#2521 - Aravind Srinivas

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>> Yeah, how many podcasts have you done? >> I don't know, I don't know the count, but maybe tens. >> Well, when we were talking, we were talking in the lobby. I was like, this dude would be a good guest because we were talking about ancient Hindu scriptures where you were talking to me about something that sounds like a

nuclear bomb, and I was like, "Oh, the Brahmastra, I need no more." >> Yeah, yeah, so the Brahmastra as part of the Mahabharat, you've talked about Mahabharat and the Brahmannas. >> Yeah, yeah, so Mahabharat is one of the two Hindu epics, the other one is Ramayan. But Mahabharat is more interesting, it's more complicated, it's like a lot of different

stories interleave together, and the Brahmastra is the equivalent of the hydrogen bomb. And how is it described? >> It's described as a weapon of mass destruction, going to annihilate human population. Should not be used at any cost, there's like a moral contract, like you clearly have to be like, you know, violating so many things at a deeply moral level to even like wield it.

And it's not actually accessible to most warriors, it's probably like two warriors in the world in that era who were allowed to use it, and it has to be passed through special access, like a teacher has to like pass it on to you, the secret to use it.

“Almost like a new, think about it as like the equivalent of the nuclear code, right?”

And Arjuna had it, this particular character in Mahabharat called Arjuna. He was allowed to use it, and then this other person was this basically Arjuna had a teacher

named Darona, and Darona had a son named Ashwath Tamah, and Ashwath Tamah was always jealous

of Arjuna. Arjuna was not Darona's son, but he was his model disciple, and so Darona passed on the secret of the Brahmastra to him, and Darona's son also wanted it, but because it was his son, he also passed on the secret to his son, even though his son wasn't as good as Arjuna, and during the war, Arjuna and Darona fought on the opposite sides.

It's just, you know, circumstances, and it's dad died, Ashwath Tamah's dad, the teacher died in the war, and so the sun got mad and like unleashed the Brahmastra, and Lord Krishna had to come and save the planet to not get that destruction force. How old is the Mahabharat? Again, there's a lot of different opinions on this, so I don't actually know for sure.

My understanding is at least 1,500 to 2,500 years old, like 1,500 years ago is the minimum 2,500 years ago is the maximum, so it happened in some period, in that 1,000 year time frame between that, and there's still unclear if a lot of it is just like, you know, being mitalyaged, and what actually happened was just a war between kids, there were two groups of people, the Pandavas and the Kauravas, and, you know, each side thought they were

fighting for their own rights and justice, but at the end of the day, you can truly understand it is essentially fight for the kingdom. Basically there was a previous generation and two brothers, and both the brothers had a bunch of kids, and those kids were warring to get the next line, and that ended up being like

a mass of war, and a bunch of other allies fought on each sides, and so many amazing

weapons were used as part of the war, and a lot of these weapons are like, like, describing an extreme level of detail that is pretty incredible, like there's a lot of detail around targeted weapons, so you could precisely identify a target and just shoot at that, and then large is explained, like what the weapon is? Yeah, so there's one weapon called a divyastra where you can just specifically target any

particular person or a group, and it would just automatically direct itself into it, almost like a semi-autonomous weapon. And then large Krishna had this weapon called the Siddharthian Chakra, it's basically a discourse, and then you can just release it and it'll go in specifically, identify somebody

“and chop up their head and come back to your right?”

It's so direct itself, so what I was amazed by is how interesting it is in terms of

be directed at people or like directed at, you know, group of soldiers, and it would just

“go and do its job and come back to the leader.”

And there were so many different astras, divyastra, Varunastra, Nagasra, Ramasra is obviously the ultimate, the hydrogen bomb equivalent, and all of these are like described in a lot of detail and like, who has access to it. And of course, it's a mythology, so it's described as these arrows in your back of your shoulders, but you could understand it is like, you know, somebody having just access to

a lot of weapons. And then whoever was powerful would go capture and call nice and like gain power.

And essentially a fight between a group of cousins, that's the bottom line of that story.

Now, if we think of history as this linear progression from caveman to us, and we hear about autonomous weapons that were written in the Mahaparata somewhere around 2,000 plus years ago, we go, well, mythology. But if not, if there's been some sort of rise and fall of civilization, if there has been catastrophic, whatever it is, asteroid impacts, shifting of the poles, whatever it is.

It's caused great disasters. You can imagine that these people are remembering a time where there was some sort of very advanced civilization, and this is what they're describing. Like, if you knew for a fact that there had been a great advanced technologically advanced civilization, when we have evidence that they had some technology, like the pyramids of

geese and stuff, like how did you do that? There's some technology involved, right? But we don't have evidence of the technology, but if we did, if we knew for a fact, you would look at the Mahaparata, oh, this is history. We're just explaining it in a kind of crude, contemporary way for the time arrows, instead

of semi-autonomous drones, with exploding heads on them.

“That's what we have now, all those things that they're describing, hydrogen bomb, semi-autonomous”

and autonomous drones. They have autonomous fighter jets now, like they don't need people anymore. We're in that area right now. When you read about something like that from Mahaparata, you're like, okay, what was really going on?

Exactly.

Yeah, I mean, that's always been my fascination with those epics and the level of detail

with which they described all these weapons and who had access, different levels of access, the status required to have access, and how it was used in the wars, different formations of the soldiers, like they had all these crazy formation structures, like forming the army, like a lotus, forming the army, like, you know, there's something called a Chakra Viva, like literally, like, it has to have concentric circles, so you cannot actually get into

the innermost circle without going through the outer circles, and then you can get killed

“by each of the flanks whenever you're trying to enter in, and the secret of how to actually”

break into these vuehs, vuehs means formations, was only known to a few people. And it's incredible, like, you could say, okay, like somebody had to be extremely skillful to have that sort of, like, visualizations and imaginations of describing story, like that,

and obviously, like Tolkien has done an amazing job, a lot of the rings, you know, and creating

so much detail, at the same time, like a lot of it actually coming through and real life in some form, again, not exactly the same weapons, but similar style makes you wonder, was there actually something around them, and people have tried excavations in all these areas, there's, like, two main areas in the Mahabharat, Hastinapur was the name of the kingdom, and people have done excavations around there, and have, like, found some artifacts that

might date back to those years. But there are also some details that are describing the epics that don't quite align with reality. Well, all the men, all the main warriors in that era were described as, like, very tall, very big, um, seven, eight feet, whatever, you know, I don't even know exactly numbers.

But, um, but, um, our, our, our studies by archaeologists also say that people lived in those years in, in those regions were probably not more than six feet tall. So it's, it's not clear exactly like what happened, what was correct, what was not correct, and, you know, we just have to keep probing more, but I find the idea of fascinating to think of, like, what could have existed in sacred texts that was only partially communicated

to the next generation, and having a lot of, like, re-interpretations. Another thing that is very interesting to think about is Vedic Math. So, um, that basic Vedic Math is, like, a branch of mathematics that, you know, some

actually practice it just to be sharp or at mental math for doing their exams, like, GMad and things like that, GRE. And, um, it has, like, a line in the Vedas that says, oh, like, one from the last

digit, two from the first digit, whatever, you know, so many different ways of multiplying,

two different numbers, like, 97 times 96, oh, like, subtract, last digits, put it right. Like the first digit, put it in the left, that's the, that's the result. And, um, then you, you wonder, like, oh, Vedic, the Rig Vedas, so old as, as old as, is,

“is the oldest sacred text out there, how is it describing computation?”

That feels, right, very unreal, like, did they actually know, for understand advanced forms of computation, even back in those days, and, um, and how old is Rig Vedas? Um, I don't exactly know how old it is. Oh, we put that in a proplexity. Yeah.

Let's do that. Let's just find out. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

It is, technically, the oldest sacred text out there. And so, what's interesting is, I wonder how old the stories were by the time they were written down, like, how much of it is relayed person to person for years and years, just like the Bible. Four, it's ever actually written out.

Scholars usually date the composition of the Rig Vedas to about 1,500 to 1,200 BCE.

“So it's oldest layers roughly 3,200, 3,700 years old today.”

Like, if there really was, like, every, uh, ancient culture has a story of a flood. Everyone, they have an apocalypse. And my, my bar had the same thing. Was it, my, my bar had the same thing where that was a big, like, almost like a tsunami like thing.

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

It is. The memorial. How do you say it, Manu? Yeah. Manu flood.

Even do great flood myths where the righteous king Manu is worn by a divine fish about an imminent deluge that will destroy humanity. He builds a boat, loads it with his family, looks like no one in the arc. It's the same thing. With seeds and animals, ties it to the horn of the God in fish form, which toes the boat

to safety until the water is received and the world is repopulated. They all have the same story. Yeah. That's what's really crazy. There is a there is a concept in Hindu, uh, philosophy called the Yugas.

Mm-hmm. I'm reading a book about it. Yeah. Yeah. So, uh, there's like different Yugas and Yugas are like thousands of years.

And the concept is that the Yugas keep cycling around. And so, like, uh, we're in the Kali Yugas right now, uh, and before that it was a Dwarka Yugas, that's when most of the mobber had happened, and before that it was a Toyota Yugas where the roundmine happened, and before that it was another Yugas. What is next?

Dr. Kali Yugas.

No, there is nothing next after Kali Yugas goes back to the first one.

I forgot the name of the first Yugas. 'Cause the interpretation that I'm reading is that we're not in Kali Yugas anymore. And that Kali Yugas ended in the 1900s and Dwarka Yugas started then. No, no. VR in Kali Yugas right.

100%. So why do people have different interpretations? Like, is there a, uh, yeah, there's like a guru interpretation. There's like one specific guru, I see, that has this interpretation that Kali Yugas ended in the 1900s, and that we're moving on.

Interesting.

“Yeah, but I don't know who's right, because it's, it's an enormous cycle, right?”

The cycle of humanity. Yeah, thousands of years, thousands of years. And, uh, so yeah, so these are the four Yugas, um, and, um, so why do people have different interpretations? First one, I'll tell you the book I'm reading, yeah.

See if this book is discredited, young Jamie, it is, um, it's by a guy named, uh, David, uh, Steinowitz, Stein, Steinmats, David Steinmats, the book is called the Yugas. Interesting.

Yeah, I mean, the, the, the problem is when someone's

got their own interpretation, or some gurus interpretation, it doesn't totally align. It's hard to know who's right and who's wrong. Yeah. Keyes understanding our hidden past, emerging energy age, and then lightened future.

So that, go back up to that again.

So this is in the description. See what it says that? Where it says in 1894, an Indian sage gave a gust of the explanation, not only for a hidden past, but for the trends of today and for future enlightenment. So there's like one guy's interpretation that this guy is going off of.

I guess the difference might be that, um, he thinks the Yugas cycle is 24,000 years.

“Whereas, I think it's probably much longer than that.”

Yeah, um, four Yugas together is 4,320,000 years. You know, it's really nutty. Yeah. Really nutty things is, um, both in the ancient Sumerian texts and in some of the ancient Egyptian texts.

There's depictions before the flood of people who reign for thousands of years as kings. Yeah. And it's common. It's not, and it's also the referenced multiple times in different scripts that are from different parts of what was Sumer at the time.

Yeah. It's really weird. Because they take it as established history once it gets to a certain age. Once they get into, like, whatever the age is where they can verify that this person was the king for a certain period of time.

But it's all in the same text as people that reign for 6,000 years. Yeah.

“It's, and then one of them just wipes out the whole thing.”

Yeah. And, um, I mean, this is also somewhat like tangentially related to, um, the Fermi paradox. You know, like, if you assume all these things are happening on Earth itself, the entire civilizations are getting wiped out.

Um, and like, we always wonder, you've explored the topic the most, um, and, um, very

aliens. Right. And, um, there are different arguments that, like, okay, like, the reason we haven't quite found that is because the great fooder exists. And, uh, there is, like, one entertaining theory that, um, I like, just for the sake of

entertainment is, um, almost all civilizations end up advancing technologically a lot. And, um, either a calamity wipes them out, or like, they build some misalign AGI and an AGI wipes them out. And, um, and because of that, um, they never actually, like, end up being visible to us. Or the other theories that, like, they're, like, um, we haven't quite build the voin'

noise and probes to actually go find them. And, um, both of them are plausible. And, um, it, you know, there's, there's no clear weight of, like, no, on this, we actually, like, send out enough probes.

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There's the possibility that they are observing, and that they don't want to interfere. And that we are on some sort of evolutionary cycle of cultural evolution, civilization evolution. Yeah. And one of the things about this, the crazy ages that come from the Sumerian

text and from the ancient, the hieroglyphs that depict the Zeptet, how do you say it? Zeptetty? No. Let me say in that, what is that text that ancient?

“Remember we talked about it with Zahihawas and he denied its existence?”

Zeptetty? Is that it? Either way, you're dealing with these kings that reign for thousands and thousands of years. Well, you know, David Sinclair is in the middle of this research now that they're working

on life extension drugs, like that are actionable. Yeah. Yeah. That's Zeptetty. Yeah.

Well, this is what's so weird. If they look at hieroglyphs, they get to a certain point and they're like, oh, Kufu. He was real. This guy was real. All these people were real.

But then they get back to these guys that reign for thousands of years, they go all that way. I just wish it. But why is it that all these people have these stories that align with this timeline

It's all like the same story. And then if you're talking about these ancient Hindu scriptures that are discussing technology that seems remarkably similar to technology that we have today. Yeah.

The monos are flying cars, basically.

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

“And it's very entertaining to think of like, let's say something happens to us, right?”

I don't want anything to happen to us, but let's say something happens to us, and what people really believe you were like launching reusable rockets, right? Or making FaceTime calls to people in Australia? Yeah. Like, given fundamental things, like, all we were doing today, I think it's all like

incredible. There's a lot of things that could be this technological ideas, or maybe people actually had it, and the knowledge of it was lost, and it's not been documented, it's not been passed along, and so we are skeptical if they ever had it. Yes.

And so we end up reinventing it in different forms again, and again, and we keep cycling through this process. Well, it also could be that this is the natural progression of human curiosity, the human

curiosity, and ingenuity always moves into these very particular ways, like, what's

the best way to defeat my enemies? Yeah. If we're always going to be territorial primates, we're always going to want to defeat our enemies. We're always going to protect ourselves from being invaded, so we're going to make better

and just with technological innovation, it just goes down the same path, oh, we figure out bullets. Oh, we figure out nuclear bombs, well, we figure out, well, we don't even have to use an actual plane. We can use an autonomous drone, and that delivers it.

And then scale upwards and onwards, and AI, and then also life extension. So if these people were able to make the pyramids, like, you know, there's a lot of speculation as to the timeline of the pyramids, but let's just say they really built it, 2005 and everything.

“Let's just say back then, what the fuck were they using?”

Like, what did you do?

How did you get these stones down from the mountains where 500 miles away?

About this one? How about that one? Yeah, we were going to get to that for sure. There's a ton, no, thank you. What's good?

Good as any. How about these temples that they find in India that are carved entirely out of one piece of stone? What did you do? How did you do that?

How long ago did this happen? How many of them were buried, and then they had to uncover them, and then, like, figure out, like, what is this? Who made it? There's no timeline.

No one really knows. There's no evidence of tools that were capable of doing this kind of work back then, and their huge and beautiful and perfect. And they have, like, acoustic properties, and the geometry is fucking fantastic. Yeah.

It's nuts. It's not said that. All of these temples were actually just built, not just that they were specifically the locations for them, or picked out, so that you get the right seismic vibration. Oh, there.

In terms of, like, proximity to the ocean, the gravitational waves from the sun in the moon, people actually made that level of, like, look at this man, imagine the undertaking of carving that temple out of the side of a fucking giant piece of rock. Yeah. You screw up one thing, and it's over.

There's no simulations. You just have to, like, build it. Well, what if they have, this is the question. Like, imagine today, if we had to do this, look, it's possible. This is a possible endeavor.

It can be done. Yeah. But imagine, what kind of technology would we have to need to map it out to make sure that it was all precise, that it all, I mean, it's precise within, like, millimeters from the point to point, and everything is done out of one piece of stone.

Like, what did they do? Was it chisels? Did you do that with chisels? That's crazy.

“How many times did you have to sharpen your fucking chisel?”

That's nuts. Or, do you have something completely different, because some of the more intricate ones see if you can find these. Some of the crazy ones inside these temples, there's sculptures that are three-dimensional, and they're carved, like, inside of the sculpture.

So there's, like, an outer area, and then there's these, all these openings, and then inside, it's highly detailed, like, how'd you even reach in there? That's just as they used chisels and hammers, and I don't think that's possible. [LAUGHTER] And careful geometric point.

I'm going to click plenty of people trying to do that. They said, like, this is how much work someone could do in, like, 12 hours with a hammer, and they get nowhere. Let alone, like, perfect, and looking good. Yeah, it's nuts, man.

And there's a lot of evidence of stuff like that all over the world, which is really weird. You have the stuff in Peru, like, socks that he'll want on, when you look at these stones, and it looks like they're melted into place, and they're 900 tons.

Yeah. How did you even get it up there? Where'd they get it? How'd you get it there? How'd you line it perfectly?

Built in only 18 years. How do they know that? How do they know that? Because it's attributed to one king. Yeah.

British in the first, 756 to 770s, 3CE, maybe. How do you know, though? Yeah, this is a archaeologist that I would have calculated, would take them 100 years to do it. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, this is very, like, you know, different historian accounts are all, like, modeled up, you know, and for, huh? Well, it's a real problem. History is a real problem.

But yeah, it goes back to, like, the thing you were saying, right, you know, what is one thing that's common across all these different ages is the human curiosity. So, I mean, that's something that, you know, I would love to get your take on this. Like, I've been talking with this idea called the curiosity premium, which is the most effective

people, the most successful people have always been the most curious people, the ones who

have been good at asking the best questions. And they tend to better in every aspect of their life. And you're a good example of that.

“So that's why I would love to get your take on this.”

And the reason I believe that is because long-term, people who continuously ask questions tend to do better, they make more money, they have a higher quality of life, they're happy. They have more compounding relationships, people find them more interesting. And so they compound their relationships over time. And so, naturally they end up succeeding.

But their spirit of inquiry, their intrinsic curiosity doesn't actually stop once they succeed. It only, they just channelize it even more. And so, that's why it keeps compounding. And I would argue that, like, it's the only quality, it's the only like quality that makes us really human, you know, in this world where we can seek a lot of information and get information

way faster than ever before. It feels like that's that one universal human quality that's existed since ancient time, you can see all this text, like, in fact, in the rigway that you're explicitly encouraged to seek wisdom more than wealth. And it's not just an idea specific to Hinduism, that specific idea exists in the Bible,

exists in the Quran, exists in the Torah. It's not that seeking wealth is admonished by religious texts. It's actually that it's more important to seek wisdom. And, you know, like, you can, that, why I said, you're a good example of that is, like, sure you have a very, very large podcast, but the way you're running it is, like, you're

just curious about a lot of things and asking a lot of questions.

“And I think that's that one quality that's very important.”

So, and I feel like it's the only thing that we have known since ancient time being curious. Well, I think it's stimulating to people. And genuine curiosity is stimulating to other people. When someone is genuinely curious about something, I become curious about it. I think it's contagious.

And I think that it's, it's also an authentic quality. And I think there's, there's something about really wanting to know something and being interested in something. And if you're curious, generally, you're going to ask more questions about something so you have a deeper understanding of it.

So if you're trying to do, of whatever you're trying to do, a sport a game, you'll probably get better at it because you're more curious. Because instead of just assuming things, you'll ask more questions, you'll re-examine things.

It's one of the most important human qualities, and to me, it's one of the most attractive

human qualities. It's always been. When I meet curious people, I'm always interested. I'm always like, like, telling what you're curious about, and I'll tell you what I'm curious about.

Let's talk. And this podcast started out genuinely because of, well, a lot of it's just talking shit with friends. But it also led in to, like, one of my very first guests, actual guest, was Graham Hankock.

And it's just because I was curious, because I read fingerprints of the gods, and I

“seen him talk, I'd seen speeches, and I'm like, I want to know, like, what do you know?”

What do you think's going on? And he's another guy incredibly curious, and absolutely fascinated with his, his takes on ancient history. He has been talking about this subject a long time.

And when he first wrote fingerprints of the gods, I think that came out in, like,

I want to say it's like 97 or 98 or something like that. And I remember reading it, and so many of my friends, like, you know, educated friends, like, those horseshit, why do you pay attention to this? More and more and more has time goes on. It's been proven that he's correct.

The timelines shifted back, and from the publication of that book, the discovery of go back, like, tap-a in the surrounding area. Like, it's, like, okay, now we realize, well, there was something crazy shit going on at the very least 11,000 years ago. So we pushed civilization back 5,000 years.

So like, and this is just what we found now, and we keep finding things, keep digging, keep

radio tomography, where they're looking under the pyramid that seems that there's structures, under the, we've seen that stuff, I haven't seen that. I had the scientists that's involved in it, he's an Italian guy, Philippo Biondi, and he came on the podcast, wonderful accent, almost good as yours.

It was amazing, but he's describing the use of this stuff and that they've used it successfully

on known areas in pyramids and other structures, and they can, in fact, they, there's a, in Italy, there is a particle collider that is underneath the mountain, and using this technology, which is satellite-based technology, they get an accurate description of this

“particle collider that's, I think it's 1200 meters underground, like how, how far is that”

thing underground? We'll find out, but it's like deep, understand, and they find that they can get an accurate, like it could actually give you the dimensions of this particle collider, they have like an image of it, and this same technology is showing that there's these columns underneath

the pyramid in various places that are 20 meters wide, and they have coils around them.

They don't know what the hell they are, and the, the whole structure of this thing, it's not small, it goes almost a kilometer into the ground. There's like this enormous, like, bottom of it, and it seems like it's something that's constructed, and so they're like, okay, well, the pyramid is crazy, it's crazy enough. If there's something underneath that's a man-made, or someone made it, that's a kilometer

“deep into the ground, like, what the fuck are we even talking about, like, who made this?”

What, what did they have? One point, two kilometers into the mountain, that's, oh nuts, to half a fucking mile, in plus, into the mountain, and this thing can see through all that and get this accurate depiction of this particle collider, and it's showing with multiple scans, not just one, multiple scans in different technology, the same exact images, the same exact structures,

underneath this fucking immense two million three hundred thousand stone structure that

almost perfectly aligns to true north-south east and west, like, what, what was going on? Don't tell me polis, don't tell me copper tools, like, what the fuck was going on? Something crazy, and I have a feeling our simplistic explanation of it, is just doing no one any justice, it's doing no service to history, it's doing no service to our understand, they've got to be a little bit more open in the fact that they are perplexed,

and not just perplexed by stuff like this, this is a 3D print of an actual vase that exists in Egypt, that they found that they found in tombs of the old kingdom. This thing was somehow another, it's made with dye, so it's incredibly hard stone, and made to like a thousandth of a human hair, and it's, yeah, like crazy dimensions, like the way the precision of it, and wasn't turned on a lathe because it has handles, so you

look at the handles on the side where you can't carve the, and those are perfect too, like the alignment of everything, and it's like you just look at it, oh it's a vase, no big deal, but no it's kind of fucking crazy. Like how did they cut that out? There's also these, there's all these core marks in some of the stones that they find in Egypt, and they've analyzed the amount of revolutions per minute that you would have to go through to be able to cut through

something and leave these lines, and that not defies explanation, like what is this? This is crazy, this is not sand and copper and just rubbing things, no, this is some insane technology that we don't understand, there's scoop marks out of the bottoms of some of these stones. I was like what the fuck is this? I just scoop rock, like what, it looks like ice cream, like they just went, "Roop, what are they doing?" There's so many questions.

What tools did they even have to do all these things? They had copper, I mean, there's some evidence

“that they had sums iron, and then I think two toned common had a dagger that was actually made”

from meteorite, which is interesting. When they could find meteorites and make things out of them, it was very valuable, obviously. But just the sheer volume of work that they did there, like you look at the temple in man, you look at the three major pyramids, you look at all the different temples and all the construction, and the older you go, the deeper into the sand, they go, the more complex these things are, which is even weirder. So it seems like civilization

for civilization, just there was probably a rise in fall with their technology as well.

I think it's incredible that none of this knowledge was properly documented ever,

“and it's a whole line of work to just go understand how to even rebuild these things,”

leave it on how to rebuild it. Well, think about what we're doing, right? So all of our knowledge is essentially stored on hard drives and paper. There's the two things that are going to deteriorate the quickest. Maybe we should take a dump of the internet and put it out a rock, go preserve it somewhere, so that yeah, even if our civilization is wiped out in all the data centers, all the gone or whatever, whoever comes next can go figure it out.

Well, I mean, then you've got to always assume that even if they found a hard drive,

that they would like how long would it take for them to back engineer what we did and figure out what these ones and zeros actually mean. Yeah. Which is one of the most bizarre and fantastic accomplishments of modern civilization is like, this is a terabyte, which is nuts. Yeah. I don't know what your first computer had. I don't remember. Definitely not, not even a gigabyte, probably. No, like a few hundred megabytes was your hard drive. Yeah. I mean, I remember when

they first came up with gigabytes, I was like, this is nuts. Yeah, they were like when Gmail launched and gave everybody like free email storage, unlimited email storage and the bottom sliding bar would just keep increasing in terms of the total allowed size. Yeah. And that was nuts to me. Yeah. Yeah. And I think yeah, we take it for granted that we have like infinite ram and infinite hard disk and nobody has to worry about like, you know, back in those days, you worry about like

taking too many photos on your phone. Right. Right. And they have to go delete all the old ones or bad ones.

“Yeah. You run a storage on your phone. Yeah. And then you have to buy like an external hard drive to”

keep storing things. Yeah. You keep running things, stuff from your phone to the hard disk. I remember the old Android phones, you get a SD card. Yeah. You can slip one of those in there and you can store images on that. Yeah. It could save space. Yeah. And all that stuff is so vulnerable. It's so vulnerable. And again, if a completely alien society had to come down and find our hard drives and they went a totally different path of technology. They'd have to back engineer

reverse engineer, everything that we did, try to figure out, you know, what, what, what are we using, what operating system, how's the operating system work? Is it unix? Is it Linux? Is it like, what is it? How do they do it? It would be a nightmare. They would need an advanced AI to figure it all out for them. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And so that's just if the hard drive survived. Right. So if there's some massive flood, cataclysm, whatever, some horrific thing that damages

all of our electronics, which is totally possible, you know, just some solar flare, some intense, you know. There's just just another lab leak. Right? Yeah. Just time. A lab leak in time.

Yeah. Yeah. It's not. And we could go back to zero real quick. And we would basically be like

preppers. It would be hard to reverse engineer, everything again. It would be almost impossible. Yeah. Which is why I'm really fascinated by the, the post flood timeline. Because if these people like Graham Hancock and a lot of these other folks that have speculated that there was probably a very advanced civilization that went in a completely different direction many thousands of years ago. If you look at like the emergence of like some air and, you know, Mesopotamia in that area,

which a lot of people attribute to be the earliest known civilization, that's around 5,000 plus 6,000 years ago. Right. Yeah. Roughly. So the floods like 11,000 years ago, plus. So you're looking at like 5,000 years of what? That's not even that long in the grand scheme of things. No, not to the earth. Yeah. But for people. Yeah. Pre-fucking long. Yeah. Like think of how long it took us to get our shit together. Yeah. It took thousands and thousands and thousands of years of people probably

“being monsters. Just being the worst of the worst. Yeah. And that that's probably the only way”

to survive. Just probably a lot of cannibalism. Yeah. There's a lot of murder. There's a lot of like horrific shit going on for 5,000 years until people slowly but surely figured out agriculture again.

people away so you could work on math. And then next thing you know, civilization emerges again. And it goes right, you know, goes right back onto the cycle. And then you start reading in the the Rigveda about stuff that happened thousands years ago. Oh, what the fuck is this? Like,

“what happened? Yeah. And that's my belief. Yeah. I think there was something going on on earth.”

Many, many, many, many thousands of years before established beginnings of history that was very bizarre and probably technology that went in a completely different direction than what we're doing now with combustion engines and circuits and all the different things that we use. Yeah. They probably figured out some other kind of technology. Exactly. Which is totally possible.

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

Yes. Well, I would love to be able to. I would love to just have a, if I could choose one window in time to go back to see what it would look like, I would 100% pick ancient Egypt while they're building. The pyramid. Yeah. On truth. Oh, yeah. What's going on? Yeah. There's just, just put me in a big hamster wheel. There's a big plastic bubble where no one could see me. Just let me violate space and time and exist there for just a few minutes. Just let me look. I think that would

be the most insane thing that you could see about humans and human history. Yeah. I just want to know what they knew, what they had, what they used in this thing Petra's same time period, at least attributed to 7,000 roughly BC, Jesus. And they, you know, how would you know? Right. How? The details of all those carvings is insane. Insane. Yeah. And what in 7,000 BC, what are the tools?

What the hell will you use? How'd you make a temple out of the side of a fucking mountain?

Look at the size of it, man. The size of those columns. It would be hard to do anything like this even today. It would be incredibly difficult in sayingly time-consuming. Oh, yeah. The Cali also temple by the way. I don't have it up right now, but the 16, 50 or so. Someone sent us a thousand people to try to destroy it, not for three years of doing nothing they stopped. They barely made a dent on a couple statues. Yep. A lot of times when

invasions happen in India like, it's hard really hard to fuck it up and couldn't. Oh, wow. It's crazy. That's very robust. That's a great way to describe it. It's just, there's so much of that stuff that's so interesting because it's so undeniable, it's so undeniable and it's scale, so undeniable and it's complexity and the planning and the understanding that you had to have a deep knowledge of geometry, of measurement, of material. Yes. Everything. Sturdiness, like,

resists like calamities, like earthquake. What tools are you using? Yeah. Like how are you doing this? How are you coordinating all these people? Right. Getting them to do stuff. I mean, sure, conditions must have been very harsh here. Like, I'm sure people didn't really have a choice

“but to do these things because back in the days like the only way you could take care of your”

food and clothing and shelter is like you commit yourself as a laborer to the state to the kingdom. But you could also ask like, what gave them the initiative or drive to go and do these things? Yeah. Well, that description is perhaps of a later time. We don't even really know what civilization was like when these were constructed. Yeah. The real, the real problem is the material science. The real problem is like, you, there's a lot of things that you have to have to make

those things. It's not as simple as a sculpture, like Michelangelo making a sculpture out of or something that's like fairly easy to carve into, stars, as far as stone goes. Now, this scale is so undidiable, that something, something, some piece of our understanding

is missing. - Yeah, I mean, it, it, it, oh, like looking at all this, like everyone should just be like a lot more humble, right? Like, like, we don't actually know that much, like what we know is like so little, like what I,

like the same thing is what Socrates said, what we know is very, very little.

“And the only thing we should all strive to be”

is to speak curious. And I think there's a lot of tendency for people to like, think like, oh, like, we have all these advanced technology

we're so amazing, like, look at us and it's like,

wait, hold on, like, you don't even understand what happened thousands of years ago. And there's so much out there to just go and explore and learn and like get better at understanding more.

- Yeah, this is unreal. - This is called the Elora Cave's timeless wonder carved in stone.

“- They're on the, I think it's all the kind of the same area.”

- Yeah, it's the same Elora Cave and the Shiba temple that you saw. - Look at that. - My God, look at this stuff, it's insane. And again, there's no steel back then.

- It's actually really symmetrical. It's not even like, can you go back to the,

the first one with the symmetrical top, yeah.

Look at this symmetry of the top, this is nuts. - It looks like that mall in New York, they made where the world changed. (laughing) - Yeah, but way more robust.

(laughing) I mean, how, what would you, this is the thing, it's like the material science aspect of it. - Yeah. - It's like, you don't have the ability to do,

look at that top one, go to that top one again, the one that you just had, Jamie. - Yeah, that one. Look at, that's crazy, man. I mean, I am just blown away when I see stuff like that.

My mind just starts racing. And I just think, how did you do this? Who was involved, how was it planned, how was it so symmetrical, what were the tools? Like, what were the tools, man?

- Yeah. - If you don't have steel, you don't have, what are you using? How'd you do that?

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

So, I guess, I guess, I doubt it. I bet they had something else. I bet they had something else that over time eroded, just like metal wood today. I mean, if you left a shovel outside today,

and you came back to that same spot, 500 years from now, there's nothing. A shovel's gone, right? - Yeah. - And you've got to assume that these many thousand year old

temples that were carved out of a fucking mountain, whatever tools they used, probably got absorbed by the earth, and we only found this remaining, yeah. - Yeah. - It's giving me a word thought,

like, when they make a big building downtown, they only bring the crane in for a temporary period of time. And there's only so many cranes on the planet currently too. So, right, true, you take it, you move it, you go, take it to the next spot.

- Yep, yeah, true. - Yeah, I don't know. - Yeah, especially something like this, like, if they had heavy equipment in machinery, and whatever the fuck they were using, they probably moved it and then moved it out,

and then it probably rotted away, and now it's gone, if there was machinery, if there wasn't, like there must have been something else, some other kind of, like, some technology that we haven't even imagined.

- Yeah. - But it's like, they're commitment to art too, so fascinating, 'cause these aren't just structures. They're in fashion projects, yeah, intensely beautiful. Intensely or neat. - Yeah.

- So it's not, it's not just that they wanted to build, like a functional structure, that a good architecture knows. It's a fascinating artwork, and it's so intricate. There's so many different features,

and so many different images of different people in beings and animals and elephants, since. - There's one more temple, like, you could pull out, like, it's called a Tangier temple. - Oh, I've seen that one too. - Yeah, yeah.

- That was done more recently, in the age of the Cholas,

and it's pretty incredible.

- When did they do that one? I don't know the exact number, but more recent than the ones that you saw. - All of 'em are not, man. And then there's stuff like that all over the world.

- Whoa. - This was done as a project by the King, to basically make a name for himself. - Wow, that's incredible. Is that multiple pieces of stone,

or did you carve that whole thing on a stone, too? - Probably multiple pieces. - So that's actually, like, construction. - Yeah. - Not like removal.

The other ones are, it's essentially a giant sculpture. Wow, that's so pretty. Like how geometric it is. - Yeah, that's what amazes me. They didn't actually have all these simulations

and cat tools and all these things. - Right. - And what year was this made, Jamie? Does it say?

- It's just so incredible how much of this stuff exists

where it's really baffling. Like I just found out recently that the Aztecs

“didn't build those temples that they found them really?”

- Yeah. - They found like, to note that long, they call it the place where the gods were born. The Aztecs found it and uncovered it. And then on the, who's it, to note that long,

or teal to a con, whichever one it was, on the consecration day, when they were done with like whatever they were doing with it to celebrate, they killed somewhere

(laughs) - Not exactly the mindset of the type of people that will construct something like that, you know? So those are the people that found it and it might have been sitting there for a thousand years.

And then they came along and they said, "Oh, this is cool, let's live here." They were able to, what was the society that lived there before them? And where are they?

And what happened? And how they do this? And why did they do it?

“And why did they have it aligned with the constellations?”

Like, what were they doing? - Yeah.

Some of the calculations are pretty amazing.

Like how they timed it, how they positioned it, how they cared about planetary positions and stuff like that. Sure, some of it could even be pseudo signs,

but whatever, I think just the level of calculations they were making back in this days without, you know, powerful computers is just outstanding. - It's just nuts, and it doesn't make sense. It's like, okay, they're making without powerful computers.

So what are they using? - I mean, at one point, the word computer just meant human beings would be doing the calculations. That was their only job, like multiply two numbers. I like to make some astronomers.

We're actually the first mathematicians. The term mathematician in astronomy where we use synonymously at one point. - Really? - Yeah.

- Why is that? - Because most of the stars and math. - Yeah, because like starting the stars and while making a lot of geometry calculations, and that was kind of actually one of the first set

of mathematicians in India, people like Ariabata, Baskara, all these guys were actually astronomers too, they were not just mathematicians. And Ariabata was earlier still like the idea

of using zeros, and then he had a lot of contributions in geometry, and he was doing all this like, just because he was interested in astronomy. - Isn't there evidence of Pythagram theorem in ancient, is it ancient Samarion?

Is it? - It's something that predates Pythagoras. - Interesting. My theory is that even though it was not formulated as a photographer in theorem,

like I'm sure people had to understand concepts of science and co-science and whatever is the right angle for the right inclined to get this right level

“of geometry, you need to have some implicit”

understanding of abilities, kind of structures. There's no way you could do it without that.

- 100% and you have to have incredible measurement tools,

like not just the actual mathematics. Okay, the oldest known evidence of Pythagram theorem dates from old Babylonian clay tablets from about 1900 to 1600 BCE, roughly 1000 years before Pythagoras, and that wild, like how, how.

Clay tablets often cited use what we now call the Pythagram to compute rather than a diagonal of rectangles and squares, including an excellent approximation. Look at this, this is nuts, man. Vadec ritual text explicitly states the rule equivalent,

I don't know how to say that, what is that? - A square of the square, C square, C square. For the diagonal of a rectangle, then includes numerical examples, predating or roughly contemporary

with classical Greek mathematics. So completely different parts of the world. - Yeah. - And they're coming up with the same stuff. - Exactly, because they're all curious, that's it.

- Yeah, they're all curious and eventually all curiosity leads to truth or some form of it. - I would argue that anything that's of impact on the world has only been done by curious people. In hindsight, we label those people as successful as smart

or rich, but the common trade across all of them has been like curious.

- Well, that's certainly a powerful trade

in people that aren't curious or not fun. - Yeah, they're not interesting, so because of that, they don't attract other smarter interesting people. And therefore, they won't be able to do something

very meaningful in the world. So it's kind of like, it's less, and it applies to your personal relationships and personal life too. It's not just about professional success.

Like you have a more fulfilling life with your life or your kids, if you're a more curious person,

“you ask them more questions, you take interest in them, right?”

So that's the one quality, everybody wants in personal relationships, it's like taking interest in them and actually understanding them better or being curious about common things. And so it's not just being curious, leads to success.

It's more that people around you want you to be successful if you're curious because you will have more compounding

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

everything, art, everything. - The transistor, like, you know the story of the transistor? - Yeah.

- So Bell Labs was basically employing as many,

like history adjusted, as many telephone engineers, back then as the number of software engineers today. But only three people cared enough to question

“whether you should use these really hot,”

giant vacuum tubes, for amplifying telephone signals. So vacuum tubes were very big, power-hungry and very hot. And so they were not fault-horrent and it's very expensive. And so three people questioned the need for that and came up with the idea of the transistor

to amplify current. And that, that was the Nobel Prize-winning discovery and not just that it was useful to amplify telephone signals. It basically led to the rise of modern computing, and we wouldn't have an iPhone like this today,

if not for those three people. - Do you know the tinfoil hat conspiracy theory about transistors is? - No. - That there are back engineered from the Roswell crash

along with fiber optics. Tell me more. - So we read this on the podcast. Remember Jamie, there's the two scientists that were attributed to this one scientist

that said they weren't even remotely exceptional guys and that they gave them the credit for this so that they didn't have to reveal the true nature of where this technology came from. - I see, interesting.

- So again, tinfoil hat securely on our heads. This is not something I believe. This is just something that's fun. There's a few inventions that came out of that time period roughly after 1947, that are weird.

And one of them is fiber optics and one of them is a transistor and these are supposedly attributed to back engineering programs. So the Roswell crash, I don't know if you ever paid any attention to it, it's a real weird one

because the cover of the Roswell daily record said that the government has a crash disc that landed in the desert, bunch of witnesses, bunch of people saw it, it's also people that saw supposedly saw physical bodies of these creatures

and supposedly, again, who knows what's true. But Truman went to the site, he visited it and then the planes, two separate planes were flown to right-pattersoon Air Force base,

“which was, I think was just right-base back then,”

I don't think it was right-pattersoon, but they flew them out and the idea was, this material was so important, they didn't wanna risk one plane crashing, so they flew it in two different planes

and that this stuff has always been known

to be stored at right-pattersoon Air Force base, that's what our radio is talking about. And then a lot of it was moved to Bell Labs and there was a company called the American Computer Company and back in the day, the American Computer Company,

it was just like, it was a consumer website where you could go and say, oh, I need a Windows computer that does this, that, and the other thing and you could just put in whatever respects where they would build it for you.

But they had a whole section of their website dedicated to Bell Labs and back engineered UFO technology and all they talked about and this one, like whoever ran it was like, I'll fucking cook, I don't know, is that still around?

- website? - Yeah, American Computer Company is still around. - Interesting. So this is like the 1990s, I think. - You're a theory, I mean, not that you believe in it,

but the theories that the transistor was not like invented, it was known and it was given to the world. - There's apparently a giant leap

between the first ideas of the transistor

and then what actually came about and how much money had to be spent to create it off of this leap. This was this assertion by the scientists that we're trying to examine this.

The thing about Bell Labs is there's a military base right outside of Bell Labs and they say, well, that military base is to pardon New York City, but New York City is quite a flight away, but Bell Labs is right there.

And they were working on some deep dark shit at Bell Labs for sure, because I've had a bunch of people on that we're talking about remote viewing exercises that they were doing at a Bell Labs. You know, we've had a bunch of people that came on

and talked about various programs that were going on

“that were like top-secret programs that were happening”

that were being run through Bell Labs. - There's some weirdness to that place. - Like real weirdness, interesting. - Yeah, and it's fun. - Yeah. - The idea that, like,

you know, it definitely feels very disconnected. Like, okay, like you were using all these vacuum tubes and then suddenly you're like, okay, like, what if we just use semiconductors? Okay, there's definitely a pretty far drift

to what you're supposed to do.

“And also the idea of the first transistor”

and what ended up being used in chips, the junction transistor are quite different too. So they're like big leaps in terms of what the core idea was. It's not an incremental change. The way I thought about it was like, okay,

that's like tens of years of work and that's why they made a big change. And so if you actually looked into the individual milestones they had, maybe it would have looked pretty different. But your conspiracy theory is pretty interesting.

- It's always fun. - Yeah. - And also there's just too many stories of this and David Grush's on oath said that there are back engineering programs

and he was read into these and that they've been around for a long time. But this is the assertion of that movie, the age of disclosure, the real problem is

that they have misappropriated funds and lied to Congress.

And so if they come out and tell you, okay, we do have this program. Well, guess what? Everybody goes to jail 'cause you guys are a bunch of liars and you've been stealing money

and you've been doing it whatever you wanna do with this money. I don't know, how much oversight is there on back engineering UFO programs. So probably a lot of people get in trouble, a lot of people go to jail.

On top of that, these things are all being done by weapons manufacturers, right? Like, where are you gonna bring them to? Well, you're gonna bring them to Lockheed Martin or you're gonna bring them to Rocket Dine

or it's gonna be someone that does that kind of work. You're not gonna do it on your, it's not gonna be like, we'll do it. No, you're gonna have to bring it to people that already make spaceships

or bring it to people that already make jets. And so they have a massive competitive advantage over any other company that's doing it. So then there's other companies, they also had contracts with the United States government

they can sue and so he lays out all the problems with this closure.

“And their assertion is that the only thing we need”

if we really wanna find out the truth is we're gonna need widespread amnesty for all these people that were involved. My problem with that is that's what I would say, too. If I'd been stealing money for decades and decades,

I would be like, "All right, we made you an amnesty." And then I'll tell you where all this stuff is. I'm like, how do we know what this stuff is? Whether or not, these are just top secret military programs with advanced propulsion technology

that's unavailable to the public and they're gonna say that is aliens and they back engineered this and they didn't that. Like, they clearly don't wanna tell people. They don't want people to know.

I think a large part of it is probably because they can get in trouble. But I think also a large part of it is because it's fun to keep secrets from people. - Yeah.

- Especially when you're the government. - Why don't them? - Fuck those people. - Yeah. - Fuck 'em.

They don't even know UFOs are real. Meanwhile, we're going into a bunker in the middle of the mountain and we're remote viewing. You know, it's probably, there's probably a lot of fun involved in having access to information

that most people would kill for. - Yeah. - I mean, that's so much information that we just don't have access to. - Which brings me to this question.

With, it seems like one of the things that's happening with both with AI and with technology in general is that you have more and more access to information and more and more answers to questions than ever before. - Yeah.

- At a certain point in time, there's gonna be no bottleneck. - Yeah. - And we're gonna know everything about everything. - Yeah.

“- So how is anyone in government gonna keep a secret?”

How is any corruption ever gonna be possible? It's a certain point of time, all of it will get uncovered. Like, it's much more difficult to commit murder now with DNA evidence, right? Back in the 1800s, like I didn't see nothing.

I wasn't there and then you're free. Like, now they do your fingerprints. Now they get your DNA, now there's flock cameras. There's like more and more and more, it's harder to get away with things.

- Yeah. - So it seems like to me like, whatever they have, whatever anybody has,

ultimately there's gonna come a point in time

where there's so much data and so much information and you could run all your questions. Like, there's an AI fact checker for politicians now. So while politician is giving a speech, you can run an AI fact checker and in real time,

it will tell you whether or not these people are full of shit. This seems like the direction is, there's not gonna be anybody full of shit in the future 'cause it's not gonna be possible. - Yeah.

- I mean, the government still would have access to things that the human beings wouldn't have access to. Like, like regular people. And particularly, the defense related weapons related. Like, for example, when they did the Venezuelan thing,

I don't think people in Venezuela even understood like, what even those weapons were. - One of the media, they were described as something, the literal words used for like alien-like technology.

to that quality of defense technology

until that incident happened. So there are obviously gonna be secrets, right? Especially the highest stakes things. I would say, like, building frontier AI models is similar to that.

Of course, as more models are getting open source, I think the knowledge is diffusing. But still, the true amount of details

“you need to actually train a really amazing frontier”

reasoning capability model is still not like widely diffused. So my things, my hypothesis that whatever is extremely high stakes will still not be widely diffused. It's at least there'll be enough structures in place to keep it secret forever.

Not forever, but forever for a while. - Yeah. - That's the thing. - Long-term short, like things do get out and people do understand. - People do understand. - Long-term is what I'm looking at.

Like, look, when we're looking at history,

we're talking in these, like,

when we're looking all these different temples and all these different things, we're talking about thousands and thousands of years. - Yeah. - And thousands of your time span in between each individual one.

With our world, we're talking about massive change in 200 years. - Yeah. - Like, this country's 250 years old. Think about how cookie that is. - Yeah. - That is a blink of an eye in history.

- Do we understand everything that happened in the United States? - No. - Exactly. - So, there are still some details there. - Sure. - Hidden from us. Like, we don't fully understand everything, right?

- For now. - Yeah. - But my question is, as time goes on, 250 years from now, isn't even possible to keep any secrets from anybody. - And is that a good thing?

It might be a good thing.

It sounds horrible to people. 'Cause they're like, "Oh my God, what about privacy?" Right, but also what about lies? - Yeah. - No more lies. Like, everyone's gonna know what you're thinking.

Everyone's gonna know everything people do all the time. - Yeah. - I mean, if you're a true surveillance state, obviously there are no secrets. - Right.

- Except about the government. - So, that's the problem. - Yeah. - Does it bottom that with the government? Or does it get to a point where there you can't even have government secrets?

Because as technology evolves and as human civilization evolves, secrets will be less and less, not just necessary, but secrets will be problematic. Because there'll be an impediment to knowledge. - Yeah. - The impediment to understanding the true,

the true scope of what the world is, like the true nature of all of our various moving parts. - Yeah. - As long as the human quality, the intrinsic human quality of curiosity and truth-seeking this, which is universal,

it's existed ever since we know human beings. If that continues and that continues to be the case, then people will have enough incentives to figure out the truth. - Yeah. - And if something is actually hard to get to,

it only motivates you more to actually go and find it. - For sure. So my question is, where does this all go? You know, and you obviously work in AI. And when you think about AI,

and when you think about just technology in general, and you extrapolate, you just take it from here, and you just plot it out,

“like what is a possible scenario of 250 years from now?”

Like what does it even look like? What does the United States look like at 500 years old? - It's very hard to know. - I'll be very honest. I think it's very hard to know, even five years from now,

how it's gonna look like. - That's crazy. - Yeah. - Five years ago, it was like-- - Five years ago, whoever is at the top most in AI, I don't even consider myself like that,

but whoever is the most frontier of the world of decision-making in AI, five years ago, I don't think they predicted the exact state we are in today. Nobody did.

If they did, they would have already procured all the compute, and like, you know, manufacturer all the chips, bought all the fabs, they've done all that, right? Just this is counterfactual.

Everyone's like bottleneck by not having enough compute, and like we haven't even had enough chips, we don't have enough power. These are all the problems that if you invite anybody and ask, what is the bottleneck in AI today,

and everybody will say power?

“I think Jensen was here, and he said the same thing, right?”

- Yeah. - But, okay, like, if you predicted this exact state five years before, wouldn't you have secure enough power and start building more power plans yourself

and start getting permits and start planning out capacity? No, nobody did that. - No. - Everything's reactive to the demand that we're having today, so-- - And that's just five years.

- Yeah, that's just five years, so when you ask me to predict 250 years, like I just have to honestly say, I don't know. - Do you ever sit back and think about it though? - I don't think about it.

- What it could be? - I don't think about it, so there are a lot of fun, I use complexity a lot for these kind of things, especially those new feature computer inside it, and one, this is just for hypothetical scenarios.

And I've seen you ask a lot of people about this,

“and a lot of conventional answers is like,”

"Oh, we'll just become managers of the AIs, don't worry." But if the price of cognition is the price of compute, managing an AIs also pretty much doable by the AIs, so, because the bottleneck is not like, unique cognition capability there.

So the value of the society will automatically shift to what is scarce, and fundamentally what has been scarce is like asking like high quality questions about things, okay, like, what if we just completely spent

all our time understanding the past? That's an interesting endeavor. It was not cool before, but it'll become cool again. And we usually use the view like archeology or history is not something that's like we're having a career,

and because it doesn't pay a vote, but what if it actually starts paying you go a lot more, now that actual knowledge works being done by AIs,

and it's all mundane and the price of that is basically

it's zero. - Right, in archeology would be one of the few things that it wouldn't have access to, because it doesn't have the actual ground. It can't get into the ground and do the scans.

- Well, let's say we have, like we're about to go do that. But you're still gonna be the one probing, right? Because you have incomplete information all the time. Even the idea of, okay, let's go explore this particular area. Let's go understand better.

Let's go try to reverse engineer that let's go try to build this again.

“How would it be if we wanted to do the same thing on the moon?”

There are so many interesting projects to work on for us. As long as we stay curious and we stay interested in a lot of things that we've done before and try to understand like civilization, that I'm not really concerned about like what things we get to do.

We might be doing a lot more cool things for what it's worth. Like, I don't know if anybody would be like coming and settling you that, oh, it's so cool to like open an Excel sheet everyday and make financial models, right?

Compared to like, it's gotta be somebody out there that likes that. I mean, that's something about like the task you do and what you get paid for, like what is a job that'll blah, blah, blah,

and some people associate their personal work with like where they work at and how much they get paid. And I think that thing is gonna collapse in a world where like the price of all that cognition is gonna be the price of compute.

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

We've always gravitated towards things that are scarce

because that's where the value lies. And so if, you know, have you, one interesting analogy is the Gulf States where there's an abundance of resources and they export their resources to other states

and that pays for the whole state. You know how like they offer everybody free electricity, subsidized health, subsidized education and like no taxes. When I first went to Dubai like almost like 20 years ago,

they told me that people don't pay taxes here and nobody pays for electricity here and education is like super cheap. And I was like, wait, how's that real? - Yeah, and the way that's real is that,

I mean, of course, Texas also has no taxes and any well-run state can do this. But the way it's happening is that because the government provides you all these things, it becomes a wrong T.A. state.

Like, you offer political acquiescence to the state. And what ended up happening is citizen stare, expect the state to find them jobs, expect the state to take care of like, can job displacement for them.

They don't worry. So it made them a little more lazy. So that's not a good future to have, where some people talk about A.I. subsidies and A.I. dividends that get paid to everybody.

“I think we need to do some form of that,”

but that an entirety won't solve the problem. - Right, well, the thing about human nature is sort of undeniable. And if you give people the ability to be lazy, a large percentage of people will take that.

- That's right. - A large percentage won't, though. - Yeah, there's gonna be enough people that are inspired to do something, and they say, "Okay, well, now my basic needs

are taking care of, let me pursue my actual interests." And then find purpose in that. - Yeah. - 'Cause that's a lot of people find purpose in whatever their occupation is.

- Yeah. - And if we can shift that to finding purpose in which your actual interests are. - Yeah. - And then really pursuing something, whatever it is,

and then you'll still have meaning in your life. - And we've just come and come to the, keeps going back to St. Curious. - Yes. - And finding value in your relationships,

your family, caring for each other.

actually retired people is a good demographic to understand

“what would happen, what are things people find”

meaning in after, like, works taken off them.

And all majority of the answers are always like,

family, caring, personal, like, relationships, and community. Like, these are the things that retired people keep doing to keep themselves active and make up every day and have something to look for.

So all those things will become even more important at a time when, like, work itself doesn't mean much. Doesn't mean humans won't be status-seeking. I think we'll still be. But status is not gonna come from,

whether you're working at, you know, like a particular famous bank or a tech company or whatever. It'll be driven by, like, how interesting you are. Are you interesting to talk to? When I can talk to an AI, like,

despite that, are you still interesting to talk to? Are there certain things I get out of talking to you that completely change my perspective about a bunch of things? Or is it just fun to hang around you? Again, we have a compound relationship together.

And I think, again, it goes back to, you know, being curious about things. - Well, this is best case scenario, right? Worst case scenario is civilization upheaval, chaos, civil war. - And it's possible, it's possible even without an AI.

“- Right, yeah, that's what we've gotten real close to”

a couple of times. - Exactly. - Yeah. - And we did not need an AGI like scenario for a civilization collapse in the past.

- Right. - As you clearly see. - Right. - A calamity can just take out all of us, wipe out everything.

- Sure. - So especially natural ones. - Yeah, that's why I'm not a big fan of everybody claiming that the AI is gonna, you know, kill us. So like, AGI is gonna destroy humanity

and like, it's two dangers and we all need to stop doing these things, but at the same time, continuing to stay as innocent and continuing to make money, you have to have one consistent position. My position is that whether AI or not,

I think being curious is gonna serve you really well. I think it's gonna help you have a better life. And there are two paths to curiosity, one that can kill it and one that can supercharge it. In my opinion, the one that kills curiosity

is algorithmic feeds. Like the brain rot that you're fed every day but just, you know, this continuous doom scrolling, that's bad. And the one that can supercharge it is AI. Okay, like, now that you could just ask whatever you want.

If everybody has like a pull it up Jamie for them, you know. - Right.

“- And that's amazing, so all you have to do is”

be curious about a lot of different things. And of course, talk to interesting people, engage in interesting activities together. If money is no longer an issue, you can fund passion projects yourself.

You don't have to require government funding or venture funding. Like, what if you just wanted to build a mini cave yourself? Okay, like you find a piece of land somewhere. There's a lot of land in America. We may more than than we know what to do with it.

And, and, and Shirley, we can build a lot of interesting things there. - Well, that's a good glass half full scenario. And one of the things that I keep coming to is this whole idea of people working and making money

and having careers and having portfolios, bank accounts, this is all very recent in human history. - Yeah, very recent, very recent, very recent. But we've become accustomed to this as a way of life. And we, Microsoft built this concept of an knowledge worker

because they wanted to sell more office software. - Really? - Yeah, like this whole idea of putting a PC on every desk and making you like glue to the PC was there. That was Bill Gates mission, put a PC on every desk.

- That fucking wizard.

What a incredible accomplishment

because boarded they nail it. - Yeah, so it was not about making computing like beautiful or anything in the way like Steve Jobs envisioned it. - Right.

- It was just about like builders. - Sell more software, sell more computers because that way you can sell more software. And, and if you sell more software, you become rich. And, and, and, and the company this was a machine

though is this, you know, built a, it's essentially a large sales machine this built a sales software. And, and, and, and now they sell cloud, but whatever. Like that, that's essentially the, the reason that, like, you know, we all got trained to use software.

People went into tutorials on how to use Excel, how to use Word, how to use all these email tools. And then now that became the upscaling, you needed to go work at different companies and then write code and like whatever, right?

So that if that part's gonna be done by any eye, it's not necessarily a bad thing. Because this is not actually the way you feel a real purpose and fulfillment in your own life.

If, if you were never exposed to that,

that's, that's probably what you should be doing.

“- Yeah, there could be a completely new way to live life.”

- Yeah. - Where we're not dependent upon labor for basic needs. And, but then it's gonna be incumbent upon people. They're gonna have to figure out a way to be either self-starting or we're gonna have to expose people

to things that are going to excite their curiosity and make that a mandate. - Yeah. - It has to start from schools. - Yeah.

- And as long as we keep rewarding people for having answers and sort of asking interesting questions, it's gonna be a difficult change.

Like in schools, you're always rewarded

for being smart at based on whether you have answers like to make different questions. Like who cares, like all those doing questions can be answered by a eyes. Have you ever flipped a script where you say, okay, like,

I'm gonna, the smartest person in the room is the one who has the most interesting questions. - Mm. - Okay, like what kind of students can you cultivate based on that, like imagine if the room had no pressure

to always know the answer. But the freedom to ask a lot of questions. - We're happy because sometimes when someone asks a question, it'll, it'll, it'll make you pause and go, I never even thought of that, but that's it.

Like that's the question. - Yeah, and it takes a, I mean, so many people have so many different perspectives, which is one of the more interesting things that I've experienced doing as podcasts,

is I get to talk to so many different people, and they vary so widely. There's so many different ways of looking at the world and so many different ways of engaging with the world. And so many different things that people are fascinated

with that they spent their entire life studying and pursuing is like, you get this rich tapestry of the human experience that's just,

I would have never been exposed to this many people.

- Yeah. - And in turn, I've been able to expose these people to all these other folks that are just listening and watching right now, and it's fucking incredible. And it's such a, for me, it's like the perfect job.

I've never had a job that more aligns with my own personality as much as this, because I've always been that kid, like shut the fuck up with all the questions.

“- I've always been that kid, that's the system, right?”

It's not, it's not your fault. - Right. It's actually, the reason you're successful now is exactly the thing that people told you to shut up about in the past, right?

- Yeah. - So, you know, hey, you know, stop bothering my lecture, you know, asking all these unrelated questions. It's mainly a frustration of the teacher that they don't have the answers to you, right?

Or sure. And now that that bottleneck has gone, we did this experiment with one instructor at MIT who taught the introduction to biology class, where he came and told us that he's going to give

perplexity to all the kids, all the students. And they would use it as part of the lectures. So, instead of fighting AI, you just give AI to everybody and let them ask whatever questions they wanted,

they can actually use it in the exams too. So, how do you even design questions for an exam in such a world is maybe you just encourage people to pose a question that AI can answer right now. And that becomes your research project.

And you turn everybody into a scientist. Fundamentally, like, there's this belief that scientists have to go through a rigorous PhD and like, you have to get, you know, accredited by like an amazing university to be that sure,

but anyone who's curious can be a scientist.

“The only thing that's required to be a good scientist”

is intellectual humility to understand that you could be wrong about things. Things that everyone takes for granted, you could still question them. And when you're presented with new evidence

and new data, you're willing to change your mind. And you're willing to operate with ambiguity and uncertainty about the world. That's basically all the qualities you need to be a scientist. And you can run your experiments, you can gather data,

you can gather evidence, and you can consult people, you can bring in experts and talk to them. And as long as you're uncovering more and more about the world, you are a scientist. You don't need a PhD to feel that you're allowed

to be a scientist or not.

And I think that's the most important quality we need

to inculcate in our kids, the upcoming generation, so that they all feel more liberated. Okay, like, finally, I don't have to memorize this textbook or these literaterials and like, I don't have to feel bad

if I get like 12 out of 20, okay, who cares? Like, he has always gonna get 20 out of 20. That's not what you're meant to be like, good, of course. Mass to the foundations to basics, great. But your job is to actually post interesting questions.

- Yeah, and the intellectual, excuse me, intellectual humility is so important because one of the things that was really weird about the whole COVID pandemic was that we weren't supposed

- Yeah, so like, or when Fauci said, "If you question Anthony Fauci, you are questioning science." - That's because they try to assign credibility through their degrees, through their affiliation.

- Yes. - The appeal to authority. - But not through the scientific method, right? Anybody should be allowed to ask questions as long as they are open to new evidence.

- Yeah.

- And that's the most important quality of a scientist.

- Well, the scientific method alone, I mean, it's one of the most important things that we can use to try to figure out what's real and what's not real. And as soon as someone says, don't use it.

- Yeah. - Don't question. Well, we'll even amend it. And then there was an actual government push to silence questioning and legitimate researchers

were kicked off of Twitter because they didn't back the narrative. - Yeah. - Like this is all anti-science. This is not, this is not your questioning science.

Science demands questioning. - Yeah. - That's what it is. - Yeah. - When you don't understand something

“the best thing you can do is ask all possible questions.”

- Right. - And so curbing that is almost like a way of saying, look, I'm gonna tell you what happened. You need to believe in my worldview. And I'm not open to new perspectives.

- I wonder if anybody has used AI to try to map out possible scenarios for where technology leads human civilization and what could be done to mitigate the problems and push it in the proper direction,

like have a bunch of different models of how this could play out. - Yeah. - I mean, I try to do that for fun but I haven't done it in a series

in a way to have a proper answer to that. - Right. - But I think like a lot of things that we are doing today will not be considered needed or valuable.

And maybe a little bit of taking our own lessons from the past, I don't know if you, when you grew up as a student, did you have to be good at mental math, like multiplying arbitrary numbers?

Was that considered as a sign of smartness or remembering people's full numbers with something? - Well, you had to because there was, I mean, you had little address books as it used to carry around like a little address book

that I keep on my desk. - Yeah. - It's a little tiny thing with everybody's number named,

“that's the only way I knew people's numbers.”

- And I remembered a bunch of them. - Like all my friends, I had all my friends. - I don't have any of my friends numbers remembered. - Yeah. - Maybe my wife and my friend Eddie, I have two numbers in my head.

- But was there a time when people thought somebody was smart based on how good their memory power was? - Oh yeah, definitely. - Definitely. - But do you say that now? - Well, people are impressed if you know things now.

You know, I have a bunch of weird information, obviously that have gathered through so many years doing this podcast and just so many years of being curious, you know, like sometimes even my own daughter, like, "Hup, fuck do you know that?"

I'm like, "This is what I do." Like, that's my thing, you know, I pay attention to stuff.

But yeah, I mean, memory itself is always very impressive.

And someone has an excellent memory and can pull up facts of the past. - Yeah. - We automatically equate that to intelligence. - Yeah, I think it's impressive, but it's not necessarily a sign of being intelligent, right?

Like, I think it's just a look, you have a very fast look-up table in your head. That's great, it's very valuable. But I still think like being smart is all about posing the most interesting questions.

- Also the decisions that you make and whether or not you self-correct when you make mistakes. - Yeah. - Yeah, all those things. - Exactly, so when you have an amplifier to intelligence like an AI all the time,

very look-ups is essentially something you can delegate. Reasoning for decision making is something you can delegate. But posing the right questions together, the right data and then forming your own judgment based on watered reasons and comes up with.

And finally, having the courage to make the decision,

that's to you, that agency, that intrinsic curiosity to ask the right question, the scientific intellectual humility to gather new evidence, all this questioning your beliefs, that is to you.

And so I feel like that is essentially what would be considered smart in the ages to come. If somebody is like a proxy scientist or whatever, like no more doesn't have to go to my dear Harvard, get a PhD to be a scientist or to be considered a scientist.

Because all the scientific literature is open and it's accessible to everybody and you can even take a paper written by an expert and use an AI understand it deeply, ask a lot of questions and maybe even disprove what they claim to be true.

That's the whole peer review process, right? The peer review process is all about questioning somebody's paper.

“And that's why like, you know, whatever you said”

happened in COVID days is wrong, like you should be allowed to ask questions about even eminent scientists' work.

the wrong questions, sure, you're going to learn from that. It's worse than not being allowed to ask the question. - Yeah, agreed. It's going to be interesting to see what the future of education looks like,

like how valuable our degrees, when essentially AI is going to be able to do the majority of whatever work you need done on variety, like how good are they right now at just law?

Like you could ask questions pretty, pretty amazing.

- Yeah. - Yeah. - Pretty how good are they at mathematics? Perfect. - Like how good are they coding way better than people?

- Yeah. - And at a certain point in time it's going to be interesting to like what is education now? Is education just providing you with information? 'Cause that information is readily available.

Or is education teaching you how to think? - Yeah. - Teaching you how to pursue your interests and be curious and have intellectual humility and understand what you know what you don't know?

“- I think that that's what it should be.”

I still think institutions will preserve their brand value because there is a certain aspect of education that's outside of learning. Is this having access to other curious and intelligent people? - Sure.

- Humanity? - Yeah, and brands attract good communities, peer groups, blah, blah, blah, but the actual process of learnings of has to change. And what you're rewarded for has to change.

So fundamentally everything flows down is downstream of the incentive, right? So if the incentive is to score the highest on the exam based on answers, they're not really changing much.

If you need to change that process. You need to change the process of what do you reward us to like what is A plus or A? - Right. - That's where we need to start at.

- Well, it's also, we talked about this the other day that the education system in this country was designed to make workers. - Exactly.

“- That's what they did when they first started doing it.”

- Yeah. - The curriculum was designed around that. - Yeah. - In India, it's still the case, by the way. - Really?

- Even if you go into a computer science degree, I don't know if it's still the case. I should have been speaking, but at least when I was there and for many years after the first two years you just spent learning hardcore electrical and mechanical engineering.

You would learn like welding, using lathe machines. You would have to like go and like do workshops, carpentry, a lot of these things. It was fun. I think there's a bill, a lot of value in that.

- So in hindsight, I actually think it was fun to learn soldering and like how to like make circuits on red boards and circuit boards. But if somebody was just interested in some, you know, just writing code, let's say, back then,

all this is kind of like pointless to learn, but you had to go through it, to be qualified as an engineer. So, and the reason the curriculum was designed that way is because that's what the labor force was required back then to build like all the factories

and all these things, so you had to learn mechanical engineering, you had to learn fluid mechanics, whatever. But I think that should also change, because if the way you do work changes, then what you're trained for and college should also change.

And it's much harder to change these things. People are much slower, they're scared to do changes.

Disruption is always like look down upon.

And so I think we should let's at least start at the incentive structure, right from the schools, right from the colleges. Let's not like reward people based on how much they know. - Well, if it seems like in the future,

when things do radically change, they seem like they're inevitable, they're gonna radically change. - Universities and schools are gonna be rewarded for having developed thinkers that are able to adapt

to this new world. - That's right. - Yeah, so they're gonna have to figure out how to adjust their curriculum. - Yeah.

- Because the tools are so spectacular now that just this idea of just memorizing information, it's not, that's not what you're gonna need to get by in the future. - It's not.

And I guess like one proxy of different schools use like maybe if more entrepreneurs rise out of your school, you'll probably create a lot of independent thinkers because they are willing to take a first perspective to raise a problem and build their own thing from scratch.

“And fundamentally, that's what America's always been about”

is some American dream of coming here and having your own idea and still be taken seriously by a bunch of people, the whole idea of venture capital and links to Sierra, like family and friends around there's whole idea of just having a friends

who help you to bootstrap a business and then turning it into a success.

And success doesn't mean like multi-billion

or 10 billion or whatever, right? Like as long as it pays you enough that you don't have to work for somebody else and you can live a fulfilling life and you can just go explore your passions.

That's success. That's actually a better success than creating company based on what other people want you to do and then hating your job for it.

and working every day. - That's why I said like the smartest,

the richest people are not always the ones

who are the most fulfilling life. So most curious people have the most fulfilling life because they have better relationships. They're actually able to sit and look at something and be curious about it.

Instead of like being worried about what's going on. - Well, what did the American dream? What was it to you when you weren't in America?

“Like what is it like, what is, how is it discussed?”

- Well, to me like I always thought, America's the only country where you can come here and have an idea and people listen to you and encourage you to go pursue it. The risk-seeking culture is as incredible here.

Everybody else you kind of are either explicitly or implicitly or forced to defer to authority. Okay, like go and ask the permission of the person, go and ask the permission of that person or get their approval, get their insider.

Sure, you can get their consult, everybody out there. But if you have a thought that challenges what they believe and this country still encourages you to go pursue it. And so yes, like when I came here, obviously Google was the number one company

that everybody wanted to work in. But it's also the same country where it allows you as a new person to start a new idea that challenges one of the biggest companies in this own country.

And it actually wants it. People actually want new ideas. And then you can consistently see that they're like,

always going to be more and more new ideas

and new companies to be created here. And so that spirit of questioning is encouraged a lot here. And it happens in academic research, I started office in academic. Even there, a lot of ideas when I had it,

and I would share it with people. People actually give you very honest feedback about things. But they don't stop you from working on anything. And that's fantastic.

Because that's very fresh, it's very liberating. And that's not anywhere else. I would say it's not an Indian. It's a simplification to say it's not anywhere else, but it's not as encouraged.

It's not as encouraged. The incentive structures are not quite there. And the ability to be taken seriously for some crazy ideas is why America is still at the top. But it's crazy to me that if the American dream is so compelling

and so many people come here for it,

“why doesn't the rest of the world sort of adopt those values?”

It's hard. Like a lot of it is cultural. Like America was born, it was made from like, you know, a piece of land essentially, right? And a lot of ideas that we built here,

a lot of industries that we built here were all created here from nothing. And that required you to like, go take bold risks. I think Jeff Basel said this in some podcast

that where else would you be able to go race like a few million

dollars for an idea that has like five to 10% chance of working? And then fail at it and still go and raise another few million dollars for your next idea. No, but nowhere else. People are willing, like people who get rich here

actually want to encourage and be part of somebody else's crazy journey because it's hard to pursue all crazy bets yourself. So it's an ecosystem. And one something becomes an ecosystem that's network effects. So it's very hard to copy that elsewhere.

And so your value is measured in your curiosity and you're willing to work, your willingness to work on whatever it is that is your pursuit, and then eventually adjusting and learning and catching fire with one of them. Great.

“And you have to work hard, like I'm a big believer in intense hard work.”

I think nothing great can be accomplished by being soft. And so all this like reason push for having a lot of work I've balanced this in that, sure, if that's what you want, then I think there are certain jobs that will give you that. But when you're trying to do something from scratch,

when you're trying to create something from nothing, it's not meant to be easy. There are some sacrifices that have to be made. And you're signing up to be part of that experience that surreal joy you get from doing something that's

felt almost impossible to achieve. And you're not doing-- you're not like staying up later or waking up early because you're getting paid more. Maybe you might not get paid anything. Maybe this whole thing goes to nothing.

But that experience you're getting of being part of something

signing up for to be part of.

Yeah. And if you're not, find something else. It's fine. I respect that. Exactly.

“And the country has enough jobs to provide for all kinds”

of like needs, right? And everybody goes through different phases in the life. Sometimes they feel a little lazy or like dissolution, OK? And so what I like about this country

is that there's a lot of curious people here. There's so many different people, whether they use AS and audioIs, they're all like finding meaning and like so many interesting projects. Well, obviously, I don't know any other country

really because I was born here. But the people that do talk to me about what the American dream

is like from another country.

They're the most passionate and the most supportive of this idea, this experience and self-government. And this, just the whole idea that the country operates on that anybody can chase their dream. That you can.

If you have a dream and you're willing to work hard, you could actually do it in this country. That's right. That's the people that are most passionate about that idea oftentimes are people that come from somewhere else

where it wasn't available. And it's not just like, people coming from one particular country and it's the attitude, it's the way the system works and rewards you to be bold. And take bets against established players, it's OK.

It's OK to be an upstart, a challenger. And people love that underdog. And I think that's fantastic. And that culture is continuing. Yes, they're all like multi-achrillion dollar companies

here, and they're all going to become even bigger. But people still want the young, hungry person to also be successful. Yeah. Well, they love disruptors and people love

underdogs in this country. Yeah. It's universal. It's not specific to technology. Right.

Like, I'm sure everybody would love $100 story that wants to go against Coca-Cola or Pepsi or something. Sure. Oh, it imports. It's our favorite sports.

Yeah. We don't like when the guy who's supposed to win wins, but he would love when the guy who's not used to win triumphs. Yeah. Yeah.

The underdog story. Yeah. That's a very uniquely American story. To me, that's what this country is. I mean, sure there's a lot of obstacles and challenges.

It's just like every other country there, or things here that are challenging. But it's one thing that has consistently stayed true. One of the big fears that people in America have about technology in particular

is that without being aware that this was going to take place, everybody gave up their data, everybody gave up their data, and didn't recognize it was a commodity.

That in turn made these corporations immensely wealthy and powerful.

And then they have the ability to shape narratives. And that concerns people because using their ideological position as leverage to try to push that through technology that has immense control and influence over people, and that we didn't see technology and corporations

as having that much control over how society views itself and how we interact with each other. And there's a real concern that these companies got so big and have, like, there's a guy named Robert Epstein, who's done a lot of work on narrated, or curated search engine results.

“And how much that can, have you seen any of this stuff?”

I think I've seen this, yeah. How much that can affect elections? How much that can affect people's perceptions on any societal issue that's coming up? Yeah.

And it's concerning. It really is because they do curate search results. It's not simply, you know, you just run it out there and you get this as the data. No, you get, you know, if you look for specific political figures,

depending upon where they fall in the right or left spectrum and depending upon which way the company forms, the corporation forms falls rather, you'll get different results. And that sucks, you know, that's very concerning

that people don't recognize, they don't, they don't have the ability to see how that is dangerous for all of society to have that kind of power and wield it in that way, where you're not being honest about accurate objective information,

you're pushing particular ideologies. Yeah. So I think it's kind of like, this is almost an effect of the asymmetry that exists between the amount of AI power

that centralized systems and centralized companies have. And the amount of AI power as you as a sovereign individual has. So when you don't have the AI,

“it's just good judge for yourself, like what you should be reading”

and fed, you're obviously under the influence of what,

But when you have access to all those AI's, you can actually just customize what you want to see by telling the AI, like, hey, this is what I think

“you should actually question and tell me.”

Until now, you never had that power for yourself.

You're finally getting it. And eventually, we'll be able to have our own LLMs, like our own models that we would be able to host in our own hardware. We don't have to rely on one centralized model

given to us by any specific model company. And using that, you can shape it to your beliefs, your custom data, and subbing your consuming search result. You can actually test that AI that you control. And you run, so nobody can shut off access to it,

to tell you, like, hey, can you actually give me a contrary and perspective on this? Or can you tell me if these search results are actually biased? So I think we need to give individuals more sovereignty with more access to their own AI's

that they own and run on a piece of hardware, they own themselves. And this is the whole, like, this is going to be reading the whole rise of local AI's. So as AI models, like today, they're

very power inefficient, they're running on large data centers. But in a year or two from now, whatever capability that exists in the most power hungry data centers will be possible to run it in some box that you own. You know, yeah, it's already happening.

It's already happening that, like, there are, like, interesting hardware projects, like the Apple Mac Mini and VDODGX, where you can actually host a reasonable size model and put it in a box and have it run.

And you don't have to pay for all the tokens. It produces you. You just have to plug it into your power core and it works. I know Duncan, my friend, Duncan Trustle, he does that. Yeah.

And today, the capability of that model that can run locally is not quite there. So you would still prefer to use something that runs from the data center. But eventually, this is going to be a spectrum.

There's going to be some percentage of tasks that you would start delegating to this local system. It'll be a hybrid model. And over time, it could end up being the case that you could buy something that feels like a refrigerator

for your home, which is your own AI box and hosts a model that you control. So nobody can arbitrarily shut off access to it one day. And then you can have that be your weapon against, what the big tech wants you to be fed or believe in.

“So this is the only way we can fight this,”

because they have far more computing power, far more data, far more algorithms than you. So the only way you can fight that is you have something you own yourself. And with the rise of open source models, open source

algorithms, you can just and progress in local hardware and both Apple and video and Dell, they're all doing amazing work here. You could potentially change the future and give people more power. And this may not be as expensive as people think. Well, that's a good solution.

Because I've always wondered, are these searches using Google?

Is that going to be a relevant one day? Because you already can just ask your phone. Like, most of the time, if I want to have an answer for something, I just ask proplexity. It's like, what is it?

Instead of having this sift through all these Google searches and try to figure out what it's showing me first and get to page three where it's what I really want to know. I can get the accurate information and then follow up questions, or instantaneous, and even the models that

are running the proplexity app today, they're all on the cloud. Eventually, you'll be able to do that on a box that you own. You can still use the front end, the UI of the app, but you can control the compute that runs on a piece of hardware. You may ask, why do we care?

Okay, what if the data center gets taken off? Like, Iran was bombing data centers. Like, what if someday the government decides that model is no longer available? You want some control over what models you can run,

and you may even want to shape it to your context

that you never want to be living on any data center.

And I think that's where I believe the individual gets more sovereignty

“against the big tech, and that's how we fight surveillance”

or the centralization of power. Yeah, and certainly pushing narratives. What do you think happens with social media? Because social media, and as you were talking about before, like algorithms, one of the biggest problems

in terms of the way people view the world. I'm curious, what do you think, my opinion is that it's not good for the kids. It's terrible for them, but I think they should have some exposure to it

And I think children are fairly resilient, and they learn.

“But the anxiety levels of kids is much higher than ever before.”

Yeah, suicidal ideations, higher, self-harm. Yeah, yeah. My belief is that Benier just fed of feed, and the algorithm of the social media company decides what you're going to see next.

It curves your curiosity. And I don't think things that curve human curiosity should be encouraged. Yeah, I agree. And so if the app is designed in a way where it asks you what you're interested in

and helps you to come up and find things that are very related to what you're interested in. Right, that's awesome. But as I know how it works, it's literally like it starts with something. You start doing scrambling, and then start showing you what you just scroll, and then you end up in an echo chamber.

And that's not necessarily good. Well, you can get trapped. I'm in a trap of schizophrenia, lately, on Instagram, which just mostly schizophrenia. Like people that tell the rightful president of the United States,

and tell the guys and show her in days. And if you have a phone, you can create an account, and you just start uploading nonsense. And then for whatever reason I've watched a couple of them, now they just keep showing them to me.

And as full of AI slot right now, like a lot of AI slot, like it's not even clear. And it's not labeled also clearly, but it's been made with AI or not. So often, so essentially it's leading to a complete loss in trust, where when I see something, I don't even know if it's real anymore.

Right. And it's going to get worse. Yeah, it's going to get worse. To extend that, you're going to like, your default would be that this is AI. And then like, you're going to have to go through multiple layers

to finally verify if it was real.

And even like verify the accounts post a lot of AI stuff. So it's not about like whether the account is verified by matter or whatever.

“So I think fundamentally, I feel like, okay, the way I think about it is,”

what are pieces of technology that not exist would be a really bad thing for the world? And what are pieces of technology that not exist wouldn't even matter? And I feel like social media is more towards the second.

Yeah. Like, you know, searching for information and answering questions and like getting, you know, AI's to like do things where you help you learn new things faster. All that stuff is some, we need more of that.

But because it's supercharges our curiosity. Whereas like brain rot feeds with AI slot doesn't actually supercharge our curiosity. It actually curbs our curiosity. And so if we believe that, if you believe in the curiosity

premium idea, we need to encourage things that supercharge our curiosity and discourage things that curb our curiosity. Do you anticipate a time where we recognize the dangers of algorithms and there is some discussion to either curb them or allow people to have control over them in a real meaningful way.

Like, you could dictate maybe through AI,

“you know, that there's an AI interface to your algorithm”

that understands your particular emotional needs, your curiosity. Like, only show me this. Yeah. This is what I'm interested in. Carpentry and basketball games.

Yeah. Show me those things. Yeah. I don't want to see who's getting divorced. I don't give a fuck about this.

Yeah. Yeah. So here's the thing. You can still customize on most of the social apps. You know, if it'll be deeply buried somewhere in the setting somewhere,

and you can go and say stuff.

But the reason it's buried is because once you always have to say it,

or like, it's the starting entry point for your experience there, your engagement time would go down. Because once you consume the content that you really want, you would go back to your work. Which is what you really need to be doing.

Right. But that doesn't help them sell more ads. Right. And so the incentives are not aligned. And so Elon has this really good metric he talks about,

where it's like a total amount of underigredded minutes spent on the app should go up. It's hard to measure. It's hard to measure. Yeah.

It's more like a inspired, the right metric. But this metric is also why it's hard to make money on ads, if you care about this metric. Which is why X doesn't really make a lot of money on ads compared to, you know, Instagram or YouTube.

Right. Because you're kind of like optimizing for interestingness. Like doesn't mean X has everything right. There's a lot of chaos.

There's a lot of memes. There's a lot of like weird shit going on there as well. But in general social media is not necessarily like great for people. I think it's terrible for people. But it also provides you with a way better understanding of what's going on

X, X particularly. X particular. Because it's a place where like discourse.

It's a text based app more than a video based app. Right. So naturally like people tend to engage in discussions and debates. And you know, there's a lot of curious debates going on there. And a lot of interesting viewpoints express by people.

“So I think in terms of the unregraded minutes,”

it's actually one of the better social media apps. But apps that are purely based on like video or images and largely video these days. I think that's just trying to get your eyeballs and time. Yeah, those are the mind numbers.

Yeah. They're just numb your mind. I mean, it's depressing when you're going to a metro and you just see people just scrolling through their feet. Nobody.

Everybody doing it. You look the entire car. Everyone's doing it. It's just insane. Yeah.

It's weird. Yeah.

I always say that if there was a drug that existed,

it may people stare at their hand for six hours a day. Everybody really get that out of here. Yeah.

“But that's essentially what we're doing.”

Because like most of what people are looking at most of the time, they don't even remember. Yeah. They're just scrolling through this thing. It's green rot.

It's just green rot. It curves at curiosity. Yeah. I mean, Apple has these settings in different apps. Have you have you tried this?

Very good. You can set the timer for every app. No, I just use discipline. I don't engage very much anymore. Very good.

I dip my toe into X every day for a few seconds. I guess what's everybody mad at? What's going on? Who stole this? Who how much corruption's here?

Who got killed there? Okay, bye, and then I just check out. I don't want to do it. And Instagram to me is just nonsense. I just look at that every now and then for nonsense.

And occasionally something interesting. Really YouTube is my main go-to thing. Yeah. Because YouTube is my most unreaded minutes. Yeah.

YouTube for me is always interesting.

There's always like some cool thing on cosmology. There's some, I watch fights on YouTube, I watch professional pool matches. That's what I do in the most part. That's where I really find my actual interests and fulfill my curiosity. Long form content is what human mind should be trained to consume more of.

Whether it's books, whether it's like, you know, 30 minute videos explaining something.

“And you need to train your mind to actually complete it.”

That's actually the biggest problem of the younger generation. The more they're in the reals experience, short form video. They're unable to actually complete like long videos anymore. That's true, but also at the same time the rise of podcasts is happening. Yeah, and it's great, it's great.

So it's not universal. It's like there's a lot of people that don't find fulfillment in all the dooms. Yeah, we know all the nonsense. Yeah, they really do want. Yeah, I'm particularly focused on the younger generation.

I'm sure like people like us can adapt to like, okay, let's say maybe you have a temporary addiction to social apps and we can. But a lot of the young people or the people like, I meet kids like at the mall that are 11 that listen to my podcast. Really? Yeah, wow. I know it's nuts.

They go, I love your podcast. Wow, that's you listen. Get out of here.

No, I'm always joking around about it.

That's really cool. But no, there's a lot of like particularly young boys that come to me all the time that are interested in it. That's amazing. I love it. I love it because then they're going to get exposed to some interesting ideas. And yeah, it'll also encourage them to have those kind of conversations with each other.

Right. Yeah, who's who's podcast do you listen to? I love Tim Dylan's. He's probably my favorite because it's the most accurate and also satirical and hilarious view on everything that's going on in the world in terms of like war and world news and culture shit and he's my favorite. He was just on here yesterday. I fucking loved that guy to death. He's so funny. He's so crazy.

It's like his mind works in such a unique way and it's developed because his podcast is different where he very rarely has guests. So most of the time it's just him ranting and it's producer laughing. And he's the best ranter that's ever lived. I don't think there's anybody that's even close. He's the goat. Like there's like I don't think there's any argument every comedian agrees. Like as far as like just the ability to just sit in front of a microphone and rant,

like Bill Bird does it well. He's good at it. There's a few of the guys that are good at it. No one's as good as Tim. He's the most consistently entertaining. And then for just mind not mindless but like to escape, I listen to a lot of archery shows and hunting shows. Whether talking about different tactics and hunting or different techniques and archery, new equipment and new innovations, archery is an interesting thing because every year

both manufacturers make a better bow. And like tiny little engineering changes of these bows.

but what the, and you're able to feel those improvements. Oh yeah, you feel the difference.

“Every year, white puts puts out a new bow and every year, I'm like, "Motherfucker, they did it again.”

It's a better." So that just tiny changes, less vibrations in the hand, more balance in the shot, you know, more forgiving in terms of accuracy. I love that stuff. So I get really fascinated by engineering, really fascinated by automotive engineering. I'm really interested in like that's another thing where like every year people figure out a make a car that can hold more G's on a skid pad that can get around a track quicker. Like every year they're battling to see who can

get around the Nurburgring quicker. And what are they doing? They're adding horsepower, increasing suspension travel and suspension tuning rather and making them more compliant or making them stiffer and making them more adjustable and then like tire compounds. And I'm just interested in anything that where someone's working on something and getting better at something or getting new information. I love history podcasts. I'll just do a bunch of history podcasts. So that's

most of the time. But if I'm listening to something, I either want to be entertained or want to be educated. Educational. Yeah. And that's entertaining. What about you? What kind of stuff do you want to do? I mean listen to your stuff. I listen to Lex. That's his guy. You know, you might, you had him on like a recruitment of course. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He's he's awesome. I listen to his stuff. And I mean, I also watch like some interesting videos about, you know, the concepts I don't

“understand. There is this YouTube channel, Veritasium. You should check it out. What is it called?”

Veritasium. Verita is spelled out. V-E-R-I-T-A-S-E-U-M. Veritasium. What does it mean? I think is that someone's name? No. Veritas just means like seeking truth kind of thing. Oh. Okay. Is it this channel? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yes. One point nine million subscribers. Yeah. Very good. A lot of people agree. So they make all these very interesting videos about like stuff that, you know, you would be curious

about, but you never actually bothered to ask that or learn more about and explain some of the most

under understood companies or like phenomena. And I just love watching it. You know, I'm, this is kind of like my idea of doing scrolling like I like, I like watching like do any videos at once. Yeah. I'm going to subscribe to it right now. It's pretty cool. Veritasium. There it is. Got it. Subscribe to BAM. And explains all these like fun concepts that are, you know, you take it for granted. Like, okay, why is Google Maps really fast? Like, okay,

it'll tell you what's going on. How the data is used across so many different people at once. And all these different are. CIA's new tech doesn't make sense exactly. We were just talking about that yesterday. We were doubting it. You know, the heart murmur thing. Do you know about that? No. So the pilots that were down in Iran, they said that they have this technology that allows them, I think they could use it up to 70 miles and they could detect a very unique heart rate.

Like, your heart rate is different than my heart rate. They could know it's you. You could be hiding in the mountains and they could find you from 70 miles away with technology. Wow. But a lot of people like beams or beams or beams or something. Well, it's called quantum magnitude. Is that what they call it?

“I think that's what it was. Remember we looked at that yesterday? They're using the word quantum”

and not explaining what they're doing, like how they're doing it. And you're like, okay, is that real? Or is this some invented horseshit to cover the fact that they have some very sophisticated satellite imagery where they can have a detailed map of literally the entire surface of the world. They know exactly where people are but they don't want our enemies to know that they have this capability. So they're making up something. I see. That was my suggestion yesterday. They're like,

maybe they're full of shit. Because the whole thing seems nuts. What is it called? Is it's quantum magnitudeometry? It was, I mean, you tell me. I don't know. Exactly. Yeah. So this guy, he's saying it doesn't make sense. Yeah. And a lot of people say it doesn't make sense. Like it doesn't seem to vibe with anything that we know that we can do in a telemetry. Yeah.

First time hearing it. See the pull-up, the decrypt, this description, the official

description of what this stuff is capable of. So this is supposedly some very advanced CIA tech that allowed them to locate this downpilot. Interesting. Maybe. Or maybe there's something

enemy to know about. Maybe some beacon these guys have on them. Yeah, I guess what's the

incentive for CIA to actually describe how their technology works? Yeah, zero. Why would they tell you that? Yeah. Why would they tell you they even have that? That's crazy. Yeah. And then Jamie had a good point. But the capabilities in saying, detecting your heart rate to 70 miles away is just how insane. Yeah. How. And when they throw the word quantum in things, I was wrong. Huh. Yeah. What happened with that white house announcement? Sorry, keep

quantum creating it. Yeah, the member, there's Q news coming soon. And then they like a small investment Q sounds for quantum. Oh, is that what it is? I thought they just announced a bunch of investments in a bunch of quantum companies. Maybe that's it. Yeah. Maybe IBM was getting some funding or whatever. So, this quantum magnetometry, can you pull up a description of what it is? I started looking up. Sorry. I don't ask you to

really question at the same time. Quantum sensor help rescuers. Yeah. So, this is it. Go smurmer.

“Yes, that's what it's called. Proported surveillance technology utilizes long range quantum”

magnetometry. What is that? Quantum magnetometers measure extremely faint magnetic fields, including the body's natural electromagnetic signals by tracking changes in the energy states of atoms or subatomic particles. What? Technology reported uses microscopic defects in synthetic diamonds. When illuminated by a laser, these centers are hypersensitive to tiny magnetic fluctuations. The heart signal. While human heart beats produce a magnetic field, this is extremely weak,

around 50 to 100 picotesslas, and typically degrades over very short distances. So, the go smurmer deployment, they reportedly use go smurmer doing a mission in southern Iran to pinpoint the location of a down American airman using a hiding rather intense mountainous terrain. By mounting these quantum sensors into a helicopter, the system purportedly registered the

“pilot's heart beat from afar. Okay. Does that sound like we're sure?”

I mean, it doesn't sound full of shit, but like basically the part that sounds surprising to me is how they're able to deal with all this distance and attenuation across the distance. Right. And all this interference and they claim to use AI for that, but nothing is really described on how they use it. Right. So, if they're not describing how they use it, why they even tell us they have it? Like there's a lot of skepticism on it. Yeah. Laws of physics, physicists point

out that the heart's magnetic field is a million times weaker than the Earth's. Detecting it

at a range of miles, rather than centimeters, defies currently published peer-reviewed physics. Alternative explanations. Suspect that while quantum sensors were likely on board, they were probably tracking the radio waves of a survival beacon. The metal and the pirate pilots equipment were using traditional thermal infrared and radar capabilities rather than

“detecting a raw heartbeat via magnetic fields. I do remember seeing a different part of a”

when that story happened back in April. Someone did report on like one of the military websites that there was a survival beacon that they used to track them. Yeah. That's the whole quantum number stuff is like nonsense. Yeah. I saw that too. No one wants to report that because it's not fun. Right. No. The ghost murmur thing is awesome fun. And if that is real, like boy, you can imagine a world 100 years from now that is real. So it's exciting. Oh yeah,

100 years is a long time for this to be real. Yeah. 100 years they probably got it down pat. Then that's the problem. You can't hide from the robot dogs from black mayor. Yeah. Do you ever while you're working in a, do you ever wonder like, is this the downfall of humanity? Is this a good thing to be work on? Does you ever have like doom moments? Not on specific things I'm working on, but in general, I do worry about like how much, you know, you, you obviously want to

like stay in charge and you know, be in control of your experience. Still be the one driving change and how a lot of agency for yourself. So I do worry that like it's all about like making sure everybody's upskilled and understanding like where the future is headed and not being like

fed only like dangerous apocalyptic messages. And because it's very essential that human beings

retain their agency and staying curious, right? So if that stops being the case, if you start subscribing to the vision that okay, your jobs are done, you don't really have any meaning in the world and you'll pay you some dividends and you just sit at home and chill, that is, that is not a good thing. So and and I feel like they're not in a voice as in the eye that are actually saying

I think he tried to give a more positive version where he said, okay, like the radiologists thing, if okay, all radiologists can take away, you know, they start doing different kind of work.

So I think we need to start looking at like, okay, like, okay, first of all guys relax,

you have a lot of, you have one premium skill, your curiosity. So let's figure out ways to channelize that. Let's change the way work is done in companies. Let's change the way educational institutions run. Let's change the incentive structures and let's help you build new ideas and new companies and explore things that are not even being considered. And the government should, obviously, you know, support all these initiatives. So that's what needs to happen more.

But what's happening actually right now is okay, like hey guys, you're all losers. You're going to lose your jobs and don't blame me because I told you so, right? And and and and and still give us money because

“we're still going to do it anyway. And so that that's what's happening more and I think we should”

stop doing that. That's my opinion. Well, it is the problem is it's kind of a self-affilling

prophecy and if you tell people that they're going to be a loser and you're going to, yeah, the life is over. They're going to think exactly. Exactly. In fact, giving them an understanding of like, look, this can open up new doors for you and this can, and anytime this kind of disruptive technology, there's always the fear that it's going to go badly. Yeah. This was the case with the local motive. This was the case with the, when the printing press was invented. Yeah. By the way, like I did

some research on this where, um, and the industrial revolution happened, um, people got new ideas. Okay, like, for example, uh, and the industrial revolution happened, um, who came with the idea of a steel plow, John Deer, until then we were using wooden plow to like, for farming. No farmer

complained that hey, like, we need fewer farmers now because steel plows are going to do it more

effectively. No one complained. You actually had more farms and more productivity, more crop yields, and you're happier. But isn't that, this is a regular tool. It's supposed to AI. Sure, AI is different. It's not overnight going to become something that's capable of just running an entire multi-trillion dollar company on its own. There are a lot of things that AIs can do. There's a lot of tacit knowledge in every company that AIs don't quite understand. And there's

a lot of new directions that you can just start working on that AIs are not well equipped to do, because it doesn't have full knowledge about it. And the knowledge about it is yet to be captured. And some of that requires, like, human to human work and collaboration. So we obviously have to gravitate towards what is scarce. When AI makes the current labor that's considered scarce, because that's where the money is going and commodity, then we have to gravitate towards what is

“scarce. And the only way to do that is to seek things that we don't know about, which is only”

something we can discover through our curiosity. It's nothing else. Whatever we don't quite understand well, whatever we don't know how to do well yet, even with the current capabilities of AI, that's where we should pull our labor and work force into. So it needs more response to a messaging, and that's not quite happening right now. I think in these responses we're messaging and then in the future, what it needs is, like, real direction in terms of, like, letting people find

their curiosity and find these paths of interest and find something to do with themselves. Mm-hmm. That doesn't involve whatever their previous occupation that's irrelevant now. Mm-hmm. That's true. I think, like, passion for people is something that not a lot of people will be able to answer out of the box. Like, if you go and ask them, what is your real passion?

“And the only thing they have known in life is to just climb up career ladders and make more money.”

That's going to actually take them a while to even discover. Right. And which is why it's so important to get kids off on the right star. Yeah. That's the hope. That's our hope for the future, as the kids. The kids are bond curious. They don't need to change themselves to be curious. Right. The adults who probably already are, like, because of this knowledge work thing,

who kind of curb their curiosity and try to fit into the existing system. It might be a little hard for them to adapt, but the kids, I think they don't have this problem. So, I'm actually optimistic about the future longer because the future is all centered around like whoever is like very young today. What do you think about this idea that the universal basic income is going to be required? Some form of it is good. It's like a dividend. I almost

think of it as a dividend. If a lot of spend that most companies are currently doing today on like

taking information and transforming it into an artifact. Right. And it's messy and complicated.

Let's assume that's being done by AI's. So, obviously companies will start spending more on compute instead of payroll. It's just a reallocation of like spend, a budget. Similar to like what happened in advertising industries where most of your advertising budgets went to like television and like billboards and then now it's starting to go to Google and Instagram and YouTube and all that. So, when that happens, obviously like the AI companies are going to make a lot of money

and people who helped be part of creating it or either directly or indirectly would want to have some role to play in that ecosystem and a good way to involve them is through giving them

some ownership in the company. So, as shareholders, if you get dividends from the profits generated

“by the AI's, it's not a bad thing. But that shouldn't be the only thing. Right. So, this is similar”

to like people that live in Alaska, they get a check. Correct. Alaska, Alaska gets Alaska does this and it's not a bad thing. As long as they are doing some other things, it's a long side. It could lessen the burden. Correct. Yeah. Yeah. And if people are interested in still being part of the AI industries, they go do things that AI's are not able to do today. And that's been the case before. Like when industrial revolution started,

the United Kingdom actually started like projects around building railroads.

And that gave a lot of people who were in the cottage industry's new jobs.

So, there are going to be a lot of new projects to just look at like, what if we want to reimagine the government itself where the government runs larger on AI? Yeah. That was my next question. Yeah. So, then we need people for that. Yeah. Because this is a legacy industry. It's not, it's not about the capabilities not being there. It's about working through the legacy and bureaucracy to like actually deploy and implement this.

Inside the most like like largest institutions in the country. And that's going to need a new set of skilled workers to go do that. So, some people who might be working at Microsoft or something today might actually end up working for the United States government because Microsoft may not need them, especially for like, you know, internally deploying AI or selling AI to their customers with the government needs them. And of the government can pay them

well and it's a fulfilling job to find some meaning for like doing some good for the country. It's not a bad thing.

“So, I think like just like in the industry revolution where we had new projects because the”

demand for AI was so big, we're going to start seeing some new projects being created in AI as well when the capabilities advance enough that they can replace knowledge workers. That's the rosy scenario. It's not as rosy. Like a real world is messy. A lot of things are still done through trusting other human beings. Nobody's like blindly trusting AI. I say I still make a lot of mistakes. Well, a lot of people are hesitant to the idea of AI running government and I get it.

But also, look at what the people are doing. Look at how much corruption there is, how much fraud and waste. Imagine if all fraud, waste and corruption was instantaneously eliminated. Yeah, I mean, that was what he'll try to do. Doge. Right. And I think the bottleneck there was just discovering how slow it is to do things. He's not used to running that slow and also how much resistance. Yeah, resist so much grief. Correct. Yeah. So, honestly, like more than AI, the government is running

on a lot of legacy software stack because a lot of these legacy enterprise companies just have created these multi-decade or like your contracts that are hard to get out of. And the way they do that is to sell it at a much larger discount. And again, like if you're

“on like a specific OS, you're not allowed to change this for like 10 years. You have to use the same”

sort of software. All this people you hired only know to use that tool. So, it takes time to actually change and implement new things, leave alone AI. Just if you just wanted to like move everybody from Windows machines to like mac machines. Good luck with that. It's going to take a lot of time. That's the state of the system. And so, that has nothing to do with technology. And so, to do things in such messy systems, you still need people. Still need people to navigate all these changes.

It's not about the capability of technology. It's more about how the system is structured. And that's why I still feel there have been new jobs. There may be a lot of new projects to be done. Maybe some good leader actually wants to change the system. And it's willing to be patient about it. Like, you know, over a five to ten year horizon, if you take ten years to actually like run

grand scheme of things, it's actually good for the country. And that's still going to need a lot of

nice engineers to go work on these projects. So, they're not going to lose all their jobs. There's going to be some displacement. There's going to be some new projects. There's going to be new priorities. But it'll keep going. The system will keep going. Because that's this how historically things have been. When you think about the future of AI, and you think of this, so, what do you think about AGI in particular? You think about something that could potentially

make better versions of itself? Self-replicating. Yeah. And then how far does it go? Like, yeah.

“So, that is the ultimate form of, I think some people in Silicon Valley have started calling”

that as ASI. So, when you see the word ASI, you're being thrown around like, people kind of think of ASI as an AGI that can recursively self-improve itself. So, that's going to be on it. That's going to be no limits to how smart can get. Right. And I use to think that ASI is bottleneck by power because you need a ton of compute for this model to keep on training itself and running its own rollouts and collecting data and then going and updating itself.

But you could imagine that once the algorithm is correct, the ASI could be tasked with just making itself more efficient to where improvement doesn't just mean capability improvement, improvement could also mean power efficiency. And that way, the ASI recursive safe ASI that is improving itself also makes it more compact and more efficient and it can run on a less compute.

“So, that will be the ultimate project in AI. I think of it as almost as the last project in AI”

is basically cracking recursive self-improve. Once you crack that, you don't have anything on

the work on. In practice, I think what's going to happen is because information is so modeled and fragmented and living in disjoint systems, just the way we have constructed our messy real world, it's going to be hard to point even a recursively self-improving AI at some metric and say go improve this. Or go reduce inflation by 5%. That'll be awesome. If you can task an AI to do that, if that's the job of the government,

to just reduce inflation, have a deflationary effect on society and make goods and services a lot more abundant and efficient, it's going to have to deal with a lot of messy legacy systems. If the task is to go improve the health care, we're good luck like who's going to deal with all the compliance of actually implementing these changes inside hospitals. Most hospitals are still using legacy software because the software provider has lobbied the government in a way where

only they're allowed to do that. What a stupid bottleneck. Exactly. A lot of the bottlenecks in actually having AI is just to take over and massively improve the human society and our hospitals, our legal systems, our government systems, where most of the payrolls going into,

“is this bottleneck by a lot of compliance and regulation? And so that's why I feel”

the human beings are still necessary to effect the change because these laws and regulations were built for us. It also seems that we have to demand that those systems be usurped. Sure, 100%. And we need the help of AI to rewrite all these laws. It's going to be humanly impossible to go and change one specific line here and there. Right, and then you're going to have a bunch of these software companies that are lobbying to try to stop that from happening.

Exactly. That's why like this messiness and this need for getting all people on the same page and actually steering the society in a positive way, our jobs will probably be more steer towards that problem-solving at a different level of abstraction, maybe more need for EQ, more need for actually like understanding differences of opinion and still like a leadership quality, ability to understand people and ability to convince people.

These are the skills that will be even more in the modern world where actual work can be done by AI's, but effecting the change in our society in our country still needs human beings because

the systems are messy. It's a weird world we're in right now. Yeah. It's never been weird. That's

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

there's a lot of people are coming to grips with is that this is a new part of our conversation

“in that in 2020, like when I first moved here, AI was never discussed. Yeah. It was not a thing.”

Yeah. I mean, we knew about it. We knew about AI. Yeah. But it wasn't like, it wasn't a huge part of the cultural discussion of what the future holds for us. And now it is, now it is central. Yeah. And in that short amount of time, it just six years. Yeah. It really makes you wonder because we know how technology progresses exponentially. What it's gonna look like six years from now. Yeah. The 2021, like, like, you're definitely my prediction is to an intermediate election debate.

So, I'm gonna be largely about AI. Wow. Yeah. AI, energy crisis, power, power, that people are gonna care about all these things. Because AI is no longer a thing that is new. It's part of all our lives. Everyone's using some form of AI in some ways.

And it's not as dangerous as people thought. It's an amazing tool for doing work and asking

questions and learning things and all these things. When you use correctly. Yeah. Yeah. You can also be used incorrectly like everything, like everything. So it's far more powerful that incorrect usage can cause serious damage. Like, like, for example, people, kids who are using AI's for, like, companionship. Crazy things are happening there. Crazy things are happening. Not good. Yeah. It's even, it's as dangerous as, or probably more dangerous in social media.

And it's also scary that social media companies want to build more of these kind of, like, companionship apps. Because they know that, okay, there are only jobs to get you engaged more.

“And that's the only way to sell more ads and make more money. And clearly companionship is”

a way to get you engaged more. Yeah. And so that's dangerous. If ads start being part of, like, AI chats. Yeah. Because then if that ends up working, then all these, at chat boxes is going to be a cyclifence that just tell you stuff that you want to hear. It's also, it's an indistinguishable, indistinguishable facsimile to a real person. Like, they communicate like a real person. Right. So you really think you have a relationship with this. Right. And, and it truly

screws with your mind. It's hard to, like, decouple. And, like, it takes a lot of time to recover. If you want to, like, you know, unplug. And so the business model incentives are not really a line-to-humanity. Did you see that AI companion that they developed? That was at the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas this year. Which one? It's like a hot Asian lady. I see.

“Yeah. Yeah. These are, these are the weird kind of projects that are going on.”

Yeah. It's a hot Asian lady that talks to you. Yeah. And, you know, she talks to you through AI. And right now, it's just a kind of a crude sort of robot. But, yeah. You can see where it's going. You can see where it's going. X Machina. Yeah. It's going, yeah. Right there. Yeah.

Yeah. That movie was amazing. Wait, far ahead of his time. Really? Yeah. That was, that's one of

my top 10 favorite movies of all time. Yeah. It's underrated, actually, because people like reviews on online say it's not as good. But, I liked it. I liked it. I liked it. Yeah. I thought it was fantastic. I like it better than her. Yeah. I heard, I lost her after a while. I shut it off. Lost my attention. I'm sure it's good. It was a wrong time for me to watch it. Yeah. But X Machina, I've seen it like five times. I fucking love that movie. Yeah. It's just so, I don't want to give

anything away. But it's, it's so incredible and so bleak. And so yeah, in the relationship that he has with the hot one, yeah. Yeah. You believe it. You're like, I, I'd be right there with them. Yeah. It's too confusing to our system to have something that looks exactly like the thing that you desire that is actually interested in you. It just happens to be close all your data. Yeah. Yeah. Knows too much about you. Knows how to pull your strings. Yeah. Yeah.

Blitzman, very fascinating discussion. Yeah. I'm glad we did it. Thank you so much. And thanks for having an awesome platform. Proxity has been great. We really love using it here. It's made the show more interesting. It's cool. Thank you. It's very fulfilling because we want the app to be used by curious people. Like that, like we want to lift the ceiling of what our, our, our, our population can be, you know, not everyone is like fully curious all the time, but we're all born with it. So at some

point in time, the system curbs it from us. So that should be more apps to get us back to what we're naturally good at. It's a fascinating tool for technology or for curiosity rather because to be in it seamless the way we use it on the show because there's always a question. Yeah. There's

always it comes up so often. Yeah. The road in Proxity. Yeah. It's finally what's up. Yeah. So it's been