Latest / Love Conquers Fear / #59: The Big Differentiator: How to Stand Out When Everyone Has the Power of AI — Mitch Joel

Transcript

#59: The Big Differentiator: How to Stand Out When Everyone Has the Power of AI — Mitch Joel · Love Conquers Fear

• 0:00
  Hey everyone, I want to announce that Love Conquers Fear with the
• 0:05
  subtitle Humanity, AI and the Age of Abundance for All is now
• 0:09
  available for preorder@loveconquersfear.org.
• 0:13
  It is such a beautiful experience to have this book in
• 0:16
  my hands. The version that you can
• 0:19
  pre-order now is hardcover comes out on June 23rd in honor of the
• 0:25
  solstice where the light overcomes the dark.
• 0:28
  It covers a very broad range of how we're going to transcend all
• 0:33
  the biggest problems and opportunities we have in the
• 0:37
  world to enter into that beautiful age of abundance for
• 0:41
  all. I hope you'll support the work.
• 0:42
  This is my love letter to humanity.
• 0:44
  This is my soul song. It's a deeply sacred book that I
• 0:49
  poured my heart and soul into. Tell your friends.
• 0:52
  Tell them about Love Conquers fear.org.
• 0:54
  Tell them about the podcast and ultimately tell them about this
• 0:58
  book because this is the manifestation of all the work
• 1:01
  I've done on this path. And it is.
• 1:04
  My deep, deep prayer for all of. Humanity, thank you so much.
• 1:08
  The call is come and talk to us about what AM means to our
• 1:10
  business. And ultimately it's not really a
• 1:12
  story about what this technology is and the tools are.
• 1:14
  It's fundamentally a story about how you're going to have to show
• 1:16
  up as a human as we evolve in this world.
• 1:19
  What I try to explain to people is like there's two paths you
• 1:21
  can go down. Path number one is you're going
• 1:23
  to use it as an answer engine, which is I think like the whole
• 1:26
  academic problem. Why are you telling kids not to
• 1:30
  use it? Because they're cheating in a
• 1:31
  world where you can do the other thing.
• 1:33
  And the other thing is to tell them we're giving you a
• 1:35
  superpower. So you have this whole world
• 1:37
  where people are using for answers and it's giving them a
• 1:39
  better e-mail to send, a better report to give.
• 1:41
  But ultimately what that's doing is it's taking away not only
• 1:44
  their agency, but their ability to think and to push it forward.
• 1:47
  At a macro level. What I think is happening is
• 1:50
  that mean is pretty high. Then what becomes your
• 1:52
  differentiator? If everyone is better than
• 1:54
  pretty good? And the answer goes back to my
• 1:57
  core roots, which is a brand. Brand will be the only thing.
• 2:04
  Welcome back everybody to the Love Conquers Fear podcast.
• 2:08
  I am back from the Ted conference, which it was in its
• 2:11
  last year in Vancouver. It was a very moving event.
• 2:15
  It was actually Chris Anderson's last as the head curator and he
• 2:20
  handed over the reins to saw Khan and next year moves to San
• 2:24
  Diego. It's March 1st through the 4th.
• 2:27
  You can apply online. It was a fantastic Ted.
• 2:31
  I felt a real shift this year in the sense that the past years,
• 2:37
  ever since the launch of ChatGPT, have felt more
• 2:41
  dystopian. They felt more kind of nervous,
• 2:45
  a lot of nervous energy about what is this AI moment mean, You
• 2:48
  know, is this the end of all jobs?
• 2:50
  Is this the end of humanity? You know, kind of the
• 2:52
  Terminator, the Matrix scenario. So you really kind of felt the
• 2:55
  gravity of that at Ted in the past years.
• 3:00
  This year it felt a lot more balanced.
• 3:03
  You know, there's still some talks like that, but it also
• 3:07
  felt more balanced in the sense that there was this real embrace
• 3:10
  of new forms of artwork that are being created that weren't
• 3:13
  possible before, that are really getting to the point where
• 3:16
  they're truly beautiful, where you're looking at them and
• 3:19
  you're just in a state of awe. There was an amazing art piece
• 3:24
  for this kind of cosmic deity speaking about our past is
• 3:30
  humanity and our future, all generated via AI.
• 3:33
  It's now live. I'll put a link in here.
• 3:36
  It's just a 4 minute long video and it really felt like
• 3:39
  something new. You know, the message felt very
• 3:43
  divine, very profound. As you know, these systems,
• 3:47
  these large language models are trained on all of humanity's
• 3:50
  content, including all the spiritual text, all the quantum
• 3:53
  physics text, all the user manuals, everything right in
• 3:56
  every language. And you, you have to ask
• 3:59
  yourself when you're using these models, what question would I
• 4:03
  ask of a machine that is trained on every single piece of content
• 4:07
  that we've ever produced? And kind of put yourself in that
• 4:10
  frame of mind. And this piece really met that
• 4:13
  moment. There was an amazing talk by Van
• 4:16
  Jones, Hopefully that'll be live by the time you see this, about
• 4:20
  the importance of this moment and meeting this moment with
• 4:23
  what he called ancient intelligence, ancestral
• 4:26
  intelligence, and a word he made-up called asphalt
• 4:30
  intelligence, which I really loved.
• 4:32
  And just the gravity of this moment.
• 4:34
  And, you know, the two things can be true at the same time
• 4:39
  that the people, some of the people making these models may
• 4:42
  not be thinking a lot about bringing the rest of humanity
• 4:45
  along. Some of them really are.
• 4:48
  And at the same time, you know, the rest of humanity needs to
• 4:52
  also meet this moment. And he, he just had a very
• 4:57
  interesting nuanced talk that for me was my favorite talk at
• 5:02
  the Ted conference. So definitely when that is live,
• 5:06
  I'll share it with you. My, my, my assumption is it's
• 5:08
  going to be live by the time you see this because it felt like
• 5:12
  one of those urgent messages. And Ted does a good job of
• 5:15
  putting those out. A lot of other things have
• 5:17
  happened since the last time I recorded here.
• 5:21
  Anthropic came out with the Mythos model.
• 5:23
  Mythos is the most powerful model they've ever come out
• 5:26
  with. They've only released it to, I
• 5:28
  think 40 companies. It's the best model at
• 5:32
  identifying security vulnerabilities.
• 5:35
  And we've really hit this point where it's so powerful that
• 5:37
  they're that they're really careful and not releasing this
• 5:40
  to the public while the security vulnerabilities are being
• 5:44
  patched up. It's also a great marketing
• 5:46
  thing for them to do, frankly, because there's a lot of
• 5:49
  companies that are spending, I heard this at Ted from one of
• 5:53
  the investors in Anthropic spending 50 to $100 million just
• 5:59
  to get in the gates with Mythos so that they're not vulnerable
• 6:03
  in this moment. So Anthropic recently crossed
• 6:07
  over 30 billion of a revenue run rate That's I think happened in
• 6:13
  about 15 months. You've got to remember then,
• 6:16
  Anthropic is a company that started in 2021 and is already
• 6:20
  at a 30 billion revenue run rate.
• 6:22
  This has never happened before in human history.
• 6:24
  No company has ever grown that fast.
• 6:28
  Obviously there's news that Chachi PT just raised a huge new
• 6:31
  round. I think they took in around 135
• 6:34
  billion. I've said many times on this
• 6:36
  podcast before that humanity's never prioritized anything like
• 6:40
  the creation of AGI. I tallied it up that there's
• 6:44
  around $7 trillion worldwide that's being spent on this
• 6:48
  moment to create AGI. Gartner Research who forecast
• 6:51
  tech spending, said that just in the US this year that number is
• 6:55
  $2.4 trillion. So really an unprecedented
• 6:59
  territory. And you know, we'll see, right?
• 7:03
  You know, I'm, I'm, I'm mostly optimistic as I've laid out on
• 7:06
  this podcast many times, but we'll really see how we made
• 7:10
  this moment. It's a really, really important
• 7:12
  moment. And you know how much I care
• 7:14
  about all of humanity. I'm also super proud to have in
• 7:19
  my hands the first print proof of the Love Conquer Sphere book.
• 7:23
  The actual copy going on sale is hardcover.
• 7:26
  It's beautifully bound. It's called the Prestige
• 7:29
  Edition, but it's cool to have this print proof in my hands for
• 7:33
  last minute corrections to the final manuscript before it goes
• 7:37
  to print. It's really amazing to have this
• 7:39
  in my hands. I mean, this is truly a labor of
• 7:42
  love for me. And as a reminder, you know the
• 7:45
  book The Love Conquers Fear book with the subtitle Humanity, AI
• 7:49
  and the Age, Abundance for all. It really covers a very broad
• 7:54
  set of topics. So it starts out with really
• 7:57
  defining why we have so much fear and how we conquer that.
• 8:01
  Chapter 2 goes into what I mean by abundance for all, and I do
• 8:05
  mean for all on the planet. This is the moment where we
• 8:08
  could choose that we have the free will to manifest that.
• 8:11
  Then I go into the second section of the book where I
• 8:13
  apply that model to the biggest problems we have, whether it's
• 8:16
  geopolitics, whether it's healthcare, whether it's
• 8:19
  education, whether it's nuclear weapons and warfare.
• 8:21
  I have a chapter on the objectification of women and the
• 8:24
  millennia of suffering that we've had because of that, The
• 8:27
  Othering of People chapter on religion.
• 8:30
  And then the third arc of the book I go into how does humanity
• 8:34
  transform? And I talk about the risk that
• 8:38
  we have. I talk about the reality that
• 8:42
  we're in, how I've really tried to grapple with what this
• 8:46
  reality is through the now over 75 books I've read on my soul
• 8:51
  quest. I end the book with how you have
• 8:54
  that inner transformation and how humanity really needs to
• 8:58
  allow love to conquer our own fear so that we can help each
• 9:01
  other do that. And then we'll have that
• 9:03
  metaphorical or mystical or both merging of heaven and earth.
• 9:07
  And I cover case studies as well in terms of why, why should you
• 9:11
  believe that humanity can do it? You know, a lot of people are
• 9:14
  skeptical about the darkness that we've had.
• 9:18
  You know, I'm Jewish, you know, the Holocaust was very dark.
• 9:21
  You know, a lot of people aren't realize that in in in Judaism we
• 9:27
  are now 16,000,000 in a world of 8.2 billion and we were
• 9:30
  16,000,000 pre Holocaust. So literally took over 80 years
• 9:34
  to get back up to our population.
• 9:36
  So there's a lot of reasons why people would not believe, but
• 9:40
  there's a lot of reasons why you can believe.
• 9:42
  And so I cover that in the case studies of the book.
• 9:44
  But I just, I just want to say it's like such an honor to have
• 9:47
  this in my hands. And I have never put as much
• 9:50
  time or energy into a book in my life.
• 9:53
  But this is, as you know, from the podcast, this is my soul
• 9:56
  song. You know, this is really what
• 9:58
  I'm meant to be doing in this lifetime to help humanity awaken
• 10:02
  and help us have a global heart shift that we need so that we
• 10:06
  enter into an age of abundance for all that's possible in this
• 10:10
  lifetime for you and for me. You can buy it now on pre-order
• 10:13
  if you go to loveconquersfear.org.
• 10:16
  It's all available there. Thanks for that.
• 10:18
  I know that's a bit of a commercial, but again, I'm doing
• 10:22
  this for the heart shift and I've been self funding the
• 10:27
  podcast this whole time. There's no ads on here as you
• 10:30
  know. And this is really what I meant
• 10:32
  to do today. I am so, so excited because I
• 10:36
  have a gentleman on who has been a friend for so long, well over
• 10:41
  20 years, and he is amazing. I was on his podcast when I was
• 10:45
  a wee lad. We'll talk about that, but
• 10:48
  welcome Mitch Joel. So good to see.
• 10:51
  You right. Thanks brother.
• 10:51
  It's so good. To be with.
• 10:53
  You Beautiful home. Oh, well, thank you.
• 10:55
  I am so honored to call you a friend.
• 10:58
  I mean, it's been a long, long time.
• 11:00
  It's a mutual admiration society then, because when I mentioned
• 11:03
  that I can text Someone Like You, I, you know, my line to
• 11:06
  other people is if I don't want to get hit by a car.
• 11:09
  But if I did, and someone saw who I got the text message with,
• 11:12
  I consider myself very, very you're on that list.
• 11:16
  Brett, well, thank you. Well, likewise, I mean, I have
• 11:20
  followed your work for a long time.
• 11:22
  You know, you've been a friend for a long time.
• 11:24
  And you know, one of the standout moments we were talking
• 11:26
  about before we started recording was seeing you on
• 11:30
  stage keynoting, just manifesting love, honestly.
• 11:33
  And you, you just manifest love on stage better than almost
• 11:39
  anybody I've seen. I mean, it's it's really like a
• 11:40
  musical performance. Like I saw Jon Batiste recently
• 11:44
  for Austin City Limits for a music TV show taping.
• 11:48
  He had everybody in the audience in this in this just beautiful
• 11:52
  place of love. And I remember that you were the
• 11:55
  one that introduced us all to the Free Hugs video.
• 11:59
  Oh God, yeah. That was a long time ago.
• 12:01
  Which which band was that? Sick puppies.
• 12:03
  Sick puppies, That's what it is. From Australia, yeah, they.
• 12:08
  So for those who don't know, they needed, they were trying to
• 12:11
  make a music video and they came across this guy who was standing
• 12:14
  on the street offering free hugs and they made a video about it.
• 12:18
  And I'm pretty certain it was one of the first videos on
• 12:21
  YouTube that went like hyper viral like that, really
• 12:24
  creative. Think of that.
• 12:25
  You know, not only was a great song, great video, great
• 12:27
  message. I think that we were at that
• 12:29
  place in that weird Netflix story kind of way.
• 12:31
  It's like they didn't want to send DVDs to people, but the
• 12:34
  technology wasn't there to stream and they were kind of
• 12:36
  waiting. I feel like it's similar that
• 12:38
  YouTube at that point was trying so many things even though
• 12:41
  they'd already been acquired by Google, but that was a moment
• 12:44
  where people really had access and it popped.
• 12:47
  So it was a great, it was a really, I always loved female
• 12:52
  keynotes. I don't like the generic story.
• 12:55
  So I'm always hunting for a story where it's like something
• 12:59
  you've seen or heard from, something that surprises you
• 13:02
  from a brand that you know, but you didn't realize did
• 13:04
  something. And that's part of my like
• 13:07
  intellectual journey and curiosity.
• 13:09
  So that was like, it's great when you're on stage and you get
• 13:12
  that reaction. You know, one of the other
• 13:14
  things that people may not realize that back then it was
• 13:17
  strange for a keynote speaker to show video with audio and not be
• 13:20
  speaking. Yeah.
• 13:21
  Also, it's just like a new style of.
• 13:23
  And also to show something that's so loving.
• 13:28
  I mean, I know that that sounds weird, but I was just on stage
• 13:32
  at the Culture Rati Summit with Sol Rashidi, who is the world's
• 13:37
  first chief officer. And there was a couple of
• 13:41
  episodes ago, it was episode 54, and we did a Part 1 and Part 2
• 13:45
  afterwards. So many people came up to us
• 13:48
  after we were on stage and they're like, we're so happy to
• 13:51
  be at a business conference that is also talking about love.
• 13:55
  I told them I said that's the human experience.
• 13:57
  I mean, like, you know, you're not supposed to like do business
• 14:00
  and not be a fully embodied human, you know, oh, I'm in
• 14:03
  business mode now. So I'm not, you know, there's no
• 14:05
  love. There's no any and, and you
• 14:07
  know, like the best business actually is when you're in the
• 14:12
  state of an act of love, bringing out the best in
• 14:15
  yourself and your team members and customers and everything
• 14:18
  else. And you know, Brandt and I, when
• 14:20
  we started a bizarre voice, that was the number one thing we were
• 14:23
  talking about behind the scenes is like, how do we bring out
• 14:26
  more of the best in ourselves and the best in everybody?
• 14:29
  And you know, we're rated the number one place to work in
• 14:31
  Austin when we're small, then medium, then large.
• 14:34
  Did I ever tell you my story about like my pre bizarre voice?
• 14:37
  I don't know if I ever told you this, but I don't think so.
• 14:39
  When I started in tech, I so I was a magazine publisher.
• 14:44
  I was in the rock music world and I always wanted to publish.
• 14:46
  I was very early into computers and desktop publishing.
• 14:49
  Started publishing a physical magazine, the second one in the
• 14:52
  early 90s. And at the time the breakthrough
• 14:56
  was a hyperlink. So I got a cover story on the
• 14:59
  net. It was like 9192.
• 15:00
  And the breakthrough technology was hyperlinks.
• 15:03
  So you could literally not have to type in the whole URL.
• 15:06
  You can go and click the link and go.
• 15:07
  So that's how early it was. But then I moved over to a meta
• 15:10
  search engine called mama.com, which was very early before
• 15:14
  Google. In fact, Larry and Sergey have
• 15:17
  spoken early days of Google where they were speaking to the
• 15:19
  other search engines. I was on one of those calls not
• 15:22
  to. Yeah, we're in a name drop a lot
• 15:23
  here, I'm sure. That's OK.
• 15:25
  It just means you're early. Yeah, very early.
• 15:27
  When I was working. And you had an opinion they
• 15:28
  cared about? At the time, it was early days,
• 15:31
  early days of online casino, all the chaos and I was acquiring
• 15:35
  just buying URLs and one of the URLs I bought was honest
• 15:38
  shopper.com. And my idea was a place where
• 15:42
  people can go and leave honest reviews.
• 15:45
  So it wasn't Consumer Reports and editorialized.
• 15:47
  It was this idea of like before blogging, bizarre voice wasn't,
• 15:51
  you've never told me this metrics probably didn't even
• 15:54
  exist at that point. And you know, obviously I never,
• 15:57
  I had a whole bunch of really interesting domains.
• 15:59
  We had a, we had a domain for a portal for moms at the time,
• 16:02
  which again, now it seems like so you, but back then there was
• 16:05
  nothing, nothing existed. And one of my ideas was this
• 16:08
  idea that because of the democratization of this
• 16:10
  platform, people will be able, average people using real
• 16:14
  products will be able to leave their opinion.
• 16:16
  And again, this is before Amazon, before Amazon reviews
• 16:19
  and, and all of that. So when you did bizarre voice
• 16:21
  and we met, I think it was in between having core metrics and
• 16:23
  bizarre boys. I was like, this is like exactly
• 16:26
  the thing. And to speak to what you were
• 16:28
  saying, look, most of us, if you're, if you're lucky, you're
• 16:32
  only spending 7 to 8 hours a day working as an entrepreneur and
• 16:36
  someone who loved what I did, I did a lot more of that.
• 16:39
  And my attitude was always, why would you do anything that long
• 16:43
  that you are unsatiated with right right now?
• 16:46
  It was a very naive, youthful punk rock metal kid that I was
• 16:51
  exuberance to work. And I pursued that forever till
• 16:55
  this moment of which, you know, we're sitting here now in this
• 16:58
  space and time. And I always struggled with
• 17:00
  that. And so when I started doing
• 17:02
  presentations, the core of it was I'm going to show you things
• 17:06
  that were made with real love, right?
• 17:09
  What's a brand like? A brand is an individual who has
• 17:12
  a business idea that's probably hyper competitive.
• 17:15
  It's very rare you're breaking into something new and what's
• 17:17
  going to be the prime differentiator.
• 17:19
  And by the way, we could talk about how this relates to AI
• 17:21
  because I have some thoughts on that.
• 17:22
  We will. It's going to be the brand that
• 17:25
  you build, which will be a thing that will connect people and
• 17:28
  they will connect to because they genuinely love it.
• 17:30
  I mean, there is consumables and things you need and whatever,
• 17:33
  but I still think there are many of those products that people
• 17:36
  genuinely are attached. Of course there are.
• 17:38
  So I I always struggle with people, you know, I'm miserable
• 17:41
  at work or I'm not Like I understand the UN, you know, the
• 17:44
  unavailableness of understanding where to go.
• 17:46
  But it just was never in my DNA. Yeah.
• 17:49
  So I'm I'm happy to be in and I love it and it speaks to that
• 17:53
  core. But I can't imagine not, which
• 17:54
  is a strange thing I guess. Yeah, it's and it's just, it was
• 17:59
  strange to me. I mean, it really jumped out at
• 18:00
  me at that conference that here we're in 2026 and that's still
• 18:05
  like part of the narrative. Same.
• 18:07
  Narrative, in fact, like we can jump into this when I talk like
• 18:11
  right now, obviously the call is come and talk to us about what
• 18:14
  am means to our business. And ultimately it's not really a
• 18:16
  story about what this technology is and the tools are.
• 18:19
  It's fundamentally a story about how you're going to have to show
• 18:21
  up as a human as we evolve in this world.
• 18:25
  And what I try to explain to people is like there's two paths
• 18:29
  you can go down. Path number one is you're going
• 18:31
  to use it as an answer engine, which is I think like the whole
• 18:33
  academic problem. It's like, why are you telling
• 18:36
  kids not to use it? Because they're cheating in a
• 18:40
  world where you can do the other thing.
• 18:41
  And the other thing is to tell them we're giving you a
• 18:44
  superpower. I'm going to show you how to use
• 18:46
  this superpower to strongman arguments, to steal man
• 18:49
  arguments and to do all this stuff because we're not there
• 18:52
  and we're in this answer engine moment, which is I, I believe we
• 18:55
  are there. I think what's happening is it
• 18:57
  generates a mean of an answer, which I, I would also argue is
• 19:02
  significantly better than the average we had before.
• 19:06
  So you have this whole world where people are using for
• 19:08
  answers and it's giving them a better e-mail to send a better
• 19:10
  report, to give a clear report that makes them sound more more,
• 19:14
  more conscious, more aware, smarter.
• 19:16
  But ultimately what that's doing is it's taking away not only
• 19:19
  their agency, but their ability to think and to push it forward.
• 19:23
  At a macro level. What I think is happening is
• 19:25
  that mean is pretty high. So we'll call it pretty good.
• 19:29
  And then what becomes your differentiator if everyone is
• 19:31
  better than pretty good? And the answer goes back to my
• 19:35
  core roots, which is a brand, right?
• 19:38
  The brand will be the only thing.
• 19:40
  I mean, if you even look at this whole open AI versus anthropic
• 19:43
  moment we're in, it's like, oh, no one, no one uses Chat Chi BT
• 19:46
  anymore. Like we're it's, it's, there is
• 19:49
  a tooling component of it. But more importantly, I think
• 19:52
  there's a branding story that's being sold and told and
• 19:55
  believed. Right by a broader.
• 19:57
  Audience. And so it is.
• 19:58
  It goes back to the early days of.
• 20:00
  What is it in the end? Like what is that competitive
• 20:02
  advantage? I mean, more often than not, it
• 20:04
  is a bit of love conquers fear, but it is a lot of it's the
• 20:08
  brand, it's the story and what people attach to, which is a
• 20:11
  very human narrative. It's not AI, it can't be AI
• 20:14
  generated. Right, right.
• 20:15
  Yeah, No, I totally agree. I mean, you know, we were lucky
• 20:18
  at both core metrics and bizarre ways to work with lots of Big,
• 20:24
  Lots of big global kind of brands.
• 20:26
  And one of them was Estee Lauder.
• 20:30
  And Estee Lauder, you know, the the photos of her at the
• 20:33
  beginning of that company, like behind the counter, like looking
• 20:37
  at a woman in the eyes, like holding her hand, you know,
• 20:40
  making that that connection, you know that that just permeated
• 20:46
  the brand. And beauty is a story.
• 20:47
  And beauty is a story, right that that you could you could
• 20:50
  see that she really cared, you know, and and you know, Sam Walt
• 20:54
  and I wrote my he does the founder of Walmart.
• 20:57
  I wrote my leadership paper when I was at warden on made in
• 21:00
  America, which is his book about really a book that I think he
• 21:04
  wrote for his kids. But he really cared about the
• 21:07
  customer. He really, really cared about
• 21:09
  the customer. And he and he was like the
• 21:10
  original undercover boss. He would like disguise himself
• 21:12
  in store or something and. You see with Costco.
• 21:14
  See what it's like? Like Costco is just reading a
• 21:16
  story about Jim Stengel is Jim No Jim Stengel is P&G, the
• 21:21
  founder of. Costco.
• 21:21
  I think it's Jim Senegal. Senegal.
• 21:23
  OK, Sorry. Yeah, this is what happens.
• 21:25
  At my advanced age, there was some type of deal where they
• 21:30
  could get Levi's for really cheap jeans.
• 21:34
  And because they have this model of never being, I think it's
• 21:37
  more than 14% markup. Yeah, I think it sells.
• 21:40
  It's an average of five. Well, it's a.
• 21:42
  No more than 14. No more than 14.
• 21:46
  The price was so low that it was going to be problematic.
• 21:49
  And it became this crazy internal debate.
• 21:51
  I mean, ultimately, they could put them on, you know, blew out
• 21:53
  and they were gone like 5 minutes.
• 21:56
  But like, what is that? Like, that's an extension of
• 21:58
  these stories. They're just iterations of that
• 22:01
  model. Like Sam ultimately believed
• 22:03
  that consumers should pay as little as possible for the best
• 22:07
  or most possible, which became a Costco story as well.
• 22:10
  And like, you just see this proliferation of these stories.
• 22:13
  And again, these are very human narratives that we that we have.
• 22:17
  It's amazing, yeah. I want to go back in The Time
• 22:19
  Machine. I want to go to the to the young
• 22:23
  Mitch. OK.
• 22:24
  What is a young Mitch like and why does that connect to what
• 22:27
  you're doing today? Like how do you look at the arc
• 22:30
  of like? Yeah, you're so.
• 22:32
  It's so funny. Because, you know, you and I
• 22:33
  have been talking about like how we're both in this moment or
• 22:37
  really feel like we're at this moment for Our Calling.
• 22:39
  I'm just kind. Of yeah, well, I'm feeling more
• 22:41
  attached and detached at the same time.
• 22:44
  If we can jump in for sure. I wrote my first book, 6 Pixels
• 22:48
  of Separation. It was named after my blog and
• 22:50
  podcast. I'm still doing the podcast, the
• 22:51
  blog genius name, but I rebranded now it's thinking with
• 22:55
  Miss Joel. I, I evolved it after 20 years.
• 22:57
  So I still do it. You were thinking back then
• 22:59
  though. I know, I know now I want people
• 23:01
  to think with me. So I did the second book control
• 23:04
  alt delete. And the idea of the second book
• 23:07
  was like, what does it mean if we have to reboot business?
• 23:11
  And this again is like 15 years ago.
• 23:14
  And as I was constructing it, I had a book deal I was
• 23:17
  constructing in my brain. It was literally a shower moment
• 23:19
  where I realized like, OK, I've got framework, but there's
• 23:22
  something really big missing. And what was missing was how do
• 23:24
  we show up in a world that we're going to have to reboot what it
• 23:27
  means to work and be connected. And that led me to a reflection,
• 23:31
  to answer your question in a long winded way, of what I
• 23:35
  called a very squiggly career. And I chose Squiggly because I
• 23:39
  realized that most of my friends in my community was go to
• 23:44
  school, do well in school, stay focused on school, get a part
• 23:48
  time job. Even volunteering wasn't that
• 23:50
  big back then. Go into a set post secondary
• 23:54
  school system. If you can get an advanced
• 23:56
  degree, all the better. Go from there.
• 23:59
  And then you rock'n'roll bottom left, top right quadrant.
• 24:03
  So .1 that I can think back on now is I find it amazing that
• 24:11
  people were making very profession based decisions at
• 24:15
  the age of like 16 or 17, when now I would say to you, like,
• 24:19
  were we making great choices when we were 16 or is that
• 24:21
  right? Like it's so interesting.
• 24:23
  One thought, secondary thought was I don't know if that path
• 24:27
  really makes sense. It becomes a bit of a box.
• 24:30
  And so when I reflect on my life, what I realized, it was
• 24:33
  really squiggly, like I tried something, it didn't work when I
• 24:36
  was really passionate that led to that.
• 24:37
  Now that and kind of like, you know, it's kind of like when
• 24:40
  you're in pain and you go see the doctor and they're trying to
• 24:42
  gauge and they're like, it's a bit of a jigsaw and they're
• 24:45
  like, as long as it's going in the right direction, you're
• 24:47
  going to pay more pain one day, less the other towards better
• 24:51
  overall. Like that's where you want to to
• 24:53
  go. So so Part 1 is just embracing
• 24:56
  the squiggly, which is what I think was the name of the
• 24:58
  chapter. Like I've always been OK with it
• 25:01
  not being this natural progression.
• 25:05
  I am the child of a middle to lower middle class family with
• 25:11
  four brothers. I was in 3rd I and now I can
• 25:15
  reflect on the fact that I was just going with the flow.
• 25:19
  In fact, if you said to me, what is your biggest challenge?
• 25:23
  I still go with the flow. We're going to go for dinner
• 25:26
  later. And you know what my opinion is
• 25:28
  on where we go. I'm going with the flow.
• 25:29
  OK. Is there something on the menu,
• 25:31
  Brett? I'll find some.
• 25:32
  Right, Right. So good and problematic in many
• 25:37
  ways. So that 1/2 is I had two
• 25:40
  brothers ahead of me who one was academically great, one was more
• 25:44
  creative and became academically really great.
• 25:47
  I was more about I'm just going to try and do the things that I
• 25:50
  love or do the things and the money will follows on something
• 25:53
  I knew, but I believed. So there's that.
• 25:56
  The other thing is I was in a very affluent community and I
• 26:00
  would go to my friend's home. My closest friends have
• 26:03
  sleepovers and this and big houses and lots of things that I
• 26:06
  clearly didn't have. You know, I was the kid who
• 26:08
  hoped for something for their birthday and never got it type
• 26:11
  of thing that that was the woe was me, wah, wah, wah.
• 26:14
  And I would look at these parents and I don't know where
• 26:16
  it came from, but day in the day of my thought was they're not
• 26:19
  that smart. Meaning I thought you have to be
• 26:22
  really academic or hyper this to be successful.
• 26:25
  And they were kind of average people doing things mostly for
• 26:29
  work. So that was interesting to as I
• 26:32
  wasn't really academically strong, but I often felt inside
• 26:37
  when I was learning that I either knew this or didn't feel
• 26:40
  important in some strange way. So I was the kid where it was do
• 26:43
  a book report and I would read the book that, you know, that
• 26:47
  wasn't prescribed. You're right, I'd fail.
• 26:49
  But I actually read three other books.
• 26:51
  You know, I was the guy who had early computers.
• 26:55
  And so I would type of a book report grade 6 or 7 handed in on
• 26:58
  my Epson dot matrix and given a 0 because the teacher was, I
• 27:02
  didn't know. How do I know you wrote it was
• 27:03
  done on the computer. Like that's how early I was into
• 27:05
  like. So there was a lot of like
• 27:07
  really interesting defining moments, but they all led me on
• 27:10
  this path of 1 self education to a certain degree.
• 27:14
  So I never let school get in the way of my education.
• 27:18
  Always reading, always curious. Very into popular culture, music
• 27:24
  at the time. Early days of computers video
• 27:26
  games Atari and television Calico Atari computers really
• 27:30
  into. Yeah, and I share that, you
• 27:31
  know, really. Into music, sports, not so much
• 27:34
  came a little bit later in terms of that.
• 27:37
  And so I kind of always pursued that.
• 27:39
  And so music became an important thing. 16 years old.
• 27:43
  I, I just, I used to buy physical magazines.
• 27:46
  There was no Internet. And I always would look at these
• 27:48
  cover stories of these rock magazine, Circus hip parader,
• 27:51
  Rolling Stones and think not who's who's on the cover, but
• 27:54
  who's this person that got to interview this person.
• 27:56
  And I wanted to go down that road.
• 27:58
  I wound up connecting with an individual who was somehow
• 28:00
  working for a national full color glossy teen magazine.
• 28:05
  They were inept at computers and typing.
• 28:09
  And so the the the trade was I'll come with my steno pad
• 28:13
  handwritten article. I'll say it to you, you'll type
• 28:15
  it up and we'll have like a digital version of it that will
• 28:18
  it was bodoms back then or printed, I don't even remember.
• 28:20
  And in exchange, I'll take you to concerts and give you some of
• 28:23
  the time there was, you know, cassettes and vinyl.
• 28:25
  C DS came in around that time I guess and we did that and then
• 28:30
  we as a gift they were taking me from Montreal where I lived to
• 28:33
  Toronto to for some rock show and on the way early days of
• 28:37
  cell phones person a cell phone in the car that Tommy Lee from
• 28:40
  Mötley Crüe is going to be in town launching it was Doctor
• 28:43
  feel good. Obviously 198889 and you got to
• 28:46
  do the interview and he panicked because he didn't really know
• 28:48
  the band. I was a huge fan so he let me do
• 28:50
  the interview. So that was my first yeah, it
• 28:53
  goes like Tommy Lee from Mommy Chase.
• 28:55
  So I write freaking nice after he doesn't even go I'm going to
• 28:57
  write the article, give me the tape.
• 28:58
  Not he goes why didn't you write the article?
• 29:00
  So I wrote it. He actually put it under his
• 29:02
  name because that was the deal. I was fine with that.
• 29:05
  I just thought was cool. The editor read it.
• 29:07
  And and realized this isn't your right, like what's going on
• 29:10
  here? He's like, OK, you got me.
• 29:11
  He came clean. I got this kid who's 1617 years
• 29:14
  old. He does this stuff for me to
• 29:15
  like bring him in. So I go to this office, big
• 29:18
  house, and he's like, how old are you?
• 29:20
  I don't remember 1617. He's like, you want to write?
• 29:23
  Like, yeah, I want to write. And that was like my first job.
• 29:25
  So I wound up spending that's awesome, many years
• 29:27
  interviewing. Really cool.
• 29:28
  Like really, not just rock bands, but like at the time it
• 29:31
  was like, you know, New Kids on the Block and MC Pam are like
• 29:33
  all the artists of the. Day I've seen some of these old
• 29:35
  photos. Yeah, I post them sometimes.
• 29:37
  It's pretty crazy, but I was really into computers.
• 29:39
  And so, in a strange trust of faith, this young guy who owned
• 29:43
  this magazine got very sick, had some heart problems, decided to
• 29:45
  shut down the magazine. I thought my career can't be
• 29:47
  over and I figured out how to publish magazines, but with a
• 29:50
  digital idea around using computers, Early days of desktop
• 29:54
  publishing and the Internet did that.
• 29:58
  And I think all of those things just punitively speak to who I
• 30:00
  am. It's like I'm interested in like
• 30:02
  culture, media, marketing, advertising.
• 30:04
  Like all the things I did kind of make sense when I reflect
• 30:07
  back on it, right? But I was, you know, enamored
• 30:10
  with Star Wars and Star Trek and action diggers and playing and
• 30:15
  drawing and comic books and just.
• 30:18
  And now when I think about, like, all the things I'm
• 30:20
  interested, and I realized, like, I had a really fortuitous
• 30:23
  and excessively privileged childhood.
• 30:26
  Right. Right.
• 30:27
  I was given all the tools to explore.
• 30:29
  Yeah. Yeah.
• 30:29
  And so I'm on a path of exploration to this day.
• 30:32
  Yeah, I mean, you know, I, I, I don't look at you as a going
• 30:35
  with the flow guy, for what it's worth.
• 30:37
  I mean, my objective view, you know, not being you, like, I
• 30:41
  mean, I view you as a real pioneer in so many ways.
• 30:45
  I mean, you know, I learned a lot from you when you were when
• 30:48
  you were speaking on stage and you were, you were manifesting
• 30:50
  love like that. It was an inspiration to me, to
• 30:53
  be honest. Like it was like I need to, I
• 30:55
  need to do more of that myself as the CEO because I have all
• 31:00
  this love in my heart. It comes from my mom, you know,
• 31:03
  who really believed in me since I was age 7, You know, taught
• 31:06
  me, I mean, learn how to program alongside me.
• 31:08
  Let me do that obsessively, you know, defending everybody that
• 31:13
  was telling her she was ruining me by by by that being
• 31:17
  everything I did. And you know, I, I had that
• 31:22
  deepness in my heart, but I was kind of like intimidated to
• 31:27
  express it, if that makes sense. Like maybe I was caught in that
• 31:30
  game of like, this is business and this is squishy and, and you
• 31:34
  help you help bring that out and, and you know, you, you, you
• 31:38
  really would bring that out in the audience.
• 31:41
  And, and so it was part of the input into, into actually what
• 31:45
  shaped me as a leader. Like you're actually, you're
• 31:47
  actually part of it. But it's very flattering.
• 31:50
  I mean, my reflection when you were saying that Brett was, I
• 31:54
  don't think people realize how bad the stuff I'm talking about
• 31:59
  was perceived culturally. Like, I was like the one loser.
• 32:04
  I, you know, I'm reading comic books, I'm listening to heavy
• 32:07
  metal rock music. I'm into computers and arcade
• 32:10
  games. And like, that's the stuff you
• 32:12
  got stuffed into a locker for. Oh, I know.
• 32:14
  If you would have said to me at nine years old that X-Men would
• 32:19
  one day become a live action movie I would have thought like
• 32:23
  that is like the most counterculture loser content
• 32:27
  that I loved that I couldn't stop reading concerning that
• 32:30
  everything and look early days Atari 800 I would take Compute
• 32:34
  magazine. I didn't know how to code and I
• 32:36
  would just copy the code in and it would be and I'm like hours
• 32:39
  and hours of doing that. Never learned how to code not
• 32:41
  good at it but again like that was loser nonsense.
• 32:44
  Now we are celebrating it as if it's as cool as it is today.
• 32:49
  There was nothing cool about it. And I think that I live the
• 32:52
  life, to be very honest, of knowing that I was loved, but
• 32:56
  also feel like a real loser all the time, like a real.
• 32:59
  So when you say that, it's very impacting on me because I think
• 33:03
  what I'm also trying to do on stage is normalize a lot of
• 33:06
  behavior. And what I mean by that is I
• 33:08
  think a lot of the things I see or feel will be normal but are
• 33:14
  not normal yet. And I believe the only way you
• 33:19
  can get people to cross that chasm is to show them emotional
• 33:24
  things to attach it that the like Gartner data statistics,
• 33:29
  you will not see that in in my content that that much.
• 33:33
  I might use it to support an idea to validate it, because
• 33:36
  otherwise it's it's an opinion. But there's a lot of of that.
• 33:41
  And so I think for a leader, often what happens is they're in
• 33:44
  the audience thinking. I see that too, and I needed a
• 33:49
  couple of those little connecting points, those
• 33:51
  adapters, those codecs. Yeah, well, you're really good
• 33:54
  at that. And and I mean, you know, you're
• 33:56
  looking at a guy, you know, known me for a long time where
• 33:59
  growing up in Texas, being a computer nerd was definitely not
• 34:04
  cool. It was like, you know, the
• 34:05
  religion here was football. Yeah.
• 34:07
  You know, and. And it's.
• 34:09
  It's such an interesting moment because it's like, do you
• 34:13
  remember when that movie Revenge of the Nerds came out?
• 34:15
  Of course, this wasn't a good story.
• 34:17
  No, but but now we're in the moment of responsibility of the
• 34:21
  nerds. Yeah, we've gone from Revenge of
• 34:23
  the Nerds to the Responsibility of the nerds.
• 34:25
  You could even make an argument that actually what we're really
• 34:27
  seeing is Revenge of the Nerds, that the way the culture is now
• 34:30
  perceiving these leaders to a certain degree, their reaction
• 34:34
  to the ways in which they were brought up and dismissed and
• 34:36
  shot down as a real. I actually think it's it's quite
• 34:40
  scary that if you looked at it more from that prison where it's
• 34:43
  all and also you and who becomes the bully and who becomes
• 34:47
  actually. Let's we'll dive into that in a
• 34:48
  second. But one, one thing I want to ask
• 34:51
  you for the audience especially, I know what you're up to, but
• 34:55
  but talk about like specifically what you're up to today because
• 34:58
  you, you had a very successful, well, I mean, you're still an
• 35:02
  entrepreneur, but you had a very successful entrepreneurial
• 35:04
  career that led to kind of the Mitch today, you know?
• 35:08
  So yeah, magazines. I started a little record label
• 35:12
  for a while and then met two people who had a digital media
• 35:20
  company CD-ROM ish designing type of information stuff.
• 35:25
  Met them through community event and thought these are two young
• 35:29
  interesting individuals. I was thinking about branching
• 35:32
  off and doing some type of digital media strategy
• 35:36
  consulting thing. They agreed to provide me with a
• 35:39
  logo, website and little stuff back and they when that was
• 35:42
  really expensive and I decided to help them with some business
• 35:44
  development positioning strategy.
• 35:47
  After a couple weeks of just hanging out, we realized there's
• 35:49
  something here and we built Twist Image, which was a
• 35:52
  marketing agency, digital marketing agency, one of the
• 35:54
  first in 2000. I forgot the name twist image
• 35:57
  because I remember that about a long.
• 35:59
  Time ago, yeah. So 2000 Twisted Madge, Twisty
• 36:02
  Madge, because we're based in Montreal and to have a little
• 36:04
  bit of that European French flair, which was a nice thing to
• 36:07
  do. Bring in a little Quebec.
• 36:08
  You know, Canadian, European vibe.
• 36:10
  So we did that and we brought in a fourth partner who was
• 36:13
  actually somebody who had built one of the larger agencies,
• 36:15
  traditional agencies and knew the business.
• 36:18
  And again, 2000 like perfect timing.
• 36:21
  We started off in the early days of social background publishing.
• 36:24
  So we built that blog, we started podcasting, which we got
• 36:27
  to still do the podcast every day, every week rather, which is
• 36:29
  crazy. And that led to attention that
• 36:33
  at least on me was come and speak at our event, come and do
• 36:38
  this and I agreed. So back up.
• 36:41
  I didn't know how to build this agency.
• 36:43
  I had an agency I did not know how to build.
• 36:45
  I bought a ticket to go to an event in Toronto called the
• 36:48
  power within sales that had like people like Jeffrey get them
• 36:50
  another teaching sales. And I thought, although I had no
• 36:52
  money, get into a car, drive the six hours, go to this event to
• 36:56
  get the ticket at the call, somebody there's no online
• 36:58
  ticketing bought a ticket. Person said, hey, when you're
• 37:01
  around, like come say hi, OK, Turns out our age, really nice
• 37:04
  young guy introduces me to the guy who owns this business,
• 37:07
  who's running these events. He somehow takes a liking to me.
• 37:11
  It's like, hey, if you're ever in Toronto for clients, like we
• 37:12
  have a new office space. There's not a lot of you know,
• 37:14
  there's a lot of room. You can have a little office,
• 37:16
  right? This is great.
• 37:17
  I got a place to squat. All right, So I start doing
• 37:19
  that. And one day this, this guy, his
• 37:23
  name was Celine, was an event called The Power Within.
• 37:25
  I came into my, the office that I was occupying is like, hey,
• 37:28
  you want to speak on stage at one of my events?
• 37:29
  And I'm like, yeah, that'd be fun.
• 37:31
  It's like talk about like personal branding and digital
• 37:33
  media, like why this matters. I said great, sure.
• 37:36
  And then I realized like, Oh my God, what have I done?
• 37:37
  And I took it really seriously. Like I started training with
• 37:40
  speaking coaches. I went to Toastmasters.
• 37:42
  I was working with a buddy of mine who was a stand up
• 37:44
  comedian, like work, like I really took the the task
• 37:47
  seriously. My first speaking event is in
• 37:49
  Edmonton in front of 6000 people with Doctor Phil as the
• 37:51
  headliner. Are you kidding?
• 37:53
  Me no 6000 people for. So after you speak there's like
• 37:57
  8 speakers that day. I'm panicking like I mean were.
• 38:00
  You terrified. I would have terrified.
• 38:01
  You can speak to people like Chuck Martin was still out there
• 38:03
  and Jim Fan was like the Zone guy.
• 38:05
  They had to talk me down. I was panicking and I was
• 38:08
  prepared, but panicking. How old were you?
• 38:10
  Yeah, this has got to be, I mean, there's, you know, past
• 38:12
  the 2003 years for, like, just before I met you.
• 38:15
  Probably. OK All right.
• 38:16
  Before that. So what happens is that after
• 38:18
  you're off stage, they're taking this air to sign autographs.
• 38:20
  Like sign autographs. I don't have anything, but I'd
• 38:21
  written an article for them, which was the program, which was
• 38:24
  a magazine. So I get there and there's a
• 38:27
  lineup of people who want my autograph to sign this magazine.
• 38:29
  I'm like, what is going on here? Right with one of the first five
• 38:34
  people happened to be this woman Marnie, who I've still very
• 38:37
  close with. She was working at speaker
• 38:39
  spotlight, the Bureau and she was like, who represents you?
• 38:41
  And I'm like, I don't even know what that means.
• 38:43
  Told her my story. I got my speaking Bureau
• 38:46
  representation that day. Wow.
• 38:48
  So it's just a crazy turn of events.
• 38:49
  So built this agency, wound up getting a book deal that the two
• 38:52
  books scaled it. Montreal, Toronto, a lot of
• 38:55
  international, big national, multinational brands did
• 38:58
  everything from taking airlines on to social media, building
• 39:01
  websites, e-commerce or days of Shopify, all all that stuff.
• 39:04
  And we sold it to WPP. Now it's about 12 years ago and
• 39:08
  we stayed in and we stayed for the whole earn out.
• 39:10
  And then essentially what happened was I all of that
• 39:14
  thought leadership was a client of the agency.
• 39:16
  So it was their ownership, right?
• 39:18
  And they were just very gracious and said, you can take your
• 39:20
  blog, your podcast, your speaking contracts or both.
• 39:22
  Like you can take that. They're super.
• 39:24
  Gracious. That's very gracious, Super.
• 39:26
  Gracious. It was a really, really fair
• 39:28
  conversation. Like I gave them a bunch of like
• 39:31
  we did. I wanted to make it special.
• 39:32
  We made it special. So Aubrey and I, who is one of
• 39:36
  my business partners, CFOCO type person, we took a small office
• 39:39
  space and we started managing that.
• 39:41
  That led us to, as you know, worlds of funds and investing
• 39:45
  and all this fun stuff which gave you some advisory work and
• 39:48
  just some interesting stuff. I'm still creating my content,
• 39:51
  I'm still speaking. We tried a couple little things
• 39:54
  and then, you know, a couple years ago landed on this idea
• 39:57
  for Thinkers 1, which is still a very tiny ongoing thing where
• 40:00
  it's a way where companies can go in and buy 15 minute video
• 40:03
  experiences. From some of the best thought
• 40:05
  leaders in the world and a custom made so you have 5 days
• 40:08
  to create a video custom made for you or they'll pop in live
• 40:11
  to your meeting. And that's kind of what I'm
• 40:13
  working on along with the investments, along with the
• 40:15
  speaking. And I'm doing a little bit of
• 40:17
  advisory work as well. And I just feel like it's a
• 40:20
  moment in time, especially with what's going on, that I need to,
• 40:23
  you know, stay in it and be in it more.
• 40:25
  So just constantly meeting people, looking for other.
• 40:28
  I'm always looking for the things that are going to strike
• 40:30
  a chord. But I'm more in control of my
• 40:32
  calendar because I don't have a full time.
• 40:34
  That's all that I'm running, Yeah.
• 40:35
  Yeah, well, you and I both are. Yes, yeah, yeah.
• 40:39
  Interesting times. So I want to, I want to ask you
• 40:41
  about this AI moment, because this is I want.
• 40:44
  To ask you about this. AII mean this is like the moment
• 40:48
  of moments, right? This is this is, you know, it's
• 40:53
  this lifetime where we're in this penultimate moment for
• 40:57
  humanity. And you know, as I was saying in
• 41:01
  the intro, like we've never prioritized anything with this
• 41:05
  much money, time, energy. And I think it's happening for
• 41:10
  two reasons. I think it's happening because
• 41:13
  of great hope. There's there's something like
• 41:16
  deeply innate in US where and some of us, you know, are just
• 41:22
  craving to understand the reality we're in.
• 41:24
  You know, that's Dimas Sisybus, you know, spoke at Ted two years
• 41:28
  ago about that. And recently there was this
• 41:32
  thread going on X where he was saying that's really what keeps
• 41:35
  him awake at night. Like, you know, really
• 41:37
  understanding, you know, why we're here and everything else.
• 41:41
  And then there's this, you know, future that people are
• 41:44
  envisioning in terms of the great hope of like the end of
• 41:48
  disease and, you know, abundance across the planet and energy
• 41:53
  abundance and etcetera. But then there's this great
• 41:57
  fear. And the great fear I think is
• 42:00
  this, that we're in the new space race or we're in the new
• 42:04
  Manhattan Project. And if we don't get AGI, you
• 42:07
  know, in the US before China, then it's all over for us.
• 42:11
  And if they get, you know, if, if, if you know, maybe they view
• 42:15
  it, I don't know what they think if we get it AGI before them
• 42:19
  that it's over for them. And you know, it's this
• 42:21
  dominance game. It's a 0 sum mindset.
• 42:24
  Like, you know, this kind of competition, which competition
• 42:28
  can be a good thing. You know, we a lot of us like
• 42:33
  sports, etcetera, but it's one thing to be competitive and then
• 42:38
  it's another thing to be like, hey, we're so competitive that
• 42:41
  we're arming up with nuclear weapons, right?
• 42:43
  So if you ever punched me, like I can destroy your whole
• 42:46
  country, that kind of thing. And and so I'm just curious like
• 42:51
  how you see this moment because, you know, you're putting out, in
• 42:55
  my opinion, some of the most thoughtful content out of all of
• 42:58
  my friends about the humanity of this moment.
• 43:03
  And you know, we're we're really early in, I mean, as, as of this
• 43:08
  recording, we're just barely past three years since the
• 43:11
  launch of ChatGPT. I mean, I mentioned intro that
• 43:14
  Anthropic as an entire company is only five years old.
• 43:19
  Five years old like. I want to throw something back
• 43:22
  at you first before I reflect. Sure.
• 43:25
  Is it possible that there's a third option?
• 43:28
  And the third option is this is really good capitalistic driven
• 43:35
  marketing as a way for these corporations to grab an untold
• 43:41
  amount of power. And the reason I'm asking you
• 43:44
  that question is when I'm curious what you think.
• 43:47
  So now I'm going to turn the tables, make it like my podcast.
• 43:49
  So I'll clip this and use it. I don't know.
• 43:53
  And the reason I'm asking you this is because I don't think
• 43:55
  I've ever been confronted with a space where the people who
• 43:59
  aren't even necessarily developing the frontier models,
• 44:01
  but who think a lot about this stuff on one side might say
• 44:05
  something like it's just a very poorly built, weirdly done
• 44:11
  prediction engine of words. People like Cory Doctorow,
• 44:15
  people like, you've all know what Harare right?
• 44:19
  Really smart public intellectuals whose work I've
• 44:22
  respected. And then on the other side,
• 44:24
  people saying that we are only at point A of what this can be.
• 44:29
  And I vacillate on this because in one sense, humans are
• 44:32
  prediction engines. So that's not like surprising.
• 44:35
  Right now my brain is thinking of the next word it's trying to
• 44:38
  pull from my brain. And I like it right as we're
• 44:40
  predicting things here, but I don't think I've ever seen it
• 44:45
  like that. And then within that too is I'm
• 44:49
  amazed by these tools and I'm, I play with them enough where I
• 44:54
  can see how it can never replace me at the same time.
• 44:57
  Yeah. So I'm going to be that third
• 44:58
  option that that the greatest case study for AI is the
• 45:02
  marketing of AI. Well, there, there is something
• 45:07
  to be said for that because you know, as I mentioned, you know,
• 45:13
  with the Mythos launch for Anthropic, you know, the
• 45:17
  marketing campaign of going to a company and saying, if you don't
• 45:21
  use this, all your cryptography essentially is going to be
• 45:24
  broken in your company. And you're like, I have no
• 45:29
  choice. I have to use it.
• 45:30
  Like, you know, if you're AJP Morgan, which is one of their
• 45:32
  forty partners, you're like, well, project.
• 45:36
  Glass wing where they're giving access project.
• 45:38
  Glass Wing because because you can't get access to MIT those
• 45:41
  you and I can't get access to it.
• 45:43
  You have to, you have to pay like, you know, fifty, $100
• 45:46
  million just to get in the door. So can I?
• 45:48
  I want to delta this and then you can jam on it.
• 45:51
  One would be Anthropic this past week shifted the business model
• 45:56
  that it's no longer and it was $200 for the enterprise.
• 45:59
  Now it's paper use. That's like an interesting thing
• 46:02
  and we know tokens are getting expensive and people there's a
• 46:05
  saying greedy token. Certain taxes are very token
• 46:08
  greedy. I was going to make greedy token
• 46:10
  T-shirts at one point start sell those on Etsy or something.
• 46:14
  Then you have this idea that I was teasing at, but I'll go a
• 46:17
  bit further. When I talk now, I talk about
• 46:21
  power falling into three PS, The lowest power being economic
• 46:27
  power, the second highest power being election.
• 46:31
  So the PS all have ES, so elections, which would be
• 46:33
  government and the third highest power being E energy, actual
• 46:38
  physical power. It feels to me less about
• 46:42
  whether or not this iteration of GPT or Clode is better than the
• 46:47
  other. To be candid, from a corporate
• 46:49
  perspective, I feel like we're in Avhs versus VHS battle.
• 46:52
  It's like everyone's battling for the same product, same
• 46:54
  product, exact same outcome. But it does feel in the data
• 46:58
  center world in particular in what they're building out and
• 47:01
  investing in, that if we relinquish that ability to give
• 47:05
  them that level of 3rd P power energy, that it puts all of us
• 47:12
  at a major deficit where in fact, even your own governments
• 47:15
  cannot really regulate or control this.
• 47:17
  At that point, they might have access to a grid where if we're
• 47:20
  all starving for energy to keep the cameras going here, they can
• 47:23
  do what they want because they have a tremendous level of
• 47:27
  actual complete power. I think it's the reason we've
• 47:30
  seen a lot of these executives at the White House.
• 47:33
  I think it's a reason we've seen just a lot of what's happened.
• 47:36
  And perhaps there's a government and that's created a
• 47:39
  proliferation of governments across or that be more friendly
• 47:41
  to this type of infrastructure build.
• 47:43
  But I find that like a really fascinating thing of what that's
• 47:49
  going to drive the algorithm that's going to be your
• 47:51
  employees. And essentially your employees
• 47:54
  are employees of Anthropic or Open AI or Google.
• 47:59
  And what's to stop them in a world where a bizarre voice, you
• 48:02
  have to get a whole bunch of people to like your Facebook
• 48:04
  page. And then Facebook decided, well,
• 48:06
  we're going to charge you to access the people who want to be
• 48:09
  followed by you. It's crazy.
• 48:11
  What makes us not think that our suddenly our employees are
• 48:14
  agents. We won't be paying.
• 48:16
  What if we're paying, let's say 80 grand a year to support that
• 48:18
  agent and next year they say it's 300 grand.
• 48:20
  What are you going to do? Right.
• 48:21
  So that's why I, when I asked the question, I it's, I wasn't
• 48:26
  being superfluous. No, I thought about that.
• 48:28
  Yeah. I think I'm curious why we think
• 48:31
  that. It's because we're going to all
• 48:32
  have this abundant AI in a world where it feels so much more
• 48:36
  monopolistic to me from a strategic perspective that I
• 48:40
  struggle. 2 things can be true at the same.
• 48:43
  Time. Yeah, for sure.
• 48:44
  What? This means.
• 48:46
  Yeah, well, so I I don't see it that way.
• 48:50
  And let me try to respond to that because you just threw a
• 48:53
  lot at me. So it's told you to take me a
• 48:55
  second to respond to it. So, you know, first of all, it's
• 49:00
  it's it's very obvious to me at this point that open source is
• 49:03
  going to win. Do you remember when Neil
• 49:06
  Stephenson came out with the book in the beginning was a
• 49:08
  command line? Totally.
• 49:10
  I'm. Just shocked to hear you say
• 49:11
  that because that feels like the most dangerous thing that can
• 49:14
  happen. It's going to happen.
• 49:16
  It's gonna happen. OK, OK, So here's here's,
• 49:17
  here's, here's here's why. So let's just go back in a time
• 49:22
  machine not that far. January 21st of last year,
• 49:26
  President Trump announces alongside Miosi Sun, Sam Altman,
• 49:31
  Larry Ellison, Project Stargate, 500 billion of funding.
• 49:34
  Yeah, 500 billion of funding towards the AGI race at that
• 49:39
  point in time was already more inflation adjusted than we spent
• 49:42
  on the Manhattan Project, and it was more inflation adjusted than
• 49:46
  we spend on the Space Race versus the Russians, OK?
• 49:48
  We're so far past that moment. I mean, we're crazily past that
• 49:52
  moment at this point. I mean, it's like, why?
• 49:54
  Not I've been hearing that like 50 plus percent of these
• 49:56
  projects aren't even going to happen or won't happen.
• 49:58
  So like is it like? I mean, we're, let's say, I
• 50:01
  mean, well, well, I mean, this is really obvious.
• 50:04
  I mean, Elon Musk, you know, building colossus, you've got
• 50:07
  Mark Zuckerberg saying 600 billion is going.
• 50:10
  Data center is bigger than Manhattan.
• 50:11
  Exactly. So, so that's happening, that's
• 50:14
  happening. It's around $7 trillion you.
• 50:16
  Haven't walked me off my Cliff yet, but keep right.
• 50:18
  So the day before Trump announced Stargate, January
• 50:23
  20th, you know what was announced the day before?
• 50:25
  Tell me it was a deep sea car one.
• 50:27
  It was open source model. They're they're 20.
• 50:30
  There were 20,000 plus branches like almost, you know, within
• 50:34
  months afterwards. I don't I don't know how many
• 50:37
  there are today, but vastly more powerful than GPT 4, which if
• 50:42
  you remember, GPT 4 came out on March of 2023, four months after
• 50:47
  launch of ChatGPT. And that's when the moratorium
• 50:50
  call happened saying pause all a development for six months,
• 50:54
  which Elon Musk and others sign 37,000 signatories.
• 50:57
  What happened with NASDAQ about a week after R1 came out,
• 51:02
  DeepSeek-R1 is NASDAQ lost a trillion dollars, a market cap
• 51:05
  led by NVIDIA, and NVIDIA lost 600 billion, a market cap
• 51:08
  because people kind of process that and said oh wait, the IP
• 51:14
  here is completely transferable. So you have to believe that that
• 51:18
  is real, not day trading. Crazy.
• 51:21
  It was real. They they tested.
• 51:23
  It was real. Oh, they tested.
• 51:25
  They tested the R1. Model, I mean, I mean when the
• 51:28
  market drops, I'm not convinced that those are active
• 51:31
  intelligent investors versus day trading sentiment is someone who
• 51:35
  follows Bloomberg and all this really extreme like I don't know
• 51:38
  if that's. It's a lot of money to move so
• 51:42
  but but you know who who knows on that front, but it was it was
• 51:47
  a settling in. I think of people like this
• 51:51
  proprietary Ness of these models.
• 51:55
  It's not all that proprietary. The weights can be stolen,
• 51:58
  borrowed, whatever you want to say.
• 51:59
  The Chinese, you know, did with that with with DeepSeek.
• 52:04
  We already know that that's a technique that can be used and
• 52:07
  there's so many open source models already.
• 52:10
  I mean, our youngest child has 6 open source models running on
• 52:14
  her computer. It really shocked me and
• 52:16
  surprised me because I thought these models are so proprietary
• 52:22
  that they wouldn't be that transferable.
• 52:26
  And I agree with you. What you just said a second ago
• 52:30
  is you said that you don't believe that, that these are
• 52:34
  that distinctive, that it's like VHS versus VHS.
• 52:37
  I agree with you. You know, Mythos Now has
• 52:41
  achieved this level. You know, we've, we have a
• 52:44
  mostly digital world in terms of banking, so many things, you
• 52:48
  know, travel. Mythos Now has achieved this
• 52:50
  level where they're pointing out real vulnerabilities.
• 52:52
  I mean, it's like they're they're finding vulnerabilities
• 52:55
  in open source code that has been around for decades plus.
• 52:57
  Years, I saw that. Yeah, that that the best
• 53:00
  programmers have not found. So we're at this moment where?
• 53:04
  Move 37 is it? Move 37?
• 53:07
  Was that the go move? Was 37 to 39 the the main move
• 53:10
  that surprised everyone? Yeah, we keep that's deep mind
• 53:14
  that's it's having at that moment.
• 53:16
  It's having that moment, right? It's having that moment again,
• 53:18
  except it's all of our systems. I mean, I mean, I don't know if
• 53:21
  you felt this, but I felt this since I was very young.
• 53:24
  I felt like I've, I felt, I, I feel mostly hope and love in my
• 53:29
  heart, but I have felt this like great responsibility building
• 53:32
  prior to AI. I'm like, we're just digitizing
• 53:35
  the whole world and that means that everything has some, some
• 53:38
  systems, right vulnerability, right?
• 53:41
  We're now at that point with with mythos and we're still like
• 53:45
  so early in this. And so, so I agree that that
• 53:49
  like models, they're just like leapfrog each other, but then
• 53:52
  they very quickly catch up. And benchmarks that they're
• 53:54
  creating as they go. Like there's just so much things
• 53:57
  that feel like a marketing thing that I've seen.
• 54:00
  But a lot of these benchmarks have been around for a long
• 54:02
  time. These math.
• 54:03
  Benchmarks, etcetera. Again, I don't know more than
• 54:05
  like listen to Peter Diamandis and following.
• 54:07
  The people are like real optimist and even in that
• 54:10
  they're like they kind of cringe at the benchmarks because it
• 54:14
  feels like they are. But that's what's interesting,
• 54:17
  Brett, is that like, I'll look at you dead in the eye and be
• 54:19
  like, IA 100% believe you. And also this, which seems
• 54:24
  really plausible. There is the gap between what's
• 54:26
  real and false isn't like a truth.
• 54:28
  It's like, why are we in a place where something as intelligent
• 54:33
  as what you just said is being opposed by equally intelligent
• 54:38
  people who have a very differing perspective?
• 54:41
  And both groups, it's all that one's trying to control the
• 54:45
  other for something. They're both in it.
• 54:47
  Yeah. So that's where my anxiety lies.
• 54:51
  Yeah, so I mean I, you know, my one of my former Co workers who
• 54:58
  is probably the best programmer I've ever met is now producing
• 55:06
  10 times the amount of code. This is than.
• 55:10
  He was before this is. SOP now, yeah.
• 55:12
  And he is producing more code than the entire team.
• 55:17
  On their phone probably. Just like this is the Toby story
• 55:20
  from right? And so I mean, to say these
• 55:23
  aren't real. I think it's just, I mean,
• 55:25
  that's real. That's real, you know.
• 55:27
  But I but again, like my theory is, yeah, of course it's real
• 55:32
  for coding. Coding is coded.
• 55:35
  We know works doesn't work somewhat more.
• 55:37
  There's an art to it, and I believe in the art of coding,
• 55:40
  but it's somewhat binary in terms of the end result being
• 55:42
  there. I'm actually not surprised that
• 55:45
  we're there because what happened with I think the early
• 55:47
  ChatGPT model is you had them trying to do this to all
• 55:51
  language and they realized really quickly it's kind of
• 55:54
  weird and buggy because humans are kind of weird and buggy.
• 55:56
  Let's focus on the coding because we know at the end it
• 55:58
  either works or it doesn't. And that's like a very
• 56:01
  streamlined, unstructured data set that can be brought
• 56:05
  together. I am more curious because now
• 56:08
  we're at that precipice, like I think the precipice we're at now
• 56:10
  is whether or not it really does convert beyond the coding and
• 56:15
  the apps and all that. And there's no surprise on that.
• 56:17
  To me, it seems very obvious that that was the right pivot.
• 56:21
  And wow, if they validated that, there's no argument.
• 56:23
  You're not going to hear from me.
• 56:24
  Agents aren't functioning. It's not unbelievable things I
• 56:27
  could build. We don't have infinite ideas
• 56:29
  that that's been messed with the whole venture world where
• 56:31
  someone's going to come to pitch an idea to you.
• 56:34
  No, they're going to build it, execute it, and come to you with
• 56:36
  something that makes you go that's impressed.
• 56:38
  Like, no, that's all real. So there are some signs.
• 56:42
  The next wave. So the next wave, this dimassis
• 56:45
  of this defines it. Sam Altman has also talked about
• 56:48
  this as well. Is that can it do completely
• 56:54
  novel science right? It can't yet, No, of course.
• 56:57
  But humans can hardly. There there are there are people
• 57:00
  that have already worked alongside the AI models we have
• 57:04
  today. Bending it to their will.
• 57:05
  To actually, no, to actually create novel vaccines.
• 57:08
  Yeah, that's actually happened already.
• 57:10
  We're seeing so, so like human plus machine, we're actually at
• 57:13
  a moment where the human plus machine can do novel science.
• 57:17
  You may remember with chess like, you know, you know,
• 57:22
  famously Watson beat Garry Kasparov and then for a long
• 57:26
  time it was like human plus AI was the best chess team.
• 57:30
  Now it's just AI is the best chess team.
• 57:33
  And humans separately. Right, right, right.
• 57:35
  Like you have a whole culture that became cool.
• 57:38
  Yeah. And Magnus and the world.
• 57:40
  So like what's interesting is they actually.
• 57:41
  Bifurcate. Totally.
• 57:42
  Totally. And they both live in real
• 57:44
  worlds where people are very engaged in the human side of it
• 57:47
  as well. Yeah.
• 57:48
  I think we'll have that with sports, too.
• 57:49
  I don't. I don't think we're going to
• 57:50
  just be watching the robots are fighting robots in UFC.
• 57:54
  I mean, I think there will be people that are into that.
• 57:56
  We'll have the spectacle and then it looks like everything
• 57:58
  else. We'll go to the extreme, the
• 58:00
  pendulum will swing back and then we'll find some medium.
• 58:03
  I completely agree. But yeah, I mean, the the reason
• 58:05
  I think that open source is going to win is that A that
• 58:10
  DeepSeek-R1 moment, which has invested many times since by
• 58:13
  lots of open source models and B, that these engineers are like
• 58:22
  cycling between these companies like nothing I've ever seen.
• 58:25
  Like like the moment that let's just say open AI and Vince AGI
• 58:29
  first or whatever. And however we even define a
• 58:32
  GIII bet you almost anything that like a week or two later
• 58:38
  Anthropic announce it and then Grock will announce it and then
• 58:41
  you know, Jim and I will announce it like.
• 58:42
  You say deep sea as open source. I understand those words
• 58:46
  together. What I struggle with is
• 58:48
  typically open sources for the general good of the community.
• 58:52
  I do get concerned of who actually is behind DeepSeek and
• 58:57
  how it was created. So what I'm curious about is
• 59:01
  does that does that hit you at all like you think so yeah, it's
• 59:05
  open source, but someone is definitely financially
• 59:08
  benefiting because they're looking at all this data
• 59:10
  information. This is like what was Elon's
• 59:12
  macro hard thing where I'm just going to look at what everyone's
• 59:15
  doing and then agent code something and sell it for a
• 59:18
  fraction of the price and just make money off of the utility
• 59:21
  that I'm selling on the power. Like these stories are so
• 59:24
  confounding to me that even if I agree maybe to the open source
• 59:28
  idea, I just don't know if it's owned by the spirit of what open
• 59:32
  source is, if you know what I'm saying.
• 59:33
  Yeah, I don't know. And do know on DeepSeek, we kind
• 59:37
  of do know. We know where it sits.
• 59:39
  The stuff that the the Chinese government imposed on DeepSeek
• 59:43
  to put into the model in terms of, you know, kind of like what
• 59:47
  Elon Musk is doing by trying to create a non woke grok.
• 59:50
  Yeah, like he's he's imposing his will.
• 59:53
  So the Chinese did some of the same things that you can't ask
• 59:56
  it certain questions that they find, you know, offensive to
• 1:00:00
  their to their government. How do you IP something and how
• 1:00:03
  do? It is open source though, right?
• 1:00:05
  So, so those things can be changed, right?
• 1:00:07
  And, and I just to me, it's pretty obvious with how much
• 1:00:13
  engineers are cycling through and how transportable this stuff
• 1:00:18
  is, open source is going to win. And and that doesn't mean, by
• 1:00:23
  the way, there won't be this big role for the frontier models and
• 1:00:26
  that and that they'll just be making money hands over fist
• 1:00:29
  like Anthropic is right now. And you know, ChatGPT I.
• 1:00:32
  Don't think anybody's making money though.
• 1:00:34
  Isn't the story that they're not making any money?
• 1:00:36
  I mean anthropics. Like highly, highly gross margin
• 1:00:41
  run rates are positive. No, but their gross margins have
• 1:00:44
  gone way up to yeah, yeah. The the the latest kind of buzz
• 1:00:48
  is that their gross margins are really significant.
• 1:00:52
  Do you know Cory Doctorow's work?
• 1:00:53
  Are you familiar with them? I love.
• 1:00:55
  I love Cory Doctorow. Walk me off the Cliff here.
• 1:00:58
  So he would hear you say that and think like this is like this
• 1:01:02
  is corporate fraud. What's going on?
• 1:01:03
  This is all BS like this that is not true.
• 1:01:06
  Like they are billions of dollars in debt and they can
• 1:01:09
  never make enough money. I've heard somebody else talk
• 1:01:12
  about the idea that Opening Eye can essentially never make money
• 1:01:15
  unless they actually hold. Yeah, I completely disagree with
• 1:01:17
  that. Yeah.
• 1:01:18
  Well. So, so here's here's the way I
• 1:01:21
  look at that. Like first of all, the demand
• 1:01:25
  for these things is super high. Like, like, you know, the
• 1:01:28
  hardest thing to do, you know, as an entrepreneur is like build
• 1:01:31
  something that people even want to buy at all, right?
• 1:01:33
  And then you have the high class problem if they actually buy it
• 1:01:37
  and we're just a click or two away.
• 1:01:40
  I mean, you have you and I have gone to Ted for a long time,
• 1:01:43
  right? And we've, we spend a lot of
• 1:01:45
  time together at Ted and we're just a click or two away in my
• 1:01:50
  opinion, from solar energy breakthroughs that that allows
• 1:01:54
  us to really completely reshape even how we discuss energy
• 1:01:59
  consumption with these models. You know, think about the
• 1:02:05
  breakthrough that Alphafold had. So that's not Alphafold's not a
• 1:02:08
  large language model, right? That's a different type of AI.
• 1:02:11
  We talk a lot about LLMS that Alphafold now has created the
• 1:02:16
  Rosetta Stone, if you will, to produce maybe an unlimited
• 1:02:20
  number of medicines to cure diseases in all types of
• 1:02:23
  fashions, you know, including personalized medicines like
• 1:02:27
  understanding people's genomes and everything else.
• 1:02:30
  And so, so we're, we're going to have like an alpha for
• 1:02:34
  everything. Google already has alpha chip
• 1:02:36
  for designing their chip fabs and their latest chips.
• 1:02:41
  They, they have all types of alpha projects we don't know
• 1:02:45
  about. I would bet almost anything that
• 1:02:48
  there is an alpha project right now that is focused on the
• 1:02:51
  material science breakthrough. We need to decode the sun's
• 1:02:56
  energy. What I mean by that is that if
• 1:02:59
  we could capture 18 seconds of the sun's rays that fall on
• 1:03:03
  Earth, it would power America's energy needs for over a year.
• 1:03:07
  These are the theories behind these data centers in space,
• 1:03:11
  which aren't. Yeah, data centers in space.
• 1:03:13
  Small satellites reflecting like there's there's two things.
• 1:03:16
  That two reasons for that. It's like 1 because it's so cold
• 1:03:20
  and the other because you're closer to the sun and you have
• 1:03:23
  you you have more direct access to the light.
• 1:03:27
  Transfers the issue because I was like we'd be building that
• 1:03:29
  northern Canada, but we can't because we can't.
• 1:03:30
  Transfer. I had Pippa Mahlgren on this
• 1:03:33
  podcast and she was talking about the fact, and I look this
• 1:03:36
  up because I was really interested that the Japanese
• 1:03:38
  have already figured out a way to beam that down to power
• 1:03:41
  stations. That's already proven that we
• 1:03:43
  can do. That So why do you think they
• 1:03:45
  would build these massive data centers?
• 1:03:46
  If we're one click way, wouldn't the investment be better spent
• 1:03:49
  on solving that first than doing this part?
• 1:03:52
  Yeah, Why are they doing that? Well, they're doing it to keep
• 1:03:55
  up with the demand, frankly. I mean, like they're trying to
• 1:03:58
  reduce the, it's like the, it's like a bit like catching a
• 1:04:02
  knife, right? They're trying to, because of
• 1:04:05
  the problem that Cory Doctorow points out, they're trying to
• 1:04:08
  very quickly figure out how to optimize and decrease the cost
• 1:04:14
  to meet the demand moment. And what's happening is that the
• 1:04:18
  models are already insanely more efficient than they were three
• 1:04:23
  years ago. That we know.
• 1:04:25
  There's no doubt about that. And the capabilities have gone
• 1:04:29
  way up. So it's using more tokens, but
• 1:04:32
  each token prices a lot less. You know the water use. 10 times
• 1:04:36
  the token. You know, I saw, I saw Ethan
• 1:04:39
  Moloch, you know, post this and he's one of my favorite.
• 1:04:41
  Followers on Ethan Moloch, too. Warden professor, very famous
• 1:04:45
  warden professor, you know, really charting the way with AI
• 1:04:50
  and and he he posted on LinkedIn this maybe six months ago that
• 1:04:55
  the water use for these models now these data centers is around
• 1:05:01
  what we use for golf courses in America.
• 1:05:03
  OK, so like this whole. That's been resolving, yeah.
• 1:05:07
  Right. That's that's been resolving.
• 1:05:08
  So, you know, I love Cory Doctorow, but I think I think in
• 1:05:13
  this case it's like a failure of imagination, honestly.
• 1:05:16
  It's like, it's like he's locked into this place of status.
• 1:05:22
  And when humanity prioritizes something like this, it gets
• 1:05:27
  better fast. I mean, we prioritize the
• 1:05:29
  vaccine development really fast during COVID and it got better
• 1:05:32
  fast, right? And so this is, this is one of
• 1:05:36
  those moments where humanity globally has never prioritized
• 1:05:39
  anything like this. The Chinese are prioritizing it.
• 1:05:41
  We're prioritizing it. You know, Europe to some extent
• 1:05:44
  is prioritizing they're they, they want to prioritize that
• 1:05:46
  they're a little bit behind, maybe a lot bit behind.
• 1:05:50
  But the way, the way I see the future with this and a big part
• 1:05:54
  of why I wrote this book and why I'm doing this podcast is that I
• 1:06:00
  see a world where almost all of humanity is going to have access
• 1:06:03
  to AGI. And that means the worst actors,
• 1:06:05
  that means the terrorist as well.
• 1:06:08
  And so, you know, part of part of what you have to believe, to
• 1:06:12
  believe that humanity is going to make it to the age of
• 1:06:14
  abundance for all is that is an act of faith.
• 1:06:18
  It starts with a love for humanity.
• 1:06:20
  Age of Abundance Star Trek world where people pursue their
• 1:06:24
  interests. Everything is taking care of we
• 1:06:28
  live. To some extent, I mean, I mean,
• 1:06:29
  like, like, it's funny because my most capitalistic friends
• 1:06:34
  will tell me like, hey, Brett, do you just talk that you're
• 1:06:37
  talking about the people are just going to be meditating,
• 1:06:39
  like we're in Bhutan or something.
• 1:06:42
  There is part of humanity that would choose that, and that
• 1:06:44
  won't be that bad. But there's another part of
• 1:06:46
  humanity that's like you and me, like, let's go, Let's go figure
• 1:06:50
  out if we can conquer faster, light speed travel and
• 1:06:53
  everything else, right? Yeah.
• 1:06:55
  That is the Star Trek future. So there's there.
• 1:06:57
  In my opinion, there's no limit to human curiosity.
• 1:06:59
  There never will be. In that model, we need to get
• 1:07:03
  somewhere in terms of some weird.
• 1:07:06
  Middle part We're on the weird middle part.
• 1:07:09
  I don't think we are yet. We've all know Harare is
• 1:07:11
  excessively worried about this. So he might fit on some spectrum
• 1:07:16
  to maybe a quarry doctoral where if unemployment drops even under
• 1:07:21
  double digits, it's calamity. It's a, it's a, it's a cesspool
• 1:07:24
  of extremism of, of, of bad political sentiment of it.
• 1:07:30
  So we have to live through, let's say we have to live
• 1:07:32
  through a very rough middle part.
• 1:07:33
  I want to say that that's the darker part for sure.
• 1:07:37
  And we come out in a place of universal super income.
• 1:07:41
  Universal. The question that my intelligent
• 1:07:44
  friends have who are passionate about this, who are not the
• 1:07:46
  people that are just going to be the naysayers, are when and why?
• 1:07:50
  How many more trillions of dollars do these companies need
• 1:07:52
  before this starts trickling down to us?
• 1:07:55
  What needs to be proven to a meta, to an alphabet, to an
• 1:08:01
  anthropic? What needs to be proven to start
• 1:08:04
  that process of of letting that power what?
• 1:08:07
  What is? And that's where I think
• 1:08:10
  rightfully, this is where I can. I tend to have happy years
• 1:08:14
  bread, right? So someone says something good,
• 1:08:16
  I'm going to go there. I'm going to go there.
• 1:08:18
  This is where I go when I go down that path, the music guy
• 1:08:21
  and me, that the culture person and me, there's no proof that
• 1:08:25
  anybody has ever transferred anything.
• 1:08:28
  We're done this for, for that group.
• 1:08:31
  Where do you have the confidence in this?
• 1:08:33
  So now it's the title of the book.
• 1:08:35
  Yeah, yeah. But like, when?
• 1:08:39
  When have we seen that real love?
• 1:08:41
  Yeah. We could solve so many things
• 1:08:43
  right now. We choose not to.
• 1:08:45
  I mean, this is a problem. You know, I'm Canadian, but here
• 1:08:48
  we're sending money over there. What about here?
• 1:08:50
  I mean, this is a standard thing and we don't see that.
• 1:08:54
  We don't see us solving those. But we can solve kids being
• 1:08:56
  hungry in school today. No solve vacation today.
• 1:08:59
  Yeah, it's a real problem. I mean, I had.
• 1:09:01
  So what's the unlock? Jamie Metzel was on this
• 1:09:03
  podcast. It was episode 18.
• 1:09:06
  He just came out with a new book If You.
• 1:09:07
  Remember these numbers as the most impressive thing?
• 1:09:09
  Really. So far, Episode 8 I'm like, I
• 1:09:12
  don't remember. I can't remember any of that.
• 1:09:13
  Good for you, right? Well, he, he just came out with
• 1:09:17
  the AI10 commandments and great, great guy.
• 1:09:21
  But you know, in that, in that episode, he said, look, we
• 1:09:23
  already have the abundance, it's just not distributed.
• 1:09:25
  Like we already have enough food to feed the.
• 1:09:27
  World willingness of the people who are you.
• 1:09:30
  You can't make a promise and then not demonstrate any.
• 1:09:33
  You can't make a promise and then fire 20,000 people the next
• 1:09:37
  day after record profits like this is.
• 1:09:40
  Yeah. So.
• 1:09:40
  So this is where I become that hippie.
• 1:09:43
  I become that we're not, but I. No, I understand.
• 1:09:46
  I mean, I, you know, I grapple with this in the book a lot.
• 1:09:51
  I look at past models. I mean, during the height of the
• 1:09:54
  Cold War, one of the existential things that we faced with
• 1:09:58
  smallpox and that could have been an extinction event for
• 1:10:01
  humanity. And somehow we found a way to
• 1:10:06
  have our best scientist work with the Russian best scientist,
• 1:10:11
  even though we're in the high of the Cold War like we're we're
• 1:10:13
  not supposed to collaborate on anything.
• 1:10:14
  I think I bet in AI circles that's already happening.
• 1:10:17
  I don't believe that we are that divided there.
• 1:10:19
  I think the top of the top are speaking to each other.
• 1:10:22
  That's very aware. I think that that is happening.
• 1:10:25
  That part I do. OK, then, then.
• 1:10:27
  Then that's you're making me even more optimistic with that
• 1:10:31
  because that must happen and and it actually needs to happen with
• 1:10:36
  the US and China as well. And the reason why is they're
• 1:10:39
  the two biggest superpower so that the more we collaborate
• 1:10:44
  with each other to create these outcomes, because what we are
• 1:10:49
  birthing is we are birthing right now as humanity the
• 1:10:54
  possibility for abundance for all on the planet.
• 1:10:58
  And, and it it does require a couple of leaps of faith.
• 1:11:02
  It requires this leap that what we're seeing in large language
• 1:11:08
  models, beating these math benchmarks, these physics
• 1:11:11
  benchmarks, etcetera. You know these like super hard
• 1:11:14
  tests, you know that that is going to be transferred into
• 1:11:20
  machines of robotic form and I. Have I'm laughing because
• 1:11:26
  there's a great band name called Machines of Love and Grace.
• 1:11:28
  Have you heard of that band name?
• 1:11:29
  Well, it's funny because that's also that's all of a book, and
• 1:11:32
  it's also Dario Modi wrote Machines of Love and Grace.
• 1:11:35
  I think he got it from what was he did band name, but the band
• 1:11:38
  names from an actual book. So whenever we talk like, that's
• 1:11:41
  my I. Reference it actually in my.
• 1:11:42
  OK, great. OK.
• 1:11:43
  So we're kismet. OK.
• 1:11:44
  Yeah. And so, so you know, I've seen
• 1:11:48
  enough like, you know, I'm an investor in Apptronic via fund
• 1:11:54
  and I've seen enough with robots, which gives me great
• 1:11:58
  confidence that we're going to get there, that we're going to
• 1:12:01
  get to the point where fiscal labor is going to be solved,
• 1:12:09
  meaning that we'll be able to go into countries like Chad.
• 1:12:14
  I personify it in the book with this country of Chad.
• 1:12:18
  I'm in this Uber and he picks me up here in Austin.
• 1:12:22
  It's 4:30 in the morning. You know, you know, sometimes
• 1:12:24
  you meet someone. It's just that electric moment.
• 1:12:26
  He and I are just totally jamming.
• 1:12:28
  Yeah, 4:30 in the morning. We're just like riffing off each
• 1:12:31
  other is such a beautiful guy. And and he's just like, you
• 1:12:34
  know, I'm in the land of opportunities.
• 1:12:37
  Like, you know, in Chad. He's like, I'm sending all this
• 1:12:40
  money back to support 6 people, including my parents, my wife,
• 1:12:44
  my children. You know, eventually I want to
• 1:12:46
  move them here and, and I, I'm, I felt like AI felt embarrassed
• 1:12:53
  because I didn't know anything about Chad.
• 1:12:55
  And so I'm like getting educated really quick on Chad, $660.00
• 1:12:59
  for GDP, a person you know, in America it's 86. 1000 it's
• 1:13:02
  called Chad GB GDPI had to jump on the job.
• 1:13:06
  OK I I stumbled on it but Chad GBT with GDP.
• 1:13:09
  With this reminds me of that Shrek line, you know?
• 1:13:11
  Yeah, I'm also here for the VL. Exactly.
• 1:13:14
  And so those those actually our oldest daughter's like favorite
• 1:13:18
  movie growing up. Oh my gosh, she watched that
• 1:13:20
  movie 100 times. You know, I'm jamming with him
• 1:13:23
  and I'm like, wow, OK, so Chad doesn't really have clean water
• 1:13:27
  hardly at all. It doesn't really have food
• 1:13:29
  hardly at all. It doesn't really have
• 1:13:31
  healthcare. Are they at all?
• 1:13:32
  Doesn't really have electricity hardly at all.
• 1:13:34
  So I was like, what hope is there in the world for Chad?
• 1:13:39
  Like, is there money to be made in Chad, etcetera.
• 1:13:41
  Like, you know, we live in a very global capitalist society.
• 1:13:45
  And it hit me. There's like a download in the
• 1:13:49
  car and I was like, it's AI, it's quantum computing, it's
• 1:13:53
  robotics, It's, it's, it's, it's basically technology
• 1:13:57
  accelerating to the point where we can create the clean water
• 1:14:01
  that they need, where we can create the electrical supply
• 1:14:04
  they need, you know, the healthcare, etcetera.
• 1:14:06
  It's, it's to the point where it gets economic enough.
• 1:14:09
  And why do I have that hope? Because if you go back 250 years
• 1:14:14
  ago, 90% of the population was completely illiterate around the
• 1:14:20
  world, 80% of the population lived in abject poverty.
• 1:14:24
  And so the arc of technological progress actually has been to
• 1:14:29
  make our lives easier and easier.
• 1:14:32
  Now, we do live in a place where we're algorithmically
• 1:14:37
  manipulating ourselves through social media, through through,
• 1:14:42
  through the regular media. And it's not a critique on the
• 1:14:44
  Free Press, a critique on the business model.
• 1:14:46
  Like it's easier to hijack someone's amygdala.
• 1:14:49
  You know, you and I were discussing that 99.9% of our
• 1:14:53
  evolutionary time as Homo sapiens, we haven't even had
• 1:14:55
  electricity, right? And so we're like, all of us are
• 1:14:58
  like, you know, even worse off than Chad is today, like, you
• 1:15:03
  know, for almost the entire evolutionary history.
• 1:15:07
  And so we're in this penultimate moment where where I do think
• 1:15:13
  we're going to conquer the physical labor that we need to
• 1:15:19
  do things that have been on the shelf for a long time.
• 1:15:22
  Like maybe someone had a notion like I'd love to, I'd love to,
• 1:15:25
  you know, maybe they visited Chad and they're like, I'd
• 1:15:28
  really love to do something. Here.
• 1:15:31
  But and then they're back at their day job, right?
• 1:15:34
  But in the future, and it's not that far away, could be 10 to 15
• 1:15:39
  years from now, we'll have the ability through robotics and
• 1:15:44
  through the acceleration of these to go in.
• 1:15:47
  And it could be an NGO, it could be a entrepreneur in Africa.
• 1:15:52
  That's like there's 80 million people, you know, in Chad and
• 1:15:55
  there's a market there to be made.
• 1:15:57
  I just need to help them have the same thing that, you know,
• 1:16:01
  in Canada or America, like we started out with no electricity
• 1:16:05
  and everything else, but we're really.
• 1:16:06
  Breaking the model because what typically would happen is a
• 1:16:09
  transference of some type of Labor to the cheaper market.
• 1:16:15
  I think what you're saying, which I believe to be a truism
• 1:16:18
  that I we haven't embraced, is this idea that we're now really
• 1:16:22
  seeing the even distribution of, I'll call it cheap, the
• 1:16:26
  knowledge of it, possibility of it for sure it's a.
• 1:16:29
  Choice whether or not we choose. Yeah.
• 1:16:30
  I mean we're even hearing now, but like these robotic companies
• 1:16:32
  that are doing the T-shirts and that we don't need to have all
• 1:16:34
  these. So there's just like this, this
• 1:16:36
  interesting like multi layered distribution happening that
• 1:16:41
  again either positions you in a great place of opportunity or
• 1:16:45
  one of extreme control. Right.
• 1:16:49
  And even as you were talking about Chad, I was somewhat
• 1:16:52
  cynically, that's my own issue reflecting on are we sure that
• 1:16:56
  that's what they want, though? That's a very Western perhaps
• 1:16:59
  thought and we can say something.
• 1:17:00
  Well, that's, you know, it's all Western thoughts.
• 1:17:02
  I want clean water and healthy like and the answer is I don't
• 1:17:05
  actually even know enough about it to know.
• 1:17:07
  They do how people, yeah, they definitely want.
• 1:17:10
  I'm pretty. Sure, most people want some
• 1:17:11
  force form of modernity. What they probably don't want is
• 1:17:14
  they probably don't want the social media manipulation and
• 1:17:17
  all the loneliness and depression rapidly on the rise
• 1:17:21
  in America and Canada, etcetera, because of this manipulation.
• 1:17:24
  Machine. But what do you see in beyond
• 1:17:28
  your writing and my my thinking and others like motion wise from
• 1:17:32
  the powers that be do you see? I do see some stuff.
• 1:17:36
  I mean, so I I mean I'm curious, you know, how you see this, but
• 1:17:40
  you know what 1 push back I get, which I completely understand
• 1:17:44
  Chris Himes, you know, was on was on episode 57.
• 1:17:48
  He's the he's the he is a long time CEO of indeed.
• 1:17:52
  Great, great guy. You know, the world's job,
• 1:17:54
  largest job search engine. He's now, he left indeed as the
• 1:17:59
  CEO after being the CEO for a long time to really go out there
• 1:18:04
  and be a big messenger on AI responsibility.
• 1:18:10
  And he's teaching a course at our historically black
• 1:18:12
  university here in Austin called Houston Tillotson.
• 1:18:14
  But he's opened the course up to anybody and it's really good.
• 1:18:18
  It's really good. I mean, that was a really good
• 1:18:20
  episode and it was a, it was 1 where he, he's, he's a pretty, I
• 1:18:24
  would say pessimistic right now with the people in control.
• 1:18:29
  And one of the things that I mentioned to him in that episode
• 1:18:32
  and you know, the AI documentary came out and that's that's
• 1:18:35
  overall pretty pessimistic. I don't know if you've seen
• 1:18:37
  that, but. That's like the Tristan Harris.
• 1:18:38
  Tristan, Yeah, yeah, I think it's Tristan.
• 1:18:41
  Tristan, yeah. And.
• 1:18:43
  I did twist image. We can call it Tristan Tristan.
• 1:18:47
  So Tristan has to be. Exactly.
• 1:18:50
  And so, you know, we're, we're seeing, you know what, what we
• 1:18:55
  didn't see at the beginning of social media is we didn't see
• 1:18:59
  people like Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey, etcetera, going to
• 1:19:03
  government saying please get involved.
• 1:19:06
  This is a really important moment.
• 1:19:08
  This should have been a government utility.
• 1:19:10
  I don't know. She knew.
• 1:19:11
  And actually, no, I know, but we are seeing it now.
• 1:19:14
  So you've got you've got Daria Modi, you know, which wrote the
• 1:19:17
  Adolescence of Technology recently.
• 1:19:19
  Beautiful. Asking for by get that people.
• 1:19:21
  That's a good PR marketing move too.
• 1:19:23
  It creates a lot of tension and excitement too.
• 1:19:25
  I think. I think.
• 1:19:26
  That's the cynic. I think it does, but but I mean,
• 1:19:30
  you know, you're you're. Taking it very authentic which
• 1:19:32
  is great. I mean I am taking all.
• 1:19:34
  Authentic. But think about the
• 1:19:36
  transformation you and I have seen because of technology.
• 1:19:38
  OK, Like, think about where we start out.
• 1:19:41
  Like we were using Atari's, right?
• 1:19:43
  And I was using the first Atari where you'd plug into the
• 1:19:47
  joystick keypad to do BASIC programming.
• 1:19:50
  It was like a color wheel. It's like horrible.
• 1:19:52
  I mean, but back then it was it was miraculous.
• 1:19:55
  And I knew as a kid, I really did.
• 1:19:58
  I mean, I debate teachers about this when I was like 10-11 years
• 1:20:02
  old that, that we were in a world transformational moment
• 1:20:06
  that that, you know, the whole world was going to be digitized.
• 1:20:10
  And I didn't know it'd be this big this fast.
• 1:20:13
  Like I didn't know it'd be 54 years old sitting in front of
• 1:20:16
  you. And it's like to this point, but
• 1:20:18
  I knew that that. That there was a massive shift
• 1:20:22
  underway and now now it's like, you know, it's a really big deal
• 1:20:25
  like the systems are so are are so online that remember that
• 1:20:30
  that hack that happened with solar.
• 1:20:33
  I think of the solar winds and. You know, brought.
• 1:20:36
  You know, brought all these vulnerabilities worldwide and
• 1:20:38
  then there was another hack where all these planes were
• 1:20:41
  down, do you know, etcetera. So we're at this point where the
• 1:20:44
  world is so digital and so digitally connected.
• 1:20:47
  And why did we create that world?
• 1:20:49
  We created that world because it's way more efficient.
• 1:20:52
  It makes our lives way, way easier in so many ways.
• 1:20:56
  It comes with this edge of the people that use it to put
• 1:21:00
  profits over people, which, you know, again, social media is the
• 1:21:04
  1st place I'd start the media's first place.
• 1:21:07
  I'd start the pharmaceutical complex.
• 1:21:09
  There's a lot of that. So there's there.
• 1:21:11
  There isn't. Things we haven't talked.
• 1:21:13
  No, there is an edge and I cover that all all that in the book.
• 1:21:16
  I mean, the book is like really balanced on on the edge.
• 1:21:20
  And I think that that edge comes out of a scarcity mindset.
• 1:21:25
  I think that edge comes out of this mindset of like we're we're
• 1:21:32
  in this world, this is all there is.
• 1:21:36
  You know, everything that we see with our five senses is is
• 1:21:40
  there's nothing else. And so it's this mindset of you
• 1:21:44
  only live once. It's extraction type mindset,
• 1:21:47
  right. I mean, Gary Zukov talked about
• 1:21:49
  this extensively in the seat of the soul.
• 1:21:51
  And so the reason long. Before there was an Internet.
• 1:21:56
  Yes, and, and, and the reason I see, I see the mantra that
• 1:22:01
  humanity needs to embrace of love conquering fear is a that's
• 1:22:06
  the mantra in all the spiritual text.
• 1:22:08
  That is the common route. You know, there's a lot of stuff
• 1:22:11
  that I don't like about religion, which was the
• 1:22:14
  scaffolding built on top of that beautiful spiritual route that
• 1:22:17
  we all agreed on that was for. Power, you know, or the other?
• 1:22:22
  Yeah. The other in right, whether it's
• 1:22:23
  a caste system in Hinduism, you know, as Jews, we used to burn
• 1:22:27
  animals at the altar. You know, we don't do that
• 1:22:29
  anymore. Christians used to do violent
• 1:22:31
  crusades, etcetera. So there's, there's a lot of
• 1:22:35
  there's a lot of problems that were built on top of that
• 1:22:37
  beautiful spiritual root. And you know, you've, you've had
• 1:22:41
  this whole career of kind of manifesting love.
• 1:22:44
  And the reason that works is because that is us at our
• 1:22:48
  highest. That is us at our highest.
• 1:22:50
  Right, it's. Beautiful part of us.
• 1:22:53
  You know, Brad, like that was a very good illustration of
• 1:22:56
  potentially the tension that I'm experiencing because I'm saying
• 1:22:59
  it and meaning it and then quite fearful that of who and where
• 1:23:05
  it's coming from. Yeah, I mean.
• 1:23:07
  And these are these are these are people that traditionally
• 1:23:10
  are clients and people I love. And you know, my simplistic
• 1:23:14
  story is prior to COVID, who was the number one employer on
• 1:23:18
  Glassdoor? It's like Google and Facebook
• 1:23:21
  and even Microsoft and these campuses where there was coffee
• 1:23:25
  and massages and dentistry work and meditation rooms and world
• 1:23:29
  renowned chefs and restaurants and these incredible places that
• 1:23:33
  you would love to work and experience.
• 1:23:36
  And then we had this calamity of COVID and suddenly they became
• 1:23:40
  Evil Empire. We were talking earlier about is
• 1:23:43
  this a simulation? And and yeah, I also don't think
• 1:23:47
  it's a simulation, but if there were ever instances of somebody
• 1:23:51
  messing with the master program to see how the people in the
• 1:23:54
  Matrix would react, that was one of those instances where I
• 1:23:57
  thought, well, what what did they do so bad that everyone
• 1:24:00
  suddenly thinks they're evil? Now we could point to the
• 1:24:02
  algorithm in the system and how it what it did.
• 1:24:04
  I mean, all of these things we could point to, but it's such an
• 1:24:08
  interesting shift and realization.
• 1:24:11
  And I don't think there was that polarity.
• 1:24:12
  People would say, oh, with social media, with the lawsuits
• 1:24:15
  currently are facing their tobacco moment.
• 1:24:18
  Well, I don't know that anybody was all excited to work at the
• 1:24:21
  tobacco. Like I don't know if it was ever
• 1:24:23
  perceived as this great institution where do no evil in
• 1:24:27
  the world's knowledge and we're connecting the world.
• 1:24:30
  All of these things were so real and true and so partially I'm
• 1:24:34
  wondering, is it like a designed algorithm, or is it just
• 1:24:37
  humanity reflecting itself back into it, Right?
• 1:24:41
  And I wonder if it's truly this manifestation of evil or just
• 1:24:44
  this actual amplification of who we are.
• 1:24:47
  It's both. Yeah.
• 1:24:48
  Well, this, I mean, it is this, this is the problem, the
• 1:24:51
  conversation. It's it's exactly what you said.
• 1:24:53
  What you said is exactly how I am, right?
• 1:24:55
  We can hold. What is the saying?
• 1:24:58
  You hold two things. Can be true at the same time.
• 1:25:00
  Yes, yes, and there's the other saying of the human the highest
• 1:25:04
  level of humanities ability to opposing ideas in your mind at
• 1:25:09
  the same time that it's very famous quote that I mean that I
• 1:25:11
  just butchered for your show, the sake, your audience, and I
• 1:25:14
  think about that that and what you just said all the time, and
• 1:25:18
  it's really hard to live like that because you want to be.
• 1:25:21
  This is how it is and like. I believe that when they say
• 1:25:24
  they're doing this to give humanity all this stuff like
• 1:25:27
  we're like that is and all these other instances that are so
• 1:25:32
  wrong and see evil and you're going to build a data center and
• 1:25:36
  control a local communities access to energy.
• 1:25:39
  They're already like, what are we doing?
• 1:25:41
  Right. No, I know.
• 1:25:42
  I mean, there, there's definitely tension there.
• 1:25:46
  There is. I mean, we are.
• 1:25:47
  In To Live with This. No, we're in the moment of
• 1:25:49
  ultimate tension with this, but I I'll give you I'll give you
• 1:25:55
  the the reason why I think even if like there was this evil
• 1:26:01
  plan, which I don't believe there's.
• 1:26:03
  A mustache I want to control, like Luther.
• 1:26:06
  Yeah, I think, I think, I think when Demisysibus says he deeply,
• 1:26:11
  deeply cares about humanity, or Mustafa Suleiman says that or
• 1:26:15
  Daria Modi says that and, you know, you see how they're
• 1:26:21
  talking out there, et cetera. Like I think they really, really
• 1:26:24
  mean it. I really, I really do.
• 1:26:26
  I think they feel the the great, you know what I called the
• 1:26:30
  responsibility of the nerds versus revenge of the nerds?
• 1:26:32
  I Sam. Alden talks a lot about that.
• 1:26:34
  Yeah. And so I think, I think that
• 1:26:36
  they really mean it. But look, even if you thought
• 1:26:39
  they didn't, there there is no market if if the world evolves
• 1:26:47
  where there's like 10 multi trillionaires and everybody.
• 1:26:51
  This is the other thing, like economically this doesn't play
• 1:26:54
  out. Right.
• 1:26:54
  And there's no safety for them. Everyone's fired, no one has
• 1:26:56
  money, so who's buying? And there's no, there's no.
• 1:26:59
  Safety for them, right? So I mean, you know, like, OK,
• 1:27:02
  great. So you're like worth $5 trillion
• 1:27:05
  but you're living in freaking in a Blade Runner or something.
• 1:27:08
  Or maybe not underground. Yeah, worsen Blade Runner, be
• 1:27:11
  Mad Max, right? You know, those are great.
• 1:27:15
  You know, the the recent Mad Max movies.
• 1:27:16
  Really. Yeah.
• 1:27:18
  Yeah. So, you know, I, I just, I just
• 1:27:22
  think that there will have to be a rebalancing a governor, if you
• 1:27:28
  will, because people won't take that world.
• 1:27:31
  I mean, like, like the difficult thing about this moment is that
• 1:27:37
  in, you know, one of the analogies that I think about is
• 1:27:40
  it's like if you and I were in India prior to the rise of
• 1:27:44
  Gandhi and we were kind of under the control of the British, I
• 1:27:48
  don't think we'd be able to see like the India Today, right?
• 1:27:50
  We'd just be like, wow, this really kind of sucks, you know,
• 1:27:53
  like. Yeah, I transferred that thought
• 1:27:55
  more to like it's. And what happened there, people
• 1:27:57
  rose up non violence. They were led by a single guy.
• 1:28:01
  And they they, they said, no, we're not going to take that.
• 1:28:05
  And I don't think that humanity, as we start to glimpse more and
• 1:28:09
  more of the possibility of real abundance, I don't think
• 1:28:12
  humanity will take it like, I really don't.
• 1:28:15
  And so there's going to be tension from the bottoms up
• 1:28:18
  where people like, no, I'm sorry, we're not going to let
• 1:28:20
  you carry the world. I've been following this.
• 1:28:22
  And I think they. Know it maybe.
• 1:28:24
  I mean, I've been following this mean of this meme of why do we
• 1:28:29
  keep insisting that we want to make science fiction reality?
• 1:28:32
  You've been following this at all where it's like you'll hear
• 1:28:34
  interviews with Neil Stephenson or just general articles about
• 1:28:38
  like, again, we're talking Mad Max and start all these Star
• 1:28:40
  Trek. So and like why?
• 1:28:43
  Like somebody had a creative idea and what's the race to
• 1:28:47
  create that as a as a like it's and it is like, if you start
• 1:28:51
  digging into this, it becomes the it's a rabbit hole of really
• 1:28:54
  interesting, super fascinating conversations about this weird
• 1:28:58
  idea of like, why are we building?
• 1:29:00
  How it was a good movie. Super like a guy, I'm in, I'm
• 1:29:05
  all in on this stuff, but why are we trying to build it?
• 1:29:07
  And then they extrapolated into space and Mars and
• 1:29:10
  multiplanetary. I mean, over to you.
• 1:29:13
  But this is like a it's another part of of the culture that I
• 1:29:17
  see now that makes me reflect on my own thinking of it.
• 1:29:21
  It is true. Why are we constantly forcing to
• 1:29:24
  make video games as realistic as possible?
• 1:29:26
  Why isn't it more fun to play a cartoon character?
• 1:29:29
  What makes it more interesting? And, you know, turning it into
• 1:29:33
  some anthropomorphic? Why do we want it to compliment?
• 1:29:36
  Like why would you ever create a chatbot that feels like wouldn't
• 1:29:40
  you want it to feel actually other for it to be most
• 1:29:43
  interesting? Super like that is a whole other
• 1:29:46
  world of again, current. You mentioned before a word that
• 1:29:50
  I love philosophy and you're saying we're living in
• 1:29:53
  philosophy and I this is what you say to the great
• 1:29:54
  philosophers in your kitchen upstairs.
• 1:29:56
  It is a time of great philosophers.
• 1:29:58
  And so one is, it is interesting that we were taking essentially
• 1:30:01
  what is made-up philosophy as some type of destination future.
• 1:30:06
  Well, we're being and by the way.
• 1:30:07
  This is philosophy. Is this philosophy what we're
• 1:30:10
  doing? Yeah, absolutely.
• 1:30:11
  Amazing that we live in a world where normally you would consume
• 1:30:14
  it through like you would think about it and put it into those
• 1:30:16
  black and white pages and words. And this, what we're doing right
• 1:30:20
  now, this actually is actually the real philosophy of
• 1:30:23
  conversation, a back and forth of, of, of the agora of whatever
• 1:30:28
  it might be. And again, that's why whenever
• 1:30:32
  there's a slight against social media or anything related to
• 1:30:35
  that, I'm always like, just watch how hard we pump the
• 1:30:38
  brakes because I'm learning more than I recognize.
• 1:30:41
  It's terrible. Like all the stuff we're doing
• 1:30:43
  is bad, but there's so much amazing beauty and and love.
• 1:30:47
  And there is. And that is like this matter.
• 1:30:50
  I was watching, I think it was Alex O'Connor's more of a
• 1:30:53
  religious bent podcaster had on Rory Sutherland, who is an
• 1:30:57
  advertising guy, like is a real character, brilliant behavioral
• 1:31:00
  economist and marketer and business person.
• 1:31:02
  And he is a philosopher. And they were going on, they'll
• 1:31:05
  send you the link. They're going on this whole rant
• 1:31:07
  about how like, it's amazing that we are actually living in
• 1:31:10
  the age of philosophy now because of the former.
• 1:31:12
  We'll put it in the show notes. I love it.
• 1:31:13
  That'd be cool. Yeah, I.
• 1:31:14
  Love to watch that, loving all that stuff.
• 1:31:15
  So again, in all of this beauty, you're like, Oh yeah, like maybe
• 1:31:19
  you can take us to that place. I just hope the the powers that
• 1:31:22
  be, whoever they are great, are very cognizant of not just what
• 1:31:27
  is being built and and what it could do, but but the why and
• 1:31:31
  the how and the the futures here.
• 1:31:33
  It's just not evenly distributed and all of these memes, we have
• 1:31:38
  to be careful because historically any transference,
• 1:31:40
  what we've made it through, there could be a lot of
• 1:31:43
  roughness. And because of what's happening
• 1:31:46
  here. I was I was live and my only
• 1:31:48
  thing is speed is that everything's always moving too
• 1:31:50
  fast isn't going too fast. It's like direction and momentum
• 1:31:53
  is greater than speed is is my like keynote idea.
• 1:31:57
  And I I pump up an image of it's somebody writing on a
• 1:32:00
  whiteboard, but it's glass. And then in front of it, it just
• 1:32:02
  says prompting vibe coding agents or it's like just imagine
• 1:32:09
  like how long ago it was when we said like coding like you need
• 1:32:12
  to learn prompt engineering. Like prompt engineering sounds
• 1:32:15
  about as archaic. I know as that was last week
• 1:32:18
  dude, right you. Know what I mean?
• 1:32:20
  And then it was like vibe coding, which is like, we're
• 1:32:21
  still doing vibe code, but now it's all like, Oh yeah, you
• 1:32:24
  start. But like the Asian told that as
• 1:32:27
  a as a head fake in terms of understanding what it is,
• 1:32:30
  whether you believe that's buying into all this capitalism
• 1:32:33
  and hype and drive and it's not real and it's fake.
• 1:32:35
  Versus when you deal with people who are doing it and you just
• 1:32:38
  see the delta of what they're developing and how it's
• 1:32:40
  transforming. Like that's you just hope that
• 1:32:44
  these people really understand what it is.
• 1:32:47
  And I also think that a very simplistic level that we
• 1:32:53
  knowledge workers, people who could make a couple 1,000,000
• 1:32:55
  bucks working on a laptop at Starbucks, as if that's hard
• 1:32:59
  work. We are now being challenged in
• 1:33:03
  terms of your advanced degrees or intellect in your years of
• 1:33:05
  experience and that, you know, with love or fear.
• 1:33:12
  There's another word out there that I reflect on a lot and
• 1:33:15
  that's just humility. Maybe we're not that as smart as
• 1:33:18
  we thought. Well, I.
• 1:33:20
  Actually think or we are. Yeah, well, I mean, Speaking of
• 1:33:24
  human curiosity and humility like we do, I think I mean, and
• 1:33:30
  and this this is nothing new, by the way, you know, during during
• 1:33:33
  the time of Copernicus and Galileo, like they, you know,
• 1:33:37
  Galileo was excommunicated from the church for dare challenging
• 1:33:42
  that, that the Earth was the center of the universe there.
• 1:33:45
  Weren't many people like him back then, Brett?
• 1:33:47
  Right. And so, so like, you know,
• 1:33:50
  there, there's many times in history where we've assumed,
• 1:33:54
  well, we've learned it all. Here's the here's the facts.
• 1:33:57
  We know what 4% of the universe is made of.
• 1:33:59
  We call that matter. We have no idea what 96% as we
• 1:34:02
  call it, dark energy and dark matter have no idea what it is.
• 1:34:06
  We are extremely landlocked to a single planet.
• 1:34:10
  I mean, it's great that Artemis 2.
• 1:34:11
  Did with a real small geography. Right.
• 1:34:14
  So we're landlocked to a single planet in a universe that,
• 1:34:18
  through James Webb telescope, we're now finding out has
• 1:34:20
  hundreds of billions of galaxies.
• 1:34:24
  It's hard, which this is What a. Galaxy, it's a brain melter.
• 1:34:27
  It's. A brain.
• 1:34:28
  Melter weight in the matrix that noodle bakers and noodle boilers
• 1:34:32
  or whatever, this is going to boil your noodle, right?
• 1:34:34
  This is boil your noodle five times a day.
• 1:34:36
  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so, so and you know, we, we
• 1:34:42
  have a energy source that we think is going to last at least
• 1:34:46
  another billion years. We've only been around for
• 1:34:48
  300,000 years on a 4.54 billion year old planet and we don't
• 1:34:55
  know how to harness it really. I mean very little.
• 1:34:58
  It is cool. And you know, Texas, we had like
• 1:35:00
  this, this part's not cool. We had this like crazy near
• 1:35:03
  power grid failure because in Texas we do a lot of things very
• 1:35:07
  independently. And so we have our own power
• 1:35:09
  grid here and we don't share with other states.
• 1:35:12
  But the counter reaction to that, which gives you some hope
• 1:35:16
  is that our solar energy starts are leading in the country.
• 1:35:19
  Like it's like just off the charts.
• 1:35:21
  You know, actually Michael Dell's son, Zachary Dell is
• 1:35:24
  leading base power. It's like it's a company, it's
• 1:35:27
  worth over a billion dollars like totally reframing the whole
• 1:35:30
  solar energy conversation and in Texas and it's certainly going
• 1:35:34
  to expand in many other states. And so, you know, you have you
• 1:35:40
  have a near unlimited energy source.
• 1:35:41
  We have no idea how. Brains are real.
• 1:35:44
  Our brains haven't evolved. They're pretty simple.
• 1:35:46
  There's a possibility that everything you just said is
• 1:35:49
  exactly equal to where Capernus is was in his moment.
• 1:35:53
  That in this moment, totally. I mean, I had all of this stuff.
• 1:35:56
  No, I had AI had a throw another episode number at you.
• 1:35:59
  I'm not love it. I'm not trying to.
• 1:36:01
  No, it's a it's an amazing random skill, yeah.
• 1:36:03
  I do it. I do it so that listeners, you
• 1:36:05
  know, know. You know which I can't remember
• 1:36:08
  who was on my first. This is well, you've got.
• 1:36:10
  Over 1000 episodes, that's a little bit different, but you
• 1:36:13
  know this one this one is of this recording.
• 1:36:16
  This is the this is the 59th episode what you and I are
• 1:36:19
  recording right now. But Peter Wang was on for
• 1:36:23
  episode 43. Amazing guy, such a great
• 1:36:27
  episode. He's the founder of a Unicorn in
• 1:36:29
  town called Anaconda. And he's very rooted in quantum
• 1:36:35
  physics and, you know, study that a lot in university.
• 1:36:38
  He's a very, very smart guy. And I was saying, Peter, my
• 1:36:42
  guess is that out of all science that can be known, we know 2%.
• 1:36:47
  I was just like choosing some, you know, really number.
• 1:36:51
  He's like Brett. He's like, it's way less than
• 1:36:53
  1%. And, and it, it made me realize
• 1:36:58
  like, wow, like, OK, for even Mr. super science guy.
• 1:37:02
  And so, so there's so much. And actually that gives me great
• 1:37:06
  hope too, because when, you know, when we're manifesting
• 1:37:09
  this type of technology, like there's so much that we have to
• 1:37:14
  learn, you know, and that is the Star Trek future, right?
• 1:37:17
  I mean. Explore strange new worlds.
• 1:37:19
  Yeah, new life and new civilization.
• 1:37:21
  And so I think the stakes are so high.
• 1:37:25
  You know, I mean, one thing that would really freak a lot of
• 1:37:28
  people out, and I'll, I'll say this and you probably already
• 1:37:32
  know the answer to this, but but but just to talk about what the
• 1:37:36
  risks are. And I detail the risk a lot in
• 1:37:38
  the book. So the amygdala is very strongly
• 1:37:42
  developed. OK, so we have this fear center
• 1:37:46
  and we touched a bit on nuclear weapons, but today in the world
• 1:37:51
  there's around 13,000 nuclear warheads.
• 1:37:55
  What percentage do you think it would take to almost completely
• 1:37:58
  extinct humanity and send us into a nuclear winter for a
• 1:38:02
  decade? I'm going to go.
• 1:38:03
  Which means the skies are totally darkened and we're all
• 1:38:05
  suffering in a freeze. I'm just my assumption got would
• 1:38:08
  be like low single digits. Yeah, you're right.
• 1:38:11
  Yep, it's 2%. Yeah, I mean.
• 1:38:13
  Essentially 2/3. So right now we have real
• 1:38:16
  weapons. These aren't like toy guns.
• 1:38:18
  These are actual warheads. China is making a ton right now.
• 1:38:23
  We're making a ton right now. Europe because of you know,
• 1:38:28
  what's happening in Russia, Russia and Ukraine is like
• 1:38:30
  arming up and you know, Iran is obviously is of this recording.
• 1:38:35
  We're in war with Iran. We'll see if that's still going
• 1:38:38
  on by the time this goes live it.
• 1:38:40
  Could be over by the time the podcast is.
• 1:38:43
  That's true. That's true.
• 1:38:45
  You know, we have Iran like trying to pursue a nuclear
• 1:38:48
  weapon to reframe the whole Middle East power structure.
• 1:38:52
  And so, you know, that's that's today.
• 1:38:55
  I mean, and so, you know, let's just say that you and I came to
• 1:38:59
  Earth and we're studying earth, right?
• 1:39:03
  We what we would ask ourselves, you know, would be like, huh,
• 1:39:06
  what do these human beings call this?
• 1:39:08
  You know what it's called? Tell me.
• 1:39:10
  There's a term, it's a Department of Defense term.
• 1:39:14
  It's called mutually assured destruction.
• 1:39:16
  Yeah, that for sure the acronym. For that is.
• 1:39:18
  No. MAD so we would we would
• 1:39:23
  conclude there's some insanity would be like why are they so
• 1:39:26
  insane? Why would they build this?
• 1:39:28
  And so would they. Kill the animals and eat them.
• 1:39:30
  Yeah. I mean, there's, there's a
• 1:39:31
  million stores. There's a million.
• 1:39:32
  Things. Yeah, Yeah.
• 1:39:33
  So why would the young girls hate each other so much when
• 1:39:36
  they have everything available to them?
• 1:39:38
  Exactly. And boys, I should say.
• 1:39:40
  Yeah. And so it's a whole different
• 1:39:42
  side conversation, self harm. But you know, like as of this
• 1:39:46
  recording, like apparently there's all this UAP disclosure
• 1:39:49
  coming and etcetera. And I don't know what to make of
• 1:39:52
  all that. But the one thing I'll say is
• 1:39:54
  that if if Uaps are real, then that means that somehow they've
• 1:40:02
  conquered faster and lightspeed travel or interdimensional
• 1:40:05
  travel, which means that they had to get to a point where love
• 1:40:08
  conquered fear because. They would have, by definition,
• 1:40:12
  if they chose faster and lightspeed weapons or, or
• 1:40:14
  interdimensional weapons, which means they would have already
• 1:40:17
  destroyed themselves, right? And so like they would, they
• 1:40:21
  would conclude if they were here, they would be like, well,
• 1:40:24
  they actually could destroy themselves 50 times over.
• 1:40:27
  And so we have to kind of transcend that.
• 1:40:30
  I mean, that's like a real thing.
• 1:40:33
  Like that's a real risk, you know, and, and so it's, you
• 1:40:38
  know, it's, it's very, it's, it's a very strange thing to be
• 1:40:43
  a human because the, the arc of all of human history.
• 1:40:46
  Like if you and I went back to the beginning or like where we
• 1:40:49
  discovered fire, you know, we would have been like, Oh my
• 1:40:55
  gosh, this is amazing. We can warm our homes, you know,
• 1:40:57
  we can cook our food, You know, that's what led to bigger
• 1:41:01
  brains. But but we would have also been
• 1:41:03
  like, my gosh, people are setting people on fire.
• 1:41:06
  You know they're burning the bit to see.
• 1:41:07
  My house down or it's burning, right?
• 1:41:09
  But that's the story of technology.
• 1:41:10
  That is the story of technology agnostic.
• 1:41:12
  And so now we're at the penultimate moment of that.
• 1:41:16
  And the scale challenge with AI or the scale opportunity is very
• 1:41:21
  real. It's not like fire, it's like
• 1:41:23
  you can proliferate it. And I do think open source is
• 1:41:26
  going to win. And so it means what is humanity
• 1:41:30
  going to do with the most powerful technology?
• 1:41:33
  And that's why, the way I see it, there is no choice.
• 1:41:36
  We must have love, conquer fear, or we will destroy ourselves.
• 1:41:41
  And I'm 95% certain we make it to the other side.
• 1:41:44
  And I'm and I'm that. Yeah, me too.
• 1:41:46
  Because I study history and people are like, well, you study
• 1:41:49
  history, you know, and I talked about the Holocaust at the
• 1:41:52
  beginning of the segment. You know, there's a lot to,
• 1:41:58
  there's a lot of darkness that humanity has and has faced and
• 1:42:01
  has today. But I wouldn't want to live at
• 1:42:06
  any other time than right now. I wouldn't want to go back fifty
• 1:42:09
  100 years ago, you know? Just to set the table on that
• 1:42:13
  there is never our grandparents time like the way we treated
• 1:42:19
  each other, the way women were treated, no air conditioned.
• 1:42:23
  It's a basic. What are the chapters here?
• 1:42:25
  We've education of women, yeah. We forget people go like we want
• 1:42:29
  to go back like anything that again, not being political, but
• 1:42:33
  to make something great again. In most instances, you are at
• 1:42:36
  the front of the greatest moment.
• 1:42:39
  It's not evenly distributed. It's worse for a lot of people.
• 1:42:42
  Yes, yes and yes. But quality?
• 1:42:44
  Ability to live at all of these? The answer is in finding out a
• 1:42:49
  way to make it more even. I actually think that in order
• 1:42:52
  for your thesis to come true, it really does require on all sides
• 1:43:00
  an ability to ask for some level of distribution and to figure it
• 1:43:04
  out in in some. Effective way we're going to
• 1:43:07
  have to you. Know when people talk, whether
• 1:43:08
  it's about reparations or whether it's about this, I don't
• 1:43:12
  know what the the little mechanics are, but it's going to
• 1:43:14
  require those who have a lot to understand that they are not
• 1:43:19
  benefiting at that level. And for those who have none to
• 1:43:22
  recognize that in order to get somewhere, there has to be that
• 1:43:26
  motion. And you know, education is going
• 1:43:28
  to see this, you know, advanced degrees, doctors, lawyers,
• 1:43:31
  engineers will have to come down a little bit because we're going
• 1:43:33
  to need those trades people, the data centers and their
• 1:43:35
  positions, HVAC people, like there's going to have to be all
• 1:43:38
  of these equalizations of distribution that I actually
• 1:43:41
  think is the only way we'll get there.
• 1:43:43
  And I recognize why people talk about Ubi or universal super
• 1:43:47
  income. I'm not sure like what the
• 1:43:49
  mechanism I think, I think what the levers.
• 1:43:51
  We have we have no choice that that will it, that has to
• 1:43:55
  happen. And and I don't know how it'll
• 1:43:58
  happen. I mean, it's very interesting to
• 1:43:59
  see Sam Altman, you know, saying he wished that it was a
• 1:44:03
  government utility, but supposedly we're past that
• 1:44:06
  moment. But.
• 1:44:07
  You know, that's my concern. Again, it goes back to my
• 1:44:09
  concerns of data. Like I understand I was debating
• 1:44:12
  or I wasn't debating. I was in a conversation about
• 1:44:14
  this with another very intellectual individual and I
• 1:44:16
  didn't know this, but apparently here in the States, a lot of the
• 1:44:19
  fiber optic cables are laid along the railways.
• 1:44:22
  That's right. I know that.
• 1:44:23
  And I thought, well, that's like it really interesting, right
• 1:44:25
  Thing with the railway barons. Then think about how it became
• 1:44:28
  institutionalized and then thinking like, oh, that's
• 1:44:30
  interesting that it's it came with a commoditized again, that
• 1:44:33
  space to super interesting how like again, history repeats
• 1:44:37
  itself and how did it work and who has control or who has the
• 1:44:40
  power And there's a lot we have to get over.
• 1:44:44
  There's a lot we have to get over.
• 1:44:45
  Yeah, The hardest part of writing this book was talking
• 1:44:49
  about how does humanity transform.
• 1:44:52
  But the case studies were really fun to talk about.
• 1:44:57
  I call it the new models of humanity.
• 1:44:59
  Like one of the case studies is Bhutan.
• 1:45:01
  You know Bhutan. The average Bhutanese citizen is
• 1:45:07
  way happier than the average American citizen.
• 1:45:10
  Which is confounding because the country's entire GDP is 3 weeks
• 1:45:17
  of coffee in the US for the entire GDP.
• 1:45:20
  OK. Again, much like Chad, not a
• 1:45:22
  place we. But wait, better off than Chad,
• 1:45:26
  like you know, they have. They have, they have much more
• 1:45:28
  clean water, much more clean electricity, etcetera.
• 1:45:32
  And they figured out a way. It's a deeply Buddhist country.
• 1:45:36
  It's all focused on interest exposed.
• 1:45:38
  To a Ted and never really went down the rabbit hole you.
• 1:45:41
  Know, you know, the interesting thing when you and I were at
• 1:45:43
  that Ted and the Prime Minister was speaking, that was in 2014.
• 1:45:47
  That was a lot long ago. Guess who the Prime Minister is
• 1:45:49
  today? That same guy, yeah, I was
• 1:45:52
  surprised when I was, when I was, we visited there, as you
• 1:45:56
  know, me and me and Deborah and the kids, We went there in
• 1:46:00
  December of last year to close out the year.
• 1:46:04
  And there was a we went on family trip and there was a
• 1:46:08
  there's another family with us. And this American woman was
• 1:46:13
  crying at the end as we're checking out with this, with
• 1:46:18
  this monk. And she was like, I just want so
• 1:46:21
  much to bring back the the heart and the soul that you guys have
• 1:46:26
  here to America. And we all felt it right.
• 1:46:31
  And here we are in a country where nobody's talking about
• 1:46:34
  like what kind of car you drive, you know, the king and queen
• 1:46:38
  status of the country. Like they, the, the people were
• 1:46:42
  saying you should have a nicer home.
• 1:46:44
  They're like, we don't need it. Like they, they roll up their
• 1:46:47
  sleeves and go work with the people and it's in it's a
• 1:46:52
  fascinating, you know, model in the book because they're like
• 1:46:55
  building this whole new age city that's embracing like AI that
• 1:46:59
  making it very humanitarian. Another another model in the
• 1:47:02
  book, believe it or not, is the fact that last year in January,
• 1:47:08
  the Vatican came out with the most responsible AI report I've
• 1:47:11
  seen today. Oh, the Vatican.
• 1:47:14
  It's like so humanitarian focused meeting the AI moment.
• 1:47:20
  I'll put a link in the show notes.
• 1:47:21
  But but it's you know, I think I think that there's a there's an
• 1:47:26
  awakening happening all over the all over the place.
• 1:47:28
  That is consciousness awakening. And the conversation is healthy.
• 1:47:31
  Yeah. And so that feels different to
• 1:47:34
  me than than other prior technical waves.
• 1:47:37
  It really does feel different. I'll bounce another thought
• 1:47:40
  that's tangential to this, which is I think about all of the
• 1:47:44
  books, because I know you and I both love to read that have
• 1:47:48
  foundationally changed how I think and was I, what I find
• 1:47:53
  super interesting is that since COVID, I think we would agree
• 1:47:57
  we've upended employment and work and dynamics from return to
• 1:48:01
  office and work from home and remote work and technology and
• 1:48:04
  the tools to be able to even record something like this.
• 1:48:07
  We've seen so many very smart people have platforms of which
• 1:48:12
  they can express new ways to think and work.
• 1:48:16
  We've had this transformation of disruption of technology, which
• 1:48:20
  you'd normally not say those two words together.
• 1:48:22
  It's either a disruption or transformation.
• 1:48:23
  This is like altogether happening and yet there hasn't
• 1:48:27
  been. Maybe with the exception of your
• 1:48:29
  book, we can we can see if that is the answer.
• 1:48:32
  It's fascinating to me that there hasn't been a book of the
• 1:48:34
  times or, or book that's introduced a new theory that's
• 1:48:37
  proven real. So people come up with a lot of
• 1:48:39
  books about empathy or whatever and all important topics.
• 1:48:42
  It hasn't really taken hold in terms of the business world.
• 1:48:45
  I find that fascinating that there hasn't been, you know, if
• 1:48:48
  you think about the books that transform us from a clue train
• 1:48:50
  manifesto to a cyclone purple couch with Jim Collins, I could
• 1:48:54
  go through. I mean, it was like book the
• 1:48:57
  behavioral economics kind of like hit a stride.
• 1:49:01
  It's amazing that all of this stuff since COVID, we haven't
• 1:49:04
  had, I mean, games, clear Atomic Habits product, but I mean like
• 1:49:08
  a transformational management. Fascinating, right?
• 1:49:12
  Like there is not a book. Yeah, I mean, you know, I think
• 1:49:15
  that there's a lot of dogmatic separation which has prevented
• 1:49:18
  that book. And and one of the things that's
• 1:49:20
  that's unusual about this podcast and this book is that
• 1:49:26
  I've got into a place myself and my own spiritual development
• 1:49:29
  where I've allowed love to conquer my own fear to the point
• 1:49:32
  where I'm very transparent. And the reason I'm so
• 1:49:37
  transparent is because a, that's actually my truth.
• 1:49:41
  And BI really, truly feel like there's no time to waste like we
• 1:49:45
  are on that, I feel, yeah, so we are on the we're on a great
• 1:49:51
  precipice and we have free will and we have to choose to
• 1:49:57
  manifest together as team humanity, the age abundance for
• 1:50:01
  all. But I I truly view it as like
• 1:50:03
  we're 99.9% genetically identical.
• 1:50:06
  Space and time. We we have we have this one
• 1:50:09
  Earth. We know that at least anywhere
• 1:50:13
  where we could reach it sustains life.
• 1:50:15
  Like in terms of today's technologies.
• 1:50:17
  I mean, it's great that, you know, SpaceX has these big, you
• 1:50:20
  know, Falcon Heavies and all this stuff.
• 1:50:22
  But but it's like, you know, if we're really landlocked, we're
• 1:50:26
  really landlocked. Like, there's a lot.
• 1:50:28
  Of science now around the fact that we can't even do half the
• 1:50:31
  stuff we're hearing people talk about it just scientifically.
• 1:50:34
  You put anybody in a pod and jettison them towards Mars like
• 1:50:38
  they're coming back. If they come back and it's not
• 1:50:40
  as. You're not radiating yourself
• 1:50:41
  pretty fast. Exactly, I was walking downtown
• 1:50:45
  in Montreal with my brother who is about 3 years older than me.
• 1:50:48
  He's now criminologist and academic, but was that long
• 1:50:51
  haired guitar rocker guy for a long time too.
• 1:50:53
  He was very intelligent, super interesting guy.
• 1:50:56
  And I don't know if it was a homeless person or somebody
• 1:51:00
  else, and I don't know what triggered it, but he said to be
• 1:51:04
  at one point, you know, the only difference between that person
• 1:51:07
  and us is space and time. And the only difference between
• 1:51:10
  you and I is space and time. We happen to be born at what
• 1:51:13
  place it was. You know, it just let's why I
• 1:51:16
  kind of blurted out space and time with like when you said
• 1:51:18
  that because it's really important.
• 1:51:20
  Oh, it's great. And this is what what what like
• 1:51:22
  if you talk about the love and like what I try to do, it's it's
• 1:51:26
  that reflection. And I do feel that sometimes I
• 1:51:29
  get trapped and caught up in it, whether it's status or where I
• 1:51:32
  think I should be compared to very normal.
• 1:51:34
  It's a human experience, right? The human condition.
• 1:51:37
  Yeah. But space and time.
• 1:51:40
  Well, you know, one thing I want to ask you about because I'm
• 1:51:44
  just cognizant of time. I know that we're about to wrap
• 1:51:47
  up here is how do you stay rooted?
• 1:51:51
  Because because I know that you have a meditation practice.
• 1:51:53
  I'm just curious like how do you because because there's you
• 1:51:56
  know, there's a lot going on in a head where there's like 2
• 1:52:00
  things to get be true at the same.
• 1:52:01
  Time. You know, Brett, I've never
• 1:52:02
  spoken about this and I'm going to share it because I think
• 1:52:04
  you'll appreciate the complexity, simplicity of it.
• 1:52:07
  Yeah, I was very early into meditation when it was super woo
• 1:52:11
  woo. I was going to those strange
• 1:52:13
  shops with the incense and buying these books and thinking
• 1:52:15
  this is really not me, but into it, into it.
• 1:52:19
  And really liked I got admitted time.
• 1:52:21
  It wasn't an Internet like the C DS of these guided meditations.
• 1:52:24
  And never, it never really clicked.
• 1:52:25
  But I was always like the idea of mind, body, spirit was always
• 1:52:30
  very important to me that whether I was anxious or
• 1:52:32
  worried, really trying to connect to all three, not just
• 1:52:35
  one. It's kind of like a three legged
• 1:52:37
  stool. Don't want to.
• 1:52:39
  And I was in early days of headspace and calm and or
• 1:52:43
  whatever was called. And I would, I remember even at
• 1:52:45
  the agency, I would sit in the parking lot to go to work so
• 1:52:47
  early because I had young kids. I would do it in the car in the
• 1:52:51
  parking lot before going in. And so like really interesting,
• 1:52:54
  but lost my way came back. Where am I now?
• 1:52:58
  It's it's so it's such a weird thing to talk about, but I'm
• 1:53:00
  happy to share one is YouTube Premium.
• 1:53:03
  So this doesn't work if you don't have YouTube Premium.
• 1:53:05
  Does not work you. Got to have no ads.
• 1:53:07
  This is I'm very tech heavy in it, but it works. 2 is I bought
• 1:53:11
  these eye blockers on Amazon that also have flat Bluetooth
• 1:53:14
  speakers here. So it's like an eye blocker like
• 1:53:17
  you travel with, but it's got Bluetooth speakers when you lie
• 1:53:19
  flat, it's not bothering you. And I've essentially found a
• 1:53:23
  bunch of these nighttime meditation, some of it is just
• 1:53:27
  audio or a beat. Some of it is actually guided
• 1:53:31
  and it's like a sleep hypnosis meditation.
• 1:53:35
  And I have to, that's how you go.
• 1:53:37
  Actually, it's a lot of it's a lot of work in a weird way
• 1:53:40
  because I can just do it on my iPhone from a hotel because I'm
• 1:53:42
  not bothering my spouse or anything like that.
• 1:53:44
  But I have to tell you that like it's been really transformative.
• 1:53:48
  Out of all the tools I've ever used, 1 is I am someone who is
• 1:53:52
  inside my brain a lot and I can overthink things and get anxious
• 1:53:55
  about the world. And that happens mostly as it
• 1:53:58
  does to all of us in the dark, alone at the darkest of nights
• 1:54:00
  and moments. So that's one thing too is I've
• 1:54:03
  never been a great sleeper and I've always kind of like you
• 1:54:07
  time is now and I'm like a little bit of that I'll sleep
• 1:54:10
  when I'm dead category type of person.
• 1:54:13
  And I found this to be the best and and most just live it like
• 1:54:19
  conquers a whole bunch of things from sleep issues to medic like
• 1:54:22
  it's all rolled out. I find it very efficient.
• 1:54:25
  Wow. OK, so we love it.
• 1:54:26
  We need to put a collection of these in the show.
• 1:54:28
  This really quickly, which is so like I'm definitely in the more
• 1:54:31
  like sleep hypnosis, meditation. It's like a whole thing and
• 1:54:34
  there's music, different videos, different creative sources, but
• 1:54:39
  they also do ones where it's like sleepy science and it's
• 1:54:42
  everything you need to know about physics spoken in a very
• 1:54:45
  calm way so you can fall asleep listening to questions of
• 1:54:49
  philosophy, stoicism. They even have like Batman
• 1:54:53
  stories and Star Trek stories that they tell in this very
• 1:54:56
  hypnotic, low way to help you ease off to sleep.
• 1:55:00
  So yeah, interesting. And by the way, these guys are
• 1:55:02
  probably making a killing because you're watching or
• 1:55:05
  listening to a YouTube video for 8 hours.
• 1:55:07
  So they've got a billion streams and God knows the money into it.
• 1:55:09
  There might be a. Business opportunity there have
• 1:55:11
  to be real careful with what's going to be pushed to you
• 1:55:14
  though. Oh yeah, because God knows
• 1:55:15
  what's going. There's also like Blade Runner,
• 1:55:17
  like audio soundscapes, Gotham soundscapes, Star Trek, like
• 1:55:22
  super interesting. How is the hell has this changed
• 1:55:25
  you? You know, just the same way it
• 1:55:26
  always has, which is if I recognize the world of screens
• 1:55:32
  and captured attention that I'm in, I need moments where I can
• 1:55:38
  really be within my own self in a positive way.
• 1:55:42
  And I feel like it is a way to add on to the reflective and
• 1:55:46
  meditative work I do when I write.
• 1:55:47
  So when you commented on my writing, you know, it is
• 1:55:50
  something I grapple with. I wonder because I don't have
• 1:55:52
  that big of an audience, if it's like, doesn't that resonate with
• 1:55:56
  people? But what I always come back to
• 1:55:57
  is it's a meditative practice from it's exhaust valve.
• 1:56:01
  So when you say what does it provide?
• 1:56:02
  It's another excellent exhaust valve.
• 1:56:04
  I like looking for exhaust valves, ways in which I can be
• 1:56:09
  in and out and feel like there's been like a benefit almost
• 1:56:14
  because I think I do have it wired to me that sleep is a bit
• 1:56:17
  of a waste. Like I won't loop it and stuff
• 1:56:19
  because I know the numbers would be disastrous.
• 1:56:22
  But I do know that when I'm I'm using those tools that it really
• 1:56:26
  it's, it's like a, it's like a stacking, right component to, to
• 1:56:29
  the fact that I, I do have to sleep and rest.
• 1:56:32
  You know, one of the things I love about writing is that
• 1:56:35
  you're both the driver and the passenger.
• 1:56:37
  It's such a weird thing. Isn't that so cool?
• 1:56:39
  Well, even like I never read a lot of fiction and I only
• 1:56:42
  recently started getting into it and you just realize like, oh,
• 1:56:45
  it's actually all nonfiction. Like you are reading someone's
• 1:56:49
  thoughts. It's so weird.
• 1:56:51
  It's such a weird format. And again, for me, like super,
• 1:56:55
  it's an attractive form. Like, I just love, you know, I
• 1:56:59
  mean, I, I, I, I fret not retirement because if you said
• 1:57:03
  to me, we're going to just plant you in the Public Library with
• 1:57:05
  your iPad or the books, I'd be like, as long as the coffee is
• 1:57:08
  hot, we're good. And I'm really happy in that
• 1:57:11
  zone. Any any books you would
• 1:57:13
  recommend because you were talking earlier about books that
• 1:57:17
  have really moved you? I'll throw a couple of things
• 1:57:20
  out there. One is I don't ever read the
• 1:57:24
  same book over and over again. Except I will come back to The
• 1:57:27
  War of Art by Steven Pressfield. Oh my God, that was just like.
• 1:57:30
  Freaking love that book. You know what?
• 1:57:32
  I haven't covered that book on this podcast.
• 1:57:34
  I love that. I've had him on the show.
• 1:57:35
  I mean, I'm a fan boy. In fact, it's fine.
• 1:57:38
  I showed him I have like the original silver hardcover first
• 1:57:42
  print. It was given to me by, you know,
• 1:57:45
  at the time somebody I was doing a lot of martial arts training,
• 1:57:47
  this guy Tony Blower, and he's all into reading.
• 1:57:49
  So he really inspired a lot of that's of the war of art to me
• 1:57:52
  you. Know that's a spiritual read
• 1:57:53
  too, like he talking about the muses etcetera.
• 1:57:56
  And you can go down a rabbit hole there where it's like Bird
• 1:57:58
  by Bird by Anne Lamott. There's a whole bunch of books
• 1:58:00
  that are relational to writing, but they're actually just life.
• 1:58:04
  I love that book. Books like Fantastic Little
• 1:58:08
  Thing I love the work of Pico Iyer, who we talked about who I
• 1:58:13
  met. You know, I had to do his work
• 1:58:15
  and I've had on the show multiple times.
• 1:58:18
  He opens up worlds to me that are are uncomfortable that I
• 1:58:22
  would never. It originally was a travel
• 1:58:24
  writer, but really walks in the space of of mindfulness.
• 1:58:29
  I would think what's what's your favorite book by him?
• 1:58:31
  His last one about his home burning down in the in the, in
• 1:58:35
  the LA fires and in the California fires, I thought was
• 1:58:40
  unbelievable the way he structured it and the way it was
• 1:58:43
  written. And you could open up it just
• 1:58:45
  it's one of those books. It's it's a very strange just a
• 1:58:50
  link to that. And then if you moved into like
• 1:58:52
  just how we think, I'll tell you what came to my mind
• 1:58:55
  immediately. It's probably not my favorite,
• 1:58:57
  but James Suzman wrote a book called Work about, like why we
• 1:59:00
  work in the history of work. It's almost like a Homo sapiens,
• 1:59:03
  but for work. And I think about that book all
• 1:59:05
  the time. I had him on the show.
• 1:59:06
  He was great. So what's interesting is they're
• 1:59:08
  not like really crazily popular books that everyone's on the
• 1:59:12
  bandwagon for. They're just things that I kind
• 1:59:15
  of picked up or someone pitched me to to speak with someone.
• 1:59:17
  I just kind of like, oh, I see the world different.
• 1:59:20
  I like books that help me see the world differently.
• 1:59:22
  Likewise. Yeah.
• 1:59:23
  Trust by Hernan Diaz, which is a work of fiction I thought was
• 1:59:26
  incredible. Yeah, well, you know.
• 1:59:28
  You throw throw two or three my way.
• 1:59:29
  I reread The Seat of the Soul by Gary Zukov.
• 1:59:32
  I had a thought. Amazing.
• 1:59:33
  I made a mental note that I have to go back to.
• 1:59:35
  That you know the gentleman that wrote the forward to my book, JD
• 1:59:38
  Messenger 11 Days in May Very, very good.
• 1:59:42
  Book, I know it. I love Mark Gober's books, I was
• 1:59:45
  just with him at Ted. An into upside down thinking and
• 1:59:49
  an into upside down living. I've read both of those twice.
• 1:59:52
  OK, I. Don't know any of the books.
• 1:59:54
  I'm so excited. It's great.
• 1:59:55
  I love a book called LSD and the Mind of the Universe by Chris
• 2:00:00
  Baish. OK, this is great.
• 2:00:01
  It's the subtitles Diamonds from Heaven.
• 2:00:05
  I actually had him on the podcast.
• 2:00:06
  Like talk, talk about total fanboy.
• 2:00:08
  Like, yeah. I love fanboy moments on the
• 2:00:10
  podcast. He came on, I think that was
• 2:00:13
  episode 36. He, he stayed here at our home
• 2:00:17
  like he's, he's great. I love Evan Alexander's books.
• 2:00:21
  I've read Proof of Heaven and the Math of Heaven twice.
• 2:00:24
  Those are very, very good books. He was on the podcast too.
• 2:00:29
  It was episode 46, Part 1 and Part 2.
• 2:00:31
  We actually, he stayed at our home.
• 2:00:33
  We did it in here and then we also did it on stage at the
• 2:00:38
  Jewish Austin Men's Gathering. It's called the JA Men 4I love
• 2:00:42
  that. Named in honor of Bert Koenig.
• 2:00:43
  Super fun to flow with him. We actually meditated in here
• 2:00:46
  too. I've read so many books on
• 2:00:49
  consciousness. What is, you know, what is this
• 2:00:52
  reality we're in? A lot of that stuff from the way
• 2:00:54
  mine's Psyche and stuff, I save a lot of those articles.
• 2:00:56
  I like that stuff. Yeah, I love that stuff.
• 2:00:59
  I mean, I very much believe consciousness is fundamental and
• 2:01:02
  we're derivative of that, which takes you into spirituality.
• 2:01:05
  I, I've read a lot of books on quantum physics, which is really
• 2:01:09
  wild cuz like Max Planck, you know, became much more spiritual
• 2:01:12
  as a result of the discoveries of quantum physics.
• 2:01:15
  You know, Albert Einstein, when he discovered quantum
• 2:01:19
  entanglement, it really shattered his worldview, his
• 2:01:22
  model. Yeah.
• 2:01:23
  I like to listen to those guys on podcast.
• 2:01:25
  Not Albert Einstein, He has a new podcast but.
• 2:01:27
  Like it would be cool. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I do like.
• 2:01:30
  Following a lot, yeah. Yeah, well, as soon as they are.
• 2:01:32
  Right. Exactly.
• 2:01:34
  Yes, Yeah. Yeah, so I mean, you know, I've
• 2:01:36
  read, I've read, I've read a lot and I cover, I distill a lot of
• 2:01:40
  it. I mean, you know, one of the
• 2:01:42
  longest chapters in the book is chapter 12 on what is our
• 2:01:45
  reality, where I distill all of that learning I've done into
• 2:01:51
  what I I believe our reality is. And so, yeah, So I mean.
• 2:01:56
  So here's what we're going to do.
• 2:01:57
  It's. Been a real journey we're.
• 2:01:58
  Going to agree that after dinner you're going to at least send me
• 2:02:01
  the digital copy. So tomorrow when I head home
• 2:02:03
  from Austin. Yeah, I'm going to start reading
• 2:02:05
  your book tomorrow. How's that?
• 2:02:06
  Good, good. I still do that.
• 2:02:07
  Yeah. And and you know, when, when I'm
• 2:02:09
  on your podcast, we could cover, we could cover all types of.
• 2:02:13
  These books as well Part 2. On my podcast.
• 2:02:16
  That sounds good. I love that.
• 2:02:18
  All right, brother, thank you love you really appreciate you.
• 2:02:22
  It's men. What an honor to know you all
• 2:02:25
  these years and and it really it's filled my heart with love
• 2:02:29
  and gratitude to tell you like the real impact you've had on
• 2:02:32
  me. I just want you to know that I
• 2:02:34
  mean really like like there's very few, you know, I've been
• 2:02:36
  speaking for a long time at different e-commerce conferences
• 2:02:40
  etcetera, you know, core metrics and we've been.
• 2:02:43
  I'm doing an RF event this year too, by the way.
• 2:02:46
  And so, so like, you know, I could probably remember the
• 2:02:51
  speeches that I've seen on two hands in terms of those types of
• 2:02:56
  conferences, which is where, which is where I've seen you the
• 2:03:00
  most, you know, and you're, you're, you're in there, man.
• 2:03:04
  I mean, like the speeches you've given.
• 2:03:06
  I remember the speeches you've given, which is really saying
• 2:03:09
  something because I've seen a lot of speeches.
• 2:03:11
  The value to me is that like we actually became friends.
• 2:03:14
  Just so special to me too, is, you know, when you asked me to
• 2:03:18
  be an advisor for data dot world, like I felt like I had
• 2:03:21
  arrived in some strange way. I thought like, that's
• 2:03:23
  unbelievable and in a more simplistic way, when you text or
• 2:03:27
  I see your name somewhere, it's a huge smile on my face.
• 2:03:29
  Thank you. It's a mutual of it.
• 2:03:31
  Right back at you. Awesome, thanks so much.
• 2:03:33
  I'm looking forward to dinner after this, in part.
• 2:03:35
  Two it I'm thinking with Mitchell, yeah.
• 2:03:37
  Yeah, well, thanks again everybody for tuning in to Love
• 2:03:40
  Conquers Fear. I'm sure you love Mitch, Mitch's
• 2:03:43
  heart as much as I do. Stay tuned.
• 2:03:47
  Lot of really fantastic guest coming on.
• 2:03:51
  You know, my day started today with getting this unbelievably
• 2:03:55
  beautiful message from a woman who watches the podcast.
• 2:04:01
  And she says that for her and her husband, it's their favorite
• 2:04:04
  thing to do in the car on long drives.
• 2:04:08
  They do a lot of long drives to listen to it.
• 2:04:11
  And that just really moves my heart, She said.
• 2:04:14
  It's really leading to them have a heart shift.
• 2:04:17
  And that's what we do need to do collectively.
• 2:04:19
  We need a global humanity heart shift.
• 2:04:23
  The heart has to conquer the head and team humanity is the
• 2:04:28
  way that we do it. Realizing the divinity within us
• 2:04:32
  all, realizing the beauty within all of humanity, really
• 2:04:36
  embracing the possibility of creating abundance for everyone
• 2:04:40
  on the planet. It's going to be a very exciting
• 2:04:43
  next 10 to 15 years, and I'm very glad you're on the journey
• 2:04:47
  with me. Keep on telling your friends
• 2:04:48
  about it. I appreciate it.
• 2:04:51
  Again, no ads or anything else. I guess I did an ad today for my
• 2:04:55
  book, but but I am I am trying to really help humanity have a
• 2:05:00
  heart shift with this book coming out and hopefully you'll
• 2:05:04
  support in that. Thanks again.