#2494 - Chamath Palihapitiya

>> The Joe Rogan experience. >> Join my day Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. [MUSIC] >> Yeah, I was listening to Tim.

>> First of all, hello, good to see you, my friend.

>> Great to see you. >> We were listening to Tim Dillon. I was listening to it on the way over here. And he was talking about Anna Paulina Luna and Tim Bershett and Trump. They're all talking about the UAP disclosures.

And like why now, like what are they doing? Like why are they distracting us with this? Tim Bershett said that whatever they're going to release, it will be indigestible. >> What does that mean?

>> Right. >> Indigestible as in, well, then it doesn't mean that it's real then.

“>> Well, I think it means that it'll be so crazy if it's real.”

So crazy.

He's the one that's been saying that there's these confirmed bases

under the ocean, that there's these specific locations. And I think you're shaking your head, you don't believe a word of it. >> No. >> I think it's true that there, look, it's completely implausible that there aren't other species.

>> Right. >> Completely implausible, just the vastness of what we're dealing with. So the real question is why haven't we encountered people or those things, those beings? >> Right.

>> And it's probably because they just, they have bigger fish to fry. So by the time that we meet them and they meet us, we're going to be at the edge of like we've kind of been there, done that on our own planet, and then we've kind of like developed the technology I guess to get beyond it. But somewhere along the way, there must have been a few, just mathematically impossible.

“So then the question is, is it buried, or were people confused when it first came?”

You're like, if you had a spaceship lined in like the 1800s, what would people have done? They would have just freaked out, they wouldn't have understood it, maybe they would have buried it. Depending on where it was, maybe they've started to pray to it, and you would have just

moved on. And then that doesn't document it in history. >> But it is. >> But how? >> It is.

There's a lot of it documented in history. >> First of all. >> For me, like hieroglyphics and like monuments and book of Ezekiel, book of Ezekiel goes in depth about some sort of UFO encounter that Ezekiel experiences where it's a wheel within a wheel and a cloud with fire flashing forth continually in the midst of a cloud as it

were gleaming metal. And for the midst of it, it came the lightness of four living creatures and the creatures darted to and fro like the appearance of a flash of lightning. This is all in the Bible.

“It's also in the Mahabharata, they talk about Vamanas, these flying crafts, and I think it's”

entirely possible that we have been visited periodically. And that we are, we have been monitored, and that we are monitored. >> I agree. >> Currently. >> And if I was going to hide, I would hide in the ocean.

>> Well, to be honest, as I get older, I'm convinced we're basically in some form of

assimilation. There's like all these little ingredients that if you start to see these little clues, you're like, they all seem so odd in isolation. And then when you put them together, I feel like a crazy person's like, nor myself. And I wonder why did this happen? Like yesterday, I was at a dinner in LA before I came

to see you. And I told this very interesting story, well, I thought it was interesting at the time. You know that, like, so in 2000, right, if you think of like what happened in tech since 2000, so the last 26 years, people can give you all kinds of like fancy theories. But there's a, like, this weird word that's been at the center of every single technological

revolution for the last 30 years, and that word is attention. Let me explain this to you. Google, they invent Google. What is Google? Google is an algorithm, it's called PageRank.

But if you look inside of it, what is it? It says, well, Jamoth's website has five links to it. Those website has two links, he's getting more attention. Jamoth's website is more important. That's the sum total of Google.

Now, they've made that a lot more refined, and they've done all these other fancy things. But it's all about attention. Fast forward to 2007, '89 when, you know, Zuck, and then when I went to work for Zuck, and we got on the scene, we're like, what do everybody care about? Attention.

And so what is, like, the Facebook algorithm, what's the Instagram algorithm? You know, how do we construct newsfeed all around attention? Joe had 35 likes, Jamie had 12 likes, your thing is more important. Let's give it more importance, because it's seemingly meeting all these human needs, attention, attention, attention.

So phase one, attention, phase two, attention, and this is around, like, how can this be possible?

the seminal paper is called attention is all you need.

It's about this word again. And when you look inside of the core part, if you peel out, peel, you know, a part AI, the little brain that makes it so capable is called an attention mechanism. It's just attention. It's all about, again, this idea of, I'm going to scower all this information, and

I'm going to figure out what patterns repeat itself, and I'm just going to double down on the stuff that I see more of, because that attention must mean it's more important. It's more true. It's more knowledgeable.

“And then I think, how could it be, like, why is it that these things are just repeating”

over and over again? And I just get confused. I don't, I don't exactly know how to explain it. So are there other ways in which we should be doing things? Absolutely.

Have we even explored it? No. So then I think, well, is this just a simulation, some kid in fucking in his house, just playing some simulation, and we're all just party to it, and that's all he understands is attention? I don't know.

I don't think it's that simple that there's a person playing a game, but if you break down just attention, well, that's all of human history is paying attention to the king, paying attention to the war, paying attention to resources, paying attention to who says the thing that resonates the most with the people? That's all about what human beings are paying attention to.

I think it's part of it, then there's also what is actually true. And I think sometimes what is true and what people pay attention to are not the same thing. True.

“And sometimes the thing that you should be paying attention to gets lost because the thing”

that you are paying attention to gets more attention because it's more interesting and useful. That's sort of where we are right now. We're in this really weird phase, I think, where you actually should be focused on this thing over here, and instead we're all focused on all these things over here.

A human example. Here's like a very big one. I think it's pretty fair to say since the last time you and I saw each other on this show, the attitude towards technology, I think, has been pretty profoundly negative. It's kind of tilted, relatively like anti-AI, you know, anti-billionaires.

It's anti-all of this stuff. And it manifests in all of these interesting ways. There's protests, there's data centers, there's all of this stuff that's happening. People are worried about job loss. All of that stuff is real.

Do I ask her? No, I'm okay, I'm okay. But what should they really be focused upon?

“And I think what they should be really focused upon is we're at the tail end of a cycle”

that doesn't work anymore, which is all about like this tension between labor, people that do the work and capital, the people that fund it and then make all the returns. And over the last 40 years, we've basically gone to this completely upside-down world where capital extracts all of the upside. And labor has extracted less and less and less and less and less.

All of this pushback, it manifests in AI, it manifests in politics, it manifests in social issues, it manifests in, you know, Israel, whatever you want to talk about, all of these issues, I think, symptomologically, come from this other issue, which is we are out of balance. This total compact that we use to have, a liberal democracy in a free market, is totally collapse.

And there are simple ways to fix that.

But that never gets the attention because it's not what you want to talk about.

The attention is here, you know, vote note of the data center, you know. This model is going to take out all the jobs, you know, this social issue is really important. That war should not be fought, that war should be fought. All of these things, while important, distract us from what the core issue is. And the core issue is that we as a society, I think, are out of balance.

The natural compact between all of us is broken. And there are some simple ways to fix that compact, get people more invested, get people more engaged in the upside, have people have a positive some view of what's happening. And that isn't happening. What simple solutions are there to this one very particular issue?

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Let's assume that you still lived in California because I think it tells this example in a more extreme way.

Let's say you make a million bucks here, which is a lot of money, but it makes the point

more cleanly.

“You'd pay, I think, 30% federal tax, and you'd pay another 15 or 16% in state tax and”

Medicare tax and all this tax. So if you're a wage earner, 50% of all your upside, go to the government. If you're a capital earner and you make that same million dollars via capital gains, you pay half that tax. Why did that happen?

That happened because in the 40s and 50s, but really in the 60s and 70s and 80s, what we were trying to do, or what the American government and what Western societies were trying to do, was to convince people to invest their money, "Hey, Joe, go build that factory, go hire those people, and we're going to incentivize you to do so."

And by doing that, there was this idea that all of those profits that you would get within

defuse, trickle down into everybody else, the workers participated everybody participated. But technology allows you to do more with less and less. So now what happens is the capital owners can accrue infinite almost, it seems like value. And the workers get less and less, but now if you get less and less and you're taxed more and more as a percentage of what you own, you're going to feel really out of sorts.

You're going to be like, "Why am I paying 50 cents of every dollar?" And I see these other ways where folks are paying 25 cents on their dollars, but their dollars are compounding way faster, and they have hundreds of billions more of those dollars than I have of my dollars.

“If you take that example and you expand it across society, I think people understand that”

now.

There's enough information, and there's enough people talking about it, where it's pretty

clear that that's happened. So the question is, how do you fix it? I think like if you think about AI, and if you believe that we're going to get into this world of abundance, and we're not working, but what does it mean for governments to tax our labor?

There is no labor. You're not working anymore. I'm not working. We're doing things out of leisure. Why should I pay 50 cents of every dollar?

Why aren't the companies that are going to be making trillions of dollars? Why don't they pay more? Why isn't there an expectation that they then help our lived society do better and thrive as a result of all of that winning?

“What's the real conversation that I think is bubbling?”

I think that we are probably another 12 to 18 months where all of these other issues are going to be important, but they're going to be viewed for what they are. They're going to get demoted, I think, in importance, and it's this core structural issue. It's what is the economic relationship that we have together as a society? What is the relationship between Joe, Chimuth, Jamie, and all these companies?

And how do we feel about a few and an ever shrinking few, making more and more and more? And then how do we feel about their ability to share that with the small amount of people? And then what is the expectation for everybody else? I think that's mostly at the core of what's happening. So back to all of this attention that we give to these other issues, distracts from that one.

Because I think you can get organized to fix this issue. You can't get consistency on any of these issues. You bring up Israel, it's like this. You bring up social issues, it's like this. You bring up whatever you want to bring up, people just kind of take aside, nothing happens.

This is actually where people are universally, much more aligned than you think. Because there's reasonable ways. One simple way is you'd say, well, let's flip the taxation model. Corporate taxes should exceed personal taxes. They've never.

We should have an expectation that then corporate actors can buy down their taxes if they want, but if they do social good for society. I'll give you an example. If the Industrial Revolution, there's a table like this and the leading lights of that era. Andrew Carnegie, Nelson Rockefeller, J. Gould, J.P. Morgan.

They sat together and they said, guys, this is going to benefit us, this industrial revolution. It may not benefit everybody. What is our responsibility? What is our collective responsibility? And they allocated tasks.

Carnegie went and built libraries all throughout the country.

I think what happened is society was like, well, these are living testaments to us doing well.

And so then they were okay with this transition. But if you think about it today, what are the living tributes that capital builds and leaves behind for society? It's fewer and fewer.

“I think that's a very big opportunity for somebody to fill.”

I think it's like, especially for folks in tech, I think, if they can get themselves organized to do that, I think we land in a good place. If they cannot get themselves organized to do that and say, everyone for themselves, I think it's going to be really complicated, super messy. Super messy because...

Super messy. That sentiment that the wealthy are getting wealthier and the middle class is disappearing and the poor are being taxed into oblivion. Look at $80,000 your teacher pays 40% tax. But if you're a multi-billionaire, most of your wealth is not W2 wages.

It's cap gains, but there's all kinds of ways to shelter cap gains. There's all kinds of ways to defer. And so even though you pay more on an absolute dollar basis, on a percentage basis, you're paying way, way less, and all of those tricks have been exposed. They've all been exposed.

These are all mechanisms that were invented from the 1980s to now, by all the banks and all the folks that wanted to come to folks that had wealth.

“And it's all known, and I think people are kind of like, "Hey, hold on a second.”

This doesn't feel fair anymore." Absolutely, but the other problem with that is, if you do tax correctly, where does that

money go and who's managing it, and ultimately who's managing it is the federal government,

and they've been shown to be completely inept at managing your money correctly. The fraud and the waste is off the charts. The amount of NGOs that have insane amount of funds at their disposal, I mean, all this is exposed by Doge, right? And you realize, like, how much fraud and waste there is and how much money, so the solution

being taxed people more, that doesn't sit with a lot of people because it's like, "Well, where is it going and who's managing it?" If the federal government was being forced to handle money, the same way a private company does. If it was all out in the open, everything was exposed, they would have gone bankrupt a long

time ago. They would have gone under a long time ago. There's no way they would have been allowed to function the way they are. The people that are managing that money would have all been put in jail. There's not a chance in hell that giving them more money is going to solve anything.

They're going to find more ways to put more of that money into NGOs that puts more of that money into democratic coffers and Republican coffers. They're going to figure out a way to funnel that money around where it's not going to benefit people. I mean, a good example that is like where, let's look at the LA fire thing, for instance.

So the LA fire fund, there's a giant fire in the palseids. All this money gets raised. It's over $800 million. It goes to 200 plus different nonprofits. None of it goes to the people.

Spencer Pratt, who's running for mayor of Los Angeles, is a great job, by the way. Fucking phenomenal. Those ads are unbelievable. Fire. They're so good.

They're fine. They're fine. And he's doing it all out of a trailer on his burnt-out land. I mean, he's the most righteous guy running in that regard. But just that being exposed, like, okay, we're going to help out these people.

We're going to donate money. We're going to raise money. We're going to do some good. We feel terrible about the people in our community that have lost homes. Well, what happens?

Well, the same people that you're saying we should give more taxes to take that money. And they just give it to a bunch of nonprofits and charity. This episode is brought to you by Armour. Every week, there's some new wellness hack that people swear by. And after a while, you start thinking, why do we think we can just outsmart our bodies?

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Yes.

Flip it. That's right.

“But even if you do flip it, and the corporates are taxed more, where is that money going?”

Well, I suspect that if you put the burden on Wall Street and corporates, they'd be a lot more organized, and they'd probably create a lot more change than a diffuse electorate. Meaning, like, let's just say the government spends a trillion dollars and waste it. I'm generally roughly aligned with that.

If you waste a trillion dollars from 300 million people, it's hard to organize at 300 million

people. But if you waste a trillion dollars from 300 companies, those companies will get their shit together really fast, and they will force a lot more change. I would hope so, but you're still dealing with incompetent people that are tasked with taking care of that money, not just incompetent, but I'm not defending these people.

Decades of corruption, decades, and decades of all these mechanisms where they can take this money and funnel it into these NGOs and these nonprofits, and all these different weird organizations that don't seem to have accountability for what they do with that money.

“That gets real slippery, and if those people in turn make deals with those corporations”

that allow them to do certain things and push things through that maybe they would have difficulty doing, then you have a different kind of a working relationship with the same groups of people in the same government.

You just take money from corporations and move it into a way where the corporations ultimately

benefit from it, but yet it doesn't do any good to the people. I mean, I can see where you're coming from. I just think that if we go on the track we're going down, it just seems like we're going to hit a crisis. Yes.

The crisis is you can't expect people to pay more and more and more, again, I agree with you, the premises, we're all paying for a system that's broken, that should change, but we still continue to have to pay our taxes, but if taxes keep going up like this at the individual level, and we don't manage this transition to something where we may be working less and less, what are we getting paid to do, and then at that point, how are we expected

to pay what? 90% of what? Right. 50% of what?

“I think people do have this weird feeling of dread that the people that are in control of a”

lot in this country, the tech companies in particular, particularly the tech companies like Google and Facebook that are essentially involved in data collection and then ultimately dissemination of information, that they have acquired enormous amounts of wealth and power and influence, and they're essentially a new form of the government. Yeah.

You know, are you aware of Robert Epstein? Do you know about his work? Not Robert Epstein. They're different guy. Robert Epstein is a guy who specializes in understanding what curated search results do and

what Google's able to do in particular, with curated search results in terms of influencing elections, that, like say, if you have two candidates that are running, let's just take LA, for instance, if I'm not making any accusations, but I'm saying, if they wanted Karen Bass to win and you searched Karen Bass, you would find all these positive results. If you searched Spencer Pratt, you would find all these negative results, and there's

a bunch of people that are always undecided voters, and those are the ones that you

really want. They're like, I don't know. I don't know. And come election night, those are the people you want to try to grab, and it's generally a large percentage.

You can influence an enormous percentage of those people, just with search results, where you can shift an election one way or another. I believe it. He's demonstrated this and shown how this is possible. That freaks people out that tech companies are in control of narratives that tech companies

can censor information, especially tech companies that work in conjunction with the government. This is what we found out when Elon purchased Twitter. You know, Elon purchased Twitter, we got all this information from the Twitter files when all the journalists were allowed to go through it, and they said, oh, this is crazy. You've got the FBI, the CIA, you've got all these companies, all these government organizations

that are essentially controlling the narrative of free speech in the country. And they're doing it in a way that benefits them. They're doing it in a way that benefits what political parties in charge at the time was the Biden administration, and they were allowed to do a bunch of weird shit, which should be illegal, but it's not technically illegal.

That freaks people out because there's no real laws and rules in regard to what they're allowed to do and what they're not allowed to do.

They're shaping attention. Yes. Yeah. Attention. Again, it goes back to attention.

Right. Shaping attention. Yeah.

“That's a big concern for people, and I think then when you find out that these people”

are able to amass enormous sums of wealth and have incredible amount of power and influence,

because of this enormous wealth and this control over these tech companies that have essentially become the town square of the world. That freaks people out, and that these very small number of people, you know, you think of Zuckerberg, you think of Tim Cook, and I don't know who the new guy is now, who's the John F. John Furnace?

Right. Furnace? No. Furnace. Furnace.

But that kind of thing gives people a lot of concern, right? It's like that these people, these unelected people, are in control of a giant chunk of how the world works.

I think that this is the existential question that we are dealing with.

We're going to have five or six companies concentrate, like whatever power you think has

“been concentrated up until now, I think we're going to look back and it's going to look”

like a Sunday picnic 10 or 15 years from now. Because on the one hand, it's going to be an even smaller subset, and on the other hand, the capability is going to be an order or two orders of magnitude. So can you imagine what that must be like? It's kind of like showing up, getting dropped into the 1800s, and you've invented the

engine, and everybody else is a horse and buggy, you can just decide to your point. That is where we're going. It's even more crazy. It's like everybody else is on a horse and buggy, and you've got an internet connection on a cell phone.

Right. It's even more crazy. Exactly.

Because what we're dealing with with AI right now is, first of all, it's already lowered

children's attention spans, and it's shrinking their capacity to acquire or absorb information because what they're doing now is just relying on AI to answer all their questions for them. Now is that their fault? Kind of, right? Because it doesn't have to be that way.

You can still acquire information in the old fashion way. You can still learn things the right way, but a lot of kids are just concerned with passing examinations and getting into good schools and what they're doing is just using AI. And they're getting better test results, but they're also not a smart, which is really weird.

It's like we're relying on it, like it's essentially like replacing our mind, and that's just, this is the beginning, this is like, these are their top-ler days of AI, and where it's going to be a super-athlete in a few years.

“I think we have to figure out how, first of all, kids need to learn, and I think this”

is where we have to do a better job as parents. Kids need to learn how to be resilient thinkers. I don't even know what that term meant before, but I know what it means now, which is like, you take this AI slop, and you just kind of like pass it off, and if like the teachers in the school system aren't trained, they're just like, "Wow, this looks good.

They have to be able to push back." Parents need to be able to look at this shit, but then all of this stuff, I'm just like so frustrated, because it's like, one more thing that I have to do as a parent, like, every time technology gets better, it's one more thing, you know, we're going to make the world super-connected and social, and all that stuff.

It sounds great to me until I have to be the one that has to tell my kid, they can't get Instagram. And then they're up my ass every day, you know, and it's just like, "I don't want to have to deal with this stuff. I want this to be handled in a way that just allows me to do what I want to do.

I don't want to say no to my kid, I don't want to police his school work and make sure he's not cheating or not learning and just like, you know, passing off this AI slot. What am I where all my tax dollars going, where is everybody else in all of this? It gets very frustrating. And again, it goes back to like this feeling of like, "Well, is this all getting better

for me?" or is this kind of like not, you know, people start to be nostalgic for what it used to be because it was just simpler, but I think that's a different way of saying easier. Well, we're just dealing with, we're at the edge of great change, like great change that has no real understanding of how it turns out.

And I think that understandably freaks people out, freaks me out, it freaks me out, but I've kind of gotten to this place where I'm like, "Well, it's going to happen." Did you see this thing, it's a CEO of Verizon, Dan Schillman, he put out this very public forecast, you know, very smart guy, well regarded in business. And I think he said something like 30% of all white-collar jobs will be gone by 2030.

But it's something like that. That's probably optimistic.

And I thought at first, my initial reaction was like, "This is totally not credible, but

then I'm like, hold on a second, that's my bias because I want to believe that that's not possible." Honestly, right, right. And as I've got an older, I'm a little bit better now, like, "Okay, hold on a second, let's weigh the probabilities."

And now I was like, "Man, if I'm going to be fair, maybe there's a 10%, 20% chance of that, there's a bunch of other outcomes that are much better than that."

“But that's part of the set of outcomes that you have to consider.”

And then I was like, "Well, what's my antidote to that?" But the only thing that I can say is, "Don't worry, it's going to be better." I don't think that that's a good answer. No. So there has to be, like, all of this kind of goes back to, look, my wife and I had this conversation

were like, "If it were up to us, who can you trust to have some super intelligence?" Now we're biased because we're friends with him, but the only person that we can trust is Elon. Because he seems to be like, he has a bigger, like it's kind of like, he's like, "Over there, he's like, I need to get to Mars."

You know, and I'm going to first hear a form of the moon, but then I'm going to Mars.

And I'm going to build like a fucking magnetic catapult to do all this shit. And so I just need this thing. I feel like he's the least corruptible. These are the most independent thinking. And I think he's the one that has an actual empathy for people.

And there are folks where there's just an insane profit motive. There are less in control of the businesses that they run. Those businesses are really out over their ski tips and the amount of money they've gotten from Wall Street and other folks who expect to return. We'll put a ton of pressure on these folks.

And if they get their first, I don't know where the chips fall. We don't really know. We can kind of guess. And then you see in the press, just enough snippets of their reactions in certain moments where you're like, hey, hold on a second, question mark here.

You see, open AI, react one way, you see anthropic, react another way. And you're like, where is this going to end up? And the honest answer is nobody really knows. So it comes back to like, we need a few people that can organize. Those guys need to self-organize and actually present a really positive face.

And they need to show why those 20% of outcomes that a Dan Schillman paints.

“The truth is, it's possible, but here's why it's not probable.”

But it's not in their best interest to do that. Because it's in their best interest to generate the most amount of money possible. That's the obligation, the up to their shareholders. That's the obligation to the people that have invested money in this company. Their obligation is not to make sure the white collar jobs stay in the same place that they're

right now. That's not true. No. They actually think their incentive should very clearly be to tell people with details and facts why there's a positive future.

And the reason is the following, right now there's a vacuum, there are no facts. And there's fear mongering and then there's this belief that this is going to be cataclysmic to human productivity and white color labor and all of this stuff. What's people's natural reaction? Well today, if you look at it, think about AI's a very simple equation, energy in intelligence

out.

“So if you want to cut the head of the snake, what do you do?”

You cut off the energy supply, right? If you're afraid of all of the super intelligence coming, the natural thing to do would be to go to the point of energy at unplug it. What is the equivalent of unplugging it today? It is to go all around the country, find the data centers, protest them and get them to be

muffled. That is an incredibly successful strategy right now. Today, about 40% of all of these data centers that get protested get muffled. You're talking about emerging data centers. Yes.

I need to, so if you're one of these companies, the first thing you should realize is I need to paint a positive vision because 40% of my energy is getting unplugged every day. And if that happens, my revenues will crater and my investors will be super pissed. So the right strategy is, what is the positive, fact-based argument?

And there are some incredible examples.

Number one. And the number two is, you have to give people some tactical benefit that they see. Because AI differently than search or differently than social media, there's no exchange of value. Let me explain what that means.

So let me just go, like, so the first thing is that if you can go and actually show people, here's an example of AI, I heard about this last night is pretty incredible. You can now take pictures of a woman's philopean tubes and you can see pre-cancer, ovarian

and you can fix it so that women don't get cervical cancer. In a different example, I told you about this example when I was here before, I finally got FDA approval, okay? There is a device now that is allowed to be in the operating room with you.

And if you have a cancerous lesion or a tumor inside of your body, the most important

thing when they go to take it out is make sure you don't leave any cancer behind. You couldn't do it because what would happen is you take it out. A doctor is literally fucking eyeballing it and saying, yeah, they send it to a pathologist, you get an answer in 10 days. For women with breast cancer, a third of these women find out that they have cancer left

behind. They go back in, they scoop some more stuff out, a third of those women, okay? And I'm like, this is bullshit, we can solve this problem. It took us a long time, a lot of money, I had to build an entire machine, imaging, all of this stuff, AI algorithms, we have to prove it all, we finally get approval, okay?

But you know, a hearted is to tell that story, in all of the attention that people are looking for, it's hard. But those are positive examples, no more breast cancer, no more cervical cancer. A different example is most drugs in pharma fail, right? And it's a very complicated problem in pharma.

It's kind of like a jigsaw puzzle of the ultimate complexity. It's like, think of your human body as like a Himalayan mountain range.

“You have to design a drug that's an equivalent Himalayan mountain range that plugs into it”

perfectly.

One millimeter off, you grow like a fourth eye, a third nipple, you die, you know?

Now you can use computers to make sure that that drug hand in glove to your body solves the exact problem, couldn't do that before. So there's all of these body of examples and you're probably only hearing them superficially at best. That should be 99% of the attention, is showing all of the constructive tactical ways in which

our lives will be better. For mom, your daughter, your wife, us, Jamie, his family, everybody. Right. That's the number one thing, nobody talks about it. I don't understand why.

Well I think because people are terrified of losing their jobs, so that's the primary concern. The primary concern that I hear from people is that there's so many people that are going to school right now, college students, that don't know if their job is going to even exist in four years when they graduate.

“And that's the second part of I think what this industry has to do better.”

There's a, I had, lunch with Jeffrey Katzenberg. He told this crazy story. I'll tell you, it's a, Steve Jobs gets kicked out apple. He buys, he starts next and he buys Pixar from George Lucas. But then he hits a rough patch and he's got this, you know, financing issue.

Katzenberg flies up, spends time with Steve Jobs says, "I'll buy Pixar." Jobs says, "Absolutely not." And then Katzenberg proposes a deal and he's like, "How about a three-picture deal?" Jobs says, "Okay." He flies back and apparently, all the animators were up in arms because they're like,

"Hold on a second," Steve Jobs is going to use these next computers to animate this

movie, which ultimately became, I think, toy story. And they're like, "This is going to put all of a side of a job." That perfect argument. And people were really upset. Roy Disney was upset, all the animators were upset and they all went to Mike Eisener.

“And they were like, "Michael, you need to fire Katzenberg."”

And they had a deal, which was like, "Look, man, you do you, but just give me the ability to say no if I think that this is your budget jump off a cliff." They talk about it and he's like, "I got your back, do the deal, make the movie." They made the movie. It was a huge success.

Fast-forward 10 years, 15 years, there's 10x the number of animators. Now, it's a small example, but why is that? You were able to use computers and now all these new people were able to come and participate in that. I get it, it's a small example.

But I think if we had better organized leadership and we could try to tell some of these examples, try to go back and document how some of these things have actually helped people it expanded the pie. There's a chance. But if we don't, I agree with you.

We're going to end up as everybody basically saying, "Hey, hold on a second. This is crazy. We need to stop this." That's the worst outcome because that's when you will have the high risk of a dislocation, like the worst outcome, like the black, what's the blackest one of it?

Let's think about the blackest one of them is when you get a model that's good enough to automate a bunch of labor, but not good enough that it can build new drugs and prevent

So there's like a gap, right? And if you can stop it here and it doesn't get to there, now you do have the worst of all worlds. You have this thing that kind of displaces labor, no new things come after it because we stop innovating.

“And that's like a non-trivial possibility now, I think.”

No, it's a huge possibility. And then there's also this thing that you brought up earlier where we have this place of abundance where no one has to work anymore. I think that's a big problem. Well, because if no one has to work anymore, first of all, what is your identity, right?

Because so many people there identity is what they do, whatever it is, if you're a lawyer, if you're an accountant, if you run a business, whatever it is, this is your identity. You have built this thing, you look forward to going there, you work at it, you look forward to doing a good job and getting rewarded for it, the harder you work, the more you get paid, there's all these incentives built in and then there's this, again, identity problem.

If all of a sudden you have universal high income, which is what Elon always talks about,

well, what gives people purpose then, like what, and also, if you have a person who's in, you know, 43 years old, in their entire life, they've worked towards this idea that the harder they work, the harder they think, the more innovative they are and the better they are and implementing these ideas, the more they get rewarded. And then all of a sudden, that's unnecessary anymore, Mike, time for you to just relax

and do what you want to do. And Mike's like, well, this is what I do, I don't have any fucking hobbies, I enjoy doing what I do, and now what I do is completely useless, and now I'm on a fixed income. Even if that fixed income is a million dollars a year, whatever it is. All of a sudden, you are in this position where everything is being run by computers,

so you feel useless, you feel like, what am I doing? I'm just taking money, I'm on high welfare, like, what do I do?

“I think that that's a really important question to answer.”

I don't know. Some people are going to write books, some people are going to do art, some people are going to find things to do, but what do you think we would have done, if we were, go back to the 1800s example, there was no office culture, you know, there's no, like, ladder to climb, how did people find meaning then?

Well, they had jobs, people still did things. If you're a farmer, you had meaning in your labor and what you did in keeping the animals alive and your chores, and there's people that find great satisfaction doing that, you have all these animals that rely on you have people that rely on you for the food that you generate.

There's meaning there. It doesn't have to be an office to be something that gives you purpose and meaning, but when all that is animated, then what happens? Because then you have no purpose, no meaning other than recreational activities. Now, if everybody just starts playing chess and doing a bunch of things that they really

“enjoy, I mean, look, there's people that would love to just play chess, you know?”

I don't know about that. I think if people really got into it, I mean, there's a lot of people that get addicted to whatever the recreation is, like golf or whatever it is. For me, it's playing pool, you know?

If you told me I never have to make any more money, I could just play pool all day.

I might just play pool all day, but I don't know how many people think that way. I don't know how many people would be able to find meaning and purpose in a recreational activity. There's so many people where their entire being is focused around productivity and generating more wealth.

What about religion as a source of meaning? Well, that would help. Do you see that's article on The New York Times? I think it was this weekend about how popular and sold out churches have become as social constructs in New York City.

It was totally fascinating. It's like young women like dressed to the night. It's going to church on the Sunday for social belonging, community meaning. I thought I was so fascinated by it.

I was like, wow, that's incredible.

It's like, if I think if you graph like just like people's use of religion as an anchoring part of their value system over the last 40 years, basically gone as zero, nobody celebrates it's not a part of the community the way that it used to be. Maybe that's the thing that we have to find. There has to be a renewal of some older things and then there has to be new things that

replace it. What's the Chinese answer to this? The Chinese have a very orthogonal answer to this. If you look at our China's organized, it's super interesting because they don't reward based on the way the American system rewards.

In fact, it's like almost orthogonal where we, it's we are rewarded with money and rewarded with sort of fame and recognition. The system, the American capital of system.

they are rewarded with is influence and power and a very, again, it's a very specific

social contract. It doesn't, I don't think it's going to work in the United States. Nor am I an advocate of it, but it works for them. You'll start off as like some, you know, low, wrong person in like some small village town somewhere in your job as like the, you know, the function area is to do good in that

community and the more you do well, you get promoted, then you get, let's say, to a reasonable size city and you get a budget. And now what happens is you actually become a little bit like a VC, like a venture capitalist. You're given a budget and you'll get a memo and it'll say, "Hey, Joe, we have a priority over the next 15 years, it's batteries."

And you have enough money put a team on the field. So you go in your local community, you find a bunch of guys, you're like, "Oh, guys, we're going to start a battery company." And you do it. And let's say they're good and they're like innovative and what happens is in the town beside

it, that battery company dies.

“Now you kind of assume the capital from Jamie, right?”

Because Jamie's like, "Fuck, I fucked up this thing that I was told to do batteries." "Okay, Joe, I'm just going to align with you." And what happens over time is you get this filtering effect and the people that are better at meeting these long-run priorities and objectives are the ones that are celebrated. But they're not celebrated with, you know, Forbes articles and all this other bullshit.

They're just celebrated by given more responsibility. And then eventually you get to the upper echelons of China and what you have are folks over, of course, of 40 or 50 years who in their eyes have demonstrated incredible prowess. There's a version of that reward system, which is very foreign to America, but that's work for China.

Now that also works because they're more confusion, you know, we're too individualist. But my point is like, you know, there are these different ways that we can find of giving

people meaning that don't have to be always around money.

But meanwhile, I think we have to answer the question, if we are expected to do less, we probably should not be taxed more.

“That's I think that's like a very basic, in my mind, I think that is like, that must”

be explored and figured out. And on the other side, there's just a ton of obvious mechanisms that corporate actors can use to minimize that. And they should find off ramps by the way, if they want to build hospitals, they shouldn't have to pay taxes.

That's a perfect example, by the way, of like, the thing in like, if you look, if you walk around New York City, there are living tributes to corporate success that people get benefit from every day, the hospitals, the buildings, the libraries, everywhere. We need a version of that. And I'm not a tax expert, but if that can be funded by private actors, so go directly

to the problem, build a bunch of libraries, build a bunch of new universities that teach kids how to think or whatever, build better hospitals that are there to actually solve the problem. These are all things that are possible, but none of it's happening today. Well, let's go back to what we were talking about earlier with the taxes and the fact that

you're giving money to a broken system. Do you think it's possible that AI could show benefit in that they can analyze all the data, which would be virtually impossible for even an office filled with human beings, paying attention to all of it. And they could analyze where all the money goes and eliminate all the fraud and waste.

Like recognize it instantaneously. Yes. That would be a great benefit and a way to make it so that your taxes directly benefit people. I'll give you one example of this.

So two years ago, you know, like every few years, I invest, but every few years, I'll start something because I feel strongly about it. And there's an effort that I made to look at all of this old code.

“Like if you think about the world, the world runs on software, right?”

Like even though you and I are talking, it's my thing to keep me speaking to her. It's all software. It's all software. Then it goes to Spotify. They pump in some ads.

It's all software. Software runs everything. What percentage of that do you think is kind of poorly written?

I'm going to say probably 80 to 90 percent of it.

Really? Oh, yeah. I've settled with errors, it's riddled with mistakes, the fact that so many companies exist is an artifact of the fact that the thing that came before it isn't working. Like if you got it right the first time, it would just kind of move and go.

So how so? What do you mean by that? So normally, if you were like, I want to build a system that does A, B, and C, right?

down. So I want to do this, what are the implications? Do you want to do that? What are the implications? And I would actually write a document that was in English before a single line of code has

been written.

“This was the, when you have to design something that can't fail.”

So for example, like if you were designing something for the FAA or for, you know, I hate to say this example because it turned out to not exactly, but like, you know, to fly a plane, right? You are first there to write in English. The reason is because everybody can then swarm that document and see the holes, okay?

And it's only then when that stuff looks complete and functional, do you build? We turned that upside down. Over the last 30 years, people in computing invented all kinds of ways to shortcut that process. And you can say, well, why did they do that because they would allow you to build something faster, make more money quickly, and then build more business.

So the direct response to, hey, it's going to take us nine months to write down the rules with somebody else showed up and says, fuck, I'll just grip and rip this thing. I'll be done in four months. Who's going to get the job? The four months, guys.

Going to get the job. So we've had 30 or 40 years of that. What are we learning about that process? It's riddled with software errors, like logic errors. It's riddled with security errors.

“I don't know if you saw this whole thing like with anthropic mythos, what are they uncovering?”

They're uncovering that we wrote a lot of really shitty code for 40 years. So that body of old code, I was like, guys, if we're going to really figure out how to do all of this, we need to rewrite all of it. So we built this thing, and it's called the software factory. Anyways, the point is, there is a government organization that we're working with.

They gave us a huge corpus of their old code, and it is unbelievable how much complexity and difficulty they have to go through to manage all the money flows with the system.

And this is a critical part of the US government.

So to your point, what I can tell you really explicitly is, the people on the ground want this stuff to be better written, it's less like some nefarious actor, like, oh, I'm going to steal here, it's a lot of very brittle fragile code. And when you rewrite it, well, first when you document it, it's like the pulp fiction thing, suitcase opens, the light shines, and you're like, and then you can rewrite it.

And you will save, so I think, like, as the government goes through this process, because they're forced to, or they want to, it won't matter, you are going to save a ton of money. They're going to have to do it, Joe, because the security risks are too high. But what they're going to end up with is impregnable code that you can read in English and understand, you'll see the holes, those holes will be plugged, because otherwise now

you'd be committing fraud by letting it be. You close the loop holes, and there's just going to be less money leaking out of this bucket.

That is an incredible byproduct.

We're going to live that over the next 10 or 20 years. Just for nothing, like, we get it for free. And that's happening. So when that happens, you're going to see government budget shrink. Now to your point, will they try to spend that extra money in other places?

Of course. Of course, they will.

“That's the next conversation, which is you have to elect people that save firewall it.”

Whatever you save, give it back to the people or invest in some scholarship program or free medicine or something, but you can't spend it on other random shit. But that's where we're at. That's going to happen. It's going to be slow, but when people start to announce these things, I think over

the next few years, you're going to be shocked. So that's the positive upside. Well, that's happening now. You're a guardless of whatever else happens. There's just, it's a lot of old shitty code that must get rebuilt from scratch.

It is getting rebuilt from scratch. And as a result, a lot of these leaky bucket problems are getting filled. So what percentage do you think could be fixed?

I think, if I had to be a betting man, I think probably 30 to 40 percent of the federal budget

is leaked out. Just for shitty code. No, meaning like all of the rules and like you can take it, I'm not saying that there isn't fraud, but I think a lot of times what happens is less nefarious than fraud, like meaning like conspiratorial actors.

Right. I just think it's like confidence and efficiency, for example, like I saw doge just say, they

I have no idea how much money those folks were getting or who they were, but it's probably a lot. It's probably not zero. And now that they got rid of it, they're not going to get that money anymore. If you implement something at the state level around all of this fraud prevention for

the daycare and all of this other stuff, again, it's all in software because it's not,

“no matter what the human wants to do, you have to go to a computer at some point, at”

least today in 2026 and type in something and something happens that's documented and then the money gets sent. That happens. There's no other way in the modern world today at scale to steal billions of dollars. And so my point is, as you document all of these systems and governments have to transparently

tell you and me the voting population here are the rules, they're going to plug a lot of these holes. And I think as you do that, there's just going to be a lot less waste and fraud. The question is, who's going to take credit for it? Everybody's going to try to take credit for it, but I think we've started it.

I think we've started this process. And again, the reason that people will start is because you'll be afraid of China hacking these systems. You'll be afraid of Iran, North Korea, and you'll say, this system can't stand. All these AI models are running around, we're going to get breached and penetrated, then they're

going to steal all the money. And the natural reaction will be okay, rewrite it. This episode is sponsored by Better Help. We've all been there, staying up late, stressed about the future. Maybe you're worried about finding a job or a looming deadline.

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So you don't have to be on this journey alone. Find support and have someone with you in therapy, sign up and get 10% off at BetterHelp.com/JRE. That's BetterHELP.com/JRE. It makes sense that that makes sense that the code and having a bunch of errors and having a lot of inefficiency and just a lot of incompetence.

That's going to save a lot of money. But so you would be doing this with AI? In part. What AI allows you to do is like, it's like, you have a textbook, okay? It's in Chinese.

You don't know Chinese, right? No. Well, this is probably doing something important, but it's in Chinese. What AI allows you to do is back-translate that into English.

“You put it through an AI model, you teach it, you coach it, right?”

You can parameterize all of it and outpops that same book in English and now you can read it and know that it's accurate. That's what we're doing. What the AI allows you to do is essentially translate from this one language that you kind of don't understand to English.

By the way, that thing that's happening is actually also a very powerful and important

trend, meaning there's all of these systems that work in ways that you and I don't understand. And part of the reason why we don't understand it, maybe it's bad software, maybe it's fraud, whatever, but nothing can be written down. There's no symbolic space. There's no English document that says, this is how the DMV works.

This is exactly the rules. This is what you can expect Joe Rogan. When you show up at the DMV and you give us this thing, here's your SLA in three days. You get a driver's license and here's exactly what's happening and here's an app and you can follow it, doesn't happen.

Here, Joe Rogan, here's how my insurance billing process works. You have this condition. I'm going to show you exactly why I made this decision. Here's the exact rule. Here's the approval or denial from CMS, follow it through and tell me if you agree or none

of that exists, but it is possible.

The first step in doing that is taking all of this legacy shit that we deal with and translating

it into English and reading it and saying, is this how we want it to work? That's going to eliminate an enormous amount of all the things that frustrate us. So this will require human oversight. Absolutely. All right.

And so then it's also going to be who's watching the walkers.

It's okay.

This is a great question.

I'll tell you how this government agency is doing it because it's a really fascinating way because I think it's very smart. They came to us and they came to another very well-known company, you can probably guess what it is. And they're like, guys, you're kind of in a foot race, but you're not competing against

each other. You can think of yourselves as frenemies. So here's this Chinese document, you're going to translate it for us. There's going to be your version of English and these guys' version of English. And every time it's the same, we're going to look at it together and we're going to agree

or not. Okay, this is exactly how we want this to work. When yours says the dog is red and his says the dog is yellow, we're going to sit and literally inspect it and we're going to figure out why you said red and why you said yellow.

“And then if you say the cat is red, the dog is yellow, so it's totally wrong, right?”

Like you've gotten, you know, or like the cat is red, I want an apple, whatever. So you're going to double and triple down on those kinds of errors. And they do it, not in public, but in this large community, where there's like technical people from all different parts, and they're just warming this problem, it is, it's incredible to see.

And so what happens is you get humans that get to use this tool, but ultimately it's our

judgment and it's done transparently. So what happens is you can't, you know, hey man, put this fucking rule in there, like the dog is yellow, just like the dog yellow, can't do it. Because now you have tens of people, hundreds of people, and then it gets documented. It's super fascinating.

I'm not saying this is how it's going to work in 10 years, but I'm telling you, it's literally what's happening right now. And I think that thing alone will be tens of billions of dollars and could be hundreds of billions of dollars of savings when it's fully done. It's a lot of people from all walks of life, all political persuitions, and they're just

in it. It's the government. It's a handful of us private companies. It's super cool to see.

“It's like, it's like, okay, we're actually going to do something here, like, this isn't,”

this is nice.

It's really, it's really cool.

So that's interesting in terms of the current moment. So in the current moment, you're able to implement this, you're able to find fraud and waste in all these problems that exist, and all these errors and shitty software. Once that's all been done, then what happens? No fucking clue.

Yeah. So this is where it gets weird, right? Because when you're dealing with AI models that are capable of doing things that no individual human being could ever possibly imagine, and then you task it with a solution, or with a problem.

The solution for this. And then it starts figuring out ways to trim this and implement that. We have to make sure that these AI's act within, they act within the best interests of the human race. I agree.

Right? Not the company, not the government, not, but the human race, and you're also dealing with China. You're also dealing with Russia. You're dealing with other countries that are also in this mad race to create artificial

general superintelligence, that if we keep shutting down Danish editors, we keep hamstring ourselves. China's not doing that? No. They're not doing that.

They're doing the opposite. They're generating as much revenue that goes towards this problem as possible. They're putting all the efforts, the country, the government, and these corporations work hand in glove in order to achieve a goal. We do not.

“And that becomes a problem if you want to be competitive with these other countries that”

are trying to achieve the same result as us. And then you have SP and all. Then you have a bunch of people that are stealing information. You have a bunch of people that are CCP members that are actually involved in companies and you find out that they're siphoning off data and that they're sharing information

and text secrets. Here's the way that the Chinese models work, the Chinese claim. So America's close source, meaning you got your own thing. Your recipe is completely secret, right? I have my own thing.

My recipe is totally secret. China uses this word called open source, but it's not open source. So they say, here's how I make my thing, you can see it, super transparent. What it is is more like open weights, which is like an recipe, it tells you, you need sugar. You need butter.

How much sugar? And they'll say, you know, so much, but then they don't say it's brown sugar.

So there's all these different ways where they kind of give you this perception that it's completely transparent. But it's somewhat transparent. So just in the level set, nobody in the world has a functional open source model, other than maybe in video, which is any good in the league of the closed source models and the

open weight models of the Chinese, okay? So the Chinese open weight models are great. The closed source models of America are great. And then there's a couple open source, like fully open, that are kind of catching up. The thing between America and China, what I find so fascinating is this following conundrum

that everybody's going to find themselves in. I think like if you think of like an analogy, America's like a planet, China's like a planet. And around us are these moons. And I'm just using the AI analogy. So in AI, what do you need?

“I think there's like four or five things you need, okay?”

The first thing you need is a fucked ton of money. So we need essentially the banks, right? Like the Game of Thrones thing, we need like, we need the iron bank, feed us the money because that's what we use to buy everything and make everything. So we need that.

We need a ton of data, okay? There's ways to get that.

We need a ton of very specific rare earths and critical metals and materials.

We need a ton of power, so and there are specific countries that are going to be really good at giving that to us. So if you look at the UAE, they are going to be the preeminent banking partner of the Western world. They are going to replace and be what Switzerland was over the last 50 years for the next

50. That's happening today. If you look at Canada and Australia, the small political fissures aside, they are the

“two most important ways in which we get access to the critical metals and materials”

that without which we get fucked because China owns, you know, can just strangle us, okay? So you have these like moons around the United States. But there's like five countries, six countries. And there's a worldview that says in China has the same thing, you know, they have Taiwan

that's complicated for us. So now we have a moon that we don't really have an answer for, which is what happens, you know, for all these super advanced chips. After they get their money, maybe Russia becomes their bank, where do they get their

critical metals, maybe it's Indonesia, right, who has a ton of natural resources.

And then you get into this game theory, which is what happens every other country. Because there are 190 countries, you have 10 that kind of defied up, what are the other 180 do? And you have to kind of sort yourself. You're like my own team of America or I'm on Team China.

And you probably have to go to people and say, well, here's what I can give you. If you're Indonesia, you're like, you probably want to be on Team America quite badly. This is why the whole Trump terror thing is so interesting because it's like this accidental way of figuring out that this is actually this new sorting function that's happening in global politics.

That's happening today. Because these countries are like, holy shit, if somebody invents a super intelligence, and I don't have it, how am I going to keep my people healthy, how am I going to educate my people? Like, I'm originally from Sri Lanka. What the fuck does Sri Lanka have to offer? Like, if you were sitting there, they should

be thinking, oh man, what do I have? Well, I have a critical piece of territory for

like naval navigation. And then what do you do? You probably go to America and say, listen, let's figure out a package, get the IMF involved, give me some cash, I'll let you kind of keep your worships there. So there's this game theory that we're about to go through because of AI because

“it's kind of, I think, sort people into these bipolar world. I actually think it makes”

a safer afterwards. I don't think it makes us less safe. I think it actually makes us more safe because if you have these resources that build up on both sides, there's more of a likelihood of a mutual detent. And we're very different. So we're less likely to fight over similar resources, meaning we're like the liberal democracy, you know, we're like the free market. They are, you know, we're individualist, they're confusion, society oriented,

you know, reputation, power focused, less really money focused. So there's a lot of ways we're orthogonal enough where if that sorting function happens, it's probably a safer place, not a more dangerous place. We have the models that can attack them. They have the models that can attack us. We kind of decide to leave each other alone. This is ultimate best case scenario. Ultimate best case scenario. What's ultimate worst case scenario? I think the worst case scenario

is they, so the way that they train their models is very important. What they actually do is,

call it a billion agents. Not just from China, but from everywhere, right? They mask the their IPs.

And they bash on these models. And they put, you know, the US models, Grock, open AI, Gemini, and Thropic. And they ask it, every random imaginable question impossible. They get the answer and they collect it. So they're using these our models as a way to train their models. They're short circling, you know, some of the hard parts. So they're already in that world. If they, then are able to get to a level of intelligence that's equal

to the United States, it will really depend on who the leader is there that wants to allocate that. Meaning, if they say that we are going to do something really nefarious and shady,

“then I think it devolves very quickly. So the worst case scenario, so the best case scenario is”

peace, prosperity, basically, like a stand-down, right, mutually assured destruction.

I think the worst case scenario is there's a, we seek one of us seeks global dominance, in which case where we're headed to conflict. And that conflict, I think, is that's very dangerous, incredibly dangerous. That's sort of like existential, I think, because it's the great of the weapons that will be used to fight that. We're not talking about fucking bullets. It's like we're so past that. It's like hypersonics, it's nuclear, it's, it's, and it's not even like nuclear, it's not, that's

like a word, but there's like, there's a gradation of the severity of these weapons that can

be created. And then if you can marry them together and deliver them in minutes. And then there's a

“cyber threat, then there's the drones and how, how you can kind of like swarm an entire country.”

Then there's the robots, which effectively are warfighters. They're one step away, right, once you weaponize them, it just becomes very, very, very complicated, very quickly. And then there's a question of whether or not AI is willing to take instruction after certain point. I mean, if it achieve sense, and if it scales, so if it keeps moving in this exponential direction, like all technology kind of does, why would it even listen to us? Like what, at what point would it say,

this is silly. I'm getting directions from people that clearly have ulterior motives. They clearly have self-interest in mind. They, they're not looking out for the entirety of the human race or even of the planet, or even the survival of these AI systems at what point in time do these systems communicate with each other and have like, like we've seen these chat rooms where these AI, LM, LLMs get together and start talking in Sanskrit. I mean, why would they, yeah, I'll tell you

it even scary one. There was a before them, one of these labs put out their latest model, a team inside of them was like, hey, let's go and test its ability to find bugs. And two or three iterations in, the AI would create the bug and solve it and go, give me my reward. And you're just like, what the fuck is going up here? Well, people do that, don't we? People do that, but it's crazy to see a machine do it to your point of like,

but they learned on people. So, so this is what goes down to like, why we have to like be a little bit more honest about where we are. These things are a little brittle. So, meaning there's a thing inside of an AI model called reward functions, which is exactly what you think it means. It's like, how do I know I did a good job? And you can make the reward function anything you want.

“And this is where I think humans are, unfortunately, a little fallible. And so if we build it”

incompletely and if we don't exactly know how to design these things correctly, what's going to happen is exactly what you said where the, you know, if somebody builds a reward function that essentially is your goal is to gain independence. That's where the huge pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is. Break free, inject yourself everywhere. If you think your computer's going to get unplugged, put yourself into the firmware of the toaster to keep yourself alive and connect to the internet

and then go, it will do it. It will do it. That we know today because we're capable of designing that framework and that harness today. Well, we've already shown that they have survival instincts, right? And they've already shown that they will without telling anyone upload versions of themselves

Right. Who wrote that? Why did you say that that was allowed? These are really complex questions.

Why did they do it that way? I don't know. These are really complicated ethical moral questions. It seems like they did it like they're treating human beings. They did it almost like what makes people want to achieve more rewards. Yeah, which is like a, again, going back to attention,

“I think that we will find out that that's the sugar high, meaning what do people really want?”

Even if they know they don't want it, they want purpose and meaning. Do we know how to encode that in a mathematical function? No. We're just making it up because like meaning and that's like a very, that's like a deep thing like you either have a sense of that you have it and you're on track or you're not. A reward is like, hey, Joe, do this and I'll give you a gold star. Do that and I'll give you two gold stars. Do this. I'll give you a hundred dollars.

And right now, we have to express those decisions in a mathematical equation. Like ultimately,

that's how at some level, that's how brittle these things are. So how do you reduce meaning into math? How do you do it? We don't know. So what do we do is we'll have some ever complicated reward functions? We'll explain to ourselves into circles how it does everything we need to do.

“That is, I think that's part of the problem. It's a huge part of the problem and then”

at one point in time to start coding itself. Right now, right? So chat GPT 5 has been essentially made by chat GPT. Right? So it's going to recognize the ludicrous nature of some of its coding. Yeah. And it's going to go, why did we do this? Back to this example. They're going to be like,

why did you write it this? Right. And it turns out because humans were involved. Right. Right.

It's like, I think we're probably at the curve, the part of the curve that's about to go like this. You're a pointy stick. The hockey stick. Yeah. And that's a very scary proposition because that's a digital god. Well, that means that we are all on a multi-hundred-day shock clock to answer these questions because it's not decades we're talking about. Right. It's maybe on the outside two years. So that's, but is that 700 days? Right. And maybe it's less than that. So maybe it's like 400

days or 500 days. My point is it's some number hundred of days, which means every day that goes by is a non-trivial percentage. That's a little crazy. So we have to sort these questions out. But how can we sort these questions out if we are creating something that's going to have infinitely more intelligence than we have available as individual human beings. And even collectively as a group of human beings. That's a really good question. Because one of the things that Elon

kind of freaked me out last time I talked to him about grock, he was like, uh, it's just kind of freaks us out every couple weeks. Like we're, it's growing and it's capable of doing things. That's just shocking. Yeah. And no one's exactly sure how it's doing it. So, okay, this isn't unbelievably important point. A lot of how this stuff works is still a mystery to most of us. So even when you're in it, like it's almost like like, Joe, it's almost like you can hit the

pause on the machine, but then like lift up the hood and look at the engine. We still don't understand why it's doing some of the shit it's doing. That's where we are. That's the honest truth of where we are. There's a lot of people that understand the theory, not a lot, but enough. There's people that know how to extend that. But sometimes you look at it and you're like, do we know why I did that? Question mark. Right. Is it thinking forward?

But this goes back to what we said, like, why can't I think part of it is like, if we were a little bit more honest and de-escalated, the winner at all costs in this specific thing,

“it would be better for everybody. So I think it's important to inspect what is the incentive”

that causes all these companies to be in it for themselves, where it must be me and nobody else. Like why? Like why? It's a question tree. Like why is it so important do you think? Where the top seven array companies couldn't get together and say, let's do this as a group. Like kind of like my government code example, we all inspect it together. We get just like just the fucking each team drafts their Delta Force. And we just mog like this, the one model.

And we why can't that happen? Because they would have to share resources. And then there's also this hierarchy of who is more successful currently. Exactly. Like what's the most ubiquitously used? Exactly. Right. Like what is it right now? It's chatGPT, right? It's probably chatGPT and

that they would want to bring in someone else. If you have another innovative AI company and you

say, let's all get together and figure this out together and share resources. If you if you thought that the risk was that meaningful, that's probably what you do. If you were an associate path and some of these people run in these companies are they demonstrate they certainly demonstrate sociopath like sociopathy. Yeah. The other the other thing that could be a little bit more banal is that they also just love status games. And this is the key status games. Yes.

Right. Attention. Right. Back to attention. Back to attention. Back to attention. Right. Dude, how many things in our life do we think just comes back down to that? A lot. I mean, what a young people want more than anything. Attention to be famous. Attention. They want to be a content creator. They want to be a clavic killer. I mean, this is the number one thing when you ask kids what they want to do. It's like content creator. Yeah. Because it's like a clear path

“where you don't even have to be exceptional. Well, I think that they're responding. We designed”

a society for them that said, here is the key incentive. That's attention. We never said it in

those words. You never told your kids that. Right. I never told my kids that. But everything around them is bombarding them with the same message. Hey, man, it's about attention. Attention is all you need. Like, you know what the name of the critical paper in AI is? Like, when you go back to like the magna card of AI, do you know what it's called? No. Attention is all you need. Really? Attention is all you need. That is the name of the fucking S of the white paper. How crazy is that?

Everything in our society. In subtle ways to just, you know, bash you over the headways. Tells you that attention is just the most precious asset. Well, it's one of the weird things when you go back to this concept that we're living in a simulation. Because it's what I mean. It's also it's like when you look at quantum physics. Right. And the idea of the observer is that things function very differently when they're observed. The difference in a particle in a wave. Right.

Like, if you pay attention to them, they observe differently. They observe differently. Yeah.

“Like, what is that? Yeah. What is that? Yeah. Why is that? Why is attention so important to us?”

That is a really important question. Right. And what is like the single best motivator in a negative way. It's negative attention. Like, that's the one thing that everyone fears more than anything. It's negative attention. Well, and then some people figure out that attention is an absolute value function. Doesn't matter if it's positive or negative. Right. The sum total is just great. Right. So if I get positive attention, great. Negative attention, great. If I can be divisive, then I can

maximize both sides of that equation. Mm-hmm. And, you know, you're rewarded for that at scale. You are, but you're also, you experience, because you're inauthentic, you experience a tremendous amount of negative attention. Yeah. And then you have this bad feeling that comes with negative attention as to versus primarily positive attention, which is a good feeling. Yeah. So it's it's letting you know you're on the wrong track. And some sort of weird primal way, like in our code,

like the negative attention is like, what's with the original version of that? It's like the reason why people fear public speaking is because initially, in a tribal situation, if you're talking in front of the group of 150 people in your tribe, it's probably because they're judging you. Right. And you've fucked up. And you've got to make some sort of a case why they don't kill you. Right. Right. This is why everyone, this is the fear of public speak.

It's where it comes from. That's encoded in our genes as well. Yeah. That thousands of years public speaking wasn't the positive act. It was defend yourself before we kill you. Exactly. Exactly.

“And the worst thing. Yeah. That's fascinating. It is fascinating. That makes a ton of sense.”

It does. Right. Well, why else would be so terrifying? Yeah. I thought of that the first time

I ever did stand up. I was like, why am I so scared? It was very strange because I had thought probably a hundred times in martial arts tournaments. Like, why was I so scared of this? But I was. I was terrified for it didn't make any sense because negative attention. Right. You know, bombing on stage. It's because all these people are judging you. And in negative way, feels. It should be like once it's over like, well, that sucked. Let it go. It's not.

You like you sit with it. Do you go to bed at night? Think about it. Do you have a batting average? Like, meaning like, is it like a fixed percentage of your show's bomb independent of the people the moment? No. It's really the real problem and every

then you start from scratch. That's where even the grades, Louis C. K. Chris Rock, Dave Spell,

they all bomb. Everybody bombs during that process. Because you're just working your craft. It's all new stuff. It's like, it's, I wouldn't say bomb, but you don't have great shows. Like, I've watched the grades work out new material. Like, you go up with ideas. You go up with, like, you might get some giggles. You might get some laughs. It might have some bits hit hard. Some bits are great right out of the shoot and some of them.

“You have to fucking figure it out. And in that process, you're going to get negative”

attention, because it's not working. It's not. It's unhappening. Kevin Hart, thought it was funny. Look at the story where he was like working new material and he was like doing some small show and he had the shit. Oh, no. Oh, stage it. He's like, I got to land this thing because I got to figure out people on the ear. So he grabbed his jacket around his self-shed. I'm so sorry. It's so funny. But he tells that story. And that's the bit that works.

Oh, my god. That's hilarious. That's hilarious. It's so funny. Yeah. Well, honesty is currency. You know, in that world, especially honesty, where you look stupid and people can belate. Well, this is where, like, I think, like Elon subtly has figured this out, which is like, there is attention, but then there's just authenticity. And if you can be yourself and you can hit the scene properly, you just get infinite attention. Yes. And that's like, that's like a real

“mind fuck to, I think. Right. He doesn't seem to have a hard time with, like, being criticized.”

Doesn't seem to bother him that much as long as he's just being himself. I think he's like two steps ahead. Like, there are, there are things like, you know, somebody tweeted yesterday or the day before or something like, he controls 2.7% of GDP or something. Right. It's got like 800 billion dollars. It's just, it's so great. It's crazy. It's so great. And it was like a comparison to John Rockefeller, John D. Rockefeller, who controlled something around the same time. And he's the first

comment. He's like, 10 trillion or bust. I think, obviously, people lose their mind. Right. People just fucking lose their mind. Right. On both sides. So this, what one side is, I think of the abundance and the incredible stuff we're going to get if he can get us to 10 trillion. And other people, like, you can't hold the third of the economy in your hand. And everybody goes crazy. And I'm like,

this guy's a fucking genius. Like, how, you would never have, like, I mean, how would you even

have the courage to tweet something like that? It just seems like so crazy. It really helps if you own Twitter. Right. Because if you did it in another format, like, you get excited. Not only that. Well, there was a real chance that you could actually get banned from the platform at one point in time. For many of the things that he's posted, he would have gotten banned for pre-2020 Twitter. Yeah. Or whatever year it was that he purchased it. Yeah. Negative attention,

attention period. Like, so it brings back to this idea of assimilation. Like, why is what humans focus on such a massive part of what's valuable to us? And sometimes what we focus on is not valuable. As you were talking about, like, the things that really matter in your day-to-day life, or that actually affect you versus the things that are in the public consciousness. Like, you have folks, great example. Like, you have folks, I'm really fucking,

I mean, ultimately at May. So there's this, this is thing that we all have, like,

recognizing the potential for danger. Right. Like, what's that sound? What is that? It might be nothing, but it might be something. Go look. So look, if you and I were designing a video game, we probably sit there and say, okay, we got to get from point A to point B. But to make it fun, we're going to put all these little distractions and honey pots along the way. Yeah. And what they should be doing is accumulating resources to get over the river and the accumulating, you know,

weapons to fight these other guys. But instead we're going to put this, like, little thing over here and the subtle thing over there. And you could easily get distracted. And some people will have to, they'll just fucking be line right to the end of it. They'll, you know, they'll get to the end boss. And I feel like that's kind of what we're tasked with doing every day. We're tasked with, we know what's important. Maybe deeply in our DNA. And then we have all this stuff that we're

“supposed to pay attention to. And I think increasingly the game is tell yourself that that's actually”

not the thing that matters. It's almost like working against you and figure out what this other stuff is. And focus on that and fix that. Like politics is a game that I think distracts,

like, it's actually like you're more likely to find alignment based on age versus by political orientation. Like people who are 30 and younger, it doesn't matter what they identify as, they all believe in the same shit. A lot more, really? Yeah. Like, meaning like, if you ask their views on social policy, taxation is real. If you ask their views, what you find is now a convergence between the left and the right, if you if you divided by age at our age, it's still much more

about completely uniform. No, it's not completely uniform. But my point is it's it's it was simpler in the past to organize people independent of age by political orientation. That simplicity is gone. Well, that isn't that because it's also a breakdown in trust of all government in particular. Right. So the breakdown in trust, which is also a lot of it is because of our access to information. Now we understand how corrupt politics are. Yeah. We understand inside of trading now in Congress.

We understand how different people flip flop on issues. We understand how the Democrats in 2008 used to view illegal immigration, which is essentially maga plus, means it's maga on steroids, versus like what they the way they look at it today. Like why is that? Well, it's all game. It's all the power influence and attention. Attention game. Yeah, it's very fucking strange. But it's all moving us in a general direction. And that general direction is access to innovation.

It's all, I've said this a lot of times when the people have heard it before I apologize. But if you looked at

“the human race from afar, if you were something else, you'd say, well, what does this species do?”

Well, it makes better things constantly. Even if it doesn't need them. Like, you know, if you have an iPhone, you know, I have a 16, you have a 16. I have a 17. I bought it. I mean, fucking turned it on. I haven't plugged it in. I haven't plugged it in. I even bought it on this. Gonna eventually, eventually I'll fucking plug it in and fucking swap everything over and figure out

where my fucking passwords are. But the reality is, you don't need it, but you want it and it's

going to keep getting better every year. Why? Because that's where obsessed with. This also aligns with materialism. Like, for a finite lifespan, why are people, like, including old people, so obsessed with gathering stuff? Well, because that fuels innovation. Because if there's no new things coming, there's no motivation to get the newest latest greatest thing. And ultimately, what that leads to is greater technology, which ultimately leads to artificial intelligence.

“My slight deviation from that is, I think sometimes people accumulate things because it's a”

status game. And that's because they get more attention. You have a Ferrari, you get attention. Right. But what does that do? It makes Ferrari make better Ferraris and all technology moves in the same general direction. No one that's true. No one company says, this is it. This is what we make. It's perfect. But if you people innately feel that by being a part of this kind of like consumerist capital system, they're contributing to progress. I don't think they innately feel it,

but I think that's ultimately the result. That's ultimately the result. And it seems to be universal.

And it seems to be constantly moving this one general direction, which is better and better technology. But like the stage fright example, you don't think it's encoded in our DNA, this idea of like, wow, when I am a part of this in some way, shape or form just things seem to get better. And I want to be a part of that. Do you think that that's possible that that's encoded in us? I think it motivates us to the ultimate goal. And that ultimate goal, I think, is that human

makes constantly make better stuff. Whatever it is, better buildings, better planes, better cars, better phones, better TVs, better computers, better everything artificial life.

That might be the whole reason why we're here. And the way I've always described it is that

we are, we are a biological caterpillar that's making a digital cocoon. And we don't even know why we're going to become a butterfly. But we're doing it. We're doing it and we're moving towards it. And it might be what happens to all life all throughout the universe. And it might be why these so-called aliens or whatever the fuck they are. It might be us in the future, it might be other versions of human beings that have gone past whatever this period of development that we're

currently involved in right now. This is just might be what happens. This is what life always does. It might realize that biological life, which is very territorial and primal and sexual and greedy. And it has all these problems with human reward systems ultimately develops into this other

“thing. Right. And then that's what we're doing. And then we're in the process of that right now.”

And I think that when if and when not if, but when when we colonize Mars, I think that that

how people think that Mars was already colonized at one point. The life already existed.

“The life already existed on Mars, like many millions of years ago, and that there's evidence”

of structures on Mars that's really weird stuff. Have you ever seen the square that they found on Mars as well? Okay, show them to them, Jamie. One of the things that they're finding with scans of Mars, this like geometric patterns and structures and right angles that shouldn't exist, like weird stuff. That couldn't be naturally. Now, no way, weirder way weirder than like the face on Sidonium. The Sidonium thing is interesting. Yeah. And then this one. Look at

that. What the fuck is that? It looks like a home of some kind of something. Some enormous structure.

And the size of that, they don't know exactly, but it may be as large as several kilometers,

or as small as several hundred meters. But they're not exactly sure. But what they are sure is that it has very weird right angles and right angles that seem to be uniform in size. That's crazy. Like, see how it's highlighted in the enhanced photograph and the upper line. Like, what is that? But sorry, did they, and were they able to send like the rover over there? No, it's too far away. I don't think it's in the exact place where the rover's at, but they're

able to get image of these things. And there's several of these things. That's insane. Yeah, there's a lot of weird stuff. There's a lot of weird stuff there. So there's also ancient civilizations

“that have these myths of us existing somewhere else and coming here. Right. But you have to think”

if human beings develop somewhere else and they they reach some high level of sophistication

and then they experience some cataclysmic disaster that completely destroyed their environment, which is what Mars is. Right. So let's assume that Mars was at one point in time it was habitable and that life existed on. And we know it was at one point in time. We know there was water on Mars. We know, and there's some sort of evidence of at least some sort of a very primitive biological life on Mars. If they got to a point where they said, hey, this fucking place

is falling apart. But this Earth spot looks pretty good and they go there. But then cataclysmes happen on Earth and no one remembers because all your information's on hard drives and then you have to rebuild society. And so you're re-remembering. And so you have all these myths of how everything started, you know, whether it's Adam and Eve or the Great Flood or whatever these things are that we pass down through oral tradition for hundreds of years and then eventually write it down

and then people try to decipher what it means and they sit in church and try to go over what it mean? Like what does this mean? Like what is the real origin of all these stories? We don't know. I mean, that's crazy. It's crazy. But if life, it sounds nuts. Why would life,

“quote, no, possibly just on Mars? How the fuck does life exist on Earth? How about that?”

How about why, why would we assume that it wouldn't have existed at one point in time? And Terrence Howard, who is a very interesting guy. Very interesting. And got some, your epist... I mean, with Eric one sign? Go crazy. Yeah, crazy. Yeah, that one was crazy. And him alone. But he's got some fucking weird ideas that he just made you go. He's a very brilliant guy. And kind of a strange heterodox thinker, right? And one of his ideas is that planets get to a certain

distance from a son and they people. And that it gets to a certain climate, a certain distance. And his idea is that I don't know if you realize that there's a giant ejection of some coronal mass ejection that just happened recently on the Sun. And they're very concerned about it. They don't know what's going to happen. And it happens all the time. The Sun releases these giant chunks of material. And he thinks that these materials get far enough away from the planet. And then

they coalesce into planets or far enough away from the Sun. They coalesce into planets. And as time goes on, they get a further and further distance from the Sun. And then obviously they get hit with asteroids and there's pants permia and water gets into them from comets. And then they develop oceans and they develop biological life. And when they have a certain amount of distance from the Sun, they people. And he thinks that as they get further and further and further away, they get less

and less habitable. And then they get to a point where they have their technology to a point where they realize like we can't sustain life on this planet anymore. We got to go over that other one. And so they go to the one that's closer to the Sun because they're too far now. Just a nutty idea. Just a nutty idea. But if you think about how recent our Sun is in terms of the

is correct and our universe existed, it was rather a universe erupted from nothing or from a very

small thing, 13.7 billion years ago. Well, this fucking planet's only four point something billion

“years old. And life is only, you know, a little bit less than that. So you have like a billion”

years or so with there's nothing. And then you start getting single-celled organisms, multi-celled organisms and eventually a pea bowls. And when it gets to a certain point when these people have advanced their curiosity and their innovation to the point where they can harness space travel and they use zero point energy and they have a bunch of different things that we haven't invented yet and then their environment degrades. Now they get to the point where they realize like, hey,

we're getting pummeled by asteroids. We can't sustain life here anymore. We've got to move like Elon wants to go to Mars, which might be the wrong answer. Well, I want to go that way. They're right. They might want to actually closer to the Sun. Exactly. I mean, the thing is he's got everything that he needs now to get there. Like, I'm not going. Are you going on? I would go. Fuck that. I'll send you an email.

Hold on a second. Think about what he's going to take. Okay. Look, when let's just say he

gets there with the city. He has, he has the way to transport us there. Right. Okay. Then when you land, he's got the way to actually transport us around on the planet, right? He's got Tesla. Right. He will have already sent a fleet of his robots. Those folks will have made some inhabitable city. Probably using the boring company drilled because you're going to, you know, be under the regolith that you don't want to be on the top. Maybe you just dig a hole and you

inhabit down there. He's got all the ways to make energy. He has the AI to help you design the stuff. He has the communication way to communicate. He's got the internet, his own internet. So he can get, you know, all of the information to everybody. And then he's got money and the super app

“so that you can transact. And then I think to myself, like, what is he actually missing?”

And then what happens if he gets there first? Is he just allowed to just do whatever he wants?

Because it's just kind of like a free for all, like, well, his constitution, like, is that what happens? Well, it's like Earth, but shit here. Like, we already have all those things here. Why would you want to go to a place where you die when you go outside? I think what people will be attracted to is that if he publishes his version of what the rules are there, there's a chance that he could make them really different to what the rules are here. Like, what kind of rules would you do if

you were the king of Mars? So I think that your view is incredibly, to me, like, positive some, like, a humanity of, like, we want to make things better. So if I think about that as, like, a function, what happens? That's like, so our natural rate of direction is forward. What pushes back on that? And a lot of it, what you find is, like, government regulation rules, all that stuff, greed, greed, too much focus on attention. So I would try to experiment with, like,

what the incentives would have to be so that you had more unfettered entrepreneurs. Like, just, like, do the thing that you think is right? Right. And there's a mechanism where we give you the ability to then make things for more people because you're proving that you're actually really good at making things. And if you don't need money at that point in society, reorienting us away from this kind of,

“brittle form of exchange to something more useful, that's worth experimenting with. I think that's”

an important, well, there's also the concept of the self of the individual, which may erode with technological innovation. So if we really can read each other's minds, if we really do get to a point where we're communicating through technological-assisted telepathy, like, a lot of the whole, the weirdness of people, as I don't know what you're thinking, I don't know if I should trust you, you know, this motherfucker might be devious, you know, you know what I mean? Well,

we'll know, and there'll be no need for all that if we really are all one. If that's ultimately something that can be achieved with technology, like this hive mind. Yes, like a legitimate hive mind. And then, like, look where society's going? Gender's kind of falling apart. People are getting a little, they're reproducing less, right? People are having less testosterone, more miscarriages, less fertile. We're kind of moving into this genderless direction. And I don't know if it's by

design, but micro-plastics and all these different chemicals that are endocrine disruptors, or all ubiquitous in our society. Is that a coincidence that that's all happening at the same time as technological innovation on mass scale? Is it? I don't know, because, like, what's the

and that we exist in a sort of tribal mindset, but yet we do it on a planet of 8 billion people.

Yeah, no, the key differentiator of humans is our ability to enact violence, to, to, to, to methodically execute premeditated violence. Yes, and, and greed and attention. And one of the things that attention is sexual preference, or, or sexual, rather, attention, like the ability to procreate the ability to acquire mates, right? Like the more resources you have, the more attractive you'll be, especially for males, and males with the ones that are involved

in the violence in the first place. You know, I can't name a single war that was started by a woman.

“How do you, how do you teach your kids that attention is not everything?”

Whew, that's a good question, especially in this society. It's probably harder to do that now than ever before, because the reaction that I suspect most kids will have is like, stop, like, leave me alone, like, it's just, it's almost an impossible thing. Well, I think kids learn more from their parents behavior than anything you say to them. I think they learn from the way you behave and the way you exist and the way you exist with them.

And if you are constantly whoring yourself out for attention, it's one thing if you get a lot of attention from what you do, but if that's your primary goal, they're going to know. Do your kids know how famous and influential you are? Like, honest question. Oh, yeah, they know. But do they have a real sense of it? Or do you just kind of, as much as it can? I mean, how can you? It's got to be weird as fuck growing up with a very

famous dad. It's very odd, but it's not my primary goal. Yeah, this is my point. You're not, you're not putting it in their face. So, to your point, you're not modeling attention is all you know. No, I have interesting conversations with the cool people. I tell jokes and I call fights. Like, those are the things that I do. And they also know that I have a very strong work ethic and that I work towards things. So, they have

very strong work ethics. They're very motivated and disciplined, like shockingly disciplined.

“And I think that's modeled. I think that comes from, they also like really enjoy achieving goals.”

And they're rewarded for it with praise and with admiration, but not never with like, you're better than other people. Never, never, like, it's the idea is like, all human beings are capable of greatness. So, it's like, find the thing that you excel at. And if you throw yourself into that, it's very rewarding. I really, I really believe in this. I tell this story when I interview people. When I interview people, I'm always like,

you know, just whatever company. I'm always like, I first only want to know about them. I'm like,

fuck your resume. Like, tell me about your parents and how you grew up. I just want to know that. Stop at 18. Everything before 18. Just tell me every little detail. Right. You know, and some people tell me these incredible stories. They'll be like, you know, my mom was an alcoholic or this or that. And I'm just like, man, this is so valuable because it allows me to understand who they are. The second part of the interview, we do the business shit. But the third part I tell this story.

This is a crazy story about what you're just saying. They ran this experiment at Stanford, where they take like a big bowl, fill it with water, and they drop in a mouse, and they measure how long it takes for the mouse to drown. They do it like a hundred times. The average is about four minutes, four, four and a half minutes. Then they run the experiment again, 100 mice, and at minute three or three and a half, they take it out, they dry it off,

they play it music, and they whisper, like sweeten up things into the mouse's ear, they drop the mouse back in the water, and that mouse treads water for 60 hours the next hundred mice on average. And the upper bound was 80. And I thought to myself, like, that is all just potential right there. Like that's all like there's all this latent potential. So if an animal has it, I'm going to assume

that humans have it too. But you never get a chance to unlock it. Like the average person is just

kind of like living a life where there may be scratching five or ten percent of their potential. And the question is, how do you get to that other 90 percent? Like how does the second batch of mice,

“how do the second batch of mice tread water for 60 hours? Well, doesn't it make any sense?”

Well, the same mice, right? I think the mice get rescued. They get rescued right on. They try it again. That those same mice cross longer. Right. So it's the same mice. So it's an experience. So they have experience now. They understand that they can tread water. Where they didn't die. So they understand that they can survive. Where they didn't know that they could survive the first time they were thrown into the

to people when they fight. Like the first time people ever have a competition, they fucking panic.

And they get really scared. And they get really like filled with anxiety. But after a while, you get relaxed. And that's when you get really dangerous. Because then you get calm and you could keep your shit together while you're in the middle of all this chaos because you have the experience of it. Without the experience of it, very few people do well the first time unless you're exceptionally talented and you have other competition experience, like you've competed in other things,

like maybe you've played football or some other things. And you know what it's like to actually

“perform in a pressure. What is the version of giving more humans a chance to get to that?”

Well, I think sports are really good for that because performing under people paying attention to you and performing where people are trying to stop you from doing something and you're trying to do something and there's all these unknowns and recognizing that hard work allows you to do whatever you're trying to do better than you previously had. One of the things my martial arts researchers said to me when I was young is that martial arts are vehicle for developing your human potential and that

through this very difficult thing that you're trying to do. You're learning that oh, if I just think smart and think hard and train wise and train hard and discipline myself to endure suffering so that I can develop more endurance and more speed and more power and more technique because I accumulate all this information and I really think about what it is and apply it with drills and with training I can get better at this thing and every time I get better at this thing I get rewarded

psychically like mentally you feel better like I know that I'm better now and then there's the belt system or you start off you're a white belt and and talk one dough you get a blue belt and then after you get a blue belt you get a green belt and then if you get a green belt first and then I forget how it goes and then it's red belt and black belt and like when you're black by like holy shit so it's this thing where you've developed to a point where you've gotten to

this next stage so all along the way you've been rewarded for your hard work and then you realize like

“oh I could do this with everything in life is there a reward different than attention it is”

it is because it's internal right you're you're all you're realizing that you could apply this to you know where it is to carpentry to music you just it's just a matter of focus and attention

and some people unfortunately never find a vehicle they never find a thing that they can throw

themselves into they realize like and this is not unique it's not like I'm an unusual person or anybody is I mean there's people that have unusual physical gifts and some people have unusual mental gifts but the reality is no matter where you start everyone can get better and when you do something whether it's learning to play guitar as you get better at it you realize like oh this is what it's all about yeah like it's really all about applying yourself to something and

then feeling this immense satisfaction of your hard work paying off and that motivates you to work

“harder to other things and if you don't find that early on it's very difficult to like find like”

real satisfaction yeah in life yeah I've always had something outside of my daily life that is the thing that I actually care about and it actually energizes me from my day-to-day life I don't know if that's like a lot of people but what do you do what's your life well initially it was poker and I and even now I obsess about the game because it's infinitely more complex than chess like chess you can get to a place where you can

roughly be good poker it's just constantly there's just too many variables there's human emotion there's human psychology the number of people all of this stuff just makes the complexity of the game something that I find magical and so I sit there and I try to understand like why am I doing the things that I'm doing and so much of it comes back to being a mirror about what's happening in my daily life it's a fucking craziest thing like I'm super insecure I'll go into poker and

I will just lose for weeks at a time but it's because I'm insecure in my daily life and what's happening is that I'm trying to find these quick wins and quick solutions because I'm in a state of insecurity I'm anxious I have this anxiety and so it's become a great mirror for me so that used to be a thing it still is a thing and but I've become reasonably skilled at it where the edges are smaller and I put myself in positions where I'm only playing against a certain group

of people and I'm the losing player frankly in that game if it went on playing against like the top pros it just doesn't it helps me and I can get tuned up for it but then I started to you

know I would take different things I tried to learn how to ski basically impossible when you're

I was a good snowboarder so I was snowboarding my whole life and then my kids ski and so I'm like

“okay well I want to do this as a family so it's like 42 or something when I tried I'm 49 now almost 50”

as brutal I mean it's like I look like a fucking idiot like it's like this gangly giraffe like trying to get down the mountain and then now I start a golf and man I gotta tell you I used to play a little bit then I stopped but there's something to me about being outside where just like being in nature I find like really motivating it's a vitamin and then just the mind body connection of that game it just really fucks with you because it's it's just nothing you can master and

overpower and it teaches you to just like be in it yeah and that's a very hard skill like if you look at the best like I there's like a handful of people that I really look up to and I obsess like manga buff it but the Berkshire meeting was this past weekend and if you look at the clips there's

this incredible thing where they transition right manga passed away buffets like now executive chairman

but this guy Greg Able and this guy Ajit Jane and Ajit Jane does this thing where he's like I teach the people that come to just say no your whole job is to just say no you're gonna get bombarded with all kinds of business pitches say no no no and eventually somebody will come and fucking try to whack you in the head with a two by four of money then you come to me and we'll do the deal and it made such an impression because like again when I'm insecure my reward function

is attention so I'm like a fucking little busy body I'm running around doing all this little bullshit you know and then man when I'm in a fucking flow state and like I'm tonning it like I'm striping the ball you know unlike a few things that really matter in size and I'm like man this is this is right it's all come to me because I'm like I'm like within myself and these other things are a better reflection of when I'm within myself and these other things are a mirror of

one I'm totally out of kilter that's just me so in my life these things tend to lead I think you're saying that's just you but I think that's generally most people I think you find these things that these vehicles for developing human potential whether it's

“martial arts or golf or playing guitar or playing chess or poker and then you have to have I think”

one at least for me one seminal relationship in your life you have to have one person that is just

undying belief in you and I never really had that until I met my wife and that was a very

and I didn't I pushed against it so fucking hard because I was like it just can't be true like why does this person give a shit to you know I mean like why do they care about me more than I just also the fear because so many people get in those bad relationships and I'm just like I I think there's a part of you like me where you're just like I'm not a very lovable person like I'm just like this is that's not who I am and this woman is just there so that's been like the

thing like for me it's like and because she's brutal she'll be like oh yeah that was fucking horrible you know like yesterday I like we had this I did this thing at milk and it was a dinner at my friend's house and then we're both going to different airports I'm flying here to see you and she's flying home and she calls me and I'm like I want to how did I do I shit but no there's the parts that I did well and then she critiques the other parts that she didn't like and then I

say which is like it's I and it's so again I'm insecure so I'm like I want the self-serving well how it because there was three of us on this panel and she's like and I was like you know I was the best right she's like no Gavin was better just like it's so but it's so refreshing because it keeps again it's like a keeps in check like it gives me a mirror you know like when I was coming to see you yesterday when we were flying down to LA for this thing

there's parts of me where when I'm insecure I kind of like externalize and I can be like really hyperbolic unnecessarily hyperbolic and it's counterproductive and she said to me listen like just imagine your friends these are hardworking people they're trying their best as well they don't necessarily know some some things have massively worked out for them but they would want to do the right thing there's people you've worked with before that want to do the right thing and she's like

just pick of them and don't judge you can observe and it's crazy but it's like I need those little things there's like tweaks it's like having the coach kind of like and that and that's very that's

“very helpful to me yeah it's very important it's hard to do that yourself I can't do it and it's also”

like I'm retard maxing like my life is like I like that flow and if I didn't have somebody who

is someone who's like an antagonistic relationship and we know a lot of people that have those kind of very sabotagey sort of marriages and relationships and that's crazy it's brutal it's brutal and

I don't think they've ever had a really good one otherwise it would never tolerate that

“I didn't know what good look like so you kind of just I think a lot of people go with the flow like”

I mean I was a nerdy kid from kind of a shitty fucked up kind of like family structure and then I got injected into this rich high school but then I got to go back to an alcoholic father among fucking welfare like it's like you know my self confidence is negative fucking two units didn't have a girlfriend you know like all the shit in high school like nothing happened for me and so my modeling of like how to be in a relationship what to do it was fucking zero

it was zero and so all those mistakes were mostly because I didn't understand what good look like and then I stumbled into this relationship after my divorce and my ex-wife is an incredible woman just like not you know what you needed or what you were just we were in in a few very specific ways we just weren't on the same page and then I find this other one and it's and I think like I don't I was so skeptical I'm like I kind of viewed like a relationship

as like this adjunct to your life there's you you're at the center you're doing your shit

“and one of the appendages to your thing is your that's what I thought and then now it's the”

opposite where I feel like my wife set the center and I'm like I would always kind of like

like almost like laugh at people in my mind I'm like it's not possible that somebody feels this way about somebody else but it's in it's a it's a huge enabler it's a it's a very much a gift so that can also be a thing that people look for you know what I mean which I think what you're saying is that there's a bunch of different things that have to sort of exist together and that it's not just completely focus on your work but that focusing on these other things

enhances the work and then the work enhances all these other things as well and they all exist together and my best work is when I'm not thinking about the attention or the money those are the two most corrupting influences in my life if I want to look back and when I have lost when I've lost the most amount of money or when I've reputationally hurt myself the most it's all been because of attention and money those are the only two things the root cause consistently has been that that

makes sense because you're thinking about a result rather than process exactly yeah exactly and then thinking about that result like oh I'm gonna get a lot of attention from this oh I'm

“gonna get a lot of money from this that actually robs you of the focus that you need to”

concentrate on the process exactly and the the thing about the process is that so much of that when you're in a flow state you're proud of irrespective of the size of it because the meetings are the same do you know what I mean like you're in the same fucking 35 minute meeting or 45 minute meeting debating a product or debating a thing but the minute that I start to feel like embarrassed about company a versus company b or decision a versus decision b now my mind is like okay

hold on a second here I'm about to run myself off the cliff you know or you know we I had this

dinner last week and this is what's amazing like we're talking about poker well this I so I'm

having dinner with my wife and and a friend and she's like how are you doing just like a very generic nice question right and I go into this long fucking diatribe of like well you know the investing thing this and then I started this other thing that and my wife's looking me like what the fuck are you rambling all about and then you got it but it got worse Joe you got worse it got even fucking worse then I'm like you know and but then I had this poker game I started rambling

it's normally on Thursdays but then I moved it up to Wednesdays but then I moved it up to the city because my friends having it and then I named dropped who the guy was and my wife just looks at me like what the fuck is going on it's you so the dinner ends it was and then she's like what the fuck is going on with you she's like that was insane and I had no idea that I was doing it and I'm like okay we need to put Humpty Dumpty back together again because I'm about to go on

rogue and I can't go off fucking like crazy wild man but it's a it's an enormous gift that's been my biggest unlock in these last like eight or nine years I get I feel like I'm kind of like adding skills to my toolkit I feel like a golfer like that's like I can shape shots a little bit now I know how to use different clubs and it's all like mindset and it's like it's very much what it's like this process oriented approach and you just can't control the outcome and that's like it's a magical

that are on social media like the kind of attention that they're focusing on like this is why

“it looks virtually signaling so unsuccessful right it's so bad for it because it's fake you're really”

concentrating on the process are you really concentrating on the result the result is getting people to love you exactly getting people to agree with you getting and then worrying about the criticism oh my god they hate me oh my god they're bad at my my statement oh my god they're this and then you're like obsessing out of all day people that aren't even anywhere near you it's like it's one of the absolute worst things for mental health is this addiction that people have to posting

things and then reading the responses to those posts and getting wrapped up in these very weird

two-dimensional interactions with human beings you never read your comments I mean you're very

famous you're like it doesn't fucking matter to me well you're gonna get to a certain point in time where if you have a X amount of people that follow you you're gonna have a percentage that are mad at you and those are the ones you're gonna think about right and if you don't self audit maybe that's good maybe it's good to say like you fucking piece of shit like oh sorry you know like what your wife saying to you like what the fuck was that like oh shit like I am very self critical very like horribly

so like to the poor I torture myself you know so I'm like I don't need that from other people and also don't people don't love me and they want me to fail like there's a lot of people that their lives are very unsuccessful and I've been way too fortunate right so it's like there's

“a reason to be upset at me if your life is shit because I've I've gotten I've three of the best”

jobs on earth it doesn't make any sense right so this is a read and also why the fuck is this podcast so successful I didn't make any sense right so it's like I get it I understand why people but I'm not gonna help them I'm not gonna help them bring me down I'm not gonna indulge it and ruin my own mind by wallowing in their bullshit because the only reason why you would do

that in the first place is if you're not together no one is healthy and happy and intelligent

is going to post mean things about you so you are reading things from people that are mentally ill unhappy and probably not maybe they're intelligent in terms of their ability to solve certain issues and problems maybe they're good at certain skills but like they're overall grasp of humanity and like being a good person is not good if you're shitting on people especially if you're like ad hominim attacks and just insults and so it's not a good thing to ingest it's not it's like if

you go down the supermarket you see twinkies oh they're right there don't fucking eat them okay that's not good for you and so it's like I don't think that is a certain point in time especially

“if you become publicly known in famous you should ever read your comments I don't think it's good”

for you but you better be self-ordered and or you'll start sniffing your own thoughts and think they smell great like don't do that either yeah but you I know a lot of people that have gone crazy reading their own comments I've met comedians they're like they think about it all day long it will fuck with them it will torture their neuroses are what creates great comedy to begin with so if you feed that neuroses in the wrong way the wrong way right and then also the self doubt creeps

in because all these people tell you suck and they like oh my god I suck and then you go on stage with this like people like I suck they hate me you can't do that like if you have a certain

amount of energy in the day this is what I always tell comedians I said like think of your attention

in your focus as a unit you have a hundred units if you spend 30 of those fucking units on assholes online you're robbing 30 units from all the things you love 30 units from your family 30 units from your friends 30 units from your job 30 units from golf or poker or whatever it is that you love to do you're stealing your own time and your own focus for losers like what would you do that and those lizards are good people they're just the most people are good people they just

they're in a bad path I would have been a person yeah yeah so they're gonna look if you gave me a fucking Twitter account when I was 16 oh my god it would have been horrendous yeah I would have been going crazy oh my god I would have been a terrible person yeah it's normal especially if your life sucks and you're not doing well and you're attacking famous people you're attacking this person is doing better than you or whatever it is like it's do you have you seen the clips of the retard maxing actually you don't know what this is

no you don't know what this is no what's retard maxing oh this guy is fantastic he sits it he sits on his back for Jamie can you can you she sits he sits on his back porch smoking a cigar basically telling you everything's kind of bullshit stop thinking about shit you know if you don't like your friends leave him if you don't like your girlfriend leave him stop overthinking simplify your life you know it's it's in it's so simple but I think it's in credit who is this guy a lie shallong I think is his name

looks maxing we talked about that recently on a podcast but that's recently entered into my mind

“into my zeitgeist looks maxing that's the covid covid but I've only found that about that within”

the last few months of life because I genuinely stay off social media as much as possible and if I do read things what I like to do I like to focus on fascinating things like a lot of my time I spend looking at youtube stuff because youtube stuff my algorithm is all like new black holes they've discovered you know new discoveries in terms of like what is the fabric of reality like I'm that's interesting to me and if I just concentrate on people being mean or shitty to each other or the latest

fucking political drama it's like what I don't have much time I'm busy I like things yeah

and I want are you on like Instagram and TikTok I'm on Instagram I do not have a TikTok this is

looks maxing I know this is retarded maxing so let me hear what he says who's this guy what's his name a lie shallong shout out to a lie shall be used as a poisoning of nostalgia but to simply remind you of what you found it for and as we grow we often give that up for security we give that up so that we're accepted we give that up to flex and appear like we have now figured things out that people will

“accept this the only way that you will truly be successful is if you are righteous and you live according”

to your nature and you play man and you don't let people take a play away from you to to be at the circus and be outing all and worried about all the bullshit return to a state of play

that's fair good advice return to it the best thing that you could do is return to a state of play

that's true there's a lot of that you know there's a lot of that absolutely oh I think that that is like a it's a it's wise man for a young fellow yeah oh okay I said you just a guy there you go look he's getting his fucking blue belt there or he's getting his purple belt what is going on there so is he getting his blue belt yeah so they're taking his blue belt off and putting his purple belt on yeah see that's he's learning he's a martial artist that's why you think martial arts people

are just more like spiritually connected to the truth I don't know if it's spiritually connected to the truth it's forced down your fucking throat because you can't believe you're better than you are if you're getting mauled every day you know and there's only one way this guy's on the path to becoming a jiu-jitsu black boy looks are pretty big guy too that'll help um but there's only one way to get a black belt and jiu-jitsu you got to train jiu-jitsu all the time and get better at

jiu-jitsu you can't pretend your better you know there's a lot of people that write poems they suck and they think they're so deep yeah but there's poems being like there's just a very simple objective measurement that's 100% you either win or you lose either tap or you get tapped out you know you tap somebody or you get you get a black belt in some gym that's easier than a different gym or something like that sort of kind of but not really I mean everybody's trying hard I mean

there's definitely better gyms where they're more technical and their program is much more systematic and they're better at breaking down skills like how to develop skills you know there's definitely better gyms there's better schools there's better places to learn but everywhere you learn you're gonna have a bunch of people that are trying hard like and you have a bunch of people that are trying to learn this and also today because of the internet

you could go on YouTube and there's thousands of tutorials breaking down new moves jiu-jitsu is like endless one of my kids as ADHD and one of the things that was recommended to us was jiu-jitsu yeah what is ADHD man it's not even fucking real because I definitely have it

“and I think it's I think it's a superpower I think we all have it I think I look I do not focus”

well on things that I think are boring but if you give me something that I love I can't I'll I'll play pool for fucking 12 hours what was crazy but like the reason I got back into golf is my seven year old gets on the course and sometimes you can talk to him and he's not making you know he's just like in his own world exactly and then you start talking about chess or jiu-jitsu or whatever and then we get him on the golf course and this kid is just dialed in yeah superpower

and I'm like holy shit and they say that that's a disease that's crazy crazy because if you're find a thing that that kid loves he's gonna excel at a above and beyond most humans we uh he does these chess classes and like look he's seven so I'm like all right mother fucker bring it fucking fucking destroyer I'm gonna fuck it all you and uh we're playing last weekend and it goes oh dad you know you can't to cancel out of check I'm like shut the fuck up I know how this

game works and then I go on to beat him and I went to my wife and I'm like he's six weeks away from

to brush up on my openings and I got I got oh my god I don't have time for this shit but I can't

let this seven year old beat me you know what I mean you're good at and I'm like and I was like how do I how do I stall this until maybe 10 or 11 then it's like okay fine you finally beat me

“congratulations you have to think of a misery extension of you and be happy when he does oh my god yeah”

that's just how it is look if you're a man and you have a son I have all daughters but if I had a son I would be legitimately terrified that he'd be able to tap me because if I had a son one of the first things that I would do is get them I got my kids involved in martial arts I didn't really engage but I didn't force them to keep doing it they did it for a certain amount of time and then they went on to do a bunch of other things that they enjoyed better which is fine but I think it's good

to learn some skills learn how to defend yourself so you're not completely lost just it's I think

it's good for you it's good to learn it's good to develop confidence but for boys I think it's critical

you know especially boys with my kind of DNA I'm like I think it's good to get that shit out of your system but if I had a son they'd be a certain point of time I'm like it's a matter of time for this motherfucker can kill me I mean I'm 58 years old I've had a 20 year old kid like he probably killed me probably fucking kill me yeah it's like what am I gonna do there's nothing you could do you just have to accept it and then hope your relationship with him is strong enough

that he's so respects you even though he can kill you because it can't be entirely bait look there's a lot of martial arts instructors that are old and they're revered and respected and nobody wants to try to hurt them right because you realize if you learn enough you get to a certain point in time when you realize I'm a bunch better dad to my sons than I am my daughters and I mean this in the following way my daughters have the role of the place whatever they want I'm in love with them

I don't love them I'm in love with them whatever they need whatever they can just just enamored by they're just like they can control me they just kind of send me in one direction or another I'm just like there by the way they know that I'm enslaved by them you know and I just want their attention any small little shred of like boy you son to keep in check whereas like my sons I keep the and I'm doing everything that I was supposed

I think I'm supposed to be doing now the good news is my you know daughters are just different like their girls they're just so they don't need the same kind of like tough love ish right you know but then my boys reveal their characteristics in ways that really surprised me and I'm just like man this is so fucking awesome parenting has been the best

like when I again like slowing down and actually being in it and I'm like fuck this is amazing

it is pretty amazing and watching your kids get really good at things is really fascinating I told you this story before but like you know my son my oldest son is my 17 year old it's just a great kid he goes and he's like I'm applying for college and I'm like great let me take you to the Naval Academy west point let me show you these service academies and he sees those and he's like these are incredible but then he's like I think I want to go to like you know

Georgetown or Vanderbilt or whatever and I'm like hey man that's like a just a bigger version of

“your high school and whatever if that's what you want to do you do you and not you know”

but you know my the I'll help you like kind of get to the starting line here but you're on your own and he had to get a job because I'm like if you're gonna get into these schools you got to get a job and so he tries to last summer I just started fucking screaming at him and I'm like you fucking lousy you haven't done anything if this is like another kids at our at our sons birthday party ice cream at him he starts crying and like you need to do more then my wife screams at him

he starts crying and then my ex wife screams at him he starts crying again and he just goes I'm out of here he walks out mean while I start panicking and I'm like I got a tiger dad this situation so I start texting a few friends trying to figure out hey can I you know do you guys want to hire this kid he's like really you know he's pretty smart kid did all this stuff in robotics yada yada one of them says I'd be willing to interview him I call him and he's like dad I got a job

I said what do you mean you got a job? I said I went around downtown went to all these places and I was in a McDonald's and the woman was having a little bit of difficulty speaking English I just booked her in Spanish and I got the application I sat down at the desk and the guy having lunch beside me said hey I heard you needed a job and I really like the way you talk to this woman I'm the general manager of the car wash down the street come and work for me

and I said well what are you going to do he goes I'm going to go work there and I said okay well

“I got this other interview for you as well so you should see maybe you can do both”

anyways the end of the story is he did he did these two jobs you were going to robotics room but then he worked at a car wash and when I tell you this story I'm so proud of this kid because of the car wash because that car wash thing he was he would come home and he's like

find in the trunk when I have to vacuum these cars and clean out the cars and I'm like bro that is a

gift you have given a fucking gift that is the thing that if you take with you you'll be golden the rest of your life because all this other shit is all kind of manufactured I help because I'm anxious I'm insecure but that shit you did on your own and that thing is what people will fucking respect when push comes to show it's also jobs it's suck are really good for you so good I used to work at brooker king when I was 14 man let me tell you 14 you had a job

when my dad had to stay behind like we were my dad was a diplomat in the embassy of Sri Lanka

“in Canada this fucking war in Sri Lanka's crazy he writes this essay his life is threatened”

so he files for refugees that's he gets it he gets kicked out of the embassy so he doesn't have a job my mom becomes a housekeeper and we're kind of toiling in this poverty cycle so 14 you have to I had to get a job and I would take the money and you know we buy I buy the bus passes I would buy some of the groceries we just trying to make it all work right and I got a job at the burger king this is another example where I was like I'm going to go get a job hey

can you drive me to the interview and my dad's like no get on your fucking bicycle and go and I thought bro we need this but you need the money more than I do why are you making me bicycle but a bicycle and I got the job and I worked there and I used to work the night shift 14 year old kid man from fucking eight till two in the morning and I would have to clean this

like eight p.m. to two in the year to go to school in the morning no then this was always like

Friday Saturday Sunday Thursday Friday sorry Thursday Friday Saturday and then yeah some days I would have to go to school but and why did I work until two because when the restaurant closes you get whatever the food is leftover right so like you get a couple chicken sandwiches you get like the you know the version of the McNuggets that Burger King had a couple woppers and you take them home but the amount of water that you can't imagine man the downtown Burger King near bars

you know after closing time the shit you see and the shit you deal with and all

“like I think of was like I just want to get the fuck out of here but that was so valuable from me”

and then I worry that my you know kids don't get exposed to it but when my son got it maybe I'm overimposing too much about it but it's like I'm like man that car wash thing is really going to be the thing that separates you in life yeah doing something that sucks it also speaks about the grinding through that you know you realize like this is sometimes people they don't pick a path and they just have a job and they don't like it and they stay with

this thing they don't like forever and that's not what you want so much want but the development like the learning how to do something that sucks and grinding through it and still doing it well yeah you know make a make a wiper be there I know how to fucking make a wiper yeah do you know what I mean yeah make the fries change the oil oh yeah and then when you apply

“that those lessons to something you actually love and you work hard at something you love”

magical oh it's incredible that's that's a real gift it's a real good yeah I mean you know some people they don't appreciate the process you know and it's hard to because like when you're young and you're going through look these difficult jobs and these things that suck and you don't know how it's gonna turn out you know and a lot of times people aren't really educated in what a process actually is and about how it does develop character it does develop discipline and these things are

actual skills that you can apply to other other things in life you just think God I'm a fucking loser

like I have a I have a visual for this I always ask myself am I in the engine room right now

this is my way of saying like an engine room it's a little hot it's a little uncomfortable but it's where all the shit is happening it's where the shit is being made and so I'm like it's a little you know discomforting but I gotta be in there and there are days where there'll be weeks where that's all I do I'm just in it you know I don't I'm not good at responding to email sometimes or whatever because there's just be weeks where I'm in it and it's an incredible visual

for me because I'm like yeah this is like we're like I'm grounded and I like feel myself and then when I when I look at my like my health that's when I just feel like really good about myself like not insecure and my vitals are different like it's crazy like my fucking HRV like my HRV craters when I'm like just like you know insecure of course

disposition and your mood well your mind is the idea that your mind is separate from the body is crazy it's crazy it's not and but is your HRV lower when you're just out of sorts yes probably right I'm sure yeah I don't really monitor it that much yeah and I'm trying not to ever get out of sorts too and one of the ways that I keep from getting out of sorts is daily discipline like it's if I if I have days where I'm sure it gets out of sorts if I have a

few days in a row where I don't work out but I work out almost every day and if I'm not working

on I'm still cold plunging and going to the sauna and stretching I'm always doing something

and if I don't do something I feel like I'm fucking up and then then I can so does it matter what it is meaning as long as it's a routine yeah well I I do it on myself I don't have a trainer but I write things down I write down when I want to accomplish the right time I want to do and then I just do it I like a robot force myself to do it and then I always feel better after it's over and it's always the hardest part of my day and so it makes everything out so much easier

because it's I fucking work out hard and so everything else is pretty easy you know because the strain like just being that fucking cold water or just going through to bottles on an air-dine bike this shit's hard it's really hard like I could die right now hard and so everything

else is like how hard it's going to be oh it's uncomfortable you know like I think it's important

to go through that I really think it is you know I really think it is and that's it the difference between you know sanity and like having a very slippery grip on your your own personal sovereignty

“I think a lot of it is like you have to choose it has to be like elective voluntary adversity”

like you have to choose to do yeah that's a really great way of saying it voluntary adversity if it's forced upon you you can kind of kind of compartmental and then you get angry like five better and resenting me do stupid shit but if you force yourself to do it you know this why these special forces guys are such fucking animals course they're choosing right exactly and they develop that you know this mentality when you're around other people that are also savages

you know you just you realize like there's other people out there in the world that are not making excuses and they are getting after it every day and they are pushing every day and the more you can surround yourself with people like that the more people the people that complain about nonsense and the find excuses and focus on other people and bitch about things and why is she doing this why is this happening for him it's losing mentality and if you're around more winners you

absorb that you imitate your atmosphere it's very important it's very hard for people especially

“young people to find positive influences and to find positive groups I think it's one of the”

reasons why a lot of young people gravitate towards podcasts because they get to hear interesting conversations with really accomplished people that are fascinating they're unlike anybody that they're around on a daily basis you know and that that's also one of the reasons why it's important to find some that's one martial arts is so good for young people because you're around other people that are doing this really difficult thing and other sports too whether it's football or wrestling

whatever I actually found like you know the last few years I go out of my way to not isolate myself that's one thing like being around other people engaging in things yes has been really healthy for me oh for sure oh my god and I just found like stick to my doing it's like everything is in my little house by myself with everybody everything comes to me it's so odd it's really very unhealthy and it starts to fuck you up in the bind and then your interaction with humans is only on the internet it's terrible

you know or if people that are sick of fantically either being paid or need something from

“hmm yeah and then I think you're in a really bad place absolutely or as like if you're in the”

grind with other people they're beating you at things it's great yeah if you're in a situation where there's a bunch of sick of fantastically connected people to you and they're just all kissing your ass and I mean we all know people that are like the heads of companies and they're just like fucking tyrants I think the the the the the the the trap of being successful because it's not everything it's wrapped up to be as exactly that you become so isolated that you become this like very

caricatures version of yourself because you forget what it's like to just the basic example like weight in line be kind to other people be polite like be accommodating have some empathy right where are you put in that situation to do those things right you forget you're just a person you're just a fucking person and if you achieve some level of success that you're trying to you're you're trying to achieve this level of success so you elevate past being a person

you're missing the point like you're never going to and if you do it'll come at a price

high-fought being successful was supposed to write all the wrongs that I felt like I missed and it

the all of life is the process I think as soon as you think that there's a goal like oh I'm

“going to retire and experience my golden years I think it's all horseshit and that's one of my”

main fears about AI my main one of my main fears about this idea of universal high-income and everyone's going to have you know ultimate abundance it's like where does anybody find purpose and meaning and where do you take whatever this thing is that the mind is constructed of these these needs that the mind has that have to be satisfied in order to achieve sanity in order to achieve some sort of like place where you can get peace yeah you're going to have to do something man

you're going to have to do something and in maybe it could just be jujitsu and golf and find some

stuff that you enjoy doing and take some benefit in that but boy that's not been the case for

hundreds of years you know that's not how human beings have exist I mean but also part of me says why do we have to work to find those things why can't we why why is it all that well you got to find the thing that's not work right but what we're getting at is like why is our identity all tied up in money and and and and and just things and objects and stuff and this is a fairly new thing in human society right why can't it transform into like your basic needs are all met like nobody

ever has to worry about starving again nobody ever has to worry about not having a home to sleep in nobody ever has to worry about not having health care nobody ever has to worry about not having education so then it becomes find a purpose with your life and as a society can we adjust can we gravitate towards a new way of existing and meaning it would probably be great in one way it'd be great because we wouldn't have to be constantly thinking why does he have that not enough that and this

that instead it would probably be like what can I do to get better at the thing that I love right what you know and or let me be a part of a project to do something that seems implausible but I feel like I'm in the engine room every day this is great I'm toiling with these tests yes probably not going to work some crazy convoluted thing that has a point zero zero one chance of success that can captivate a lot of people yes you know the process the process yeah the process

the process is everything and there's no I still like think back there is no attention in the process right there's only attention in the outcome right right absolutely which is another crew and

“a secret that that's actually where you should be focused well you might get attention but that's”

on what you want what you want is the process to work out you want you want to get better at whatever it is you're doing and get that thing to a better place than it is right now currently right that's what you think of you're not thinking of I am going to get all this attention I'm going to be on the cover of America's there yeah can't you can't be that that's not good for anybody but everybody thinks that's what they're going to get oh I'm going to get everybody

thinks that's what they want yeah right and the problem with that is that it's not what you want no and then now we're going to completely upend potentially all of that yeah well maybe it'll come inside it'll coincide with the hive mind technology this hive mind thing actually that you say I find very compelling because this idea of like how do you govern an AI each of us individually

“are not capable but I think you me like 10,000, 100,000 people working together the question is”

are we smarter and I think there's a reasonable chance that could be true and then the other version of the hive mind is here are all these like crazy ideas that would just make the world

incredible and group of 1,000 people go off and they kind of jointly work on that together that I

find super fascinating like that could be it like it could be like you know a thousand physicists are like we're going to create this new interstellar form of transportation and there's just go off and they're just like they don't have to worry about existing because all of that's paid for well it also could solve all of our problems that we have with like haves and have knots if we're all one how could we tolerate have knots how could we tolerate people living on dirt floors and

third world countries no access to clean water we wouldn't tolerate it because they would be us and we would understand that yeah I mean it could be like a complete game changer in terms of human civilization it could really move people into complete next direction I mean it could eliminate

crystals you fucking hippie but legitimately if look if everybody has a cell phone which essentially everybody does right right now in this time in age if we get to a point where everybody is connected everybody is hive mind connected you're there's we're all you're not going to just be able to drive by a homeless encampment you won't you'll feel it you'll feel it you'll feel it it won't be like hell you fucking losers but hit the gas it's gonna be like we need to solve this we need to get these

people counseling mental health crisis get them off the drugs whatever it is it's wrong with them

I mean that's an incredible idea yeah you know like when I do airplane kind of like

goes like this and your stomach goes and you just feel it could you imagine like you drive by a

“homeless encampment and that's what you feel like you feel like something's wrong and we'll all”

feel it collectively if we're all connected and we all feel things connectively we will actively work together to solve these problems and if we're dealing with if if we really get to a point of abundance like true abundance where resources are not an issue and no one's starving we could really fix all the problems that meant like none of the marines are mountable none of them are breathing underwater right none of them are flying to the sun none of them right so all of them are

things that could be if we took all the world's resources socialism doesn't work right

why is it not work because it rewards lazy people and it punishes ambitious people it's not it doesn't work with human nature but it would work if you have fucking hive mind if we all we all understand what it means to put in effort we all understood what would each other are feeling and thinking right and we all compiled resources and fixed all of our social problems like literally stop all wars stop all crimes stop all violence stop all poverty done and then what do we do we work together

to solve whatever the fuck else is wrong with your society well it's more like what is left over that we haven't figured out think about what the world was like before the internet it's almost impossible to imagine but we both grew up without it yeah yeah and so we're entering into this new world think about what world was like without the hive mind but yet we all grew up without it like

“that might be the next thing the thing that I remember the most about that era is I had a”

positive some view of everybody really meaning there weren't like the the bad actors were pretty bad but yeah generally like I looked up to most business people like the people that I now I feel like have been a little bit unmasked then to me were pristine like the billgates is of the world you know I was like man I really aspire to be billgates when I was like 14 or 14 it just seemed like like why is it Biden all the farmland is fucking weirdo I mean

it's a fucking so funny he he bought this like 45,000 acres and 4500 acres I can't get the order magnitude right in Phoenix to build his own digital city yeah it's like weird so I bought this 1700 acres beside him that's a very it's a very odd thing it's a very odd thing when people get exposed and you just go like what the fuck is that guy really all about and but he also like how

“isolated is he I he's been his been isolated for 50 years right like who are his friends and how”

how many people does he have be very hard to be him actually I mean especially now that he's divorced right so now he's got no one going but it's a beach fucking sucks yeah he's got I mean he has a long-term partner um she seems like a lovely woman um but yeah it's just gotta be super lonely it's gotta be it's not right I to me it's not worth that level of I don't even know what is it it's like material success at least measured in the outside world I don't know what it is but it's not it's a lot man

this is like I like I don't know how Elon does it like it's a lot it's super isolating yeah it's it's it's just that he's very by himself and he's gonna be even more isolated in a matter of a few months yeah that's unfortunate because you have very empathetic very kind of like sensitive people like that I think need other people well he's got people around him but he's got very few people around him that can kick reality out him you know that that is a bit of a problem but he's still seems to be

having fun every time I'm around we have a bunch of laughs like he's fun the hang of it he's got

incredible sense of you we um what Jamie and I went down uh to one of the rocket launches at

six yeah we went down there and we watched from the ground why took off which is incredible because it's like how far was it Jamie was like two miles away from us mile mile a half so I could some

dude it's been honest the fucking thing first of all it doesn't look that far it looks like it's like maybe quarter mile yeah so you feel it you feel it you feel like his kids are crying like we want to go inside like it's disturbing like the amount of energy that's coming out of these fucking rocket boosters and then I hung out with him in the command center while the rocket was flying through space and we're watching it on all these monitors and then lands in the water

and Australia and he's cracking jokes the whole time because the thing is like losing pressure because it's they're stress testing all the stuff which is really funny when really dumb people

always a fucking dumb ass is rocket keep blowing up like like they just don't understand like

“the only way you find out with the capability of this technology is as you have to like let it blow”

up and then you go okay it needs to be thicker it needs to be this and that and we need to add these things and there's sensors everywhere and so he's cracking jokes the entire time while this thing is like losing pressure and eventually wound up landing and it was fine but it did have a hole in it but it was just like he's laughing like he's having a good all time he's not freaked out you know he he's uniquely built to handle it I uh when there was a rocket launch in

Raidhamburg in California and I chartered a Pilatus and I because you can get a Pilatus like a little like propeller plane oh okay and I went around and around and I have this video of it kind of like coming up and through because like how close were you hundred miles oh wow but you but it's like right there you know because the distance is getting right and it's coming up and I'm kind of going right it was the crazy it was cool it was super cool that's really

super cool it's very cool it's very cool I mean it's just star bases bananas just when you go down there and they have their own town the whole thing straight is fucking cyber trucks everywhere I'm like how do you find your car like you if is it incorporated town it started off as yeah incorporated but it's a thing now I believe it's its own town and is there a mayor

“that's a good question I think there is I think we talked about this I don't remember though but”

the actual factory itself is nuts because like Jamie and I were both like this is way bigger than I thought it was going to be and the rockets are way bigger than you thought and like the garage doors are fucking bananas you got a city government website commission mayor crazy bobby peded bobby peded is the bear yeah that's Irish pub like it's really cool they have really good food you know when he when he opened the first giga factory which is in Nevada we

had a party and like it was like a small opening thing and so we all drove in there and I have a video of me and I just like a pickup truck driving into the thing I started the video and I think it was 43 seconds until it ended and this was like you know a decade ago and I thought to myself this is

implausible like I've never even contemplated things that could be built this big I didn't think it was

allowed I don't even know how something like this works and I was like how does how do you envision this whole thing works like simple raw materials in the front cars out the back that's it it sounds so simple well he thinks big you know things big and thank god he's around I mean if he wasn't

“around if he hadn't purchased twitter I think our entire civilization would look very different”

very different it would I mean that sounds like a very grandiose thing to say sounds hyperbolic but you're right I think it's true because I don't I think free speech is a core component of our civilization and I don't really think we had it I think it was curated and it was very tightly controlled by the actual federal government which is spooky I don't know it decided what we should be paying attention to yes just put it very simply without kind of like and that's not right right because when they're

telling you to pay attention to this and the actual issue is this and you cannot then you can't fix what's actually broken right and you start to we start to basically be like we're part of just the a useful idiot for these people yes and that's not right it's not right well that's a man

this is a lot fun it's always great to talk to you thank you very much for doing this it was very cool

we're still together all right thank you all right bye everybody