 years. How do they know that? How do they know that? Because it's, uh, attributed to one king. Yeah, so King Christian I, 756 to 773 CE, maybe. I mean, how do you know though? Yeah, they said the archaeologist said it was a they calculated it would take them 100 years to do it.

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, this is where like, you know, I don't know, different historian accounts are all like muddled up, you know?

Well, it's a real problem. History is a real problem.

But yeah, it goes back to like the thing you were saying, right? You know, what is one thing that's common across all these different ages is the human curiosity. So I mean, that's something that, you know, I would love to get your take on this. Like I've been toying with this idea called the curiosity premium, which is the most effective people, the most successful people have always been the most curious people, the ones who have been good at asking the best questions. And they tend to do better in every aspect of their life. And you're a good example of that. So that's why I'd love to get your take on this. And the reason I believe that is because long-term, people who continuously ask questions tend to do better. They make more money. They have a higher quality of life. They're happy. They have more compounding relationships. People find them more interesting, and so they compound their relationships over time. And so naturally they end up succeeding, but their spirit of inquiry, their intrinsic curiosity doesn't actually stop once they succeed. It only— they just channelize it even more. And so that's why it keeps compounding.

And I would argue that like it's the only quality, it's the only like quality that makes us really human, you know, in this world where we can seek a lot of information and get information way faster than ever before. It feels like that's that one universal human quality that's existed since ancient time, since the oldest texts. Like in fact, in the Rig Veda, you're explicitly encouraged to seek wisdom more than wealth. And it's not just an idea specific to Hinduism. That specific idea exists in the Bible, it exists in the Quran, it exists in the Torah. It's not that seeking wealth is admonished by religious texts. It's actually that it's more important to seek wisdom. And, you know, like, you can— why I said you're a good example of that is like, sure, you have a very, very large podcast, but The way you're running it is like you're just curious about a lot of things and asking a lot of questions. And I think that's that one quality that's very important. So, and I feel like it's the oldest thing, it's the only thing that we have known since ancient time, being curious.

Well, I think it's stimulating to people and genuine curiosity is stimulating to other people. When someone is genuinely curious about something, I become curious about it. I think it's contagious. And I think that It's also an authentic quality, and I think there's something about really wanting to know something and being interested in something. And if you're curious, generally you're gonna ask more questions about something so you have a deeper understanding of it. So if you're trying to do whatever you're trying to do, a sport, a game, you'll probably get better at it because you're more curious. Because instead of just assuming things, you'll ask more questions, you'll reexamine things. It's genuine. It's, it's one of the most important human qualities, and to me, it's one of the most attractive human qualities. It's always been— when I meet curious people, I'm always interested. I'm always like, like, tell me what you're curious about, and I'll tell you what I'm curious about. Let's talk. You know, it's, it's— and this podcast started out genuinely because of— well, there's a lot of just talking shit with friends, but it also led into, like, one of my very first guests, actual guests, was Graham Hancock.

And it's just because I was curious, because I had read Fingerprints of the Gods and I'd seen him talk. I'd seen speeches and I'm like, I want to know, like, what do you know? What do you think's going on? And he's another guy, incredibly curious and absolutely fascinated with his takes on ancient history. He has been talking about this subject a long time. And when he first wrote Fingerprints of the Gods, I think that came out in like I want to say it was like '97 or '98 or something like that. And I remember reading it and so many of my friends, you know, educated friends, like, this is horseshit. Why are you paying attention to this? More and more and more as time goes on, it's been proven that he's correct. The timelines shifted back. And from the publication of that book, the discovery of Göbekli Tepe and the surrounding area, like, it's like, okay, now we realize, well, there was some crazy shit going on at the very least 11,000 years ago. So we pushed civilization back 5,000 years. So like, and this is just what we found now, and we keep finding things, keep digging, keep looking.

And then you see the stuff that they're finding underneath the pyramid with this radiotomography where they're looking under the pyramid, that it seems that there's structures under the pyramid. You've seen that stuff? I haven't seen that. I had the scientist that's involved in it. He's an Italian guy, Filippo Biondi, and he came on the podcast. He has a wonderful accent, almost as good as yours. It was amazing. But he's describing the use of this stuff and that they've used it successfully on known areas in pyramids and other structures, and they can— in fact, they— there's a— in Italy, there is a particle collider that is underneath a mountain, and using this technology, which is satellite-based technology, they get an accurate description of this particle collider that's— I think it's 1,200 meters underground. Like, how, how far is that thing underground? We'll find out. But it's like deep under stone, and they find that they can get an accurate— like, they can actually give you the dimensions of this particle collider. They have like an image of it. And this same technology is showing that there's these columns underneath the pyramid in various places that are 20 meters wide, and they have coils around them.

They don't know what the hell they are. And they— the whole structure of this thing, it's not small. It goes almost a kilometer into the ground. There's like this enormous, like, bottom of it, and it seems like it's something that's constructed. And so they're like, okay, well, the pyramid is crazy. It's crazy enough. But if there's something underneath it that's a man-made, or someone made it, that's a kilometer deep into the ground, like, what the fuck are we even talking about? Like, who made this? What did they have? 1.2 kilometers into the mountain. That's nuts. It's half a fucking mile plus into the mountain, and this thing can see through all that and get this accurate depiction of this particle collider, and it's showing with multiple scans, not just one, multiple scans in different technology, the same exact images, the same exact structures underneath this fucking immense 2,300,000 stone structure that almost perfectly aligns to true north, south, east, and west. Like, what? What was going on? Don't tell me police. Don't tell me copper tools. Like, what the fuck was going on? Something crazy. And I have a feeling our simplistic explanation of it is just doing no one any justice.

It's doing no service to history. It's doing no service to our understanding. They've got to be a little bit more open in the fact that they are perplexed, and not just perplexed by stuff like this. This is a 3D print of an actual vase that exists in Egypt that they found that is They found it in tombs of the Old Kingdom. This thing was somehow or another— it's made with diorite, so it's incredibly hard stone, and made to like a thousandth of a human hair in its— yeah, like crazy dimensions. Like the way the precision of it, and wasn't turned on a lathe because it has handles. So you look at the handles on the side, well, you can't carve those, and those are perfect too. Like the alignment of everything, and it's like you just look at it, "Oh, it's a vase, no big deal." But no, it's kind of fucking crazy. Like, how did they cut that out? There's also these— there's all these core marks in some of the stones that they find in Egypt, and they've analyzed the amount of revolutions per minute that you would have to go through to be able to cut through something and leave these lines, and it defies explanation.

Like, what is this? This is crazy. This is not sand and copper and just rubbing things. No, this is some insane technology that we don't understand. There's scoop marks out of the bottoms of some of these stones. It's like, what the fuck is this? How'd you scoop rock? Like, what? It looks like ice cream. Like, they just went whoop. Like, what are they doing? There's so many questions.

What tools did they even have to do all these things? They had copper.

I mean, there's some evidence that they had some iron and then I think Tutankhamun had a dagger that was actually made from meteorite, which is interesting. You know, like when they could find meteorites and make things out of them, it was very valuable obviously. But the— just the sheer volume of work that they did there, it's— if like you look at the Temple of Man, you look at the, the three major pyramids. You look at all the different temples and all the construction, and the older you go, the deeper into the sand they go, the more complex these things are, which is even weirder. Yeah, so it seems like civilization after civilization, just, they would— there was probably a rise and fall with their technology as well.

Absolutely. I think it's, it's, it's just incredible that none of this knowledge was properly documented ever. And it's a whole line of work to just go understand how to even rebuild these things, leave alone how did they build it.

Well, think about what we're doing, right? So all of our knowledge is essentially stored on hard drives and paper. Those are the two things that are going to deteriorate the quickest.

Maybe we should take a dump of the internet and put it on a rock, go preserve it somewhere so that even if our civilization is wiped out and all the data centers are like gone or whatever. Right. Whoever comes next can go figure it out.

Well, I mean, then you've got to always assume that even if they found a hard drive, that they would— like, how long would it take for them to back engineer what we did and figure out what these ones and zeros actually mean? Yeah. That would is— which is one of the most bizarre and fantastic accomplishments. Of modern civilization is that like, this is a terabyte. Yeah. Which is nuts. Yeah. I don't know what your first computer had. I don't remember.

Definitely not even a gigabyte probably. No. Yeah.

Like a few hundred megabytes was your hard drive. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I remember when they first came out with gigabytes, I was like, this is nuts.

Yeah. You remember like when Gmail launched and gave everybody like free email storage, unlimited email storage, and the bottom sliding bar would just keep increasing in terms of the total allowed size. Yeah. And that was nuts to me.

Yeah.

Yeah. And I think, yeah, we take it for granted that we have like infinite RAM and infinite hard disk and nobody has to worry about like, you know, back in those days you worry about like taking too many photos on your phone. Right. Right. And then you have to go delete all the old ones or bad ones. Yeah.

You'd run out of storage on your phone.

Yeah, and then you have to buy like an external hard drive to keep storing things. Yeah, I remember transferring stuff from your phone to the hard disk.

I remember the old Android phones, you get an SD card. Yeah, you could slip one of those in there. You could store images on that. Yeah, save space. Yeah, and all that stuff is so vulnerable. It's so vulnerable. And again, if a completely alien society had to come down and find our hard drives and they went a totally different path of technology. They'd have to back engineer, reverse engineer everything that we did, try to figure out, you know, what, what, what are we using? What operating system? How's the operating system work? Is it Unix? Is it Linux? Is it like, what is it? How do they do it?

It would be a nightmare. They would need an advanced AI to like figure it all out for them.

Right. Yeah. Yeah. And so that's just if the hard drives survive. Right? So if there's some massive flood, cataclysm, whatever, some horrific thing that damages all of our electronics, which is totally possible, you know, just some solar flare, some intense—

or just another lab leak, right?

Yeah, just time, a lab leak in time. Yeah, yeah, it's nuts. And we could go back to zero real quick., and we would basically be like preppers and hunters.

It would be hard to reverse engineer everything again.

It would be almost impossible. Yeah. Which is why I'm really fascinated by the flood, the post-flood timeline, because if these people like Graham Hancock and a lot of these other folks that have speculated that there was probably a very advanced civilization that went in a completely different direction many thousands of years ago, if you look at like the emergence of like Sumer and you know, Mesopotamia and that area, which a lot of people attribute to be the earliest known civilization, that's around 5,000+ years ago, right? Yeah, roughly. So the flood's like 11,000 years ago plus. So you're looking at like 5,000 years of what?

It's not even that long in the grand scheme of things.

No, not to the Earth, but for people, yeah, pretty fucking long. Exactly. Like, think of how long it took us to get our shit together. Yeah. It took thousands and thousands and thousands of years of people probably being monsters, just being the worst of the worst. Yeah. And that's probably the only way they survived. There's probably a lot of cannibalism. Yeah. There's a lot of murder. There was a lot of like horrific shit going on for 5,000 years until people slowly but surely figured out agriculture again. Yeah. Started building walls. Everybody relaxed a little, got some solid weapons to keep people away so you could work on math.. And then next thing you know, civilization emerges again and it goes right, you know, goes right back onto this cycle. And then you start reading in the Rig Veda about stuff that happened thousands of years ago. What the fuck is this? Like, what happened? Yeah. And that's my belief. Yeah. I think there was something going on on Earth many, many, many thousands of years before established beginnings of history that was very bizarre.— and probably technology that went in a completely different direction than what we're doing now with combustion engines and circuits and all the different things that we use.

They probably figured out some other kind of technology. Exactly.

Which is totally possible. And it's amazing. Like, it's amazing to think of, like, what if we could rediscover all of that again?

Yes. Well, I would love to be able to. I would love to just have a— if I could choose one window in time to go back to see what it would look like, I would 100% pick ancient Egypt while they're building the pyramids.

Show me what the fuck was going on.

Yeah, there's just— just put me in a big hamster wheel. There's a big plastic bubble where no one could see me. Just let me violate space and time and exist there for just a few minutes. Just let me look. I think that would be the most insane thing that you could see about humans in human history. Yeah, I just— I want to know what they knew, what they had, what they used. Looking at this thing, Petra is same time period. At least attributed to, 7,000 roughly BC. Jesus. And they, you know, how would you write that?

How? The details of all those carvings is just insane. Insane.

Yeah. And what, in 7,000 BC, what are the tools? What the hell were you using? How did you make a temple out of the side of a fucking mountain? Look at the size of it, man. The size of those columns.

It'd be hard to do anything like this even today.

It would be incredibly difficult, insanely time-consuming. Oh, uh, yeah, the Kali Asa Temple, by the way, I don't have it up right now, but in 1650 or so, someone sent 1,000 people to try to destroy it, and after 3 years of doing nothing, they stopped. They barely made a dent on a couple statues.

Yeah, a lot of times when invasions happen in India, like, they tried really hard to fuck it up and couldn't.

Oh, that's crazy.

That's very robust.

That's a great way to describe it. It's just, there's so much of that stuff that's so interesting because it's so undeniable. It's so undeniable in its scale, so undeniable in its complexity and the planning and the understanding that You had to have a deep knowledge of geometry, of measurement, of materials. You had to have accurate—

yes, everything. Sturdiness, like resist like calamities, like earthquakes, floods.

And then even if you had that, what tools are you using? Yeah. Like, how are you doing this?

Yeah. How are you coordinating all these people and getting them to do stuff? And I mean, sure, conditions must have been way harsher. Like, I'm sure people didn't really have a choice but to do these things because back in those days, like the only way you could take care of your food and clothing and shelter is like you commit yourself as a laborer to the state, to the kingdom. But you could also ask like, what gave them the initiative or drive to go do these things? Yeah.

Well, that description is perhaps of a later time. We don't even really know what civilization was like when these were constructed. Yeah. The real problem is the material science. The real problem is like you— there's a lot of things that you have to have to make those things. It's not as simple as a sculpture like Michelangelo making a sculpture out of something that's like fairly easy to carve into as far as stone goes. Now, this is— the scale is— it's so undeniable that like something, something, some piece of our understanding is missing.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it, it, it, oh, like looking at all this, like everyone should just be like a lot more humble, right? Like, like we don't actually know that much. Like what we know is like so little, like whatever, like the same thing as what Socrates said, what we know is very, very little. And the only thing we should all strive to be is just be curious. And I think there's a lot of tendency for people to like think like, oh, like we have all this advanced technology. We're so amazing. Like, look at us. And it's like, wait, hold on, like, you don't even understand what happened thousands of years ago. And there's so much out there to just go and explore and learn and like get better at understanding more. What is this place? This is— yeah, this is unreal.

This is called the Ellora Caves, timeless wonder carved in stone. They're all— I think it's all like kind of the same area.

Yeah, it's the same Ellora Cave and the Shiva Temple that you saw.

Look at that. My God, look at this stuff. It's insane.

And again, there's no steel back then. It's actually really symmetrical. It's not even like, uh, can you go back to the first one with the symmetrical top? Yeah, look at the symmetry at the top. This is, uh, it's nuts.

It looks like that mall in, uh, New York they made where the World Trade Center was. Yeah, but way more robust. I mean, how? What, what were you— they— you— this is the thing, it's like the material science aspect of it. Yeah, it's like you don't have the ability to do— look at that top one. Go to that top one again, the one that you just had, Jamie. Yeah, that one. Look at— that's crazy, man. I mean, I am just blown away when I see stuff like that. My mind just starts racing and I just think, how did you do this? Who, who was involved? How was it planned? How is it so symmetrical? What were the tools? Like, what were the tools, man? Yeah. If you don't have steel, you don't have— what are you using? How'd you do that?

I mean, most of it is done with stone, clearly, right?

So I guess, I guess, I doubt it. I bet they had something else. I bet they had something else that over time eroded just like metal would today. I mean, if you left a shovel outside today and you came back to that same spot 500 years from now, there's nothing. That shovel's gone, right? Yeah. And you've got to assume that these many thousand-year-old temples that were carved out of a fucking mountain, whatever tools they used probably got absorbed by the earth and the only thing that's remaining. Yeah. Yeah. It's giving me a weird thought. Like when they make a big building downtown though, they only bring the crane in for a temporary period of time and there's only so many cranes on the planet currently too. So. Right. True. You take it and you move it, you go take it to the next spot. Yep. Yeah, true. Yeah. I don't know. Yeah. Especially something like this. Like if they had heavy equipment and machinery and whatever the fuck they were using, they probably moved it and then moved it out and then it probably rotted away and now it's gone. If there was machinery, if there wasn't, like there must have been something else, some other kind of, like, some technology that we haven't even imagined.

Yeah.

But it's like their, their commitment to art too was so fascinating because these aren't just structures.

They're passion projects.

Yeah. Intensely beautiful. Yeah. Intensely ornate. Yeah. So it's not, it's not just that they wanted to build like a functional structure. Yeah. That good architecture. No, it's, it's a fascinating artwork, and it's so intricate. There's so many different features and so many different images of different people and beings and animals and elephants.

And there's one more temple like you could pull out, like it's called the Tanjore Temple.

I've seen that one too.

Yeah, yeah, that was done more recently in the age of the Cholas, and it's, it's pretty incredible.

When did they do that one?

I don't know the exact number, but more recent than the ones that you saw.

All of them are nuts, man. And then there's stuff like that all over the world. Whoa.

This was done as a project by the king to basically make a name for himself.

Wow. That's incredible. Is that multiple pieces of stone or did he carve that whole thing out of stone too? Probably multiple pieces. So that's actually like construction. Yeah, not like removal. The other ones are— it's essentially a giant sculpture. Wow, it's so pretty. Look how geometric it is.

Yeah, that's what amazes me. Like, they didn't actually have all these simulations and CAD tools and all these things, right?

And What year was this made, Jamie? Does it say? It's just so incredible how much of this stuff exists where it's really baffling. Like, I just found out recently that the Aztecs didn't build those temples, that they found them. Really? Yeah, they found like the Tenochtitlan. They, they call it the place where the gods were born. Mm-hmm. The Aztecs found it and uncovered it, and then on the— when is it Tenochtitlan or Tío Tucán, whichever one it was, on the consecration day, when they were done with like whatever they were doing with it to celebrate, they killed somewhere between 20,000 and 80,000 people in 4 days. Damn. Not exactly the mindset of the type of people that would construct something like that. Yeah. You know, so those are the people that found it and it might have been sitting there for 1,000 years and then they came along and said, oh, this is cool. Let's live here. Okay, but what was the society that lived there before them? And where are they? And what happened? And how'd they do this? And why'd they do it? And why did they have it aligned with the constellations?

Like, what were they doing? Yeah.

It's some of the, some of the calculations are pretty, pretty amazing. Like how they timed it, how they positioned it, how they cared about planetary positions and stuff like that. Sure. Like some of it could even be pseudoscience, but whatever. I think just the level of like calculations they were making back in those days without, you know, powerful computers is just outstanding.

It's just nuts and it doesn't make sense. It's like, okay, they're making it without powerful computers. So what are they using?

I mean, at one point the word computer just meant a human, right? Like human beings would be doing the calculations. That was their only job, like to literally like multiply two numbers. Like to make some— astronomers were actually the first mathematicians. The term mathematician and astronomer were used synonymously at one point. Really? Yeah. Why is that?

Why studying the stars and math?

Yeah, because like studying the stars involved making a lot of geometry calculations. And that was kind of actually one of the first set of mathematicians in India. People like Aryabhata, Bhaskara, all these guys were actually astronomers too. They were not just mathematicians. And Aryabhata was earlier still like the idea of using zeros. And then he had a lot of like contributions to geometry. And he was doing all this like just because he was interested in astronomy.

Isn't there evidence of Pythagorean theorem in ancient. Is it ancient Sumerian? Is it? It's some, some, something that predates Pythagoras.

Interesting. My theory is that even though it was not formulated as a Pythagorean theorem, like I'm sure people had to understand concepts of sine, sines and cosines and like, you know, whatever is the right angle for the right incline to get this right level of like geometry. You need to, you needed to have some implicit understanding of it to build these kind of structures.

There's no way you could do it without that. Yeah, 100%. And you have to have incredible measurement tools, like not just the actual mathematics. Okay. The oldest known evidence of Pythagorean theorem dates from old Babylonian clay tablets from about 1900 to 1600 BCE, roughly 1,000 years before Pythagoras. Isn't that wild? Like, how? How? Clay tablets often cited, uh, use what we now call the Pythagorean theorem to complete— to compute, rather, the diagonal of rectangles and squares, including an excellent approximation. Look at this. This is nuts, man. Vedic ritual text explicitly states the rule equivalent— I don't know how to say that. What is that? A squared, B squared, C equals C squared for the diagonal of a rectangle that includes numerical examples examples predating or roughly contemporary with classical Greek mathematics. So completely different parts of the world. Yeah.

And they're coming up with the same stuff. Exactly. Because they're all curious.

That's it. Yeah. They're all curious and eventually all curiosity leads to truth or some form of it.

I would argue that anything, anything that's of impact in the world has only been done by curious people. In hindsight, we label those people as successful, as smart, or rich, but the common trait across all of them has been like curious.

Mm-hmm. Well, that's certainly a powerful trait, and people that aren't curious are not fun.

Yeah, they're not interesting. So because of that, they don't attract other smarter, interesting people, and therefore they won't be able to do something very meaningful in the world. Mm-hmm. So it's kind of like It's less about— and it applies to your personal relationships and personal life too. It's not just about professional success. Like you'll have a more fulfilling life with your wife or your kids if you're a more curious person. You ask them more questions, you take interest in them, right? So that's the one quality everybody wants in personal relationships is like taking interest in them and like actually understanding them better or like being curious about common things. And so it's not just that, you know, being curious leads to success. It's more that people around you want you to be successful if you're curious, because you will have more compounding and fulfilling relationships.

I would agree with that. Yeah. I'd say it's one of the more important qualities of human beings. I mean, it's led to everything that we have today. All curiosity has led to all of our architecture, math. Yeah. Everything. Art. Everything.

The transistor, like, you know, the story of the transistor. Yeah. So Bell Labs was basically employing as many, like, like history adjusted, as many telephone engineers back then as the number of software engineers today. But only 3 people cared enough to question whether you should use these really hot giant vacuum tubes for amplifying telephone signals. So vacuum tubes were very big, power hungry, and very hot.. And so they were not fault tolerant and it's very expensive. And so 3 people questioned the need for that and came up with the idea of the transistor to amplify current. And that was the Nobel Prize winning discovery. And not just that it was useful to amplify telephone signals, it basically led to the rise of modern computing and we wouldn't have an iPhone like this today if not for those 3 people.

Do you know what the tinfoil hat conspiracy theory about transistors is? No.— that they are back-engineered from the Roswell crash, along with fiber optics. Tell me more. So, we read this on the podcast. Remember, Jamie, there's the two scientists that were attributed— there's this one scientist that said they weren't even remotely exceptional guys and that they gave them the credit for this so that they didn't have to reveal the true nature of where this technology came from. Oh, they—

I see. Interesting.

Again, tinfoil hat securely on our heads. This is not something I believe. Okay. This is just something that's fun. There's a few inventions that came out of that time period, roughly after 1947, that are weird. And one of them is fiber optics and one of them is a transistor. And these are supposedly attributed to back-engineering programs. So the Roswell crash, I don't know if you ever paid any attention to it, It's a real weird one because the COVID of the Roswell Daily Record said that the government has a crashed disc that landed in the desert. Mm-hmm. Bunch of witnesses, bunch of people saw it. It's also people that saw, um, supposedly saw physical bodies of these creatures and, uh, uh, supposedly, uh, again, who knows what's true? Mm-hmm. But Truman went to the site. He visited it, and then the planes, two separate planes, were flown to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, which was, I think, was just Wright Base back then. I don't think it was Wright-Patterson, but they flew them out, and the idea was this material was so important they didn't want to risk one plane crashing, so they flew it in two different planes.

And that this stuff has always been known to be stored at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. That's what everybody always talks about.. And then a lot of it was moved to Bell Labs. And there was a company called the American Computer Company. And back in the day, the American Computer Company was just like— it was a consumer website where you could go and say, oh, I need a Windows computer that does this, that, and the other thing. And you could just put in whatever your specs were and they would build it for you. They had a whole section of their website dedicated to Bell Labs. And back-engineered UFO technology. And all they talked about in this one, like whoever ran it was like a fucking kook. I don't know. Is that still around? That website? Yeah. American Computer Company. Is it still around? Interesting. So this is like the 1990s.

So you're saying your theory, I mean, not that you believe in it, but your theory is that the transistor was not like invented. It was known and it was given to the government.

There's apparently a giant leap. Between the first ideas of the transistor and then what actually came about and how much money had to be spent to create it off of this leap. This was this assertion by these scientists that were trying to examine this. The thing about Bell Labs is there's a military base right outside of Bell Labs, and they say, "Well, that military base is to guard New York City," but New York City is quite a flight away, but Bell Labs is right there. And they were working on some deep, dark shit at Bell Labs for sure, because I've had a bunch of people on that were talking about remote viewing exercises that they were doing out of Bell Labs. You know, we've had a bunch of people that came on and talked about various programs that were going on that were like top secret programs that were happening that were being run through Bell Labs. There's some weirdness to that place, like real weirdness. Interesting. Yeah. And it's fun. The idea that like, you know, that—

Because it definitely feels very disconnected. Like, okay, like you were using all these vacuum tubes and then suddenly you're like, okay, like what if we just use semiconductors? Okay, there's definitely a pretty far drift from what you were doing currently to what you're supposed to do. And also the idea of the first transistor and what ended up being used in chips. The junction transistor are quite different too. So they're like big leaps in terms of what the core idea was. It's not an incremental change. The way I thought about it was like, okay, that's like tens of years of work and that's why they made a big change. And so if you actually looked into the individual milestones they had, maybe it would have looked pretty different. But your conspiracy theory is pretty interesting.

Like— It's always fun. Yeah. And also, there's just too many stories of this. And David Grusch has, you know, on oath said that there are back-engineering programs and he was read into these and that they've been around for a long time. But this is the assertion of that movie, The Age of Disclosure, that the real problem is that they have misappropriated funds and lied to Congress. And so they come out and tell you, okay, we do have this program. Well, guess what? Everybody goes to jail because you guys are a bunch of liars. And, uh, you've been stealing money and you've been doing it, whatever you want to do with this money. I don't know, like, how much, how much oversight is there on back-engineering UFO programs, you know? So probably a lot of people get in trouble, a lot of people go to jail. On top of that, these things are all being done by weapons manufacturers, right? Like, where are you going to bring them to? Well, you're going to bring them to Lockheed Martin, or you're going to bring them to you know, Rocketdyne, or it's gonna be someone that does that kind of work.

Yeah. You're not gonna do it on your— it's not gonna be like, we'll do it. No, you're gonna have to bring it to people that already make spaceships or bring it to people that already make jets. Yeah. And so they have a massive competitive advantage over any other company that's doing it. So then there's other companies that also had contracts with the United States government, they can sue. And so he lays out all the problems with disclosure, and their assertion is that The only thing what we need if we really want to find out the truth is we're gonna need widespread amnesty for all these people that were involved. Mm-hmm. My problem with that is that's what I would say too if I had been stealing money for decades and decades. I'd be like, I— we need amnesty and then I'll tell you where all this stuff is. I'm like, how do we know what this stuff is, whether or not these are just top-secret military programs with advanced propulsion technology that's unavailable to the public? And they're gonna say that it's aliens and they back-engineered this and they did that. Like, they clearly don't want to tell people.

They don't want people to know. I think a large part of it is probably because they could get in trouble, but I think also a large part of it is because it's fun to keep secrets from people. Yeah, especially when you're the government. Why tell them? Fuck those people. Yeah, fuck them. They don't even know UFOs are real. Meanwhile, you know, we're going into a bunker in the middle of the mountain and we're remote viewing. You know, it's, it's probably, there's probably a lot of fun involved in having access to information that most people would kill for.

Yeah. I mean, there's so much information that we just, we just don't have access to.

Which brings me to this question. With, it seems like one of the things that's happening with both with AI and with technology in general is that you have more and more access to information and more and more answers to questions than ever before. Yeah. At a certain point in time, there's gonna be no bottleneck. Yeah. And we're gonna know everything about everything. Yeah. So how is anyone in government gonna keep a secret? How is any corruption ever gonna be possible? It's at a certain point in time, all of it will get uncovered. Like, it's much more difficult to commit murder now with DNA evidence, right? Back in the 1800s, like, I didn't see nothing. Yeah, I wasn't there. And then you're free. Like, now they do your fingerprints, now they get your DNA, now there's flock cameras. There's like more and more and more. It's harder to get away with things. Yeah. So it seems like to me, like, whatever they have, whatever anybody has, ultimately there's gonna come a point in time where there's so much data and so much information, and you could run all your questions. Like, there's an AI fact-checker for politicians now.

Yeah. So while politician is giving a speech, you can run an AI fact-checker and in real time it will tell you whether or not these people are full of shit. This, it seems like the direction is there's not going to be anybody full of shit in the future because it's not going to be possible.

Yeah. I mean, the government still would have access to things that we human beings wouldn't have access to, like, like regular people. Um, and, um, particularly defense-related, weapons-related, like for example, uh, when they did the Venezuelan thing, I don't think people in Venezuela even understood like what even those weapons were. I don't think we did. They were described as like, yeah, they were described as something alien. The literal words used were like alien-like technology. So even we didn't know that the United States had access to that quality of defense technology until that incident happened. So there are obviously going to be secrets, right? Especially the highest stakes things. I would say like building frontier AI models is similar to that. Of course, as more and more models are getting open source, I think the knowledge is diffusing. But still, the true amount of details you need to actually train a really amazing frontier reasoning capability model is still not widely diffused. So my hypothesis is that whatever is extremely high stakes will still not be widely diffused. At least there'll be enough structures in place to keep it secret. Forever? Not forever, but for a while.

For a while. Yeah. That's the thing. Long-term, sure. Things do get out and people.

It feels like long-term is what I'm looking at. Like, look, when we're looking at history, we're talking in these— like, when we're looking at all these different temples and all these different things, we're talking about thousands and thousands of years and thousands of year time span in between each individual one. With our world, we're talking about massive change in 200 years. Yeah, like, this country's 250 years old. Think about how kooky that is. Yeah, that is a blink of an eye in history.

Do we understand everything that happened in the United States? No, exactly. So there are still some details that are sure hidden from us, right? We don't fully understand everything, right?

For now. Yeah, but my question is, as time goes on, 250 years from now, is it even possible to keep any secrets from anybody? And is that a good thing? It might be a good thing. It sounds horrible to people because they're like, oh my god, what about privacy? Right, but also what about lies? Yeah, no more lies. Like everyone's gonna know what you're thinking. Everyone's gonna know everything people do all the time.

Yeah, I mean, if you're a true surveillance state, obviously there are no secrets, right? Except about the government itself.

That's the problem. Yeah, does it bottleneck with the government or does it get to a point where there you can't even have government secrets? Because as technology evolves and as human civilization evolves, secrets will be less and less, not just necessary, but secrets will be problematic because they'll be an impediment to knowledge. They'll be impediment to understanding the true scope of what the world is, like the true nature of all of our various moving parts. Yeah.

Man, as long as the human quality, the intrinsic human quality of curiosity and truth-seekingness, which is, you know, universal. It's existed ever since we've known human beings. If that continues and that continues to be the case, then people will have enough incentives to figure out the truth. Yeah. And if something is actually hard to get to, it only motivates you more to actually go and find it.

For sure. So my question is, where does this all go? You know, and you obviously work in AI. And when you think about AI and when you think about just technology in general and you extrapolate, you just take it from here and you if you just plot it out, like, what is a possible scenario of 250 years from now? Like, what does it even look like? What does the United States look like at 500 years old?

It's very hard to know. I, I'll be very honest. I, I think it's very hard to know even 5 years from now how it's going to look like.

That's crazy. Yeah. 5 years ago was like—

5 years ago, whoever is at the topmost in AI— I, I'm, I don't even consider myself like that, but whoever is at the most frontier level of decision-making in AI 5 years ago, I don't think they predicted the exact state we are in today. Nobody did. If they did, they would have already procured all the compute and like, you know, manufactured all the chips, bought out all the fabs. They would have done all that, right? Just this counterfactual. Everyone's like bottlenecked by not having enough compute and like we don't have enough chips, we don't have enough power. These are all the problems that if you invite anybody in AI and ask what is the bottleneck in AI today and everybody would say power. I think Jensen was here and he said the same thing, right? Yeah. But okay, like if you predicted this exact state 5 years before, wouldn't you have secured enough power and started building more power plants yourself and started getting permits and like started like planning out capacity? No, nobody did that. Nobody. Everything is reactive to the demand that we're having today. So, and that's just 5 years. Yeah, that's just 5 years.

So when you ask me to predict 250 years, like, I just have to honestly say, I don't know. Do you ever sit back and think about it though? I do think about it. What it could be? I do think about it. So there are like a lot of fun— I use Perplexity a lot for these kind of things, especially this new feature computer inside it. And one, this is just for hypothetical scenarios. Let's say there is an AGI, right? I've seen you ask a lot of people about this. A lot of conventional answers is like, oh, like we'll just become managers of the AIs, don't worry. But if the price of cognition is the price of compute, managing an AI is also pretty much doable by the AI itself. Because the bottleneck is not like unique cognition capability there. So the value of the society will automatically shift to what is scarce. And fundamentally what has been scarce is like asking like high quality questions about things. Okay, like what if like we just completely spend all our time understanding the past? Like that's an interesting endeavor. It was not cool before, but it'll become cool again.

And like we usually used to view like archaeology or history is not something that's like worth having a career in because it doesn't pay well. What if it actually starts paying you a lot more now that like actual knowledge works being done by AIs and like it's all mundane and all the price of that is basically at zero.

Right. And archaeology would be one of the few things that it wouldn't have access to because it doesn't have the actual ground. It can't get into the ground and do the scans and—

No, let's say we have like robots to go do that. Mm-hmm. But, but you're still going to be the one probing. Right. Because you have incomplete information all the time. Even the idea of like, okay, let's go explore this particular area. Let's go understand better. Let's go try to reverse engineer it. Let's go try to build this again. How would it be if we wanted to do the same thing on the moon? There are like so many interesting projects to work on for us as long as we stay curious and we stay interested in like a lot of things that we've done before and trying to understand like civilization that I'm not really concerned about like what things we get to do. We might be doing a lot more cool things for what it's worth. Like, I don't know if anybody will be like coming and telling you that, oh, it's so cool to like open an Excel sheet every day and make financial models, right? Compared to like—

There's got to be somebody out there that likes that.

I mean, there's something about like the task you do and what you get paid for, like what is the job title, blah, blah, blah. And some people associate their personal worth with like where they work at and how much they get paid. And I think that, that thing is going to collapse in a world where like the price of all that cognition is going to be the price of compute.

What do you think happens to people if a large percentage of jobs get replaced by AI? I think they'll find new things.

We've always gravitated towards things that are scarce because that's where the value lies. And so if, you know, have you— one interesting analogy is the Gulf states where there's an abundance of resources and export their resources to other states and that pays for the whole state. You know how like they offer everybody free electricity, subsidized health, subsidized education. And like no taxes. When I first went to Dubai, like almost like 20 years ago, they told me like people don't pay taxes here and nobody pays for electricity here. And education is like super cheap. And I was like, wait, how is that real? And the way that's real is that, I mean, of course, Texas also has no taxes and any well-run state can do this. But the way it's happening is that because the government provides you all these things, it becomes a rentier state. Like you offer political acquiescence to the state. And what ended up happening is citizens there expect the state to find them jobs, expect the state to take care of like job displacement for them. So they don't worry. So it made them a little more lazy. So that's not a good future to have where Some people talk about AI subsidies and AI dividends that get paid to everybody.

I think we need to do some form of that, but that in entirety won't solve the problem.

Right. Well, the thing about human nature is sort of undeniable. And if you give people the ability to be lazy, a large percentage of people will take that. That's right. A large percentage won't though. Yeah. There's going to be enough people that are inspired to do something and they say, okay, well now my basic needs are taken care of. Let me pursue my actual interests. That's right. And find purpose in that. Yeah, because that's— a lot of people find purpose in whatever their occupation is. Yeah. And if we can shift that to finding purpose in what your actual interests are, yeah, and then really pursuing something, whatever it is, yeah, then you'll still have meaning in your life.

And we've just come up with a cure. It keeps coming back to staying curious. Yes. And, and, and finding value in your relationships, your, your family, caring for each other. If you ask a lot of retired people, actually retired people is a good demographic to understand what would happen, what are things people find meaning in after like work's taken off them. And majority of the answers are always like family, caring, you know, personal like relationships and community. Like these are the things retired people keep doing to like, you know, keep themselves active and wake up every day and have something to look for. So all those things will become even more important at a time when like work itself doesn't mean much. Mm-hmm. Doesn't mean humans won't be status seeking. I think we'll still be, but status is not gonna come from whether you're working at, you know, like a particular famous bank or a tech company or whatever. It'll be driven by like how interesting you are. Are you interesting to talk to? When I can talk to an AI, like, despite that, are you still interesting to talk to? Are there certain things I get out of talking to you that completely change my perspective about, like, a bunch of things?

Or is it just fun to hang around you? Can we have a compound relationship together? And I think, again, it goes back to, like, you know, being curious about things.

Well, this is best-case scenario, right? Worst-case scenario is civilization upheaval, chaos, civil war.

And it's possible. It's possible even without an AI. Right. Yeah.

So that's what we've gotten real close to it a couple of times.

Exactly. Yeah. So, and we did not need an AGI like scenario for a civilization collapse in the past, as we've clearly seen. Right. A calamity can just take out all of us, wipe out everything.

Sure. Especially natural ones. Yeah.

That's why I'm not a big fan of everybody claiming that the AI is going to you know, kill us. So like AGI is going to destroy humanity and like it's too dangerous and we all need to stop doing these things. But at the same time, continuing to build data centers and continuing to make money. You have to have one consistent position. My position is that whether AI or not, I think being curious is going to serve you really well. I think it's going to help you have a better life. And there are two paths to curiosity, one that can kill it and one that can supercharge it. In my opinion, the one that kills curiosity is algorithmic feeds. Like the brain rot that you're fed every day with just, you know, this continuous doom scrolling, that's bad. And the one that can supercharge it is AI. Okay, like now that you could just ask whatever you want, if everybody has like a pull it up Jamie for them, you know. Right. And that's amazing. So okay, so all you have to do is Be curious about a lot of different things. And of course, talk to interesting people, engage in interesting activities together.

If money is no longer an issue, you can fund passion projects yourself. You don't have to require government funding or venture funding. Like what if you just wanted to build a mini cave yourself? Okay, like you find a piece of land somewhere. There's a lot of land in America. Way more land than we know what to do with it.. And surely we can build a lot of interesting things there.

Well, that's a good glass half full scenario. And one of the things that I keep coming to is this whole idea of people working and making money and having careers and having portfolios and bank accounts. This is all very recent in human history. Yeah, very, very recent. Very recent. Very recent. But we've become accustomed to this as a way of life.

And we— and Microsoft, Microsoft built this concept of a knowledge worker because they wanted to sell more Office software. Really? Yeah, like, like this whole idea of putting a PC on every desk and, and making you like glued to the PC was there. That was Bill Gates' vision, put a PC on every desk.

That fucking wizard. What a, what an incredible accomplishment because boy did they nail it.

Yeah, so it was not about making computing like beautiful or anything. In the way like Steve Jobs envisioned it. Right. It was just about like— Selling computers. Sell more software, sell more computers because that way you can sell more software. And if you sell more software, you become rich. And the company just was a machine that was just built essentially a large sales machine that's built to sell software. And now they sell cloud, but whatever. Like that's essentially the— reason that like, you know, we all got trained to use software. People went and did tutorials on how to use Excel, how to use Word, how to use all these email tools. And then now that became the upskilling you needed to go work at different companies and then write code and like whatever, right? So that if that part's going to be done by an AI, it's not necessarily a bad thing because this is not actually the way you feel like real purpose and fulfillment in your own life. If, if you were never exposed to that, whatever you had is the intrinsic curiosity in you. That's probably what you should be doing.

Yeah, there could be a completely new way to live life. Yeah, where we're not dependent upon labor for basic needs. And but then it's gonna be incumbent upon people, they're gonna have to figure out a way to be either self-starting or we're gonna have to expose people to things that are going to excite their curiosity and make that a mandate. Yeah.

It has to start from schools. Yeah. And as long as we keep rewarding people for having answers instead of asking interesting questions, it's going to be a difficult change. Like in schools, you're always rewarded for being smart based on whether you have answers to like 20 different questions. Like who cares? Like all those 20 questions can be answered by AIs. Have you ever like flipped the script where you say, okay, like I'm going to— the smartest person in the room is the one who asks the most interesting questions. Mm. Okay. Right. What kind of students can you cultivate based on that? Like imagine if the room had no pressure to always know the answer, but the freedom to ask a lot of questions.

Right. Because sometimes when someone asks a question, it'll just make you pause and go, I never even thought of that.? But that's it. That's the question. And it takes a— I mean, so many people have so many different perspectives, which is one of the more interesting things that I've experienced doing this podcast is I get to talk to so many different people and they vary so widely. There's so many different ways of looking at the world and so many different ways of engaging with the world and so many different things that people are fascinated with that they spent their entire life studying and pursuing. It's like you get this rich tapestry of the human experience that's just— I would have never been exposed to this many people. Yeah. And in turn, I've been able to expose these people to all these other folks that are just listening and watching right now. And it's fucking incredible. And it's such a— for me, it's like the perfect job. I've never had a job that more aligns with my own personality as much as this, because I've always been that kid like, shut the fuck up with all the questions.

I've always been that kid. That's the system, right? It's not your fault. Right. Like, it's actually the reason you're successful now is the exact thing that people told you to shut up about in the past. Right? Yeah. You know, hey, you know, stop bothering my lecture, you know, asking all these unrelated questions. It's mainly a frustration of the teacher that they don't have the answers to you. Right? Sure. And now that bottleneck is gone. We did this experiment with one instructor at MIT who taught the Introduction to Biology class where he came and told us that he's going to give Perplexity to all the kids, all the students, and they would use it as part of the lectures. So instead of fighting AI, you just give AIs to everybody and let them ask whatever questions they want and they can actually use it in the exams too. So how do you even design? Questions for an exam in such a world is maybe you just encourage people to pose a question that AI can't answer right now. And that becomes your research project. And you turn everybody into a scientist. Fundamentally, like there's this belief that scientists have to go through a rigorous PhD and like you have to get, you know, accredited by like an amazing university to be that.

Sure, but anyone who's curious can be a scientist. The only thing that's required to be a good scientist is intellectual humility, to understand that you could be wrong about things. Things that everyone takes for granted, you could still question them. And when you're presented with new evidence and new data, you're willing to change your mind. And you're willing to operate with ambiguity and uncertainty about the world. That's basically all the qualities you need to be a scientist. And you can run your experiments, you can gather data, you can gather evidence, and you can consult people, you can bring in experts and talk to them. And as long as you're uncovering more and more about the world, you are a scientist. You don't need a PhD to feel that you're, you know, allowed to be a scientist or not. And I think that's the most important quality we need to inculcate in our kids, the upcoming generation. So that they all feel more liberated. Okay, like finally I don't have to memorize this textbook or these lecture materials and like I don't have to feel bad if I get like 12 out of 20. Okay, who cares?

Like AI is always going to get 20 out of 20. That's not what you're meant to be like good at. Of course, master the foundations, the basics, great. But your job is to actually pose interesting questions. Yeah, and the intellectual—

excuse me, intellectual humility is so important. Because one of the things that was really weird about the whole COVID pandemic was that we weren't supposed to question science. Yeah. It was like that, or when Fauci said, if you question Anthony Fauci, you are questioning science.

That's because they try to assign credibility through their degrees. Yes. Through their affiliations.

Yes. Appeal to authority.

But not through the scientific method. Right. Anybody should be allowed to ask questions as long as they are open to new evidence. Yeah. And that's the most important quality of a scientist.

Well, the scientific method alone, I mean, it's one of the most important things that we can use to try to figure out what's real and what's not real. And as soon as someone says, don't use it. Yeah. Don't question. Well, wait a minute. And then there was this, an actual government push to silence questioning and legitimate researchers were kicked off of Twitter because they didn't back the narrative. Yeah. Like this is all anti-science. This is not, this is not, you're questioning science. Well, science demands questioning. Yeah.

It's what it is. Yeah. When you don't understand something, the best thing you can do is ask all possible questions. Right. And so curbing that is almost like a way of saying, look, I'm going to tell you what happened. You need to believe in my worldview. And I'm not open to new perspectives.

I wonder if anybody has used AI to try to map out possible scenarios for where technology leads human civilization and what could be done to mitigate the problems and push it in the proper direction, like have a bunch of different models of how this could play out. Yeah.

I mean, I try to do that for fun, but I haven't done it in a serious enough way to have like a proper answer to that. Right. But I think like, you know, a lot of things that we are doing today will not be considered needed or valuable. And maybe a little bit of taking our own lessons from the past. I don't know if you, when you grew up as a student, did you have to like be good at mental math, like multiplying arbitrary numbers? Was that considered a sign of smartness or remembering people's phone numbers or something?

Well, you had to because there was, I mean, you had little address books as we used to carry around like a little, I had a little address book that I keep on my desk. Yeah.

It's a little tiny thing with everybody's number and name.

That's the only way I knew I knew people's numbers and I remembered a bunch of them, like all my friends. I had all my friends. I don't have any of my friends' numbers remembered. Yeah. Maybe my wife and my friend Eddie. I have two numbers in my head.

But, but was there a time when people thought somebody was smart based on how good their memory power was? Oh yeah, definitely. But would you, would you say that now?

Well, people are impressed if you know things now. Yeah. I have a bunch of like weird information, obviously, that I've gathered through so many years of doing this podcast and just so many years of being curious. You know, like sometimes even my own daughter's like, how the fuck do you know that? Like, this is what I do. Like, that's my thing. Yeah. You know, I pay attention to stuff. Yeah. But yeah, I mean, memory itself is always very impressive. And someone has an excellent memory. Yeah. And can pull up facts of the past. Yeah. We automatically equate that to intelligence.

Yeah, I think it's impressive, but it's not necessarily a sign of being intelligent, right? Like, I think that's just a look. You have a very fast lookup table in your head. That's great. It's very valuable. But I still think like being smart is all about posing the most interesting questions.

Also the decisions that you make and whether or not you self-correct when you make mistakes.

Yeah. Yeah. All those things. Exactly. So when you, when you have an amplifier to intelligence like an AI, all the time, where lookups is essentially something you can delegate. Reasoning for decision-making is something you can delegate. But posing the right questions to gather the right data and then forming your own judgment based on what it reasons and comes up with. And finally, having the courage to make the decision, that's still you. That agency, that intrinsic curiosity to ask the right question, the scientific intellectual humility to like, you know, gather new evidence, always questioning your beliefs, that is still you. And so I feel like that is essentially what would be considered smart in the ages to come. If somebody is like a proxy scientist or whatever, like no more, doesn't have to go to MIT or Harvard and get a PhD to be a scientist or to be considered a scientist. Because all scientific literature is open and accessible to everybody. You can even take a paper written by an expert and use an AI, understand it deeply, ask a lot of questions, and maybe even disprove what they claim to be true. That's the whole peer review process, right?

The peer review process is all about questioning somebody's paper. And that's why, like, you know, whatever you said happened in COVID days is wrong. Like, you should be allowed to ask questions about even eminent scientists' work. It's okay. Like if you're dumb and you had the wrong questions, sure. You're going to learn from that. It's worse than not being allowed to ask the question. Yeah, agreed.

It's going to be interesting to see what the future of education looks like. Like how valuable are degrees when essentially AI is going to be able to do the majority of whatever work you need done on Variety, like how, how good are they right now at just law? Like you could ask questions. Pretty good. Pretty, pretty amazing. Yeah. Yeah. Pretty good. How good are they at mathematics? Perfect. Like how good are they at coding? Way better than people. Yeah. And at a certain point in time, it's gonna be interesting to like, what is education now? Is education just providing you with information? Because that information is readily available. Yeah. Or is education teaching you how to think? Yeah. Teaching you how to pursue your interests and be curious and have intellectual humility and understand what you know and what you don't know.

I think that that's where it should be. I still think institutions will preserve their brand value because there is a certain aspect of education that's outside of learning, which is just having access to other curious and intelligent people. Sure. And community. Yeah. And brands attract good communities, peer groups, blah, blah, blah. But the actual process of learning itself has to change. And what you're rewarded for has to change. So fundamentally everything flows down, is downstream of the incentive. Right? So if the incentive is to score the highest on the exam based on answers, you're not really changing much. You need to change that process. You need to change the process of what do you reward a student? Like what is A+ or A? Right.

That's where we need to start at. Well, it's also the, we know we talked about this the other day that the education system in this country was designed to make workers. Exactly. That's what they did when they first started doing it. Yeah. The turn of the century.

Curriculum was designed around that. Yeah. Well, in India, it's still the case, by the way. Really? Even if you're a computer, even if you go into a computer science degree, I don't know if it's still the case. I shouldn't misspeak, but at least when I was there and for many years after the first 2 years, you just spend learning hardcore electrical and mechanical engineering. You would learn like welding, using lathe machines. You would have to like go and like do workshops, carpentry, a lot of these things. It was fun.

I would think there'd be a lot of value in that.

So in hindsight, I actually think it was fun to learn soldering and like how to like make circuits on breadboards and printed circuit boards. But if somebody was just interested in some,— you know, just writing code, let's say, back then, all this is kind of like pointless to learn, but you had to go through it to be qualified as an engineer. So— and the reason the curriculum was designed that way is because that's what the labor force was required back then to build like oil factories and like all these things. So you had to learn mechanical engineering, you had to learn fluid mechanics, whatever. But— I think that should also change because if the way like you do work changes, then what you're trained for in college should also change. And it's much harder to change these things. You know, people are much slower. They're scared to do changes. Disruption is always like looked down upon. And so I think we should, let's at least start at the incentive structure right from the schools, right from the colleges. Like let's not like reward people based on like how much they know.

Well, it seems like in the future when things do radically change, and it seems like they're inevitable, they're going to radically change, universities and schools are going to be rewarded for having developed thinkers that are able to adapt to this new world. That's right. Yeah, so they're going to have to figure out how to adjust their curriculum. Yeah. Because the tools are so spectacular now. That just this idea of just memorizing information is— it's not— that's not what you're going to need to get by in the future. It's not.

And I guess like one proxy different schools use is like maybe if more entrepreneurs arise out of your school, you probably created a lot of independent thinkers because they are like willing to take a fresh perspective towards a problem.

Right.

And build their own thing from scratch. And fundamentally, that's what America's always been about is, you know, the American dream of coming here and like having your own idea and still be taken seriously by a bunch of people. The whole idea of venture capital only exists here, or like family and friends around. This whole idea of just having your friends help you to bootstrap a business and then turning it into a success. And success doesn't mean like multi-billion or $10 billion or whatever, right? As long as it pays you enough that you don't have to work for somebody else and you can live a fulfilling life and you can just go explore your passions, that's success. That's actually a better success than creating a company based on what other people want you to do and then hating your job for it.

Yeah, and having a yacht and being miserable and working every day.

And that's why I said like not the smartest or the richest people are not always the ones who have the most fulfilling lives, the most curious people have the most fulfilling lives because they have better relationships. They're actually able to sit and look at something and, you know, be curious about it instead of like being worried about what's going on.

Well, what did the American dream— what was it to you when you weren't in America? Like, what is it like? Like, what is— how is it discussed?

Well, to me, like, I always thought America is the only country where you can come here and have an idea and people listen to you and encourage you to go pursue it. The risk-seeking culture is just incredible here. Everybody, everywhere else you kind of are like either explicitly or implicitly are forced to defer to authority. Okay, like go and ask the permission of this person, go and ask permission of that person or get their approval or get their insight or sure, you can get their, you can consult everybody out there. But if you have a thought that challenges what they believe in, this country still encourages you to like go pursue it. Mm. And so yes, like when I came here, obviously, you know, Google was the number one company that everybody wanted to work in. But it's also the same country where it allows you as a new person to start a new idea that challenges one of the biggest companies in this own country.. And it actually wants it. People actually want new ideas. And then you can consistently see that there are like always going to be more and more new ideas and new companies to be created here.

And so that spirit of like questioning is encouraged a lot here. And it happens in academic research. I started off as an academic. Even there, a lot of ideas when I had it and I would share it with people, you know, people actually give you very honest feedback about things, but they don't stop you from working on anything. And that's fantastic because that's very fresh.

It's very liberating. And that's not anywhere else.

I would say it's not. It's not in India. It's a simplification to say it's not anywhere else, but— It's not as encouraged.— It's not as encouraged. The incentive structures are not quite there. And ability to like be taken seriously for some crazy ideas is why America is still at the top.

But it's crazy to me that if the American dream is so compelling and so many people come here for it, why doesn't the rest of the world sort of adopt those values?

It's hard. You know, like a lot of it is cultural. Like America was born, was made from like, you know, a piece of land essentially, right? And a lot of ideas that we built here, a lot of industries that we built here were all like created here from nothing. And that required you to like go take bold risks. I think Jeff Bezos said this in some podcast that where else would you like be able to go raise like a few million dollars for an idea that has like 5 to 10% chance of working and then fail at it and still go and raise another few million dollars for your next idea. Nowhere else. People are willing to like, people who get rich here actually want to encourage and be part of somebody else's crazy journey. Because it's hard to pursue all crazy bets yourself. So it's an ecosystem. And once something becomes an ecosystem, there's network effects. So it's very hard to copy that elsewhere.

And so your value is measured in your curiosity and your willingness to work on whatever it is that is your pursuit. Yes. And then eventually adjusting and learning. Yes.

Catching fire with one of them. Correct. And you have to work hard. Like, you know, like I'm a big believer in intense hard work. I think nothing great can be accomplished by being soft. And so all this like recent push for, you know, having a lot of work-life balance, this and that. Sure, if you have work-life balance, if that's what you want, then I think there are certain jobs that would give you that. But when you're trying to do something from scratch, when you're trying to create something from nothing, it's not meant to be easy. Right. There are some sacrifices that have to be made and you're signing up to be part of that experience, that surreal joy you get from doing something that felt almost impossible to achieve. And you're not doing, you're not like staying up late or waking up early because you're getting paid more. Maybe you might not get paid anything. Maybe this whole thing goes to nothing. That experience you're getting of being part of something that feels very hard to achieve is what you're signing up for to be part of. Yeah.

And if you're not, find something else.

It's fine. Respect that. There's nothing wrong with that. Exactly. And the country has enough jobs to provide for all kinds of needs, right? And everybody goes through different phases in their life. Sometimes they feel a little lazy or disillusioned. Okay. And so What I like about this country is that there's a lot of curious people here. There's a lot of like so many different people, you know, like whether they use AI or not AI, they're all like finding meaning in like so many interesting projects.

Well, obviously I don't know any other country really because I was born here, but the people that do talk to me about what the American dream is like from another country, they're the most passionate and the most supportive of this idea, this experiment in self-government, and this— just the whole idea that the country operates on that anybody can chase their dream. You can. If you have a dream and you're willing to work hard, you could actually do it in this country. That's right. Yeah, that's— you know, it's most— the people that are most passionate about that idea oftentimes are people that come from somewhere else where that wasn't available.

And it's not just like, you know, people coming from one particular country or another. It's the attitude. It's the way the system works and rewards you to like be bold and take bets against established players. It's okay, right? It's okay to like be an upstart, a challenger, and people love that like underdog. And I think, you know, that's fantastic. Like, and that culture is continuing. Yes, there are like multi-trillion dollar companies here and they're all going to become even bigger. But people still want the young, hungry person to also be successful.

Yeah, well, they love disruptors. Yeah. And people love underdogs. Yes. In this country. Yeah. Yeah.

It's universal. It's not specific to technology. Right. Like, I'm sure everybody would love an underdog story that wants to go against like Coca-Cola or Pepsi or something too. Sure. Yeah.

Oh, in sports, it's our favorite thing. In sports, yeah. We don't like when the guy who's supposed to win wins. We love when the guy who's not supposed to win triumphs.

Yeah. Yeah. The underdog story.

Yeah. That's a very uniquely American story.

To me, that's what this country is. I mean, sure, there's a lot of obstacles and challenges, just like every other country. There are things here that are challenging, but it's one thing that has consistently stayed true.

One of the big fears that people in America have about technology in particular is that without being aware that this was going to take place, everybody gave up their data, everybody gave up their data and didn't recognize it was a commodity. That in turn made these corporations immensely wealthy and powerful, and then they have the ability to shape narratives. Yeah. And that, that concerns people because using their ideological position as leverage to try to push that through technology that has immense control and influence over people, and that we didn't see technology and corporations as having that much control over how society views itself and how we interact with each other. And there's a real, real concern that these companies got so big and have— like there's a guy named Robert Epstein who's done a lot of work on narrate— or curated search engine results and how much that can— have you seen any of his stuff? I think I've seen this, yeah. How much that can affect elections. How much that can affect people's perceptions on any societal issue that's coming up. And it's concerning. It really is because they do curate search results. It's not simply, you know, you just run it out there and you get this is the data.

No, yeah, you know, if you look for specific political figures depending upon where they fall in the right or left spectrum and depending upon which way the company forms, the corporation forms, falls rather, you'll get different results and that sucks. Yeah, that's, it's very concerning that people don't recognize, they don't, they don't have the ability to see how that is dangerous for all of society.— to have that kind of power and wield it in that way where you're not being honest about accurate objective information. You're pushing particular ideologies.

Yeah. So I think it's kind of like, this is almost an effect of the asymmetry that exists between the amount of AI power that centralized systems and centralized companies have and the amount of AI power as you as a sovereign individual have. So when you don't have the AIs to just go judge for yourself, like what you should be reading and fed, you're obviously like under the influence of what, you know, whatever big tech company is controlling the information flow. But when you have access to all those AIs, you can actually just customize what you want to see by telling the AI like, hey, this is what I think you should actually question and tell me. Until now, you never had that power for yourself. You're finally getting it. Right. And eventually we'll be able to have our own LLMs, like our own models that we would be able to host in our own hardware. We don't have to rely on like one centralized model given to us by like any specific model company. And using that, you can shape it to your beliefs, your custom, you know, your custom data.. And so when you're consuming a search result, you can actually ask that AI that you control and you run.

So nobody can shut off access to it to tell you like, hey, like, can you actually like give me a contrarian perspective on this? Or like, can you tell me if these search results are actually biased? So I think we need to give individuals more sovereignty with more access to their own AIs that they own and run on a piece of hardware they own. Themselves. And this is the whole, like, this is going to be leading to the whole rise of local AIs. So as AI models, like today, they're very power inefficient. They're running on large data centers, but in a year or two from now, whatever capability that exists in the most power-hungry data centers will be, it'll be possible to run it in some box that you own. Really? Yeah. It's already happening. It's already happening that like there are like interesting hardware projects like the Apple Mac Mini, NVIDIA DGX, where you can actually host a reasonable size model and put it in a box and have it run and you don't have to pay for all the tokens it produces you. You just have to plug it into your power cord and it works.

I know Duncan, my friend Duncan Trussell, he does that.

Yeah. And today the capability of that model that can run locally is not quite there. So you would still prefer to use something that runs in the data center. But eventually this is going to be a spectrum. There's going to be some percentage of tasks that you would, you would start delegating to this local system. It'll be a hybrid model. And over time it could end up being the case that you could buy something that feels like a refrigerator for your home, which is your own AI box and host a model that you control. So nobody can arbitrarily shut off access to it. One day. And then you can have that be your weapon against what the big tech wants you to be fed or believe in. So this is the only way we can fight this because they have far more computing power, far more data, far more algorithms than you. So the only way you can fight that is you have something you own yourself. And with the rise of open source models, open source LLMs, you can just, and progress in local hardware, and both Apple, NVIDIA, Intel, they're all doing amazing work here.

You could potentially change the future and give people more power, and this may not be as expensive as people think.

Well, that's a good solution because I've always wondered, like, is— are these searches, like using Google, is that going to be irrelevant one day? Because you already can just ask your phone. Like, I— most of the time, if I want to have an answer for something, I just ask Perplexity. I was like, what is it? Instead of like having to sift through all these Google searches and try to figure out what it's showing me first and get to page 3 where it's what I really want to know, I can get the accurate information, then follow-up questions are instantaneous.

Yeah. And even the models that are running the Perplexity app today, they're all in the cloud. Eventually you'll be able to do that on a box that you own. You can still use the front end the UI of the app, but you can control the compute that runs on a piece of hardware. You may ask, why do I care? Okay, like what if someday like the data center gets taken off? Like Iran was bombing data centers. Right. Like what if someday like the government decides that model is no longer available? You want some control over like what models you can run and like you may even want to shape it to like your context that you never want to be living on any data center. And I think that's where I believe the individual gets more sovereignty against big tech. And that's how like we fight surveillance or like centralization of power.

Yeah, and certainly pushing narratives. What do you think happens with social media? Because social media, and as you were talking about before, like algorithms, like it's one of the biggest problems in terms of the way people view the world.

Yeah, I'm curious what you think, like, you know, like my opinion is that it's not good for the kids. It's terrible for them.

Yeah, but I think they should have some exposure to it because I think it's good to know that it's a thing. And I think children are fairly resilient and they learn, but the anxiety levels of kids is much higher than ever before. Yeah, suicidal ideation is higher. Self-harm. Yeah. Yeah.

I'm a little— my belief is that when you're just fed a feed and the algorithm of the social media company decides what you're going to see next, it curbs your curiosity. And I don't think things that curb human curiosity should be encouraged. Yeah, I agree. And so if the app is designed in a way where it asks you what you're interested in and helps you to come up and find things that are very related to what you're interested in. Right. That's awesome. But that's not how it works. It's literally like it starts with something, you start doomscrolling, and then start showing you what you just scrolled, and then you end up in an echo chamber. And that's not necessarily good.

Well, you can get trapped. Yeah. You can get— I'm in a trap of schizophrenics lately. On Instagram, which is mostly schizophrenics, like people that tell me that the rightful president of the United States, and like, you tell the guy hasn't showered in days, and, you know, and if you have a phone, you can create an account and you can just start uploading nonsense. And then for whatever reason, I've watched a couple of them, so now they just keep showing them to me.

And it's full of AI slop right now. Yeah, a lot of AI slop. Like, it's not even clear, and it's not labeled also clearly, whether it's been made with AI or not. So Often, so essentially it's leading to a complete loss in trust where when I see something, I don't even know if it's real anymore.

Right. And it's going to get worse.

Yeah, it's going to get worse to the extent that you're going to like, your default would be that this is AI. And then like, you're going to have to go through multiple layers to finally verify if it was real. And even like verified accounts post a lot of AI stuff, so it's not It's not about like whether the account is verified by Meta or whatever, right? So I think fundamentally, I feel like, okay, the way I think about it is what are pieces of technology if did not exist would be a really bad thing for the world? And what are pieces of technology if did not exist wouldn't even matter? And I feel like social media is more towards the second. Yeah. Like, you know, searching for information and answering questions and like getting, you know, AIs to like do things for you, help you learn new things faster. All that stuff is some, we need more of that. But because it supercharges our curiosity, whereas like brain rot feeds with AI slop doesn't actually supercharge our curiosity. It actually curbs our curiosity. And so So if we believe that, if you believe in the curiosity premium idea, we need to encourage things that supercharge our curiosity and discourage things that curb our curiosity.

Do you anticipate a time where we recognize the dangers of algorithms and there is some discussion to either curb them or allow people to have control over them in a real meaningful way, like you could dictate maybe through AI, even that there's an AI interface to your algorithm that understands your particular emotional needs, your curiosity, like only show me this. Yeah. This is what I'm interested in. Carpentry and basketball games. Yeah. Show me those things. Yeah. I don't want to, I don't want to see who's getting divorced.

I don't give a fuck about this. Yeah. So here's the thing. You can still customize on most of these social apps.— you know, it'll be deeply buried somewhere in the settings somewhere, and you can go and say stuff, but the reason it's buried is because once you— you always have to say it, or like it's the starting entry point for your experience there, your engagement time would go down, because once you consume the content that you really want, you would go back to your work, which is what you really need to be doing. But that doesn't help them sell more ads. And so the incentives are not aligned. And so Elon has this really good metric he talks about where it's like a total amount of unregretted minutes spent on the app should go up. Mm, that's a good way to— It's hard to measure. It's hard to measure. It's more like in spirit the right metric. But this metric is also why it's hard to make money on ads if you care about this metric, which is why X doesn't really make a lot of money on ads compared to Instagram or YouTube. Right.

Because you're kind of like optimizing for interestingness. Like, doesn't mean X has everything right. There's a lot of chaos. There's a lot of memes. There's a lot of like weird shit going on there as well. But in general, social media is not necessarily like great for people.

I think it's terrible for people, but it also provides you with a way better understanding of what's going on in the world than has ever existed before.

X particularly. X particularly? Because it's a place for like discourse. It's a text-based app more than a video-based app. Right. So naturally like people tend to engage in discussions and debates and you know, there's a lot of curious debates going on there and a lot of interesting viewpoints expressed by people. So I think in terms of the unregretted minutes, it's actually one of the better social media apps. But apps that are purely based on like video, or images and largely video these days. I think that's just, you know, just trying to get your eyeballs and time.

Yeah, those are the mind numbers. Yeah.

They just numb your mind. I mean, it's depressing when you go into a metro and you just see people just scrolling through their feed. Nobody.

Everybody doing it. You look the entire car.

Everyone's doing it. It's just insane. Yeah.

It's weird. Yeah. I always say that if there was a drug that existed that made people stare at their hand for 6 hours a day, Everybody be like, get that out of here. Yeah, but that's essentially what we're doing. It's like most of what people are looking at most of the time, they don't even remember. Yeah, they're just scrolling through this thing. It's brain rot. It's just brain rot.

It curbs your curiosity. Yeah, I mean, Apple has these settings in different apps. Have you tried this? Where what, you can set the timer for every app?

No, I just use discipline. I don't, I don't engage very much anymore. I very, I dip my toes toe into X every day for a few seconds. I go, what's everybody mad at? What's going on? Who stole this? Who— how much corruption's here? Who got killed there? Okay, bye. And then I just check out. I don't want to do it. And Instagram to me is just nonsense. It's— I just look at that every now and then for nonsense and occasionally something interesting. Really, YouTube is my main go-to thing. Yeah, because YouTube is my most unregretted minutes. Yeah, YouTube for me is always interesting. There's always like some cool thing on cosmology. There's some— I watch fights on YouTube. I watch professional pool matches. That's what I do for the most part. That's where I really like find my actual interests and yeah, fulfill my curiosity.

Long-form content is what human minds should be trained to consume more of, whether it's books, whether it's like you know, like 30-minute videos explaining something. And you need to train your mind to actually complete it. That's actually the biggest problem with the younger generation. The more they're in the Reels experience, short-form video, they're unable to actually like complete like long videos anymore.

That's true. But also at the same time, the rise of podcasts is happening.

Yeah. And it's great. It's great.

So there's, it's not, It's not universal. It's like there's a lot of people that don't find fulfillment in all the doom scrolling and all the nonsense. Yeah, they really do want—

yeah, I'm particularly just focused on the younger generation. I'm sure like people like us can adapt to like, okay, let's say maybe you have a temporary addiction to social apps and we can—

but a lot of the young people are the people like— I meet kids like at the mall that are 11 that listen to my podcast. Really? Yeah. Wow. I know, it's nuts. They go, I love your podcast. I'm like, who lets you listen? Get out of here. No, I'm always joking around about it. That's really cool. But no, there's a lot of like particularly young boys that come up to me all the time that are interested in it.

That's amazing.

I love it. I love it because then they're going to get exposed to some interesting ideas and it'll also encourage them to have those kinds of conversations with each other. Right. Yeah. Whose podcast do you listen to? I love Tim Dillon's. He's probably my favorite because it's the most accurate and also satirical and hilarious view on everything that's going on in the world in terms of like war and world news and culture shit. And he's my favorite. He was just on here yesterday. I fucking love that guy to death. He's so funny. He's so crazy. It's like his mind works in such a unique way. And it's developed because his podcast is different where he very rarely has guests. Mm-hmm. So most of the time it's just him ranting and his producer laughing, and he's the best ranter that's ever lived. I don't think there's anybody that's even close. He's the GOAT. Like, there's like— I don't think there's any argument. Every comedian agrees. Like, as far as like just the ability to just sit in front of a microphone and rant, like, Bill Burr does it well. He's good at it. There's a few other guys that are good at it.

No one's as good as Tim. He's the most consistently entertaining. And then for just mind— not mindless, but like to escape, I listen to a lot of archery shows and hunting shows where they're talking about different tactics in hunting or different techniques in archery, new equipment and new innovations. Archery is an interesting thing because every year bow manufacturers make a better bow. And like tiny little engineering changes of these bows. Like, it's a weapon that's been around for who knows how many thousands of years, but what the—

and you're able to feel those improvements?

Oh yeah, yeah, you feel the difference. Every year Hoyt puts out a new bow, and every year I'm like, motherfucker, they did it again, it's better. So just tiny changes, less vibrations in the hand, more balance in the shot. Shot, you know, more forgiving in terms of accuracy. I love that stuff. So I get really fascinated by engineering, really fascinated by automotive engineering. I'm really interested in like— that's another thing where like every year people figure out how to make a car that can hold more G's on a skid pad, that can get around a track quicker. Like every year they're battling to see who can get around the Nürburgring quicker. And what are they doing? They're adding horsepower, increasing suspension travel, and suspension tuning rather, and making them more compliant or making them stiffer and making them more adjustable. And then like tire compounds. And I'm just interested in anything that where someone's working on something and getting better at something or getting new information. I love history podcasts. I listen to a bunch of history podcasts. So that's most of the time when I'm— if I'm listening to something, I either want to be entertained or I want to be educated.

Educational. Yeah. Yeah. And that's entertaining. Yeah. What about you? What kind of stuff do you listen to?

I mean, I listen to your stuff. I listen to Lex. There's this guy. I mean, you might— you had him on, like Rick Rubin, of course. Sure. Yeah. Love that guy. Yeah. He's awesome. I listen to his stuff. And I mean, I also watch some interesting videos about concepts I don't understand. There is this YouTube channel, Veritasium. You should check it out.

What is it called?

Veritasium. How do you spell that? V-E-R-I-T-A-S-I-U-M. Veritasium.

What does it mean?

I think—

Is that someone's name?

No, Veritas just means like seeking truth kind of thing. Oh, okay. Is it this channel? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Ooh, okay.

20.9 million subscribers.

Yeah, it's pretty good. A lot of people agree. So they make all these very interesting videos about like stuff that, you know, you would be curious about, but you never actually bothered to ask that or learn more about and explain some of the most under-understood companies or like phenomena. And I just love watching it. You know, I'm— this is kind of like my idea of doom scrolling. Like I like, I like watching like 20 videos at once.

Yeah, I am going to subscribe to it right now. It's pretty cool. Veritasium. There it is. Got it. Subscribed.

Bam. And explains all these like fun concepts that are, you know, you take it for granted. Like, okay, why is Google Maps really fast? Like, okay, it'll tell you what's going on, how the data is used across so many different people at once. And all these different departments.

CIA's new tech doesn't make sense. Exactly. We were just talking about that yesterday. We were doubting it. You know the heart murmur thing? Do you know about that? No. So the pilots that were downed in Iran, uh-huh, they said that they have this technology that allows them— I think they could use it up to 70 miles and they can detect a very unique heart rate. Like, your heart rate is different than my heart rate. They could know it's you. You could be hiding in the mountains and they could find you from 70 miles away with this technology. Wow. How does it work?

Beams or waves or something? Well, it's called—

what is it called? Quantum magnetometry. Is that what they call it? I think that's what it was. Remember we looked it up yesterday? They're using the word quantum and not explaining what they're doing, like how they're doing it, and you're like Okay, is that real, or is this some invented horseshit to cover the fact that they have some very sophisticated satellite imagery where they can have a detailed map of literally the entire surface of the world? They know exactly where people are, but they don't want our enemies to know that they have this capability, so they're making up something. I see. That was my suggestion yesterday, that like maybe they're full of shit because the whole thing seems nuts. What is it called? You got it. It's quantum magnetometry. Sure. Okay, what does that mean? You tell me. I don't know. Exactly. Yeah. So this guy, he's saying it doesn't make sense. Yeah. And a lot of people say it doesn't make sense. Like, it doesn't seem to vibe with anything that we know that we can do. Yeah. First time I'm hearing it. See the— pull up the decrypt— this description, the, uh, official description of what this stuff is capable of.

So this is supposedly some very advanced CIA tech that allowed them to locate this downed pilot. Interesting. Maybe. Or maybe there's something else going on. Or maybe there's some other methods that they use that they don't want the enemy to know about. Maybe some beacon these guys have on them.

Yeah, I guess what's the incentive for CIA to actually describe how their technology works? Yeah, zero. Yeah.

Why would they tell you that? Yeah. Why would they tell you they even have that? That's crazy. Yeah, and then Jamie had a good point. The capability is insane.

Detecting your heart rate 70 miles away is just how insane.

Yeah, how? And though when they throw the word quantum and things, I was going, hmm, hey, what happened with that White House announcement? Sorry, keep— yeah, the—

remember there's Q news coming soon, and then they like at the bottom of the test, Q sounds for quantum. Oh, is that what it is? I thought they just announced a bunch of investments in a bunch of quantum companies. Maybe that's it. Like taking a position. Yeah, probably that's it. IBM was getting some funding or whatever.

So this quantum magnetometry, can you pull up a description of what it is? Sorry, I started looking up the website thing. Sorry, I know I was asking you too many questions at the same time. Quantum sensor help rescuers. Yeah, so this is it.

Ghost Murmur.

Yes, that's what it's called. Propported surveillance technology utilizes long-range quantum magnetometry. What is that? Quantum magnetometers measure extremely faint magnetic fields, including the body's natural electromagnetic signals, by tracking changes in the energy states of atoms or subatomic particles. What technology reportedly uses microscopic defects in synthetic diamonds? When illuminated by a laser, these centers are hypersensitive to tiny magnetic fluctuations. The heart signal— while human heartbeats produce a magnetic field, is extremely weak, around 50 to 100 picoteslas, and typically degrades over very short distances. So the Ghost Murmur deployment— they reportedly used Ghost Murmur during a mission in southern Iran to pinpoint the location of a downed American airman using, uh, hiding rather in dense mountainous terrain. By mounting these quantum sensors into a helicopter, the system purportedly registered the pilot's heartbeat from afar. Okay.

Does that sound like horseshit? I mean, not— it doesn't sound full of shit, but like, basically the part that sounds surprising to me is how they're able to deal with all this, like, distance and attenuation across the distance.

Right.

And all this interference, and they claim to use AI for that, but nothing is really described on how they use it.

Right, so if they're not describing how they use it, why are they even telling us they have it? Why?

So like, there's a lot of skepticism on it.

Yeah. Laws of physics. Physicists point out that the heart's magnetic field is a million times weaker than the Earth's. Detecting it at a range of miles rather than centimeters defies currently published peer-reviewed physics. Alternative explanations suspect that while quantum sensors were likely on board, they were probably tracking the radio waves of a survival beacon. The metal in the pirate pilot's equipment, or using traditional thermal, infrared, and radar capabilities rather than detecting a raw heartbeat via magnetic fields. As I do remember seeing a different part of a— when that story happened back in April, someone did report on like one of the military websites that there was a survival beacon that they used to track them, and that the whole quantum number stuff was like nonsense. Yeah, I saw that. But no one wants to report that because It's not fun, right? No, the ghost murmur thing is awesome fun. And if that is real, like, boy, yeah, you could imagine a world 100 years from now where that is real.

So it's exciting. Oh yeah, 100 years is a long time for this to be real.

Yeah, 100 years, they probably got it down pat. Then that's the problem. You can't hide from the robot dogs from Black Mirror.

Yeah, you know. Yeah.

Do you ever, while you're working in AI, do you ever wonder like, is this the downfall of humanity? Is this a good thing to be working on? Did you ever have like doom moments?

Not on specific things I'm working on, but in general, I do worry about like how much, you know, you obviously want to like stay in charge and, you know, be in control of your experience. Still be the one driving change and have a lot of agency for yourself. So I do worry that like it's all about like making sure everybody's upskilled and understanding like where the future is headed and not being like fed only like dangerous apocalyptic messages. And because it's very essential that human beings retain their agency and staying curious, right? Like, so if that stops being the case, if you start subscribing to the vision that, okay, your jobs are done, you don't really have any meaning in the world, and we'll pay you some dividends and you just sit at home and chill. That is not a good thing. So, and I feel like there are not enough voices in AI that are actually saying anything different to that. And I like when Jensen was here, I think he was a little different. I think he tried to give a more positive version where he said, okay, like, The radiologist thing, if okay, if all radiologists can take away, you know, they start doing different kind of work.

So I think we need to start looking at like, okay, like, okay, first of all, guys, relax. You have a lot of, you have one premium skill, your curiosity. So let's figure out ways to channelize that. Let's change the way work is done at companies. Let's change the way educational institutions run. Let's change the incentive structures and let's help you build new ideas and new companies. And explore things that are not even being considered. And the government should obviously like, you know, support all these initiatives. So that's what needs to happen more. But what's happening actually right now is, okay, like, hey guys, you're all losers, you're going to lose your jobs and don't blame me because I told you so. Right. And still give us money because we're still going to do it anyway. And so that's what's happening more. And I think We should stop doing that. That's my opinion.

Well, it is— the problem is it's kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy. And if you tell people that they're gonna be a loser and you're gonna— yeah, the life is over, they're gonna think that way. Instead of giving them an understanding of like, look, this can open up new doors for you. Yeah, this can. And anytime there's any sort of disruptive technology, there's always the fear that it's gonna go badly. Yeah, this was the case with the locomotive. This was the case with, yeah, when the printing press was invented. Yeah.

By the way, like I did some research on this where in the Industrial Revolution happened, people got new ideas. Okay, like for example, when the Industrial Revolution happened, who came up with the idea of a steel plow? John Deere. Until then we were using wooden plows to like for farming. No farmer complained that, hey, like We need fewer farmers now because Steel Plow is able to do it more effectively. No one complained. You actually had more farms and more productivity, more crop yields, and you're happier.

But isn't that just a regular tool as opposed to AI?

Sure, AI is different. It's not overnight going to become something that's capable of just running an entire multi-trillion dollar company on its own. There are a lot of things that AIs cannot do. There's a lot of tacit knowledge in every company. That AIs don't quite understand. And there's a lot of new directions that you can just start working on that AIs are not well equipped to do because it doesn't have full knowledge about it. And the knowledge about it is yet to be captured. And some of that requires like human-to-human work and collaboration. So we obviously have to gravitate towards what is scarce. When AI makes the current labor that's considered scarce because that's where the money's going in commodity, then we have to gravitate towards what is scarce. And the only way to do that is to seek things that we don't know about, which is only something we can discover through our curiosity. There's nothing else. Whatever we don't quite understand well, whatever we don't know how to do well yet, even with the current capabilities of AI, that's where we should pull our labor and workforce into. So it needs more responsible messaging, and that's not quite happening right now.

I think it needs responsible messaging, and then in the future, what it needs is like real direction in terms of like letting people find their curiosity and find these paths of interest and find something to do with themselves that doesn't involve whatever their previous occupation that's irrelevant now.

That's true. I think like passion for people is something that not a lot of people would be able to answer out of the box. Like if you go and ask them, what is your real passion? And the only thing they've known in life is to just climb up career ladders and make more money. That's going to actually take them a while to even discover. Right.

Which is why it's so important to get kids off on the right start.

Yeah, that's the whole point.— that's our hope for the future is the kids. The kids are born curious. They don't need to change themselves to be curious. The adults who probably already are like, because of this knowledge work thing, who kind of curb their curiosity and try to fit into the existing system, it might be a little hard for them to adapt. But the kids, I think they don't have this problem. So I'm actually optimistic about the future long term because The future is all centered around like whoever is like very young today.

What do you think about this idea that universal basic income is going to be required?

Some form of it is good. Some— it's like a dividend. I almost think of it as a dividend. If a lot of spend that most companies are currently doing today on like payroll, which is paying a knowledge worker for a certain task— think of knowledge work as basically taking information and transforming it into a an artifact, right? And it's messy and complicated. Let's assume that's being done by AIs. So obviously companies will start spending more on compute instead of payroll. It's just a reallocation of like spend or budget similar to like what happened in advertising industries where most of your advertising budgets went to like television and like billboards. And then now it's starting to go to Google and Instagram and YouTube and all that. So when that happens, obviously like the AI companies are going to make a lot of money and people who helped be part of creating it or either directly or indirectly would want to have some role to play in that ecosystem. And a good way to involve them is through giving them some ownership in the company. So as shareholders, if you get dividends from the profits generated by the AI, It's not a bad thing, but that shouldn't be the only thing.

Right, so this is similar to like people that live in Alaska, they get a check because of the—

Correct. Alaska does this, and it's not a bad thing as long as they are doing some other things alongside.

It could lessen the burden.

Correct. Yeah. Yeah, and if people are interested in still being part of the AI industries, they go do things that AIs are not able to do today. And that's been the case before. Like when Industrial Revolution started, the United Kingdom actually started like projects around building railroads. And that gave a lot of people who were in the cottage industries new jobs. So there are going to be a lot of new projects to just, okay, like what if we want to reimagine the government itself where the government runs largely on AI? Yeah, that was my next question. Yeah. So then we need people for that. Yeah. Because this is a legacy industry. It's not about the capabilities not being there. It's about working through the legacy and bureaucracy to like actually deploy and implement this inside the most like largest institutions in the country. And that's going to need a new set of skilled workers to go do that. So some people who might be working at Microsoft or something today might actually end up working for the United States government because Microsoft may not need them, especially for like, you know, internally deploying AI or selling AI to their customers, but the government needs them.

And if the government can pay them well and it's a fulfilling job to find some meaning for like doing something good for the country, it's not a bad thing. So I think like just like in the Industrial Revolution where we had new projects because the demand for AI was so big, we're going to start seeing some new projects being created in AI as well when the capabilities advance enough that they can replace knowledge workers.

That's the rosy scenario.

It's not as rosy. Like, real world is messy. A lot of things are still done through trusting other human beings. Nobody's like blindly trusting AIs. AIs still make a lot of mistakes.

I know a lot of people are hesitant to the idea of AI running government, and I get it. But also, look at what the people are doing. Look at how much corruption there is, how much fraud and waste. Imagine if all fraud, waste, and corruption was instantaneously eliminated. Yeah.

I mean, that was what Elon tried to do with Doge, right? And then I think the bottleneck there was just discovering how slow it is to do things. It's not, he's not used to running that slow. Yeah.

And also how much resistance. Yeah, resistance. Because there was so much grift. Correct.

Yeah, so honestly, like more than AI, the government is running a lot of legacy software stack. Because a lot of these legacy enterprise companies just have created these multi-decade or like year contracts that are hard to get out of. And the way they do that is to sell it at a much larger discount. And like, you know, like if you're on like a specific OS, you're not allowed to change this for like 10 years. You have to use the same set of software. All these people you hired only know to use that tool. So it takes time to actually change and implement new things. Leave alone AI, just if you just wanted to like move everybody from Windows machines to like Mac machines, good luck with that. It's going to take a lot of time. That's the state of the system. And so that has nothing to do with technology. And so to do things in such messy systems, you still need people. You still need people to navigate all these changes. It's not about the capability of technology. It's more about how the system the system is structured. And that's why I still feel there will be new jobs.

There may be the, you know, there's a lot of new projects to be done. Maybe some good leader actually wants to change the system and is willing to be patient about it. Like, you know, over a 5 to 10 year horizon, if you take 10 years to actually like run majority of the government processes on AIs, it may seem slow to you today, but in the grand scheme of things, it's actually good for the country. And that's still going to need a lot of nice engineers to go work on these projects. So they're not going to lose all their jobs. There's going to be some displacement. There's going to be some new projects. There's going to be new priorities. But it'll keep going. The system will keep going because that's just how historically things have been.

When you think about the future of AI and you think of this, so when you think about AGI in particular, you think about something that could potentially make better versions of itself? Self-replicating. Yeah. And then how far does it go? Like, yeah.

So that is the, that is the ultimate form of— I think some people in Silicon Valley have started calling that as ASI. So when you see the word ASI being thrown around, like people kind of think of ASI as an AGI that can recursively self-improve itself. So there's going to be no limits to how smart it can get. Right. And I used to think that ASI is bottlenecked by power because you need a ton of compute for this model to keep on training itself and running its own rollouts and collecting data and then going and updating itself. But you could imagine that once the algorithm is correct, the ASI could be tasked with just making itself more efficient too, where improvement doesn't just mean capability improvement. Improvement could also mean power efficiency. And that way the recursive safe ASI that is improving itself also makes itself more compact and more efficient and it can run on less compute. So that would be the ultimate project in AI. Think of it as almost as the last project in AI is basically cracking recursive self-improvement. Once you crack that, you don't have anything else to work on.

In practice, I think what's going to happen is because information is so muddled and fragmented and living in disjoint systems, just the way we have constructed our messy real world, it's going to be hard to point even a recursively self-improving AI at some metric and say, go improve this or go reduce inflation by 5%. That'll be awesome. If you can task an AI to do that, if that's the job of the government to just reduce inflation, have a deflationary effect on society and make goods and services a lot more abundant and efficient, it's going to have to deal with a lot of messy legacy systems. If the task is to go improve the healthcare, well, good luck. Like, who's going to deal with all the compliance of actually implementing these changes inside hospitals? Most hospitals are still using legacy software because that's the software provider has lobbied the government in a way where only they're allowed to do that. God, what a stupid bottleneck. Exactly. So a lot of the bottlenecks in actually having AIs just take over and massively improve the human society and our hospitals, our legal systems, our government systems, where most of the payroll is going into, is just bottlenecked by a lot of compliance and regulation.

And so that's why I feel we human beings are still necessary to effect the change because these laws and regulations were built for us.

And it also seems like we have to demand that those systems be usurped.

Sure, 100%. And we need the help of AIs to rewrite all these laws. It's going to be humanly impossible to go and change one specific line here and there. Right.

And then you're going to have a bunch of these software companies that are lobbying to try to stop that from happening. Exactly.

Yeah. It's— that's why like this messiness and this need for getting all people on the same page and actually steering the society in a positive way, our jobs will probably be more steered towards that problem solving at a different level of abstraction, maybe more need for EQ. More need for actually like understanding differences of opinion and still like a leadership quality, ability to understand people and ability to convince people. These are the skills that will be even more important in a world where like actual work can be done by AIs, but affecting the change in our society, in our country still needs human beings. Because the systems are messy.

It's a weird world we're in right now. Yeah. It's never been weirder.

That said, there's a lot of things that can still go wrong when you give power, so much power to, you know, like specific companies and they deploy all these bots and then anybody can use them in weird ways. You don't even know if like you're talking to a real person anymore. Right. They're like people who just run AI responses and chat with like 500 people at once. And that's like an old business. And so I think it's going to take a lot of adjustment.

Well, the other piece of adjustment that a lot of people are coming to grips with is that this is a new part of our conversation and that in 2020, like when I first moved here, AI was never discussed. Yeah. It was not a thing. Yeah. I mean, we knew about it. We knew about AI, but it wasn't like you— it wasn't a huge part of the cultural discussion of what the future holds for us. Yeah. Now it is.

Now it is central. Yeah.

And in that short amount of time, in just 6 years, it really makes you wonder because we know how technology progresses exponentially. Yeah. What it's going to look like 6 years from now. Yeah.

The 2028, like, like You're definitely, my prediction is 2028 election debates are going to be largely about AI. Wow. Yeah. AI, energy crisis, the power, power. People are going to care about all these things. Because AI is no longer a thing that is new. It's part of all our lives. Everyone's using some form of AI in some ways. And it's not as dangerous as people thought. It's an amazing tool for like doing work and asking questions and learning things and all these things. When used correctly. Yeah. Yeah. Can also be used incorrectly. Like everything. Like everything. So it's far more powerful that incorrect usage can cause serious damage. Like, for example, people, kids who are using AIs for like companionship. Right. Crazy things are happening there. Crazy things are happening. Not good. Yeah, it's even, it's as dangerous as, or probably more dangerous than social media. And it's also scary that social media companies want to build more of these kind of like companionship apps because they know that, okay, their only job is to get you engaged more. And that's the only way to sell more ads and make more money. And clearly companionship is a way to get you engaged more.

Yeah. And so that's dangerous if ads start being part of like AI chats. Yeah. Because then if that ends up working, then all these chatbots are just going to be sycophants that just tell you stuff that you want to hear.

It's also, it's an indistinguishable facsimile to a real person. Like they communicate like a real person. Right. So you really think you have a relationship with this.

Right. And it truly screws with your mind. It's hard to decouple and it takes a lot of time to recover if you want to unplug. And so the business model incentives are not well aligned to humanity.

Did you see that AI companion that they developed that was at the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas this year? Which one? It's like a hot Asian lady. I see.

Yeah, yeah, these are, these are the weird kind of projects that are going on.

Yeah, it's a hot Asian lady that talks to you. Yeah, and you know, she talks to you through AI, and right now it's just a kind of a crude sort of robot, but yeah, you could see where it's going.

You can see where it's going.

Ex Machina. Yeah, it's going.

Yeah, right there. Yeah, yeah, that movie was Amazing. Quite far ahead of its time. Really?

Yeah, that was— that's one of my top 10 favorite movies of all time.

It's underrated actually because people like reviews online say it's not as good, but I liked it.

I loved it. Yeah, I thought it was fantastic.

I like it better than Her.

Yeah, Her, I lost Her after a while. I'd shut it off. Yeah, lost my attention. I'm sure it's good. It was the wrong time for me to watch it. Yeah, but Ex Machina, I've seen it like 5 times. I fucking love that movie. It's just so— I don't want to give anything away, but it's, it's so incredible and so bleak. And so, yeah, in the relationship that he has with that—

the hot one. Yeah, yeah.

You believe it. You're like, I, I'd be right there with him. You know, it's too confusing to our system to have something that looks exactly like the thing that you desire that is actually interested in you. It just happens to be— pulls all your data. Yeah, yeah. Knows too much about you, knows how to pull your strings. Yeah. Yeah. Well, listen, man, very fascinating discussion. Yeah. I'm glad we did it.

Thank you very much. Thank you so much.

And thanks for having an awesome platform. PopTalk City has been great. We really loved using it here at the show. It's made the show more interesting.

It's cool. Thank you. It's very fulfilling because like we want the app to be used by curious people like that. Like if we want to lift the ceiling of what our population can be, you know, Not everyone is like fully curious all the time, but we're all born with it. So at some point in time, the system curbs it from us. So there should be more apps that get us back to what we're naturally good at.

It's a fascinating tool for technology, or for curiosity rather, because to be able— and it's seamless the way we use it on the show because there's always a question. Yeah, there's always— it comes up so often. Yeah, throw it in Perplexity. Yeah, let's find out what's up. Yeah, it's always been great for us.

So thank you. Thank you so much.

All right, my pleasure. Bye everybody.