Latest / Love Conquers Fear / #57: Why AI Responsibility Is the New Human and Civil Rights Issue — Chris Hyams

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#57: Why AI Responsibility Is the New Human and Civil Rights Issue — Chris Hyams · Love Conquers Fear

0:00
Hey everyone, I am so excited to hold in my hands the first print
0:05
proof of Love Conquer Sphere. Thank you so much for all the
0:08
love you give for the Love Conquer Sphere podcast.
0:11
A lot of that is baked into this book.
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This is the last print before it goes to hardcover.
0:19
It's got just a beautiful jacket.
0:21
You can see the phoenix rising. And I really put my heart and
0:26
soul into this book to help humanity have a global heart
0:30
shift. So we make it through this
0:32
exponential of exponential curves to that age of abundance
0:36
for all. You can pre-order the book now
0:39
at loveconquersfear.org. It's available on all of the
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popular platforms. I really hope that you support
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this work and pass it on so that we can have that heart shift
0:52
that we all need to make it to that incredible age.
0:54
And I just want to thank you from the bottom of my heart.
0:58
My work basically, and, and the course is a core part of that,
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is that I believe that AI is the civil rights and human rights
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issue of our lifetime, given the power that it holds either to
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make so many things better than they have been or to make them
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worse. I think the fundamental dividing
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line between going towards the positive and going towards the
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negative is power. I have deep, deep concern about
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essentially every single problem that I think are the significant
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problems facing humanity. Wealth inequity, criminal
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justice system, housing, education, healthcare, climate.
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All of those things are going to be dramatically impacted by AI.
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Welcome back everybody to the Love Conquers Fear podcast.
1:46
I hope you enjoyed the last episode with Rachel Woods.
1:49
She created the term AI operations and it was super fun
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flowing with her. And this is a really beautiful
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week for the podcast. I'm so happy that that I have a
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very good friend who has agreed to come on the podcast and he is
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teaching a course on AI responsibility at Houston
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Tillotson University. And we're really going to unpack
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that today and to talk about what is our path to make it to
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the age abundance for all in a responsible way.
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And since the beginning of this podcast, I've said for all, and
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I literally mean for all, you know, personified it with the
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Uber driver Calabu, who picked me up here at our house 4:30 in
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the morning. We're just having an amazing,
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amazing conversation. And he is a living the American
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dream from his vantage point. You know, he comes from a
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country in Chad where the GDP is $660 a person.
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Our GDP here is 86,000 a person. They don't have things like
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stable electricity, clean water, you know, stable clean water,
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access to the type of food abundance we have here, access
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to the type of healthcare we have here.
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And doesn't mean that everybody in America has that.
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There are a lot of people in America who are really suffering
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from poverty. And if you missed the episode
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with Brian Hubbard, episode 53 of the podcast, he's the CEO of
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the Americans for I Began Initiative.
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His cause for that actually started with the opioid crisis
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in Kentucky, which is really ravaged communities all over
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America in this kind of pharmaceutical complex to really
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create economic incentives for people to suffer.
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And we saw what happened with the Sacklers, etcetera.
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So this is a really important episode, a really important
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topic, and I'm very happy to have Chris Himes here, who is
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the long time CEO of Indeed. And you left recently to really
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focus on this. And you know, I decided when
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dated out world was acquired on 7/7 to not go to ServiceNow
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specifically so I could focus on what I'm doing with Love
4:20
Conquers Fear. So we're both on this mission to
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hopefully have humanity both land the plane to get to the
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other side of what we both see is this exponential of
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exponential curve. But also have the plane take off
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as we create a beloved community around the world, realizing
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we're 99.9% genetically identical and realize the
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divinity within us all and have this future of abundance for
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all. I don't think there's any other
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option for us to do it in any stable manner, any lasting
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durable manner for humanity if it's not for all.
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I want to, I want to start out with giving you gratitude
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because you may remember, you know, I was leaving Core Metrics
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to start a company called Bizarre Voice.
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And you were so kind to reach out to me.
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I'd send an e-mail to the Bootstrap Austin group, which at
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that time was kind of like the original kind of, you know,
5:26
entrepreneurial gathering. And I'd moved back with my wife
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Deborah, from San Francisco. I'd been there for four years.
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And I said, I'm looking for an incredible VP of engineering.
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And you wrote me this e-mail and you said, well, you are in luck,
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my friend. And you introduced me to Paul
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Rogers, and Paul became the first CTO of Bizarre Voice.
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It was a very sad day when he left, but he was there.
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He was there for a good, you know, three, 3 1/2 years.
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And Oh my gosh, that was one of the greatest gifts anybody has
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ever given me. Paul just absolutely did an
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incredible job building the engineering team there.
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And I just want to thank you for that because that was a very
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selfless act. You know, you didn't even really
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know me back then. And it led to a great outcome
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with with bizarre voice. You know, it's all, it's all
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that initial team that you start with, It's really going to
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determine the fate of the company.
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Yeah. Well, first of all, thank you
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for having me here. I'm really excited to to get to
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have this conversation with you today.
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But also just in terms of introducing Paul, you know, I
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have to thank you also for creating a home for a group of
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people who I worked very closely with at Trilogy who are all not
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just extraordinary technologist, but I think extraordinary humans
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as well and absolutely in bizarre voice.
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And then again at data dot world you created, you know what I
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think are two of the best engineering teams Austin has
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ever had. Maybe I hope I hope that there
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are better ones in the future. But they were both really
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amazing places. Paul was.
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The reason I made the introduction is that he was
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ready for something new and to find a good home for someone
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that you love, who you know has so much to offer.
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That and then Paul bringing all the people who came over with
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him and that. You brought on board.
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If you if you do this, as long as the two of us have, you just
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want to see those people go on to do something great.
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And so, so thanks for for creating that for, for.
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All thank you, that means a lot to me for you to say that.
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And you know, I know you're wired the same way this way, but
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the greatest joy I have in starting companies truly is
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seeing how well the people do. And you know, they're now over
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70 companies have been started by former observer voice people,
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which is incredible. And the biggest compliment they
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can give me is, you know, they're they're taking that same
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great culture into their company and always say, well, that makes
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sense because you were a part of making it great.
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You were you were a big part of the input into that culture.
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You know, you know, as Aceo, you've been the CEO of indeed
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for a long time. You know, you get a lot of over
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the top credit that really it's the entire team doing it
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together. So I'm just constantly reminding
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people of that. You know, I would love to dig.
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And I I first of all, I just want to say I absolutely love
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what you're doing at Houston Tillotson.
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I'm a big Houston Tillotson fan. It's it's amazing that we have
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this university in Austin that is actually older than UT
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Austin. I'm embarrassed to say, and
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I've, I've said this publicly many times that I did not know
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of Houston Tillotson. You know, I was born and raised
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here, was born in 1972, literally did not even know it
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existed until I got to meet the CEO at the time.
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And Heather Bruner was. Colette Pierce, Brunette, Dr.
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Burnett. Yeah, she's amazing.
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And now the now Melba's there as the as the president.
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But but Colette, you know Heather Bruner, who we both know
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who was the CEO of bizarre voice.
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She was like, I'm going to take a group of tech people and we're
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going to go into Houston Tillotson really, really get
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network there. And and that was that was the
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first time where I started to learn about it.
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And it's just so cool that it's here and so-called that you
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chose Houston Tillotson as as the foundation for building this
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AI responsibility course. But as you look back at your
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your life arc, you know, we go from the young Chris to the
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Chris today who's become, you know, super successful CEO who
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is now doing this. Like, why do you why do you
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think you're doing what you're doing today?
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And how does it connect? How did the dot You know the
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Steve Jobs thing? How does?
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How did the dots connect in reverse?
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Yeah, so I technology attracts all kinds of people and so there
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is no like one story of this is how people in tech get there.
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But my path was definitely not a direct one.
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I mean, I was sort of math and physics geek growing up, but by
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the time I got to college, I sort of hard pivoted into all
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humanities and, and arts and, and then didn't come back to
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this field until I was 26 years old.
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And so I, I did not like you start coding when I was, you
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know, in seven years elementary school and then sort of, you
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know, build companies along the way.
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I I used. To my mom, by the way, you know
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the story. Yeah.
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I wish you learned how to program with.
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It's, it's an amazing story. And so I, I'd always, I first
10:54
arrived as somewhat of A at least feeling like an outsider
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and a little bit of an alien because I had all these other
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sort of, and I'll get into it sort of more kind of deeply
11:06
human experiences and then came to tack and sort of always
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viewed myself as a little bit different than everyone else
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because I was, I was almost 30. I was married with one kid,
11:16
another kid on the way and sort of saw the, the human and the
11:23
tech side together. And my whole career has been
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sort of from that perspective. And So what I've seen first
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with, you know, the Internet, I, I went to grad school in 1993 to
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study computer science, which was the year Mosaic came out.
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It was the year that the one point O kernel of, of Linux came
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out. It was, you know, the Java and
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Amazon, you know, all launched within the sort of three years
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that I was in school. And we've seen a 30 year massive
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societal change that's come as a result of that.
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But I've, I've always been interested in the human side of,
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of technology. And so what's happening with the
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AI it this is not like a new thing, other than the fact that
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the acceleration we've seen in the last few years, we can also
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get into that has made this feel more urgent.
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But but to sort of back up, I guess on on the human side.
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So probably the most important fact in my life is that I'm a
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recovering drug addict and alcoholic.
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I got sober when I was 20 years old.
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So the majority of I'm 58 now. So most of my life has been
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spent in recovery, but it was, you know, as much as anyone who
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goes through a a really profound sort of physical, emotional,
12:50
psychological experience now that impacts you.
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You know, I did not grow up with trauma.
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I did not grow up, you know, with, with abuse.
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Those can be contributing factors to addiction, but I was
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just sort of born differently with a, with a different, you
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know, psychological and emotional and and physical make
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up than than others. And I mean.
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It's also genetic, right? I mean, yeah.
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So John Mackey has always told me it's more a genetic issue,
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that there's just something in your brain that doesn't stop you
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from having too many. Drugs, the mental model I think
13:31
that many people have is that it is, it is sort of a two-part or
13:37
depending on if you want to say three-part, there's a spiritual
13:39
component to it as well, but it's a, there's a physical thing
13:42
which for most addicts and Alcoholics, there's this concept
13:47
of the phenomenon of craving. Once you, once I ingest, if you
13:51
and I sat down, if you had a, a shot of tequila and I had a shot
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of tequila, you know, you might sort of feel a little bit calm,
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you might feel a little bit maybe woozy.
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For me, instantaneously, it creates a desire for more.
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And once I start, I can't stop. Now I might have a few, but I
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might also wake up in jail in Mexico and have no idea what I
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mean. Like I literally I, I have no
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control once there's anything in me.
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And if it was just a physical thing, like if you are allergic
14:25
to nuts, just don't eat nuts, you're fine.
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So the other problem that addicts have though is the sort
14:33
of the psychological side, which is that despite all of the
14:38
evidence of everything that's happened before, I am convinced
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that, well, this next time it's going to be a little different.
14:45
Maybe it maybe if it's vodka and not tequila or maybe if I smoke
14:49
a little weed before, you know, whatever those things are.
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And it's those two combinations that that cause the the problem
14:55
for us. And so, you know, in my case, I
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got was a junior in college. I was arrested on felony drug
15:01
charges. I was facing 20 years in prison
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and actually could not stop at that point.
15:07
And so normally people who end up having the moment of clarity
15:12
that is necessary usually for, for people to, to change and,
15:17
and, and get sober, it typically comes not because you're using a
15:23
lot and things are going badly. It's when you try to stop, you
15:26
realize you can't. And so I actually got arrested
15:29
and I was placed in a pretrial intervention program and told
15:34
that I was going to be drug tested randomly.
15:36
And if I had a single positive test, I was going straight to
15:39
prison for 20 years and I could not stay sober then.
15:42
And I, I never got tested. And it's only because of that
15:47
fact that I'm didn't spend a couple decades in prison and let
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my life go very, very different way.
15:55
But so then, then I got sober at 20 and my life took a a
15:59
completely different turn. And having been through that
16:02
experience, one of the foundations and I've, I've done
16:06
decades and decades of, of therapy and group work and, and
16:10
recovery is an, is an active thing.
16:13
It's not AI got sober and I'm done.
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It is, it is still the most important component of, of who I
16:20
am and, and how I live my life and how I see my, my role in the
16:23
world. And a big part of that is I very
16:26
clear that I received something that was, that was a gift.
16:31
Regardless of, of how you look at that, there are millions and
16:34
millions of people who suffer from the same disease that I
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did, right? Who might want or even need that
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change more and who can't get it.
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And, you know, we talked about, and we'll probably also get into
16:47
the awakening thing. You know, something, something
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happened to me and something happens to everyone who is able
16:51
to get sober that I was able to see in a moment, right?
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That the nature of, of my reality.
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And that actually the thing that I thought was my solution was
17:00
the source of the problem. I got that.
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And as a result, then the way to keep it in most models of
17:07
recovery is you have to give it away.
17:11
And so I've spent the last decades of my life really as my
17:16
primary purpose is to, is to be useful and helpful to others.
17:22
And that is, you know, that can happen on a large scale through
17:25
work, but actually, most importantly, it happens
17:28
one-on-one. I've spent years volunteering
17:33
and, and bringing practices into people who are incarcerated and
17:39
working with other addicts and Alcoholics.
17:41
And that sort of foundation was the most important thing and
17:46
continues to be the most important thing in my life after
17:49
after all this time. And so then I went off into the
17:53
world. I graduated college a year
17:56
sober. I had gone and had studied
18:00
architecture as an undergrad. I originally came in as a as an
18:04
engineer and, and dropped out of the engineering program in part
18:07
because I was burned out, but also in part because my
18:09
addiction had really taken off by the time I got into school
18:12
and the engineering was just too much work.
18:15
But I really fell in love with, with architecture and thought
18:19
that I wanted to design homes and figured out early on in my
18:24
academic career that I had no talent and that wasn't going to
18:27
happen. And, and so when I graduated
18:30
college, I basically just wanted to go and, and be useful.
18:34
So actually my first job out of college was working in
18:36
adolescent addiction recovery. I went to go work in a treatment
18:39
center in the, the adolescent wing of the rehab that I had
18:42
gone through work with young addicts and Alcoholics.
18:46
I'd met my wife and my now wife, then girlfriend in college and I
18:50
was in Los Angeles and she had moved to a small town in
18:52
Vermont. And after, you know, six months
18:55
of us being apart, I just decided to drop everything and
18:57
move out there and start a substitute teaching and then
19:00
found a full time job. I spent two years teaching
19:02
public high school special education and that sort of
19:07
one-on-one being in being proximate with people who had
19:17
circumstances in their lives, whether it was sort of of their
19:21
own make up or just the the circumstances they were born
19:23
into. That made day-to-day living more
19:27
difficult. Being in proximity to people
19:31
like that and doing whatever I could to understand where they
19:35
were coming from and to try to be helpful.
19:37
That was sort of, you know, what I devoted my time and energy to
19:40
and the long, long set of things that happened after that.
19:44
Lizzie got a job or went to grad school in Los Angeles.
19:46
We moved there. I continued doing that type of
19:50
work, but then also I was a musician and decided to try to
19:53
spend full time, try to become a professional musician.
19:57
What did you play? I play drums.
19:58
You and Ryan Kush. There's a lot of folks in tech.
20:01
There's a lot of overlap there. Turns out that computer science.
20:06
Engineering, computer science, architecture and music are all,
20:11
the way that I think of it, the sort of intersection of math and
20:13
art. And because I think software
20:16
development is an art, which is changing a lot right now,
20:20
obviously. Anyway, I tried to become a rock
20:23
star, did not become a rock star, but but was really glad
20:25
that I I spent that time and energy doing it.
20:28
And then Lizzie got a job at Rice University as an academic
20:31
librarian. In 1993, we moved to Houston and
20:34
I could take undergraduate classes for free.
20:37
I had, I got my first e-mail account in 1990, which was, you
20:41
know, not everyone had one had one at the time.
20:44
But that was sort of an amazing thing that I had this buddy who
20:48
was a roommate of mine who was living in Asia and we were in
20:51
contact because he had e-mail. I was like, oh, this is
20:53
incredible. And then somewhere along the way
20:55
I read go to escherbach. I don't know how I landed on
20:58
that. I literally have no idea who
21:02
suggested it or if I just saw it at the bookstore.
21:04
But I don't know if you're, if you're familiar with the the
21:06
Hofstetter and yeah. And it's it's basically a.
21:09
Lot of the amazing book, yeah. It's an incredible book and it's
21:13
a lot of the sort of fundamental ideas that I think are essential
21:18
to sort of computer science thinking that was swimming
21:22
around in my head. And when I got to Rice, I had to
21:24
pick something to study. And so I, I'll try computer
21:27
science and it just sort of clicked right away and decided
21:32
and, and I do this often, you know, I kind of fall in love
21:35
with things. I was like, oh, this I'm going
21:36
to do for the rest of my life. And it's kind of right.
21:39
But ended up getting a masters in CS and was very much because
21:45
of what was going on in the world.
21:46
I consider it really fortunate, right place, right time that it
21:49
was when in 1993. I mean, you were coding long
21:52
before then. There wasn't what we think of as
21:54
a there wasn't a tech industry, right?
21:56
There was the, you know, a computer hardware industry.
21:58
There was an IT as a job. There was no tech industry.
22:02
And there certainly was nothing like what we talked about.
22:04
Growing up here in Austin. It was not lucrative, was weird,
22:07
it was not cool. It was super geeky and I was
22:10
pretty sure at the time that I was going to get a PhD and teach
22:14
because I had taught before and I love teaching.
22:16
And it wasn't like there was something that I was going to go
22:20
do with that. And then then the World Wide Web
22:22
happened and a bunch of friends of mine from Rice went to this
22:28
company, Trilogy here in Austin. And I, they, they recruited me
22:33
and I ended up basically deciding, OK, I'll go and get a
22:37
job for a year or two and sort of pay off some of the debt and
22:39
then I'll go back and get the PhD.
22:41
And 30 years later that didn't happen.
22:44
But I'm now back in, in higher Ed.
22:46
And so the teaching thing is something that I've wanted.
22:49
You know, I did in high school, I really thought that I was
22:52
going to do in, in my, in my late 20s, I thought that was
22:56
the, the career for me. So I kind of always believed
22:59
and, and you know, you, you run a company and you have lots and
23:04
lots of employees and you have, you know, we had indeed 350
23:08
million, you know, job seekers coming to the.
23:11
So you can, you can do things that are useful to people on a
23:13
very, very large scale. But still for me, you know,
23:16
being in a small room with eight students, I get something out of
23:20
that that I, that's different. And it's not like I don't want
23:22
to also have larger impact on the world, but I can't, I can't
23:26
just live in the abstraction. It's, it's working with small
23:30
groups of people and it's the actual human connection.
23:33
That's, that's super important to me.
23:34
So the work that I'm doing to me now, looking backwards, like I
23:39
couldn't have said 30 years ago or, you know, 40 years ago, this
23:43
is where I want to be, right? But the, the thread is really
23:47
consistent in terms of wanting to given whatever skills and
23:53
capabilities that I have to point them in a way that is
23:58
going to be the most useful to, to the most people.
24:02
And then part of being in recovery also.
24:04
And, you know, that is really clear is this idea that I know
24:09
it's important to you that we're, we're all interconnected
24:12
and we're all, we're all essentially the same.
24:15
I think it's very easy for people, especially in the US
24:19
where we have this notion of the American dream and that anyone
24:23
can pull themselves up by their bootstraps.
24:25
And this is an incredible thing. And it's it's not untrue that
24:30
there are paths and opportunities for people here
24:33
that might not exist the same in other places.
24:36
But it's also not true that anyone with the skills and with
24:39
the wherewithal can be successful.
24:42
That is a that is 100% not true. There are a trillion accidental
24:49
cosmic rolls of the dice that put people in the right place
24:52
where they can then go down that path.
24:55
But there are, there are far more people who are incredibly
25:01
capable, unbelievably hard working, who just do not have
25:07
due to circumstances, the, the chance for success.
25:09
And so part of the part of having this gift of, of recovery
25:15
for me, it's been super clear that, you know, there was a
25:20
cosmic roll of the dice, right for both where I was born into
25:24
what circumstances. I, I know for certain that, you
25:30
know, I was arrested. Just just put things in
25:32
historical perspective. I didn't realize at the time.
25:33
I was arrested in 1987 in the US.
25:37
That was the first year in the war on drugs of minimum
25:40
mandatory sentencing. I was a white kid from
25:43
Princeton. I spent one night in jail.
25:45
I got into pretrial intervention program.
25:49
I had to go to a probation office in Trenton every single
25:52
month where I was going to be in theory, randomly drug tested.
25:55
I was never drug tested there. There were, by best estimates,
26:00
30 to 50,000 black and brown men who were arrested in 1987 for
26:05
the same or less charges than me who did 5 to 30 years.
26:11
And so I know so much of the life that I've had and the
26:16
places that I've been able to to get into are not due to
26:21
something unique and special about me.
26:23
And just being in recovery has just drawn such a fine, like it
26:27
is not an abstract. None of this stuff is an
26:28
abstraction for me. It is very, very clear lived
26:31
experience. And so that has also kept me
26:34
wanting to and I know that there's something that you're
26:36
focused on you, you talk about the, the Uber driver from Chad.
26:41
The most important thing to me is given the what I think are,
26:46
you know, whatever word you like grace or gifts or anything that
26:51
that I have received to do to this random cosmic rolls of the
26:55
dice. It's almost too much to absorb
27:00
that. And so the only response that I
27:02
have is I, I have to, I have to work to do whatever I can to try
27:08
to help people who haven't had the same the dice roll in the
27:13
same way in whatever way that I can.
27:16
Yeah, yeah. I mean, you know that you're,
27:19
you're deeply rooted in humility and it's one of the things that
27:21
I love about you. And you know, you're, you've
27:25
been one of the most celebrated CE OS in Austin and everybody I
27:29
know that's, that's worked. And indeed that I personally
27:33
know has raved about working with you.
27:36
And I, I, you know, one thing I just want to give my opinion on,
27:41
on what you just said is that it's not just cosmic randomness
27:46
in my opinion, it's, it's that things were happening for a
27:50
reason and you had the free will to choose how to react to those.
27:55
And there's no doubt as an entrepreneur, I remind people
28:00
all the time, it takes grit and luck.
28:02
And I'm like, don't just tell me it takes grit because there's
28:05
people working multiple manual labor jobs that are working a
28:08
lot harder than the CEO of a tech company just to make ends
28:12
meet. Definitely luck is, is a factor.
28:18
And, you know, sometimes it is just pure luck, and sometimes it
28:22
is luck of the tailwinds coming. I mean, the reason the bizarre
28:27
voice was so successful is that Brandt and I had a thesis on how
28:32
the world was going to become a lot more social.
28:35
We started in 2005. It's two years before the
28:39
iPhone, Facebook was close to the public.
28:41
There was no Twitter, no Snapchat, no Instagram, no
28:44
TikTok. And we accurately predicted.
28:49
And you know, it's not like we controlled any of these moves
28:53
that the world was about to go very social and that created the
28:57
tailwind or as Mike Maples junior, who was on episode 20 of
29:03
this podcast would say, kind of the pattern break for the
29:09
inflection point to occur that would allow us to be successful.
29:13
You know the wealthiest Texan is Michael Dell, who hit that bull
29:19
to order. I think it's Elon Musk now.
29:21
Well, that's true. That's true.
29:22
That's true. It is.
29:23
Yeah. Yeah.
29:24
No, yes, it is Elon Musk now. But you know, prior to Elon
29:27
Musk, it's it's Michael Dell. And it's funny, you just you
29:33
just brought back a memory that that I went to see Michael used
29:38
to invite me to see the Dell world, you know, just kind of as
29:41
a guest. And I remember the first time he
29:44
had Elon Musk come out at the beginning of Tesla, like it was
29:48
just totally off people's radar at that point in time.
29:52
It was really wild. They drove a Tesla through,
29:54
through, through this aisle in the crowd and everything else is
29:58
brought back that memory. But but you know, he he hit this
30:00
inflection point in the bill to order model for PCs where the
30:05
Internet and e-commerce was just about to go boom.
30:08
And, and so, you know, I, I, I, I very much believe in the
30:13
Celestine prophecy. I don't know if you've read that
30:15
book that the synchronicities happen and there is some cosmic
30:22
plan for our lives, but we have to choose it.
30:26
And the way you've the, the superpower that you've, you've
30:32
been endowed with through your actions has given you this level
30:39
to be deeply connected with the people that you're interacting
30:42
with because of all those circumstances of your life.
30:46
It's, it's so it's so clear to me.
30:47
And, and I, I just want to say that I don't know if you agree
30:51
with it or not, but, but I want to say that because, because
30:54
it's hard to give ourselves grace and you really flow in
30:58
this world with a lot of love. And, and this gift you're giving
31:01
the students at Houston Tillotson is amazing, but also
31:05
you're open sourcing this course.
31:08
You know, you're, you're well, you're opening it up.
31:10
But like anybody can take it, right?
31:12
And you make it clear in the introduction to the course,
31:14
which I loved watching that, that it's for everybody.
31:19
It's for the retired English school teacher.
31:21
It's for anybody that cares about this AI moment and where
31:25
it's going and how do we shape it.
31:27
So much of, of all the stuff boils down to what lens we
31:32
choose to put on. But again, I think I think we
31:34
agree on the same set of facts. Cosmic roll of the dice can also
31:37
be a cosmic plan just based on, on, on how you view it and so
31:43
much of this stuff. And I think once we get into
31:44
the, you know what, what do we think this reality thing is?
31:47
We'll cover that. There's there's a number of
31:50
different ways to look at it, but for me, the the more the
31:55
older I get and the more experience I have, the less I
32:01
find it important even to put a pin on something I am.
32:07
I'd become, I'd become much. I was extremely certain about
32:12
things when I was younger, and the older I've gotten, the more
32:18
I've not just become to accept, but actually embrace
32:22
uncertainty. And also, it doesn't mean I
32:25
don't have a hunger to understand and learn.
32:28
And I'm, I've, I've learned more in the last 20 years than I did
32:31
in the 1st 20 years of my life. But I think there's so much
32:35
about the world and how it works that one of one of my favorite
32:39
words that a teacher of mine likes to use all the time is
32:43
ineffable. I think that's ineffable, just a
32:46
fundamental one of my favorite words to to many of these things
32:49
and that the. That word's probably mentioned
32:52
30 times in my book coming out. Well, yeah.
32:56
And so there are, there are things that language is as
32:59
extraordinary as it is, is just a clumsy tool.
33:04
And the there are many things that are just experiential and
33:08
trying to trying to sort of explain it all and say this is
33:12
exactly what it is and what it means.
33:14
I find that I'm, I'm more closed off when I there's a, there's
33:19
some Heisenbergian sort of component to this, that the more
33:21
I try to sort of like say this is what it is and pin it down
33:25
that the less, the less I'm open to in terms of where things
33:29
might. Actually, you know, I think
33:30
that's, I think that's wise. You know, the like is in this
33:35
pursuit that I've had like really diving into ancient
33:39
spirituality, whether it's the Bhagavad Gita, whether it's
33:41
Adele de Ching, whether it's Buddhism, whether it's the Torah
33:45
or Kabbalah, you know, the Zohar or the Bible.
33:49
I've been looking for the, the synchronous route between
33:53
because that's where I think, you know, the 11 aspect of the
33:59
truth lies. And that's, that's the genesis
34:04
of the name of this project is that it synchronizes on that we
34:08
have to do the internal work, tell our love to conquer our own
34:12
fear. And that's a lot of
34:14
deprogramming and reprogramming. And that's a hard work.
34:18
And you've, you've been through hard work on, on your path and
34:22
then we're more capable of helping others do that.
34:26
And if, if everybody did that, we would both be 100% certain
34:31
that we make it to the other side of this and create the
34:34
beloved, you know, community that Martin Luther King
34:37
projected across the globe and have abundance for all.
34:42
It's the, the, the biggest challenge is overcoming our core
34:47
nature and the way we've constructed things with this
34:53
illusion of separation. And maybe maybe that's a good
34:55
segue just to get into this AI moment and dive into your course
35:01
on the way you see it. And you know why?
35:06
Why choose AI responsibility as as the nomenclature for the
35:10
topic? Yeah, So I guess I'll start with
35:14
with with kind of two just high level framings that the first
35:17
is, is how I think I started the the first lecture and every time
35:20
I talk it's sort of the first thing I say.
35:24
Probably two weeks after ChatGPT came out, I was at a conference
35:28
and someone asked are you excited or concerned about AI?
35:32
And my answer was yes. Right.
35:34
And, and I think it's really important to establish when I'm
35:38
having these conversations about all the problems.
35:40
I think that as a technologist, you know, you and I grew up
35:47
reading science fiction, watching movies, thinking about
35:51
these things. And I certainly never expected
35:55
in my lifetime to see any of this.
35:56
I thought it was a great conceptual framework for what
36:00
might happen at some point and I there's never been a time that's
36:05
more vibrant and exciting in terms of what the possibilities
36:10
are. And at the same time, I can't
36:14
think of a time with greater precarity and that I don't I
36:24
have yet to come up with an example.
36:26
And talking to people about any technology that humans have
36:31
created that is asymmetrical in terms of its potential for good
36:37
and its potential for I'll. The more powerful The thing is,
36:41
the more positive impact on the world is possible.
36:47
And symmetric to that is the potential for bad and I.
36:52
Would agree with that by the way.
36:53
I mean, you know, starting with the discovery of fire, we could
36:57
use it to, as we did mostly to warm our caves back then or
37:02
wherever we lived and cook our food and create bigger brains
37:06
and higher IQ and more comfort. Or we could use it for for great
37:11
health. And every every technology is
37:14
intentionality of how we use it for sure.
37:17
And so my, my framing for the my, my work basically, and, and
37:23
the courses is a, is a core part of that is that I believe that
37:27
AI is the civil rights and human rights issue of our lifetime,
37:32
given the power that it holds either to make so many things
37:40
better than they have been or to make them worse.
37:44
And that where things are going to come down.
37:46
And this is, you know, where we'll get into our kind of
37:49
different maybe areas of focus on it.
37:52
I think the fundamental dividing line between going towards the
37:57
the positive and going towards the negative is power.
38:02
And the civil rights and human rights component of this is I
38:10
have deep, deep concern about essentially every single problem
38:17
that I think are the significant problems facing humanity from,
38:22
you know, wealth inequity, criminal justice system,
38:27
housing, education, healthcare, climate, the condition of
38:33
workers. All of those things are going to
38:36
be dramatically impacted by AI. They're all today significant
38:44
problems and there are some people who benefit dramatically
38:48
and the vast majority of people do not and actually suffer under
38:54
those systems. And AI right now, especially
38:58
because the way it's being developed is so completely
39:03
entrenched in money and power that something really miraculous
39:12
would need to happen to shift that direction.
39:15
Where all of the things that to me feel like they're basically
39:20
off the rails already to prevent them from just going completely
39:25
off the rails and and being sort of durably stuck there for the
39:29
next, let's just say century generously.
39:32
The difference between that and then going the other way.
39:36
To me, the solution is not a technological solution.
39:42
It's a, it's a political and economic and, and social one.
39:46
And right now I look at I have a a good friend who gave a talk a
39:52
couple of years ago, You know, Stephen Tomlinson gave a talk a
39:57
couple of years ago. And you and I were just a
39:59
culture on it, which is an amazing conference and that.
40:02
Stephen gave this beautiful talk on on the difference between, he
40:05
didn't invent this idea, but he just, he's such a good
40:07
storyteller about the difference between optimism and hope.
40:11
And he said optimism is looking at a set of data points on a
40:17
chart that go up and to the right and believing that things
40:21
will continue to go up and to the right.
40:23
And he said, I'm looking at the charts and they don't look good.
40:26
So I'm not optimistic, which is why I have hope and why I have
40:32
to have hope. And so hope is is a human
40:36
superpower. And I think it is the thing that
40:40
has helped every time in humanity that we have faced or
40:44
been on the brink of something horrific that we've been able to
40:48
sort of pull ourselves out of it and been able to endure along
40:51
the way. Hope is the thing that we have
40:55
to have. But by the definition of
41:00
optimism, I'm extremely not optimistic right now because of
41:05
the situation that we're in right now.
41:07
And that and especially just to be totally frank, and I don't, I
41:11
don't know what you're, how much you've gone into politics on
41:16
this podcast, but the fact that this is all happening right now
41:20
with Trump in the White House makes all of this dramatically
41:23
more frightening because of the foundation of whether or not
41:28
there is going to be a positive future enabled by AI.
41:34
The the fundamental problem in all core AI research right now
41:38
for people who are working on something like AGI is this
41:42
alignment problem, right. And so the problem of alignment
41:46
is how do we ensure that whatever it is that we're
41:50
building quote has values aligned with human values.
41:57
So the first real problem there. And again, this is not a
41:59
technology problem. This is a philosophy problem.
42:03
There's no such thing as human values. 8 billion people, you
42:07
can talk to 8 billion people and you will, there will be thematic
42:09
things that are similar, but whose values are we talking
42:12
about? And if, if I told you that we
42:16
could create AGI and that's a really important like, so I, I
42:21
see this, there's a decision tree here, right?
42:23
In terms of the, how do we get to an, an age of abundance and
42:27
I'd love to get into because I know that you've thought about,
42:30
I, I'm thinking about how do we avoid the bad outcomes?
42:34
I haven't spent as much, I haven't gone nearly as deep as
42:36
you. So I want to, I want, This is
42:38
why I'm excited for the conversation.
42:40
My, the decision tree that I see when I look at it and we can get
42:43
into all the reasons that I'm worried about these things, but
42:45
the decision tree is the first branch of the decision tree is
42:47
either we get to AGI or we don't, right?
42:50
It is not a given. There's a lot of people who say
42:52
100%, so a lot of people who say 0%.
42:55
I also think it's how we define it.
42:57
Like, you know, Jensen was just on the Lex Friedman podcast and
43:01
he's already claiming that we got in there and you know,
43:04
there's, there's there's many, many people who've claimed we've
43:08
blasted past the Turing test, etcetera.
43:10
So we've. Definitely blasted past the
43:12
Turing test. But I think that when when most
43:14
people that I hear talking about AGI, they're describing
43:17
something that is another hundred 1000 times more powerful
43:20
than what we have right now. Because the idea that I hear
43:23
most frequently is that it is going to be so extraordinary.
43:27
It is going to it is going to solve all of our problems.
43:29
So we don't yet have that. We have not cured cancer.
43:31
We haven't cured poverty ended war.
43:32
So like, yeah, the scientific. So I'm just saying that the
43:34
thing that people talk about when they talk about AGI and and
43:37
yeah, there's as many different definitions of AGI as there are
43:40
definitions of consciousness. I think, I think AGI is going to
43:43
be a little bit like we'll we'll know when we see it more than a
43:50
strict definition like what, what kind of what kind of be
43:53
able to see so. I'll go with for, for, for my
43:57
take today, which I'm sure will evolve.
43:59
Let's let's just say it's something that is considerably
44:02
more evolved than we are actually and can do things and
44:06
solve things that we can't yet and that we couldn't without it.
44:10
So let's just say that that's the thing that we're talking
44:12
about. So the first branch in the
44:15
decision tree is we either get AGI or we don't.
44:18
If we don't get AGI, then I think right now we're on a
44:23
really bad path because all the things that AI is intensifying
44:28
right now from, you know, certainly further destruction of
44:33
the climate. Every major tech company that
44:37
Amazon, Google, Microsoft, that all had these goals for 2030 for
44:44
for getting to to net zero, they've abandoned all of them
44:47
because they said with AI it's not going to happen.
44:49
So like we are definitely on a worse path there.
44:51
We are 100% on a worse path for concentration of wealth and
44:57
power and bias and a dystopian potential for disinformation and
45:06
misinformation. So there's like all these
45:08
different things and the is what my course is sort of covering
45:11
all of these classes. If we don't get to ADA, if we
45:13
don't get to a thing that is better than us at solving
45:17
problems, those problems are going to get worse and worse.
45:20
So that first part of the decision tree I'm really
45:22
concerned about. Then if we get to AGI, we could
45:26
split it up into 1000 other ones.
45:28
But let's just say there's an important branch there for
45:31
people who are doing this research.
45:33
That is, is it. And this is a term that I, I, I
45:36
picked up from have you read the cloud Constitution?
45:38
So really I. Haven't read it yet.
45:40
Yeah, but I I have read Dario Modi's thesis.
45:43
Like including adolescents. One of the fundamental concepts
45:46
in the Claude constitution, what they essentially say is the most
45:49
important, there's a set of principles, but the most
45:51
important principles are all around this idea of courage
45:53
ability. So it's the it's the opposite of
45:56
incorrigibility. Can we get AI to do what we
45:59
want? That is about so.
46:01
So then there's another branch which is can, if we create AGI,
46:05
are we doing it in a way where we have been careful and
46:08
thoughtful enough? And again, nobody, there's not a
46:10
single researcher says that they know how to do this.
46:12
But let's say they figured out and then it's, it's corrigible
46:15
or in, if it's incorrigible, then I think it things end
46:18
really, really badly. So then there's this narrow path
46:20
where we get to AGI, it is corrigible.
46:24
And then just to simplify and not go down to 6000 other paths,
46:29
it is either imbued with values that help unite us and bring us
46:35
together and help us help love to conquer fear or not.
46:40
Because it's entirely possible that we get to an AGI and we
46:43
have been rushing and so careless and we, we 100% don't
46:49
understand what's going on inside of a neural network right
46:51
now. We definitely would not
46:52
understand what's going inside that it any one of the paths
46:57
where it does not basically have values that are positive.
47:03
So in the symmetrical tool for good and evil and again this is
47:09
not in any way try to be careful.
47:14
I do not believe that it's hyperbolic to say that if you
47:17
imagine something just maybe even a few times more powerful
47:21
than what we have today. And if that was a tool of an
47:24
authoritarian state, that makes would make 1984 look like Orwell
47:31
was not very creative. And so who's like, if you told
47:38
me that we could get there and let's say what's happening in
47:42
this country right now, the Trump administration and the
47:48
entire Republican Party right now is working actively to
47:53
prevent any type of AI regulation at all.
47:59
They are working to prevent the states from passing any
48:03
regulation. They're pushing back on the EU
48:06
to not enforce, which is supposed to go into effect in in
48:09
August of this year and to take all of the guardrails off and to
48:14
run 100,000 miles an hour. And so.
48:16
And then you have people like Elon Musk who state very, very
48:20
clearly that the the goal of grok when he first created it
48:23
was to create an anti woke AI, right?
48:26
And we can argue about the, the use of the term woke, but what
48:30
he means is the opposite of the, the sort of inclusivity and
48:38
equality of of all people, the ideas that he is publicly
48:43
stating he is trying to imbue in his AI.
48:47
So let's say Elon Musk gets there first and it's his ideals
48:51
or let's say the Trump administration drives through
48:55
the work that they've been doing actively since January 21st of
48:58
2025 to keep the, the guard where rails and, and frankly,
49:06
the, the sort of the, the sort of shared facts and, and reality
49:12
out of the values that that go into this AI that's also really,
49:19
really scary and dystopian. So for me, there's a really,
49:22
really narrow path that no one can articulate any confidence
49:30
in. If you we talked to us before,
49:32
you have not yet seen the AI doc.
49:33
You will see it probably before this this episode airs, but.
49:37
Yeah, for sure. I'm going to go see it this
49:39
weekend. You know, the the filmmaker
49:40
asked directly to to Dario and and Sam and Denise, like tell me
49:46
it's going to be OK. Like we can't do that.
49:50
None of them have any certainty around that.
49:53
So as a result, I think that we need to be and the, and the
49:59
purpose of the course, and I'm happy to dive into it even more,
50:02
but it's, you know, it's number one to sort of demystify the
50:04
technology. I think that people need a basic
50:06
understanding. The first, you know, 8-9 hours
50:09
of the course is focused on what is a large language model and
50:13
how does it work for someone who's not a computer science or
50:15
math major. I think it's really important
50:17
for as important for as everyone to have a, a sort of personal
50:25
kind of spiritual awakening if we're going to become a better
50:29
species. I think understanding this
50:32
technology and, and what it is and what it isn't is really
50:36
essential for everyone. And a big part of that is
50:39
because I think in order to, to handle the, the real societal
50:43
challenges that that we're facing here is I think some of
50:48
the most dangerous language that is used to describe AI is
50:53
alternately either that it is some form of magic.
50:57
And it can seem like, you know, that we all know the Arthur C
51:00
Clark line. Yep.
51:00
But. All technology looks like magic
51:03
when? Any sufficiently advanced
51:05
technology is indistinguishable from magic, and that's great for
51:09
a science fiction writer, but it's actually dangerous when the
51:12
average person believes this thing is magic.
51:14
It's not magic. It's a lot of math done at
51:17
scale. And it turns out that language
51:19
is such an extraordinarily human thing that when you model the
51:23
math and scale of language, you, it can do all kinds of
51:25
extraordinary things, but it's not magic.
51:27
And if we think of it as magic or the more dangerous framing,
51:32
there are people out there who talk about it almost in God like
51:35
terms that it is some form of, of some, you know, deity.
51:40
And I think that if the average person thinks of AI as either
51:44
magic or God, like, then the inevitability of it is going to
51:50
happen. It's going to happen a certain
51:52
way. And that it is going to somehow
51:54
if, if you have a, a set of beliefs around magic or
51:57
spirituality that are inherently good, then you think that things
52:00
are going to work out because this thing is magic or God.
52:03
So I think it's really important to understand that it's 100%
52:06
not. It doesn't mean that
52:08
extraordinary things that we can't comprehend could come from
52:11
it. And so I think you need to have
52:13
that basic understanding. And then we need to look very
52:15
soberly at these different areas of society, none of which are
52:19
problems that AI created our, our world today is really great
52:26
for a small set of people that include you and me who have
52:31
money and power and the, the day-to-day we suffer because we
52:36
care about our loved ones who are going through things.
52:39
Or we might care for other people around the world who are
52:41
suffering. But it's not the same suffering
52:44
as, as the, the billions of people on the planet who do not
52:46
have the, the basic kind of their basic needs met in the
52:51
same way or live in a level of precarity.
52:54
And that the, the challenge then is how do we, how do we ensure
53:04
with all of this stuff and looking at all these problems
53:06
and these problems that exist today that are significant, How
53:11
do we not have something as powerful as AI potentially in
53:16
the wrong hands, potentially something that is incorrigible,
53:20
make all of that dramatically worse.
53:22
And I think the solution there is not in building a better AI.
53:27
The solution is actually, we need to, we need to get down to
53:29
the nitty gritty of like the economic, political and social
53:33
issues and AI might come up with, you know, the, the stories
53:38
that I, I hear from people who say that you don't need to worry
53:41
about the stuff because AI is going to solve all those
53:42
problems. There is a, there's a sort of
53:46
magical thinking to that. To me.
53:47
I mean that that's just like it's, it's a magic or it's got,
53:49
it's going to somehow, it's going to come up with an answer
53:51
for climate change. It's going to come up with an
53:53
answer for abundant energy. It's going to come up with an
53:56
answer for food and medicine for everyone.
54:01
But then there's a like, OK, what is the mechanism?
54:03
Let's say, let's say that the there is this future AI that is,
54:08
is wise beyond our imagining and it comes back and says, hey,
54:13
here's the solution for climate change.
54:15
Cut back on fossil fuels. We've known that for 50 years.
54:19
Like we have, we sort of know solutions to all of these
54:21
problems already. And as a society, we don't like
54:25
any of them. It doesn't mean that most people
54:27
that the power structures do not like the solutions to climate
54:31
change. The power structures do not like
54:32
the the solutions. There's very simple solution to
54:36
health in the US. We know that like everyone needs
54:41
to have basic healthcare and we need to cut healthcare costs.
54:44
That's a political problem. That's an economic problem.
54:46
That is not that is not a wise intelligence.
54:49
And so my concern is that we need to, and especially right
54:55
now, the fact is happening with Trump in the White House and all
55:00
of the things that might otherwise have us approach
55:04
something that is so important and could go so great or so
55:09
horribly with some level of respect for how big that is.
55:13
And I think the biggest thing that's that's missing is, is any
55:16
humility. So there's a lot of people who
55:18
seem to be really certain about the the right path.
55:21
And I am and and look, you and I come from this world,
55:28
technologists in general, especially ones that have been
55:32
successful, what they do have an extraordinary arrogance.
55:36
And I mean, I know early on in my career, I thought I was
55:39
really smart. I thought I really knew things
55:40
and I could deeply understand because I had this engineering
55:43
systems thinking and I could look at something and figure out
55:45
what was wrong with the healthcare system, what was
55:47
wrong with, you know, the economy in Bolivia or whatever.
55:53
Tech people tend to think that we're just generally intelligent
55:58
and we understand everything and we know the solution.
56:00
So my biggest fear here is that the people who are driving all
56:07
of these decisions tend to be either from technology or from
56:12
from money and, and political power.
56:14
And my focus and why I'm teaching the course the way that
56:18
I'm teaching it and where I'm teaching it is that I think we
56:22
need the philosophers and the ethicists and the economists and
56:26
the doctors and the historians and the the authors.
56:31
They're the ones who are necessary to figure out this
56:34
problem. This problem is 100% not going
56:37
to be solved by computer scientists alone.
56:39
Computer scientists are going to have a big part in this.
56:41
But the more the language coming out of Silicon Valley right now
56:45
especially seems like, you know, we just think that we're smarter
56:50
than everyone else and we're going to figure this all out.
56:52
And you know, that the phrase that that came to me recently
56:55
and also I'll test drive it here is with because this thing is
57:01
amazing and extraordinary. And it is, it's impossible not
57:03
to have as a technologist some kind of awe for it.
57:07
My fear is that a lot of, of folks in tech right now are, are
57:14
really sort of intoxicated by the potential for what this
57:20
might be and, and the power that can come along with it.
57:23
And so the phrase that sort of popped into my head one night is
57:26
that we're, we're all drinking the electric kool-aid.
57:29
So it's a, it's kind of a play on, you know, drinking the
57:32
kool-aid, which we all know what that comes from, but you know,
57:37
it's electric. But electric Kool-aid also is,
57:40
has this reference to the electric Kool-aid acid test,
57:44
which was, you know, back in the, in the 1960s, the, the acid
57:49
tests in San Francisco were where the first sort of broad
57:53
scale social LSD experiments were happening.
57:56
And, and I think that collectively as a, as a society,
58:01
there's a little bit of this, like we're, we're drinking this
58:04
electric Kool-aid and we're, we're sort of believing a bunch
58:07
of stuff because we're seeing some of the amazing potential.
58:12
But we're ignoring some of the actual real world situation that
58:19
I think needs to be centered in all of this.
58:21
And not as a, let's let AI figure out how to solve those
58:25
problems. Like I want to, I want to sit
58:27
down with someone in the room with an economist because I'm
58:30
not an economist. I've thought about this a lot,
58:31
but I'm not economist. And have someone explain to me
58:34
how AI will solve the problem in the future where let's say
58:40
depending on who you talk to, 20 to 60 to 80% of people will not
58:45
have work. And the idea that AI will just
58:48
create an abundance of food and abundance of healthcare.
58:52
Still, what those people are describing is the most advanced
58:58
socialist state that has ever existed.
59:01
None of the people who are building this technology are
59:03
socialists, all right. None of the people who are
59:04
funding it are said. In fact, they're extraordinarily
59:07
anti socialist ideals. So again, if the AI comes up
59:12
with an answer, which is, hey, this is what we need to do,
59:16
human beings still need to implement it.
59:18
Unless the AI becomes the president of the United States
59:24
and then gets to be wise and sort of make these decisions.
59:27
You're talking about implementing these sort of high
59:30
ideals in the physical, societal, economic, political
59:35
world. And they all seem completely
59:38
antithetical to have how we operate here.
59:42
So I do agree with you that the, the only solution for all that
59:45
is like a global instantaneous spiritual awakening, which I
59:49
would love to see, but I don't, I don't have a plan for that.
59:52
And So what I'm working on is what is the plan to try to
59:56
create the awareness around these issues and to demystify.
1:00:01
Because I think, I think the most dangerous thing that anyone
1:00:03
can do right now is to say, don't worry about this problem
1:00:06
because AI will solve it because I want, I've yet to hear any of
1:00:10
those. There's a lot of really smart
1:00:11
people. I haven't had the chance to talk
1:00:13
to many of them, but I've, I've yet to hear anyone say, well,
1:00:16
here's what AI is going to do, actually physically to take
1:00:21
someone in this country with a set of laws and societal
1:00:25
structure that we have who doesn't have a job and make sure
1:00:29
that they are living in some form of actual material
1:00:34
abundance. Because I also think that the
1:00:37
you know, I don't believe that Elon Musk actually is working
1:00:43
towards or wants to live in a world where everyone has
1:00:45
everything they need. Because being the richest person
1:00:48
in the world doesn't mean anything if everyone has
1:00:51
everything. Like being rich only matters
1:00:55
because you're richer than someone else.
1:00:57
And so if there was an AI that could actually make everyone
1:01:02
equal, I don't think that many of the, I think some of the
1:01:04
people who are building this, but I think many of the people
1:01:06
who are building and funding it don't want that kind of world.
1:01:09
And it's just a sort of an advanced rhetoric.
1:01:12
It's the electric Kool-aid that they're sort of feeding to
1:01:14
everyone. That is a lot to unpack.
1:01:18
OK, let let's. We both spent a lot of time
1:01:20
thinking about this. We have either of us gets going,
1:01:22
I know. That no, I literally just
1:01:24
concluded writing an entire book about this called Love Conquers
1:01:28
Fear with the subtitle Humanity, AI and the Age of Abundance for
1:01:31
All, which comes out on the solstice, like right after the
1:01:35
solstice, June, June 23rd in honor of it.
1:01:39
And the cover has a cosmic phoenix, you know, rising.
1:01:44
And I don't spare anything in that book.
1:01:49
I mean, I, you know, chapter 3, chapter 1 is on conquering fear.
1:01:55
Why do we have it, etcetera. Chapter 2 is on abundance.
1:01:57
Chapter 3 is on geopolitics and I go through education,
1:02:00
healthcare, the objectification of women, you know, climate
1:02:05
change and energy and nuclear weapons and warfare and just on
1:02:09
and on and on about what the biggest problems we have are and
1:02:13
looking at them very clear eyed and also looking at why should
1:02:17
we have any hope at all on any of those problems.
1:02:20
And so let me first just start with, with a, with a couple of
1:02:24
things you said. So I agree that the, the
1:02:29
challenge here is immense. I, I really agree with that,
1:02:33
with the fact that this is the most fateful time in the history
1:02:38
of humanity. And that means I believe in
1:02:42
reincarnation. I don't know if you believe in
1:02:43
reincarnation, but but it believes that you and I, that
1:02:48
our souls chose this lifetime to come in and that we knew that
1:02:52
this was going to be an inflection point.
1:02:55
And I know that I'm doing exactly what I'm supposed to be
1:02:58
doing right now. I've seen that in psychedelic
1:03:01
journeys. I, I, I, I know that I'm in
1:03:05
alignment with my highest calling, with what I'm doing.
1:03:09
I see it in meditation and I certainly don't have all the
1:03:14
answers and I do not think it's possible to have all the
1:03:16
answers. But but there are models that we
1:03:18
can look at. But let's just start out with
1:03:20
one, one, one thing you said. So Elon Musk, you know, he is a
1:03:26
intense person of light in some ways, an intense person of
1:03:30
darkness in some ways. And so, you know, it's
1:03:33
interesting, like, you know, if you you watch his Davos talk and
1:03:38
he starts out the talk, he's being interviewed by the CEO of
1:03:41
BlackRock by Larry Fink. And he starts out the talk
1:03:45
joking about the peace summit. And he's like, oh, it's like P
1:03:51
i.e. CE, like we'll get a piece of
1:03:53
Greenland, we'll get a piece of Venezuela.
1:03:55
It's just, it's, it's just ridiculous.
1:03:57
But then the rest of the interview is actually happening
1:04:02
is to create abundance for everyone on the planet.
1:04:05
And and he's actually changed the Tesla mission statement to
1:04:09
that. You know, I don't think he even
1:04:11
knows himself from one day to the next.
1:04:14
Like, like what? Why he's driving towards what
1:04:18
he's driving towards. And I think Trump is, is, is, is
1:04:22
wired that way too, where, you know, you don't know what he's
1:04:25
going to decide one day to the next.
1:04:28
And, you know, Walter Isaacson profiled that in his book on
1:04:31
Elon Musk, that you don't know if you're going to get the good
1:04:32
Elon or the bad Elon. But one thing that I do want to
1:04:41
point out. Is that?
1:04:44
The tech. Leaders of these.
1:04:47
AI companies and and and. I will say that this is biased.
1:04:53
In the sense. That I am wired deeply for
1:04:55
optimism, but there's many reasons why that's the case that
1:05:00
I could unpack the if you, if you really, if you really, you
1:05:04
know, just look for it. They are preaching
1:05:08
responsibility. I mean, now doing and preaching
1:05:12
are two different things. But you know, Dario Modi,
1:05:14
there's lots of, there's lots of things he could be spending his
1:05:17
time on. I mean, you know, you and I both
1:05:19
run companies and just imagine the intensity of trying to run
1:05:22
Anthropic right now or trying to run open AI right now.
1:05:25
If you're Sam Altman are trying to, you know, run Google
1:05:30
DeepMind and all the Google's AI initiatives if you're demosis of
1:05:33
this or trying to run all of the AI initiatives at Microsoft.
1:05:38
If you're Mustafa Suleiman, which actually has a really
1:05:41
interesting background intersectionality with your
1:05:43
background, because he he has a a very different type of
1:05:48
background where he came into computer sciences, The Co
1:05:50
founder of deep mine. It's very interesting that the
1:05:52
Co founders of deep mine are running AI at the, you know,
1:05:57
Google and Microsoft. I mean, you can't get much
1:05:59
bigger than that. And you, you listen to, you
1:06:02
know, Jensen Wong, they are preaching.
1:06:08
They are preaching how? Important this moment is.
1:06:11
And they're not, they're, they're not, in my opinion,
1:06:17
shying away from this moment like they're, they're, they're
1:06:19
preaching like, hey, we have to make sure that we develop these
1:06:24
things in a way where the world, you know, where humanity
1:06:30
benefits. And, you know, and they're
1:06:34
writing pretty thoughtful pieces on it.
1:06:37
And it's not perfect and they are in this capitalist kind of
1:06:41
construct where it's just like, you know, profit maximization,
1:06:44
like revenue all the way. But you know, Elon Musk is
1:06:48
asking that Davos interview by Larry Fink.
1:06:51
He's like, you know, what do you what do you say on the narrative
1:06:54
on, you know, kind of there's going to be these multi
1:06:57
trillionaires and then everybody else lives in kind of squalor.
1:07:00
He's like, well, there's no market if that's the case, like
1:07:03
like the, you know, like capitalism will will correct
1:07:07
along the way because there's no market if we create that that
1:07:11
world. And so, so I, I, I think to me
1:07:15
that's encouraging, you know, and I profile a lot of what
1:07:20
Dario is writing in the love conquer spirit book, especially.
1:07:28
And, and so I think that I think that that's, that's a good sign
1:07:32
versus just the sign. You know, Marc Andreessen's
1:07:34
different, different case, you know, you, you quoted in the
1:07:39
introduction to your course that he says anything that slows
1:07:42
down, you know, this AI progress and then cost lives is the
1:07:47
equivalent of murder. I think that's like way too far.
1:07:50
It's not even the end cost lives.
1:07:52
It is. The assertion that AI will save
1:07:55
lives so slowing down AI is a form of murder, right and so so
1:08:01
you know let's. Take let's take energy, for
1:08:03
example. So I cover energy in the book we
1:08:09
have, we have real problems in the world, you know, I mean, I
1:08:13
mean, you know, I personalize it with the country of Chad.
1:08:17
And it was on that drive with, with Calabu where I'm like, you
1:08:22
know, what's the answer here? You know, what, what, what hope
1:08:25
does Chad have to create anywhere near the level of
1:08:31
abundance that we have in America?
1:08:33
And I think you would agree that the technology has been a huge
1:08:40
catalyst for what we have today. You know, that if we went back
1:08:45
100 years, 200 years ago, that people were living, you know, if
1:08:50
you go back 100 years ago, 90% of the world was totally
1:08:54
illiterate just 100 years ago, and 80% was living in abject
1:09:00
poverty. That was 100 years ago.
1:09:03
And so, you know, we, we, we have definitely, capitalism has
1:09:08
helped lifted billions of people out of starvation.
1:09:12
Poverty. But we still have plenty of
1:09:14
poverty, without a doubt. And Steven Pinker lays out the
1:09:17
data a lot for that in Enlightenment Now.
1:09:22
And so if you take energy and we were able to have the material
1:09:26
science breakthrough. So I think alpha fold, you know,
1:09:29
for protein folding and how, how that's going to help us decode
1:09:33
all types of new medicines to solve all types of disease.
1:09:37
And the alpha energy equivalent for material science
1:09:40
breakthrough. If we took 18 seconds of the
1:09:43
sun's rays that fall on the earth, 18 seconds, it would
1:09:48
power America's energy needs for over a year.
1:09:51
And, and it's, it's like God, you know, put this big, you
1:09:54
know, you know, fusion reactor in the sky that apparently has a
1:09:59
billion years left of life. You know, that's pretty long
1:10:02
life for a battery that is just backing us to plug into.
1:10:09
And if you think about the Maslow hierarchy, the base of
1:10:13
it, as I cover in that chapter, and this is barred from Paul
1:10:18
Pablo Solman, who's a good friend who wrote an amazing book
1:10:22
about the deep tech future that beholds us.
1:10:27
It, it starts with energy. Like if we could create a world
1:10:31
of unlimited energy from the sun, then we could desalinate
1:10:36
everywhere we want. We could have robots that are
1:10:40
powered by solar that could go into Chad and clean, you know,
1:10:44
clean, clean, clean up the water supply there, build the
1:10:47
pipelining they need, build the electrical pipelining they need,
1:10:52
build the healthcare abundance that they need, etcetera.
1:10:56
And if we could create, if we could create abundance.
1:11:00
In Chad, that would be. Like heaven on earth, you know,
1:11:02
what do you look at that as metaphorically?
1:11:04
So this is this is where getting back to.
1:11:07
The the demystification part. You don't.
1:11:14
You don't believe this because you understand what the.
1:11:16
Technology is but I think a lot of people have this idea when
1:11:18
they hear that AI is going to solve a problem and especially
1:11:21
if you think it's magic or if you think it's some kind of God
1:11:23
like thing. People think that AI and this is
1:11:26
where the science fiction is maybe set us off in in the wrong
1:11:29
understanding. People think of AI as a thing,
1:11:33
an independent entity, right that on its own will go and
1:11:37
yeah, that solve problems. And so if we don't believe, I
1:11:41
think it's if we say. What are the problems that AI
1:11:44
could solve? Lots of thing it.
1:11:48
Anything that is solvable? And that's actually an important
1:11:51
thing. And I'll just, I'll throw this
1:11:52
out before I forget it, because I was reminded this morning that
1:11:58
this amazing Confucius quote that when the start up that I
1:12:02
had before I, I joined, indeed, when it failed.
1:12:06
I was watching a documentary actually on the research team
1:12:09
that was trying to isolate the Higgs boson.
1:12:13
And they were trying to do it before, before their Collider
1:12:18
was going offline and before the Halderon was coming online.
1:12:22
And they had this this window and they thought they found it,
1:12:24
then they didn't. And at the end that the
1:12:26
scientists got up as the lab was shutting down in this, you know,
1:12:28
last decade of research they had and they didn't get there.
1:12:31
He pulled up this quote from Confucius, which is the hardest
1:12:33
thing of all is to find a black cat in a dark room, especially
1:12:38
if there's no cat, right? And so it's an important reason.
1:12:43
And like, I think that's, that should be the sort of the line
1:12:45
that every startup has on the on the wall.
1:12:48
But I think just in terms of humanity as well, like AI can
1:12:52
solve any problem. AI can find a black cat in a
1:12:55
dark room, right? If there's a cat, right?
1:12:57
But it can't if there isn't. And there there are many of
1:13:00
these problems that we are talking about where there there
1:13:02
might not be in. So in addition to is it a
1:13:04
solvable problem, we have to point significant resources
1:13:09
towards it. And so alpha fold was not AI
1:13:13
solving one of the biggest problems in in fundamental
1:13:16
chemistry. Google spent depending on how
1:13:20
you want to look at it. And I think you kind of have to
1:13:22
count the acquisition of DeepMind.
1:13:24
They'll go spend like 2 1/2 billion dollars to solve protein
1:13:28
folding, which is an extraordinary problem and
1:13:30
demesis of this one. The Nobel Prize, absolutely.
1:13:32
And and deserved, but it wasn't like some.
1:13:34
GPU's were spinning and solved this problem right?
1:13:36
So no, they directed it so. I again I would love to I.
1:13:40
Understand from it I can sketch out a technology road map just
1:13:44
to solve water desalina tion in Chad.
1:13:48
I'd like to see someone explain the economic plan to do that.
1:13:52
Yeah. So it's not right Yeah.
1:13:55
So. But like someone needs to pay
1:13:57
for those robots and to send them to chat.
1:14:00
And so right now, because of the unimaginable and almost.
1:14:05
Ineffable. Sums of wealth and power that
1:14:08
come from this AI is being pointed at problems that
1:14:12
generate a huge amount of revenue.
1:14:15
They're not the Google pointed at the alpha fold because that
1:14:19
was one of the biggest problems in fundamental science and
1:14:21
because it would help identify and because there's probably
1:14:24
ways for them to monetize it. Oh yeah, they, they did not,
1:14:27
they did not point 100,000 GP us at ending unhoused homelessness
1:14:34
in the US. And it's hard to imagine who
1:14:37
would do that. So I, we also know the answer to
1:14:42
unhoused homelessness. So like Elon Musk should pay
1:14:46
more than his fair share. And like we do not, we can solve
1:14:49
90% of the problems in this country through solutions that
1:14:54
we've been aware of for 50 to 100 years.
1:14:56
And so we're also holding out for some other magical thing to
1:14:59
come along. But the what is the actual
1:15:02
economic modeling for how just because we can make something
1:15:05
cheaper, it doesn't mean that we would choose to deploy it in
1:15:08
those ways unless it's going to provide some return.
1:15:12
All right, well, you're, you're definitely not going to get.
1:15:15
A disagreement for me in terms of love has to conquer fear and
1:15:20
we have to choose this path and, and, and we have to choose
1:15:24
abundance for all. And the way I've seen it is that
1:15:28
the divine is working through US and it is going to force us to
1:15:31
make that choice because if we use the most powerful technology
1:15:36
we've ever manifested to continue to play the 0 sum power
1:15:41
base game, there is no future. I mean, I, I've seen that and
1:15:47
that would be an extremely sad ending when you and I, given our
1:15:53
technical background, can, can see that it's possible, it is
1:15:57
possible like, and that technology has always been the
1:16:02
path for what is possible. But yes, it does come with,
1:16:07
we've got to use it responsibility.
1:16:09
You know, if you, if you take, you know, our evolutionary time,
1:16:14
we didn't even have electricity until, until the past around 300
1:16:17
years. We've been around for 300,000
1:16:19
years. So that in and of itself means
1:16:22
that we're in the point 1% of all Homo sapiens that have ever
1:16:25
been been around. And it's even a smaller number
1:16:28
if you say we're derivative of hominids, you know, with Homo
1:16:31
erectus and everything that preceded before, which been
1:16:33
around for four million years on this 4.54 billion year old
1:16:37
planet. And so you know it, we have to
1:16:41
have the breakthroughs through technology.
1:16:46
Where it? Kind of breaks the back of the
1:16:51
cost structure that would create the opportunity for a
1:16:57
enterprising entrepreneur in Africa or an NGO going in
1:17:04
saying, OK, now the costs are so different because we have
1:17:08
unlimited energy from the sun that we can go and address these
1:17:15
problems. And Chad, I, I, I don't see, I
1:17:19
don't see any other way for, for, for us in the current
1:17:23
construct that we've created for it to get that way, I mean.
1:17:28
You know, in in. America, as, as you very well
1:17:32
know, we had slaves that bootstrap capitalism and it was
1:17:36
a horrible practice where I, I have to imagine, like a lot of
1:17:40
the people even at that time that had slaves in their heart
1:17:44
of hearts, like knew that this dehumanization was, was really
1:17:49
wrong that like it, it gnawed at them, but they rationalized it
1:17:53
in their head, like we need this for labor, et cetera.
1:17:56
And you know, machine automation just completely broke the back
1:18:01
of that where it just unmask it for what it was.
1:18:05
It's completely dehumanizing practice.
1:18:07
How did we ever even treat people that way?
1:18:10
And you and I would both agree. You know, I conclude my book,
1:18:14
the entrepreneurs essentials Chapter 23 is all about the
1:18:18
responsibility entrepreneurs have to create the society that
1:18:23
they want. And it is about a for all
1:18:26
message that in America we're still we we still haven't
1:18:32
rectified what came out of that. You know, black wealth in
1:18:36
America is 110th on average, what white wealth is.
1:18:40
There were Jim Crow laws and all types of things like, you know,
1:18:43
and that's just the clear eyed way to look at look at why these
1:18:47
disparities exist. It came from that, from that
1:18:51
root and then depression after that route.
1:18:55
So there's no doubt that that our core nature has to.
1:19:02
Change. For us to grasp abundance and
1:19:05
there's there's authoritarian regimes around the world which
1:19:09
are really oppressing people which which we need to
1:19:13
transcend. But at the same time, like it is
1:19:18
also an act of faith on my part and it's faith in humanity
1:19:22
because I think that and we might have definitions of words.
1:19:26
So I. Think you have hope and faith?
1:19:28
Yeah, I'm not sure when you describe that.
1:19:31
So you're actually optimistic because your answer is we need
1:19:34
to have a global spiritual awakening to avoid disaster.
1:19:37
We do. And yeah, that is part of it.
1:19:40
Just to say that you're. Optimistic that we're going to
1:19:42
have a global. Spiritual awakening.
1:19:43
First of all, I do think there's a consciousness.
1:19:45
Awakening underway. I see it.
1:19:47
I see it all over the place. I mean, there is a consciousness
1:19:49
spring underway, as I wrote, you know, a couple of years ago, and
1:19:53
it's manifesting in all types of ways.
1:19:55
Dan Brown's new book, You know, the Secret of Secrets is all
1:19:58
about the nature of consciousness.
1:20:00
That fluffy tapes is all about the nature of consciousness.
1:20:03
You have Anika Harris, who's married to Sam Harris, who wrote
1:20:05
Lights On, which is all about the nature of consciousness.
1:20:07
Michael Pollan's new book at World Appears is all about.
1:20:10
But I think what you're talking about the nature of
1:20:11
consciousness, It's the the small.
1:20:15
Percentage of people with power that actually need to have that
1:20:18
awakening, they have always been the masses have had more belief
1:20:24
and faith and devotion because the world's religions have
1:20:27
created a way for people to endure the most difficult
1:20:32
situations. And it's always been that the
1:20:34
mass, the the largest group of people have been in the most
1:20:39
difficult circumstances and they have been more probably devout
1:20:43
in their belief because of it. What we need is an awakening of
1:20:46
a very small number of people who not very differently from
1:20:51
what you're describing during slavery.
1:20:54
Does Elon Musk somewhere know deep inside that his ideas about
1:21:01
his trans child or anything else that or about does he Does he
1:21:07
deep down inside know that there is no, there's no real white
1:21:15
genocide in South Africa and that he is spouting anti-Semitic
1:21:21
and, and racist and, and creating an entire AI built to
1:21:28
to sort of reinforce those ideas?
1:21:30
Does he maybe feel bad about that inside?
1:21:33
I actually don't think he does. Is it possible if he had years
1:21:37
of therapy that he might uncover his daddy issues and whatever
1:21:41
else is leading to this, that it's possible?
1:21:43
You need to eat, you need Elon Musk and like in 20 other people
1:21:46
to have the spiritual awaken. It's not.
1:21:48
The masses, I think, already have this idea that we're all.
1:21:52
And that makes me actually even more.
1:21:54
Confident because because the, the, the, there have been many
1:21:59
examples. You know, Byron Reese was on,
1:22:01
was on the podcast. He's like a super utopian guy.
1:22:04
He's 100% certain way to make it.
1:22:06
And his thesis is that the masses have it.
1:22:10
And it's everyday acts of kindness that get us there.
1:22:13
But the, you know, you take, if you and I were Indian in India
1:22:18
prior to the rise of Gandhi, we would have been able to see it.
1:22:21
We would have just been like, wow, you know, India used to be
1:22:25
this amazing place. Now it's just colonized by the
1:22:28
British. And then Gandhi comes along.
1:22:30
So there's a certain amount of kind of bodhisattvas that that
1:22:34
are coming or being awakened that are here.
1:22:39
And I don't know what that number is for humanity to tip,
1:22:42
but that was a mass political movement.
1:22:44
So that was he was. A set of spiritual principles
1:22:46
that then had to translate into boots on the ground, people
1:22:51
banding together, which I think is, I mean, so and maybe again,
1:22:55
we have different language, maybe maybe we're seeing exactly
1:22:58
the same thing. I think the the in the decision
1:23:01
tree, the the one path that gets us to a dramatically better
1:23:06
place is is basically workers of the world rising up.
1:23:14
I agree and that I come from so this is the other the other
1:23:17
reason that the masses rising like the.
1:23:19
The reason that that. Indeed turned out to be in my
1:23:22
career when I landed there, the place that that where my heart
1:23:27
really landed and stuck. I come from a long line of Labor
1:23:31
organizers. My grandparents met in the Bronx
1:23:34
and in the early 40s organizing the Lady International Lady
1:23:39
Garment Workers Union and my great grandfather was a
1:23:43
organized coal miners in Pennsylvania.
1:23:45
And I grew up sort of in and around the, the spirit of the,
1:23:48
the labor movement and, you know, the, the, the.
1:23:53
The Foundation. Technology has certainly helped
1:23:58
raise the standards of of living in in this country, but labor
1:24:04
unions and and there have been political.
1:24:08
And social. Movements that have done more to
1:24:12
ensure and the labor movement also problematic and racist.
1:24:14
There's a whole bunch of, you know, history that's, that's
1:24:16
sort of problematic there, but that has done more to distribute
1:24:23
some form of, of protections and, and, and equality.
1:24:27
And I think that when you get to, again, like what is AI being
1:24:31
pointed at right now? AI.
1:24:32
So the, the language that's being used just as a founder.
1:24:36
I mean, it's one of the, the, the, the things that I do in my
1:24:38
class with my students is to, to sort of say consider.
1:24:43
The source of. Someone, and I think actually
1:24:45
the most important thing that any of my students on campus
1:24:47
will ever get out of this class is there's a bunch of people
1:24:52
talking about AI, including me, including you, including Elon
1:24:55
Musk and Dario and Sam. Any time anyone says something
1:25:00
about AI, they're coming from a certain perspective in a place
1:25:04
and want you to believe what they're saying for certain
1:25:09
reasons. Might, might believe it to their
1:25:11
core or might not believe it at all and be saying it.
1:25:14
And so the most important thing is to be able to to take a step
1:25:16
back and say this person is saying this.
1:25:18
Why might they want me to believe this?
1:25:22
And it's really important to understand that people who are
1:25:26
sitting on near trillion dollar valuations of of their companies
1:25:30
and stand to. Have a kind of wealth that no
1:25:37
one in. History could have ever imagined
1:25:39
coupled with the kind of power that no one can imagine because
1:25:41
whoever builds the thing if that thing if there is a black cat in
1:25:45
the dark room that we have to take with a grain of salt that
1:25:51
someone who says they're trying to benefit all humanity like So
1:25:54
what are they actually doing? So open AI has on their mission
1:25:59
state page that describes what what open A is mission is the
1:26:05
the first paragraph has the short version, which is to
1:26:07
create artificial general intelligence to benefit all
1:26:10
humanity. But then a paragraph down,
1:26:12
there's the longer version, which is to to create artificial
1:26:16
general intelligence, by which we mean autonomous systems that
1:26:19
outperform humans at all economically valuable work,
1:26:23
because that is of all of the things that AI could be targeted
1:26:28
at the most economically. Valuable as.
1:26:31
A for profit company, right? There's nothing solving Desalina
1:26:36
tion and Chad is not going to to do that.
1:26:39
It might be, you know, in the theory, a nice side effect, but
1:26:43
replacing human labor is spelled out on in their mission
1:26:47
statement as the goal. And so it's it is really
1:26:52
extraordinarily important to understand that.
1:26:54
And I think that the more because of all of this other
1:26:59
language around there around you don't have to worry it's going
1:27:01
to solve all the problems. It's this sort of magical thing.
1:27:05
I think if all the workers of the world actually read that
1:27:08
statement and understood that people would be sharpening their
1:27:12
pitchforks and lighting their torches and taken to the street.
1:27:14
And I think that's what's going to that's what's going to take.
1:27:17
We need a political and economic and social upheaval.
1:27:21
And that's what what Gandhi did was coming from spiritual
1:27:25
principles and speaking to people that way.
1:27:27
But he got people to rise up and take political action and bring
1:27:30
about political change. And that's there is no, there's
1:27:34
no solution to our AI problems that doesn't include a
1:27:37
significant political. Yeah, I've said, I've said since
1:27:41
the beginning of this podcast that.
1:27:44
That it's, it is going to take a bottoms up pressure as people
1:27:50
see this future that we're manifesting, that humanity is
1:27:55
manifesting, that we can get to more and more abundance, that
1:27:59
people will demand it like humanity will demand it.
1:28:02
It's it's kind of like, you know, if, if if we went back in
1:28:06
a time machine to when, you know, our early, early
1:28:09
predecessors discovered fire and you know, let's say your tribe
1:28:14
discovered it, you wouldn't been able to say like, sorry, Bright,
1:28:17
your tribe can't have it. It just wouldn't have worked out
1:28:21
right, because it was too good to have.
1:28:24
And humanity will demand access to this and it there's actually
1:28:30
a capitalistic incentive as well for these systems not to destroy
1:28:38
humanity and destroy the market, which is which it's it's fuzzy
1:28:42
right to see how that's self correcting, but there it has to.
1:28:48
Be self correcting. Or you're right, then people be
1:28:51
like, we're not going to take a world of like 15 mega
1:28:54
trillionaires and and allow them to destroy everything.
1:28:58
They're that they will have no safety in that, in that type of
1:29:01
world. And there's also this forcing
1:29:05
function that the divine is working through us to get us to
1:29:10
make this fateful decision because we have free will.
1:29:12
It's like, are we going to choose abundance for everyone on
1:29:15
the planet? Are we going to choose
1:29:17
continuing to allow the amygdala to and the ego to dominate our
1:29:23
decisions and create the 0 sum fear based mindset which has led
1:29:27
to us having 50 times today the amount of nuclear weapons we
1:29:31
would need to destroy almost all of humanity and send the world
1:29:35
into a nuclear winter for a decade like with 50 times today.
1:29:40
And we're still producing more. China's producing a ton right
1:29:43
now. So we have, we have a, we have a
1:29:45
disease that's actually called MAD mutual assured destruction,
1:29:49
and it is an insanity and we have to transcend that.
1:29:53
And, and you know, it's been a long time coming in some ways,
1:29:58
but I do have faith that we have transcended quite a few
1:30:02
constructs. I mean, you know, in the chapter
1:30:04
in my book on the objectification of women, women
1:30:07
in America didn't have the ability to have their own
1:30:11
checking accounts until the late 1970s.
1:30:13
That a lot of women don't even know that.
1:30:16
It's kind of a mind blowing fact in itself.
1:30:19
And almost no men know that because they didn't have to deal
1:30:22
with that struggle. And that meant if a woman was in
1:30:26
a bad marriage, like she can't even hardly fathom leaving to
1:30:31
even have her own checking account to open her own small
1:30:33
business or whatever she needed to do to take care of herself
1:30:36
financially. And that's in America, right?
1:30:39
And they're still countries where women are like super
1:30:41
oppressed. And so we have to, we have to
1:30:47
transcend the core nature that that we've had, But we do
1:30:53
evolve. I mean, there I, I can't imagine
1:30:56
us in America saying, let's go back to the days of slavery.
1:30:59
I think that I think that's totally off the table.
1:31:03
I I just can't even imagine like a mindset that would take us
1:31:07
there and I can't even imagine one of these tech leaders, these
1:31:13
tech oligarch type of people like suggesting that right.
1:31:17
So. So Jim Crow though, might be on
1:31:19
the table. Make America great.
1:31:20
Again is yeah, yeah, very. Explicitly evoking.
1:31:26
A time when white men didn't have to deal with all of the
1:31:33
other. Have you ever read that book The
1:31:35
Alchemist? You know that.
1:31:37
Book No. It's so good.
1:31:38
It's a that's a book you can read every decade.
1:31:40
There's so many layers of wisdom and I highly recommend it.
1:31:43
But you know, one of the phrases in that book, and this phrase
1:31:47
has been used in many different books is it's always darkest
1:31:50
before the dawn. And when I was reading that
1:31:53
book, I read over that line like 50 times.
1:31:57
Another line is, you know, with great power comes great
1:32:00
responsibility. That's not in The Alchemist, but
1:32:02
that's from Voltaire and Spider Man, Uncle Ben, Uncle Ben and
1:32:06
Spider Man. Exactly.
1:32:07
That's that's in my book too. This is a forcing function
1:32:11
moment. And I have, I do have this
1:32:14
aspect of faith because I just don't think that if you went
1:32:18
back 100 or 200 years ago and we lived in that time and we looked
1:32:23
around at what we had, I don't think we could have been able to
1:32:27
envision what we have today. I just don't, I, I, I don't, you
1:32:31
know, in our wildest imagination, even if you had the
1:32:35
mind of like a Leonardo da Vinci, like, you know, who did
1:32:38
have the mind to invent all types of things.
1:32:41
And look, this is totally speculative, but I think that if
1:32:43
you could. Show what we have today to a
1:32:46
plantation owner in Virginia and say, would you take that over
1:32:49
this? They would say no because what
1:32:52
they had was was more powerful. And that that power is, you
1:32:58
know, with great power comes great responsibility.
1:33:01
Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
1:33:05
And that's one of the, I mean, maybe, maybe some of them, but
1:33:08
but there were there. Were enough of them that that
1:33:11
that you know got the message right and and it and it did lead
1:33:14
to the to the defeat of slavery. But in in that case it actually
1:33:19
did take really violent people right with the Civil war and
1:33:24
people did cling on to power for a long time.
1:33:28
But this is a moment where you know you you laid out in the
1:33:31
introduction to your course and I completely agree with it.
1:33:34
I mean, you know, we're, we're, we're sitting here and it's been
1:33:37
barely three years since the launch of Cha Chi PT and your
1:33:42
member, you know, you and I are both of, of you know, similar
1:33:45
age where, where you remember, you know, the, the sayings of
1:33:50
like we're the first generation to remember life before the
1:33:53
Internet. We're the first generation to
1:33:55
remember life before mobile phones or the 1st generation to
1:33:58
remember life before social media, etcetera, etcetera.
1:34:01
Well, I think, I think you're going to be able to say a
1:34:03
statement like that every year and then eventually, like every
1:34:08
couple of months, assuming we make it to the other side of
1:34:11
this, which I've laid out, you know, why?
1:34:14
Why I'm 95% certain we do many times on the podcast.
1:34:18
But but we've got to breakthrough like so many
1:34:21
different gates to get there. And it is, it is it is an act of
1:34:28
faith in humanity that that when push comes to shove, we make the
1:34:33
right choice. And, and part of part of that
1:34:35
act of faith is just based on our history.
1:34:37
And that, you know, we could have already destroyed ourselves
1:34:40
many times over with nuclear weapons.
1:34:42
You know, somehow we managed to muddle our way through that.
1:34:47
You know, in the, in the book I outline, you know, smallpox and
1:34:51
polio and the fact that we were collaborating, you know, our
1:34:55
scientists were deeply working with Russian scientists during
1:34:59
the Cold War. I mean, like supposedly we were
1:35:01
like mortal enemies. But we're like, hey, if we don't
1:35:04
work together, it's it's over and we work together, right?
1:35:08
To to create so that the two analogies that I I keep coming.
1:35:11
Back to are our climate change and and nuclear technology and
1:35:17
in terms of sort of the paths forward and climate change is 1
1:35:21
where for at least 50 plus years we've known when the cause is
1:35:29
and we've known what we need to do.
1:35:30
We keep searching for a better answer that doesn't.
1:35:33
That isn't the hard answer, but there's enormous.
1:35:37
But we we have a. Technological solution and we've
1:35:39
had. It for a very, very long time
1:35:41
and the only reason it's worse is that it's like the problem is
1:35:43
worse now and so we have to do more drastic things today.
1:35:47
But we have completely as a as a people, as a whole.
1:35:53
And you can point fingers in certain places that have been
1:35:55
forced than others. We we lack the political and
1:35:57
economic well right. It is not a technological
1:36:01
question. Don't you think there, Chris,
1:36:03
that that there could be? A technological breakthrough
1:36:06
like like, again, decoding, you know, how to capture the sun's
1:36:09
energy. That would reframe that whole
1:36:12
conversation where it'd be like, we also have solutions, you
1:36:16
know, but now we understand a lot about harnessing the.
1:36:20
The sun's energy and this administration has essentially
1:36:24
ended. Yeah, that's true, 100% of the
1:36:27
subsidies. In the in the research that are
1:36:28
going into. That and made it economically
1:36:31
valuable and people who have spent, you know, the last 10
1:36:34
years building and investing in the you know, all the funding
1:36:38
has gone away. So again, we that's a that's a
1:36:40
political and economic thing. It is entirely to do with the
1:36:44
money and the, you know, the with oil companies, that's
1:36:49
that's really that's, that's really it.
1:36:51
But the data on the solar starts in Texas is.
1:36:54
That we've never had more, you know, and and it was because of
1:36:57
our cod and everything else. So.
1:36:58
So the one analogy is that the other path?
1:37:00
Forward that I use is nuclear technology, and nuclear
1:37:04
technology was it at the time. And again, many people believe
1:37:08
that AI is a bigger discovery than nuclear technology.
1:37:12
But at the time, it was the most extraordinary scientific
1:37:15
breakthrough in the history of mankind, more actual power and
1:37:19
potential than than anything before.
1:37:22
And it happened at a time of extraordinary international
1:37:27
precarity and post Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
1:37:35
The response? Of.
1:37:38
The US government and and the international community was not
1:37:43
hey, we're in a deadly. Race with.
1:37:46
Russia, we need to win at all costs and this thing is so
1:37:53
powerful. We just need to be on top.
1:37:55
So what we're going to do is we're going to open source
1:37:57
nuclear fission, give it to everyone and tell them to build
1:38:03
all the reactors and weapons that they want as quickly as
1:38:05
possible with no safety or guard rails at all, because we have to
1:38:09
get there first. If we'd done that 100% for not
1:38:13
sitting here in this nice room having this conversation today.
1:38:16
And instead, what happened was something that seemed impossible
1:38:20
on the heels of a quote World War, which is, over a course of
1:38:25
of decades, 191 countries coming together to create a plan for
1:38:35
deep proliferation. And for inspections.
1:38:37
And third party verification and we did have you know, there were
1:38:41
four countries that did not sign on that have become nuclear
1:38:44
powers since then. But the estimates in the 50s and
1:38:47
60s with that there is going to be 5070 plus nuclear nations.
1:38:52
And we have we have 8 that we know of right now.
1:38:57
And it wasn't perfect, right. In our lifetime we've had Three
1:39:00
Mile Island, we've had Chernobyl, we've had Fukushima.
1:39:04
So there have been problems with none of them have been as
1:39:07
cataclysmic as they could have been.
1:39:09
And I consider that a success story.
1:39:12
And so like if, if AI can go the way of that and it's not because
1:39:16
I, you know, I'm not well, I can't say I have 0 concern about
1:39:21
the Terminator thing. But like, I'm not a, I'm not a
1:39:23
doomer and that AI is going to kill us all.
1:39:26
I am concerned that we are going to kill each other with that.
1:39:29
It is a powerful tool and powerful weapon.
1:39:31
And I believe in technology and I have extraordinary concern and
1:39:36
skepticism around humanity as a whole.
1:39:40
I I believe in humanity. But the structures that we've
1:39:43
created in where we are in 2026, going back in the history of the
1:39:47
power structures that exist and how much power that exists in
1:39:50
particular in this country and how concentrated it is, I have
1:39:53
very little. Comfort that lets me sleep well
1:39:58
at night. Knowing that those power
1:40:01
structures are going to be the ones.
1:40:02
They're going to be making the decisions and are going to be
1:40:05
wielding the power of, of this AI.
1:40:07
And in particular, you know, what happened with the Manhattan
1:40:10
Project, which was the most extraordinary technological
1:40:15
achievement I, I think that this country's ever produced is it
1:40:19
was run by the government and was all sides.
1:40:22
We really believe that AI is a national security issue, which I
1:40:26
I do believe it is. This should be a government.
1:40:30
Project. It should not.
1:40:31
Be private capital. Private capital controlling the
1:40:35
most powerful tool in the universe, right?
1:40:41
Is. I don't know that anyone if they
1:40:43
really. Thought about that should be
1:40:44
sleeping well at night unless they were at the top of the heap
1:40:47
and thinking they were going to be the ones with all the power.
1:40:50
And also thinking that the in the decision tree that like if
1:40:53
they're going to be able to it's going to be cordial, cordable,
1:40:55
they're going to be able to do make it do what they wanted to
1:40:58
do right. So I am So what, what what I'm
1:41:03
doing in my course and you know the first part of it is how does
1:41:08
technology work? Because I want to demystify it.
1:41:10
I want people to understand it's not magic and it's not a God.
1:41:13
Also because understanding the technology helps understand what
1:41:16
the problems are. If you understand how it works,
1:41:21
then why does it hallucinate? Is not a mystery.
1:41:26
LLMS are hallucination machines. They were designed to make shit
1:41:30
up and the fact that they happen to hallucinate facts is a real
1:41:35
nice bonus of them. That also gets us a little
1:41:39
unfortunately, too comfortable with the fact that that maybe
1:41:41
they're they're right or the fact that that bias is baked.
1:41:44
And we've had conversations about some of the techniques,
1:41:46
but no one has yet come up with a approvable way once the base
1:41:51
model is pre trained to get the bias out.
1:41:55
There's a bunch of band aids and others like that.
1:41:56
But so I think if you understand that technology, then when we
1:41:59
look at these problems, for each of the problems we're looking
1:42:01
at, at bias, at disinformation, at worker exploitation, at, at
1:42:06
potential impact on jobs and the the the climate, copyright and
1:42:12
creative theft. These are sort of the big areas
1:42:14
that are that are things that, you know, I lose sleep over
1:42:18
right now because those are real problems that are being made
1:42:20
worse today, right? What I'm trying to do is.
1:42:23
Say OK. Let's start with the idea that
1:42:28
AI could lead to either because it solves the problem itself or
1:42:33
because some of your thesis, I think is that AI helps us to see
1:42:37
a different path, to see our our role and our connection to each
1:42:40
other and and it helps us decode what our actual.
1:42:43
Reality is so how? So?
1:42:44
How can AI be a catalyst either? Through it solving problems or
1:42:48
it causing us to see things differently so we solve
1:42:51
problems. How can all of these areas of
1:42:54
concern, which are old problems that are not new, AI didn't
1:42:58
create them, but AI is, is currently the path to make them
1:43:01
worse. If we take at face value this
1:43:03
idea that it could solve all these problems, what would it
1:43:05
actually look like for AI to make this tip, for this problem
1:43:10
to be solved as a result of AI? And so we look at it very
1:43:14
explicitly through the lens of, you know, what is, what is the
1:43:17
goal? What would it look like if AI
1:43:19
was going to was going to actually solve the problem of
1:43:22
disinformation? OK.
1:43:26
What it would mean is that we. Would actually be able to look
1:43:29
at any piece of content. Yeah, of any modality and.
1:43:33
Know for certain. If it was AI generated, AI
1:43:37
generated. Or what the source?
1:43:39
Is and if we had and and you know what actually we, we have
1:43:43
the technology for that already and CB2A there's.
1:43:46
Like a, there's a framework for how it.
1:43:47
Could work, we just need to adopt it.
1:43:49
But what we need? And maybe the answer is like AI
1:43:51
gets us so freaked out about the fact that we could no longer
1:43:54
believe our eyes and our ears at all that we somehow agree.
1:43:59
You know what democracy and. Freedom are.
1:44:03
Contingent more than a hana aren't was like super clear that
1:44:06
like a shared reality is necessary and without that we're
1:44:13
yeah, we're doomed. I report I, I, I.
1:44:16
I quote her a lot in my book. Yeah.
1:44:20
So. So it's a really important
1:44:22
concept. So then.
1:44:22
So, so there is a way. So for each of these problems, I
1:44:25
can say like, I can spell it out.
1:44:26
So that's the, that's, that's the the one for, for
1:44:29
disinformation. So then we say that's the goal.
1:44:32
So what's you know, and, and the solution, the solution, the, the
1:44:35
goal is that we can, we can tell truth from falsehood.
1:44:39
The, the solution is a international standard for
1:44:45
watermarking and where you can just look at anybody's content
1:44:48
and know where it, where it came from.
1:44:51
But then we look at it through the lens of, of power.
1:44:53
So that the, the title of the course is responsible AI
1:44:56
Technology, Power and justice. So like the whole theme is, is
1:44:59
what I think of as justice. Like how do we, what is the
1:45:03
restorative plan? How do we make the world
1:45:05
actually better? And so the power analysis then
1:45:10
is every problem that exists anywhere in the world.
1:45:13
And anyone who's tried to build a company has also looked at a
1:45:15
bunch of problems and said, oh, this is, this is easy.
1:45:17
I can just build software to do this.
1:45:19
And the answer is nobody wants it, you know, because it it they
1:45:23
don't want the problem solved or there's enough power.
1:45:26
So anytime where there's something that doesn't work the
1:45:29
way that we would, we would hope that it does.
1:45:31
There's someone who's benefiting from that.
1:45:34
Someone is profiting, someone is paying and someone gets to
1:45:37
decide what happens there. The reason the healthcare system
1:45:41
functions the way that it does is that insurance companies and
1:45:45
healthcare companies actually make a lot of money from a lot
1:45:48
of of how Byzantine and hard to access and how expensive the
1:45:53
system is. And the vast majority of us pay
1:45:57
and there's a small number of extremely powerful lobbies.
1:46:01
So you have to look at it from power perspective, what stands
1:46:04
in the way of us fixing these problems and then what would
1:46:07
need to happen And the answer of what would need to happen, we
1:46:10
could we could replace all of my ideas in the course with a
1:46:13
global spiritual awakening where suddenly everyone sees that we
1:46:16
are interconnected and that if we solve the problems for
1:46:20
everyone then we all benefit. But yes, IA 100% agree that that
1:46:23
would solve every problem. But then there also is what is a
1:46:26
road map for how we can through political, economic and social
1:46:31
means, create the environment where we choose these things.
1:46:35
Because when when it comes to to disinformation and one of the
1:46:38
things that we talked about in the class, like even a simple
1:46:42
technology solution. So for let's say hallucination
1:46:45
as another sort, one of the sub problems, RAG works really well,
1:46:50
right? LLMS on their own are going to
1:46:53
spit back out whatever's in the base model because they don't by
1:46:56
and large have a fact store. But when you combined with
1:47:00
something like RAG, they can actually look up and report
1:47:04
things that are factual at least coming from from that data
1:47:07
store, right? Why doesn't every company?
1:47:10
Then just implement. That well, the answer is it's
1:47:14
expensive, it's slow, it's not necessarily what consumers want
1:47:17
because they want something that's going to come back
1:47:19
quickly or how about Google? Google has the closest thing to
1:47:23
a universal fax store. So why doesn't all of Google
1:47:28
Search and Gemini just come together so everything is Gemini
1:47:34
plus Rag? Well, they could do that, but
1:47:36
actually Google's entire business model still relies on
1:47:41
if AI just gave you the answer to everything.
1:47:44
They stopped making money tomorrow because there's no ads
1:47:48
in there. So Google is not does not want
1:47:50
to replace Google Search 100%. So you just have you sort of
1:47:55
have to look at the things that actually have to happen along
1:47:57
the way and what are the things to get there.
1:47:59
And if I had to just distill like what you know from I think
1:48:04
of myself as a. Actually heard this.
1:48:06
Phrase recently that I can't believe I hadn't heard before
1:48:09
Doctor Fallon Wilson talks about public interest technology as
1:48:14
opposed to responsible technology.
1:48:16
So coming out of the, the history of public interest law
1:48:19
that started in the also the civil rights movement, and that
1:48:23
is that sort of as a, as a name feels actually really good to me
1:48:26
because I, I believe in technology and I believe that
1:48:29
technology can be in the public interest.
1:48:32
It just often is not. And what would it actually take
1:48:38
for technology to really sort of improve the world that it has to
1:48:44
come from, from that place? And, and so there's just a lot
1:48:47
of stuff that is, is sort of nitty gritty on the ground
1:48:53
dealing with human systems and understanding and deconstructing
1:48:56
the power that benefits from things being messed up and
1:49:00
things being unequal. And so I think while we're
1:49:04
working on the how do we raise consciousness?
1:49:08
How do we identify clearly what what needs to happen?
1:49:10
And so to me, like, I think of it as at least at the very, very
1:49:14
least, if this is the most powerful thing that we've ever
1:49:17
created. And maybe the, you know, as IJ
1:49:20
good said, our final invention, once we create it, we won't have
1:49:23
to invent anything else because it's going to it's going to
1:49:26
invent everything else for us. We just need to be careful and
1:49:31
cautious and and there is zero care and caution from the top
1:49:37
down. You have people like Dario and I
1:49:39
think that I think there's a big spectrum.
1:49:40
I think you got Elon on one side and Dario on the other side and
1:49:43
everyone falls in between. And I think Dario does actually
1:49:47
in his heart really, and he's torn because there's also this
1:49:51
there's a big race and there's a huge amount of money.
1:49:54
But him staring down heck Seth and saying no was the only act
1:49:59
of courage that of meaning that I've seen in the last year.
1:50:03
That was, you know, to me was super, super powerful.
1:50:05
And I think he really does. And I think the people who who I
1:50:08
think there are people who work at these other companies who
1:50:10
believe it. But when you get to the top, I
1:50:12
think he's he's the one who's who's the greatest hope in terms
1:50:15
of actually really believing these things and doing a lot of
1:50:18
work and, and being very, very open about it, about the things
1:50:22
that they don't know and the potential problems.
1:50:24
And Anthropic is regularly publishing research that is
1:50:30
extremely unflattering to them and everyone else.
1:50:32
I don't see anyone else doing that.
1:50:34
And so like I, I have a lot more comfort from from their
1:50:40
approach. But what I think we need to do
1:50:43
is I think we need to slow down. You know, if, if Marc Andreessen
1:50:46
is all about acceleration, I'm, I'm about diesel.
1:50:48
I'm not about shut it down, turn it off, unplug it.
1:50:51
But I think we need to slow down.
1:50:52
I think that you know, and and look, you and I, if you've spent
1:50:55
any time, if you spent decades building software, we have been
1:51:02
building various. Forms of software, let's say
1:51:04
for. 75 years now, no one has ever figured out how to.
1:51:11
Build software that doesn't have problems.
1:51:13
That doesn't do things maybe like the 1980s team building the
1:51:17
the shuttle software. There's some famous stories
1:51:20
about how they built software and had no bugs, how to get it
1:51:22
right. Yeah.
1:51:23
But that was a that was a very different story than like.
1:51:26
No software you've ever built? No software I've ever built or
1:51:29
our teams have ever built has been without problems.
1:51:32
We just haven't been in this position to build any software
1:51:36
that could tip the scales for humanity one way or another.
1:51:39
So those problems were sort of manageable, but we also know, I
1:51:43
know the people who work with you and I know how they work.
1:51:45
Like there's a lot of thought and care that goes into trying
1:51:48
to think about all the things that could go wrong and not
1:51:51
going faster. Even when you, I'm sure as the
1:51:54
CEO and me as the CEO saying like, hey, we need to get this
1:51:56
done faster. Like they're like, hey, we have
1:51:59
to still be careful. And the other principle of
1:52:02
software engineering that we know is that the earlier you
1:52:06
discover problems, the faster you end up going and the cheaper
1:52:11
it is. Because discovering problems.
1:52:14
In test or God forbid when it's out in production is a lot more
1:52:19
expensive. And what we're doing right now
1:52:22
is saying we're building something that is far more
1:52:26
impactful than any software that any human being has ever
1:52:29
imagined before. We are trying to build it and
1:52:36
rebuild it and rebuild it faster than any software that's ever
1:52:40
been built, especially now that we're using AI to build it.
1:52:42
So there's like the deploy cycles are stuff that you and I
1:52:45
could never have dreamed of when we were, you know, building
1:52:47
companies. But also we have no idea how it
1:52:52
works. So we had all of this problem
1:52:55
doing the stuff before with deterministic software, even if
1:52:59
we had statistical models and there was some stochasticity, I
1:53:03
can tell you someone was coming in and what possible paths it
1:53:06
could take. And, you know, we are now
1:53:09
building the systems that the smartest people in the world,
1:53:11
will we someday maybe unlock the mysteries of how neural Nets
1:53:16
work? Maybe.
1:53:17
But today, smartest people in the world cannot tell you what's
1:53:20
going on or why they do what they do.
1:53:22
And the smartest people working on alignment either have quit
1:53:26
because they think it's impossible, or they have yet to
1:53:29
come up with a credible plan for how we can actually make them
1:53:32
corridible and control them. So you put all that stuff
1:53:34
together and that we're running as fast as we possibly could and
1:53:37
the impact and we have no idea what we're doing.
1:53:40
That's right there. Like if I was if there's one
1:53:43
thing. That I could do it would be we.
1:53:45
Just need to slow down. And so part of why I think it's
1:53:49
important to talk about the problems and and I don't, you
1:53:55
know, I hope you don't see that as coming from a place of fear,
1:53:58
like it's coming from a place of deep concern for humanity.
1:54:01
So I think that I think we need to be aware of those things.
1:54:04
So the the thing that could seal our fate more than anything else
1:54:10
is if we go too fast and we're too careless and running with
1:54:14
scissors when it comes to AGI seems like the worst idea
1:54:19
humanity has ever had. So certainly there there are a
1:54:24
lot of. People signaling even even Sam
1:54:27
Altman, you know, I sent you a podcast where he was on Laurie
1:54:31
Siegel's new podcast. It's called Mostly Human.
1:54:33
And he, he's actually suggesting on that podcast, this is, I
1:54:36
mean, you know, I've been in tech a long time like you, but
1:54:39
he's suggesting in that podcast that he wishes that this was
1:54:44
government controlled. I mean, that's very unusual.
1:54:48
I never heard the social media people saying that or the, you
1:54:53
know, operating system people saying that in prior ways or the
1:54:57
mobile, you know, mobile systems, you know, that came
1:54:59
online. So it's interesting, right?
1:55:04
And, and, and, you know, a lot of the things you, you outlined
1:55:07
all create opportunities. There's a lot of people, you
1:55:09
know, Dario left open AI to start Anthropic.
1:55:12
Mere Morati left open AI to start her company.
1:55:15
You know, Doctor Fifi Lee is on hiatus from Stanford to start
1:55:20
World Lab just raised a billion diamonds in the first round.
1:55:25
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.
1:55:27
So, so I mean they're there there.
1:55:30
Are there are people that have incredible intentionality which
1:55:34
are going into this for the opportunity to create AI safety?
1:55:38
I mean, it had Minoj sexy, you know, you probably know Minoj on
1:55:42
the podcast that was that's episode 42.
1:55:47
And you know, he runs an AI safety company called Trustwise.
1:55:51
So there, there, there are a lot of opportunities embedded in
1:55:55
everything you said. And AI does have this aspect of
1:56:01
superpowers and we've seen the cloud code and everything else
1:56:04
to create things that are going to lead to a lot more
1:56:10
entrepreneurs and a lot more products and services that we
1:56:14
can't, we can't imagine. So it, it's a, it's a, it's a
1:56:17
very dynamic system, but we should, we should go into
1:56:21
spirituality. And the reason, reason why is
1:56:24
like that. I do, I do want to just say that
1:56:28
that, you know, in the lattice, like I envisioned that it is
1:56:32
this science and spirituality coming together.
1:56:36
But it's, it's a lot of it's a lot of dynamic system too, that
1:56:41
I think it's going to get us to the other side of this.
1:56:43
Like necessity is the mother of invention.
1:56:46
And as we approach more and more of this frontier, I think it's
1:56:49
going to lead to more and more of an awakening.
1:56:53
And even if you don't approach that from a spirituality
1:56:56
standpoint, there's a way to look at it, you know, purely
1:57:01
scientifically. Is there something about natural
1:57:03
selection evolution that is trying to awaken us so we that
1:57:08
we don't extinct ourselves? And we all, I think viscerally
1:57:13
feel that. I actually even think, I mean,
1:57:15
remember that Elon Musk, like he did sign the, the Paul's all AI
1:57:20
development thing. And you know, you could say,
1:57:22
well, he just signed that to get to get power.
1:57:25
And maybe that's true, but he did put his signature on it,
1:57:29
right? And, and that was the that was
1:57:30
the Future of Life Institute created by Max Tegmark, who
1:57:34
wrote Life 3.0, which, you know, we talked about the arrogance of
1:57:39
technologist and in life three that, oh, you may remember the
1:57:41
tale of the Megas where you know, they're the, they're the,
1:57:46
they're the ones that invent AGI and then they try to change and
1:57:50
shape the world. And they do successfully in this
1:57:53
short story in it is short fiction story in it to be
1:57:59
essentially the senators of the world.
1:58:01
Like they're like, we know best and we're going to change it.
1:58:05
So how do you how do you view what is?
1:58:08
I mean, you're very spiritually developed.
1:58:10
A lot of people may not know that.
1:58:12
About you but. But how do you view this reality
1:58:15
that we're in? And the reason I've covered this
1:58:18
on the podcast is that it's not only a core truth for me, it's
1:58:24
that there's a different dynamic system underway, which is, you
1:58:29
know, our souls having this physical experience in this
1:58:33
lifetime. And we part, part of my faith
1:58:38
comes from the the divine is working through us to manifest
1:58:42
this choice. And it is our choice.
1:58:45
You know, we do have free will like it.
1:58:47
It could turn out, I've laid out the 5% chance it could turn out
1:58:51
that we do destroy ourselves. But part of the act of faith is
1:58:57
not just the past and kind of how we evolved and you know,
1:59:01
we've manifested more abundance that we could imagine a hundred,
1:59:04
200 years ago, etcetera. But but it's also that that God
1:59:09
is working through us. We are the hands and we're.
1:59:12
The hands that. Need to make the fateful choice
1:59:16
and it is that with great power comes great responsibility
1:59:19
moment. But how do you, how do you kind
1:59:21
of look at this reality through your many, many decades of
1:59:24
practice and spiritually my experience, you know, in in
1:59:29
recovery? Was very largely, you know,
1:59:34
through a bunch of sort of personal inner work to, to
1:59:37
start. But I think I, I agree with you
1:59:42
that I think that there is an evolutionary component.
1:59:44
And I'm very clear that this is the way that I look at things.
1:59:48
I have, I do, I try very hard to not speak in terms of this is
1:59:53
how things are because I, I have the the longer I look at it, the
1:59:56
less I know for certain. I mean, let's say real quickly
1:59:58
in the lattice, like you know, right about the years 20. 30
2:00:01
through 2085, we still don't understand the nature of God by
2:00:05
2085. So, so I think it is an effort
2:00:07
to even anything. So, so like I, I think that.
2:00:12
The that there is some part of. Our of.
2:00:16
Our nature that is part of, you know, our evolutionary
2:00:22
psychology at the very least, where having a thirst for
2:00:29
understanding something bigger than us and how we're connected
2:00:33
and what is our place. I think we're programmed with
2:00:36
that. And that is not inconsistent
2:00:39
with could it be divinely created or could it not be?
2:00:43
So like my, my whole view of, of all this stuff is I happen to
2:00:49
have a, a personal belief in faith, but it does not.
2:00:54
Where I've landed is it's not contingent on there has to be
2:00:57
something supernatural or mystical about it.
2:00:59
Like it also works for me if it's just purely scientifically
2:01:04
or rationally explained, because what I what I see is when people
2:01:13
follow that. Sort of.
2:01:15
Instinctual Dr. And through practice, study, whatever, and
2:01:24
in particular through community, come to a point, a point of view
2:01:28
about the world where we actually do look at it as we're
2:01:32
we're not separate. We're all part of the single
2:01:35
Organism, which might or might not be going on, you know,
2:01:39
infinitely or could just be happening right now.
2:01:43
That when people see that seek that out and then try to live
2:01:46
their lives as as if that was true, that we tend to be better
2:01:53
to each other and the world goes better.
2:01:56
So whether or not we're actually seeing something that is a real.
2:02:02
Divinity. Or we just have this drive and
2:02:05
maybe that's the evolutionary thing.
2:02:07
Like I would be perfectly fine at the end of my life if I found
2:02:09
out. You know what?
2:02:11
It's all just, you know, science, we can explain it.
2:02:14
And that natural selection, the reason that we've survived as
2:02:17
long as we have is because we have this drive to believe that
2:02:19
there's something else. Even if there isn't anything if
2:02:21
coming, if if you know, my final day, my final breath lights out,
2:02:25
I would be fine with having lived with all of this all along
2:02:29
as opposed to suddenly there's something else there.
2:02:33
I have no idea what is or isn't there.
2:02:37
So I've been on sort of a, you know, a path through that that's
2:02:39
deeply tied to just actually doing the work day-to-day with
2:02:43
people who are suffering, you know, in in one way or another.
2:02:49
And part of the deal, part of the extraordinary thing about
2:02:52
recovery is that the biggest insight that that some of us
2:02:58
come to. Is that?
2:03:01
All of the difficult things that I've experienced.
2:03:04
The the sort of the the personal.
2:03:06
Pain and suffering of of addiction and of being an
2:03:11
addict, which means you do all kinds of things that do go
2:03:13
against your core values and you hurt people and you take from
2:03:17
people. And that all of the, all of the
2:03:21
suffering that I've experienced then and then all of the
2:03:23
suffering as humans that we go through in in day-to-day
2:03:25
existence is the thing that makes me useful to someone else.
2:03:31
That the the root of compassion is is seeing that the connection
2:03:36
between the two of us is that we suffer and that through my own
2:03:40
suffering, I can see your suffering and see beyond the,
2:03:46
the causes and the conditions and the obscurations, whatever
2:03:48
that might make you act in a way that drives me nuts.
2:03:54
But what connects us and compassion and love are
2:03:57
interconnected. But for me part part of why you
2:03:59
know, you've got I've become a practicing Buddhist.
2:04:03
So for the last 15 years I've been studying and practicing and
2:04:08
built a, you know, a mentation practice, studied with the
2:04:11
teacher intensively, go on retreats every single year.
2:04:15
And I sort of, I went from being someone who was extraordinarily
2:04:19
anti anything that looks like religion and you don't happen to
2:04:27
grow up with. Without.
2:04:28
It's a it's a long, too long a story here, but my mom's family
2:04:31
are Italian Catholics. My dad's family were Russian,
2:04:33
Ukrainian, Russian, Ukrainian, Polish Jews who were devout all
2:04:38
the way up to my parents generation.
2:04:39
It was cut off at their generation.
2:04:41
So we were raised with people who came from a strong faith
2:04:44
tradition but had none. So we were raised with nothing,
2:04:48
which as a sort of mathematically and
2:04:51
scientifically minded person, at some point looked with
2:04:55
skepticism and the opiate for the masses kind of point of
2:04:58
view. But it also meant that I didn't
2:04:59
have a lot of baggage. So I know a lot of people who
2:05:01
had who grew up with a faith tradition that was really
2:05:03
important to them. I know a lot of people who
2:05:05
experienced sort of religious trauma and some of those people
2:05:09
have a much harder time to actually.
2:05:12
So like I didn't have a lot of baggage.
2:05:13
I got over it and I started to I mean, you know, we, we've talked
2:05:16
about this year, your psychedelic experiences and more
2:05:19
recent. I had extensive psychedelic
2:05:22
experimentation 1985 to 1988. So, you know, 4040 years ago
2:05:28
and, and it turns out once my, you know, and that was not the
2:05:32
sort of the root of my addiction, but my addiction was
2:05:34
happening at the same time. And I so I just need to be
2:05:37
abstinent from all that stuff. But those experiences certainly
2:05:41
got me to see that we certainly don't see the whole reality on
2:05:47
our own. And it made it clear that there
2:05:49
was more going on that then set me off on this, on this path to
2:05:52
want to understand all the people who had seen or believed
2:05:56
that there's more going on than what meets the eye.
2:05:59
And somewhere along the way when I decided I needed something.
2:06:06
More. That just therapy and and sort
2:06:08
of group work in the service work was not enough.
2:06:11
I decided I I need a meditation practice and it was meditation
2:06:15
was really the gateway to Buddhism.
2:06:16
I just where I started looking, It all happened to be Buddhist
2:06:21
writing and teaching and the Buddhism just made sense to me.
2:06:25
And in particular, and I've spent now a lot of time with the
2:06:30
study and practice of it, but the the core principles of it
2:06:34
just really resonated with me in particular.
2:06:36
There's multiple different schools at the high level, but
2:06:38
the Mahayana Buddhism is really built on this foundation of the
2:06:44
the Theravada, which is sort of the kind of what the Buddha
2:06:47
taught explicitly is really about the, the path to sort of
2:06:51
individual liberation. And the Mahayana builds on that.
2:06:56
And it's, yeah, the goal is, is the, the end of suffering.
2:07:02
But actually the, the vow, the, the Bodhisattva vow.
2:07:05
And I've, I've taken these vows and this has been sort of
2:07:08
important part. The thing for me is to want to
2:07:11
work to believe the suffering of all sentient beings.
2:07:14
And so the goal is not personal salvation for personal
2:07:17
salvation. It's to essentially do the work
2:07:20
on yourself so you can then try to help all sentient beings, no
2:07:26
exceptions. And so, I mean, I could, we
2:07:31
could talk about Buddhism, but like the basic concepts of
2:07:33
Buddhism are what I, I think of as you know, the core concepts
2:07:40
of reality is that we and my hyena Buddhism.
2:07:42
So like the basic idea is that is the idea of Buddha nature.
2:07:47
So we are all born pure and pristine and perfect and it is
2:07:54
conditioning of the the human experience that clouds are our
2:07:59
view of that ultimate reality and that the the goal depending
2:08:07
on which school. You're in.
2:08:09
I mean, the goal is. Really just to recognize that,
2:08:10
like if we could, if we could recognize at any moment what our
2:08:16
true nature is, then there's only one possibility, which is
2:08:20
we're, we're all connected and I need to do everything I can to,
2:08:23
to help everyone else anytime. But that's not, none of us lives
2:08:28
like that. Even the Dalai Lama 24/7 is not
2:08:32
living in that that state. And so some people, I mean, do a
2:08:35
lot of work to remind ourselves and having iconography and other
2:08:38
things like that around. So you can, you can see it and
2:08:40
remind that. But so I think the, the basic,
2:08:43
you know, human existence in reality is we don't see things
2:08:45
clearly because of this conditioning and that because
2:08:51
of, of that obscuration, we tend to and the, the sort of the
2:08:56
fundamental idea is that we have this illusion that we are, we
2:09:03
are separate and that there is some kind of permanence.
2:09:08
There's a million other ideas. But like, if you sort of boil it
2:09:10
down to that and the original teaching of of the Buddha is is
2:09:15
really around sort of impermanence and about
2:09:21
interdependence is probably the easiest translation or it was
2:09:24
called interdependent Co arising.
2:09:26
But really sort of like that. We are all, there's a great Zen
2:09:29
poet and Zen teacher, Jane Hirschfield, who said that Zen
2:09:35
pretty much boils down to to three things.
2:09:39
Everything changes, everything is connected.
2:09:41
Pay attention. And.
2:09:44
So that's maybe like the simplest sort of statement of,
2:09:46
of how I how I think about it. But that I think that reality is
2:09:50
that, yeah, I think that we are all perfect and pure and are
2:09:56
suffering. The fruit of our suffering is
2:09:58
that we don't realize that and anything, any set of practices
2:10:01
that we can do. And in Buddhism, you know, one
2:10:04
of the things that I really loved about when I sort of dove
2:10:07
into the Buddhist teachings is that the Buddha's primary way of
2:10:12
transmitting this teaching was to start by saying, Hey, I'm
2:10:16
going to tell you, I sat under this tree.
2:10:19
I, I was on this path for years and years trying to figure all
2:10:21
the stuff out. And then I sat under this tree
2:10:23
and sort of saw what I believe is, is reality as it is.
2:10:28
I can tell you what that is, but I don't believe me.
2:10:31
You need to figure it out for yourself.
2:10:33
And that the, the path is, you need to.
2:10:35
So Buddhism is not about reading and it's not about meditation.
2:10:40
It's, it's, it's those two together, but it doesn't exist
2:10:43
without without study and without practice.
2:10:46
And that his dying talk with his students was, you know, that the
2:10:52
final thing he said that's the most famous was like, be a lamp
2:10:55
unto yourself. And so don't take anything that
2:10:58
I've said in all of these years for granted.
2:11:02
Go out and see and figure it out for yourself.
2:11:03
And that to me is really important because I, it's not
2:11:06
the message that I hear. And a lot of other places, which
2:11:08
is this is the way it is. And if you don't do it this way,
2:11:11
you're right, you're doomed. Well, there is the dogma.
2:11:14
Yeah. And then and anything there are,
2:11:16
there are dogmatic. Buddhists.
2:11:17
So like you can, you can find you can find dogma.
2:11:19
Anywhere but at the core teaching.
2:11:20
And that was something that really, really appealed to me
2:11:24
and and it was consistent with what I'd seen in my lived
2:11:27
experience of being a person, recovery and trying to work with
2:11:30
people and seeing people come to the this realization that helped
2:11:34
them get sober. And it ties back to some of the
2:11:37
stuff that I saw and and experienced in, in psychedelic
2:11:40
experiences that definitely shaped the way that I've I've
2:11:43
seen the world since then. But I guess the other thing that
2:11:45
I think is really important and it is, it turns out is
2:11:48
foundational, I think to a lot of of the great spiritual
2:11:51
traditions is this idea of discernment as being like
2:11:58
incredibly essential and important and that we can see
2:12:00
things and have experiences. And then we have to integrate
2:12:04
that and figure out what yes. I I don't care.
2:12:07
How many psychedelics you take you've you've never.
2:12:10
Grasped. Reality in a way where you have
2:12:13
it all figured out, right, for sure.
2:12:15
And I completely agree. One of the most important things
2:12:18
in my life, looking back on, on this on, on a life of, of, of
2:12:22
trying to do these things is that I can.
2:12:25
And I'd be curious what, what you would say.
2:12:26
But like I can point back to any point in time 30 years ago, 20
2:12:31
years ago, five years ago, six months ago, where something I
2:12:35
was really certain about, it turns out I was completely and
2:12:38
totally wrong about. And some of the things that are
2:12:40
most important to me in my life are things that I was completely
2:12:45
and totally had prejudged and was wrong about and then saw
2:12:49
things in a different way. And those are the things that
2:12:51
actually are most dear to me. And so if you believe that in
2:12:55
your own experience, then the only logical conclusion, this is
2:12:59
just like, you know, very, very simple formal logic.
2:13:04
Or is that if that's true, then I'm completely delusional right
2:13:07
now about a whole bunch of things.
2:13:09
So I, so that it's impossible to believe that and not try to
2:13:13
approach the world with humility and also understand that like,
2:13:17
if you think you're humble, you're probably not.
2:13:18
But like just starting with the principle of like I, I have to
2:13:21
believe that I'm as wrong about as many things as I am right now
2:13:25
as I was 10 years ago or 20 years ago.
2:13:26
Yeah. I mean, I think that we we need
2:13:28
to approach it with with a lot of humility.
2:13:31
I do believe that whatever the nature of God is, whatever the
2:13:35
nature is that created The Big Bang, you know, the, the miracle
2:13:39
that every materialist needs to grapple with, It's, it's, it's
2:13:44
so far beyond our comprehension that I do think will be forever
2:13:48
grasping at it. I have really loved diving into
2:13:55
all of this ancient scripture to look for the common route
2:13:58
because it's, it's, it's looking for the pattern recognition and
2:14:02
anything I've ever studied, I've I've looked for that.
2:14:06
And so that the common route is this is this route of that where
2:14:12
we actually come from is from this place of love and light.
2:14:17
And we're seeing that more and more through quantum physics and
2:14:20
all the experiments that are being done with sound and
2:14:22
everything else. And, you know, one of the things
2:14:25
you said, you said earlier, which, which I just like to
2:14:29
reframe is that there is a universal human value.
2:14:35
It there is a, there is a universal alignment.
2:14:37
It's just that we have like so much programming and including
2:14:43
in religion, You know, one of the chapters in my book is on is
2:14:46
on religion and that that programming has created a dogma
2:14:53
of separation. Like I'd love the Bhagavad Gita,
2:14:55
that it starts out with the caste system.
2:14:58
And I reject that, that frame. And there's lots of things that
2:15:03
religion has has evolved from like, you know, I'm Jewish, we
2:15:07
don't burn animals at the altar anymore.
2:15:10
Christians don't go on violent crusades, etcetera.
2:15:12
And you know, most Hindus don't really practice the caste system
2:15:17
anymore that there are still some, right?
2:15:19
So, so there is a, there is an evolution underway.
2:15:23
But I do have, I do have great faith that there is this
2:15:28
consciousness awakening underway to awaken us back to our core
2:15:33
nature and that technology is the catalyst.
2:15:37
And the question I think for both of us is, is it light that
2:15:45
takes? Us there primarily.
2:15:47
Or is it darkness that takes us there primarily because one way
2:15:50
or another, we're going there. And even if we just slow down,
2:15:55
like, even if, even if people listening to this, you know, are
2:16:00
in power and say, and, and let's say that that decision is made
2:16:04
one way or another, we're going to this path because underlying
2:16:09
the fear of, of the capitalist motive, like we need to get AGI
2:16:13
before China, et cetera, is the hope.
2:16:18
There is hope too. And you know, and I know you see
2:16:21
that and, and, and I want to be incredibly clear and, and, and
2:16:26
incredibly respectful about that because you, you're very
2:16:29
responsible and you're responsible AI class of saying,
2:16:32
look, I, you know, the answer for me is yes to both, right?
2:16:35
That, that there is this great promise and you lay out, you
2:16:39
know, some of the amazing breakthroughs that have
2:16:41
happened. But what an honor this is to do
2:16:45
this with you. I'm just mindful of the fact
2:16:48
that you have a meeting in about 15 minutes.
2:16:51
I really, I really don't want to want to make you late for that.
2:16:56
You've been so generous with your time here, and this is not
2:16:59
the last we'll be talking about the topic.
2:17:02
I hope not. I was actually going.
2:17:04
To say that that like we should definitely.
2:17:07
Do this again, I mean, just a year from now, like, think about
2:17:11
how much progress is going to be made.
2:17:14
And so I hope you'll take me up on that because I'm very
2:17:17
dedicated to helping humanity have the heart shift that we
2:17:22
need to make it to the other side of this.
2:17:24
I want us to create heaven on earth.
2:17:26
That's why I'm doing this. That's why I'm self funding it.
2:17:29
You know, there's no ads on this or anything else.
2:17:31
It's not an economic motive. It's a, it's a true love for
2:17:35
humanity and wanting us to create that beloved society that
2:17:40
MLK saw that create that around the world.
2:17:43
And the amazing thing about this time is that that's never been
2:17:48
more possible. But it also is correct to say
2:17:52
that it's never been more possible to destroy ourselves,
2:17:54
Right. So, so we want both of you.
2:17:56
And I want to get to the same destination, of course, for the
2:18:00
for the sake of all humanity. And and it's going to be a wild
2:18:04
ride over the next 10 to 15 years.
2:18:06
Well, thank you for what you're doing.
2:18:07
And thank you. Thank you for.
2:18:09
Yeah, what you're doing is. Amazing.
2:18:11
What amazing gift to those students and I can't wait to
2:18:14
see. How this grows for you like your
2:18:18
voice is really important. So people should sign up for
2:18:22
that course online. You know, you make it very
2:18:24
accessible and it does benefit a great 'cause with Houston
2:18:29
Tillotson. It's awesome that you're serving
2:18:31
on the board of trustees. It's, it's, it's going to be fun
2:18:34
to see where you go with this too, you know, because I know, I
2:18:37
know it's a big drive for you and you're, you're communicating
2:18:40
a very important message that everybody needs to hear.
2:18:43
So thanks so much for Thanks, Brett.
2:18:44
Well, thanks again, everybody for tuning in to another episode
2:18:48
of Love Conquers Fear. I absolutely love that episode.
2:18:53
It really does take us looking at this challenge and
2:18:57
opportunity from many different perspectives.
2:19:00
And that's why with Love Conquers Fear, I've been mixing
2:19:03
it up with lots of scientists, spiritual teachers, amazing
2:19:07
entrepreneurs, amazing investors, amazing executives
2:19:11
like Chris. And wow, what what an episode.
2:19:15
So I hope you really enjoyed this.
2:19:17
Thanks for all the love you're giving me.
2:19:19
I get so many messages every day from people that are having a
2:19:23
hardship. You know, we talked about
2:19:25
Buddhism. I was going to ask Chris about
2:19:27
Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance.
2:19:29
If you haven't read that, that's a good one.
2:19:31
And thank you again for all the love.
2:19:35
Please keep on sharing it. Again, this is self funded and
2:19:39
my goal here is to help with the collective awakening that we
2:19:43
need to make it to the other side.
2:19:46
Thank you.