Latest / Love Conquers Fear / #11: Can AI Become Conscious? Aneil Mallavarapu on Science meets Spirit

Transcript

#11: Can AI Become Conscious? Aneil Mallavarapu on Science meets Spirit · Love Conquers Fear

• 0:00
  What do you make of materialists speaking about the these kinds
• 0:04
  of assertions from people and saying things like just your
• 0:07
  brain chemicals firing and your neurons firing in some weird way
• 0:11
  and it's just like a hallucination?
• 0:13
  If we do not have a shared definitive understanding of what
• 0:18
  consciousness is, how could we possibly say that a machine is
• 0:22
  conscious? I think it was in March of this
• 0:24
  year. I did quote from the Gita just
• 0:26
  made the argument of you know we have this manic race to create
• 0:30
  AGI. Part of that race is to create
• 0:34
  sentience. I think understanding
• 0:36
  consciousness and understanding what we are and understanding
• 0:39
  the causes in the world are not just mechanistic.
• 0:43
  It really is God's final exam for humanity.
• 0:45
  Now, whether you want to look at that as nature or consciousness
• 0:48
  or whatever you want to call that, I believe that it's God
• 0:51
  working through us. I've had that just I know this
• 0:54
  is it. I know this is right.
• 0:56
  I know this is where technology is going to go.
• 0:58
  And you know, time we know is an illusion.
• 1:00
  Kind of touched on time earlier, but someone is just wants to
• 1:03
  take a science based approach to time.
• 1:05
  They should read the order of time.
• 1:07
  And I remembered in my mind's eye walking around Blake Austin,
• 1:12
  we started at the library some very profound experiences.
• 1:15
  As you know, said that the message that he received is that
• 1:18
  the frequency and intensity will increase.
• 1:24
  Hey everyone, welcome back to the Love Conquers Fear podcast.
• 1:29
  I am back from Lake Tahoe where I was with my friend Morgan
• 1:33
  Linton. That was an awesome episode.
• 1:35
  I really enjoyed doing that with him and he levelled me up in AI
• 1:41
  powered programming, which was really cool because I've been
• 1:44
  programming since I was age 7 and I got very into Claude code
• 1:50
  with him. Cursor Warp, which is an AI
• 1:53
  power terminal, of course, GitHub and created quite a bit
• 1:58
  of code as a result. And now I'm kind of unleashed in
• 2:03
  terms of my coding ability all over again.
• 2:07
  It's like a revisit to my childhood and what eventually
• 2:10
  got me to become an entrepreneur in the 1st place.
• 2:14
  And I have to tell you that my guess, and Morgan and I were
• 2:18
  talking about this after that podcast ended, is less than 5%
• 2:23
  of the engineers in the United States are using these tools the
• 2:28
  way that they should be. And I've seen first hand how
• 2:32
  there's some resistance and I will forever be changed as a
• 2:38
  result of using these tools for the first time and now using
• 2:41
  them regularly. Because when I start my next
• 2:45
  companies in the future, whenever I'm investing in a
• 2:48
  company, I'm going to make sure that I really assess the CTO,
• 2:54
  the VP of engineering, to see if they're already using these and
• 2:57
  how they're using them regularly to really make themselves much
• 3:03
  more productive. When you see an AI agent like
• 3:07
  Claude Code actually go and do the debugging for you and you're
• 3:11
  guiding, it really reminds me of Fantasia.
• 3:14
  You know, where Mickey Mouse is is kind of, you know, animating
• 3:19
  everything. And that's what it feels like
• 3:22
  you're you're essentially like you're in Fantasia and you're
• 3:25
  directing these AI agents. You're basically a
• 3:28
  choreographer. And now I understand what the
• 3:32
  CTO of Beta dot World talks about in terms of how all in we
• 3:38
  went with called code at Dated Out World when that came out, I
• 3:43
  think it came out in like April. And that was really the game
• 3:47
  changer at Dated Out World for us with coding because Dated Out
• 3:50
  World's code was really, really complicated.
• 3:53
  This was not like a simple vibe coding type of thing.
• 3:57
  You know, vibe coding is like when someone uses something like
• 4:00
  cursor to create A to do list app and they've never programmed
• 4:04
  before. And it's cool that they can do
• 4:06
  that to be clear. But all of a sudden they
• 4:08
  conclude like, wow, I'm a great programmer.
• 4:11
  And then once they start to build something more complex,
• 4:14
  they realize they need that systems level architectural
• 4:17
  thinking that only comes from having really worked with code a
• 4:22
  lot. And as a result, they end up
• 4:25
  having some pretty big walls that they run into and then
• 4:31
  they're like, gosh, AI is not ready yet for someone with my
• 4:34
  skill set. And so they conclude that it's
• 4:38
  the a is fault. But the reality is that systems
• 4:42
  level thinking is always going to be important.
• 4:44
  A lot of people ask me now like, hey, you know, my son, daughter
• 4:48
  are going into computer science. Is that still a good idea?
• 4:53
  And my answer is, your children should do exactly what they're
• 4:57
  meant to do. If they're passionate about it,
• 4:59
  let them do it and run with it and things will work out great.
• 5:03
  You know, Will they be programming the same way they
• 5:05
  learned in CS? The answer is no.
• 5:08
  Will they require systems level thinking?
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  That's always going to be useful in the world.
• 5:13
  But things certainly are going to get easier and easier on the
• 5:16
  path to the age of abundance for all.
• 5:19
  So anyways, if you haven't, if you haven't played around with
• 5:22
  those tools, I highly suggest you do.
• 5:24
  You'll be kind of blown away. Also, if you haven't used
• 5:28
  Perplexities web browser, comment and use the AI
• 5:32
  assistant. You know, you can go to
• 5:34
  forexamplekayak.com or let's say you're booking on American
• 5:38
  Airlines a.com or you're shopping on Amazon or you're in
• 5:41
  Gmail. Just go to those in the web
• 5:44
  browser with comment, click on the AI assistant button and on
• 5:50
  the right hand side you can just talk to it like you would talk
• 5:53
  to ChatGPT and direct it to do anything, which is really
• 5:58
  fascinating. It literally takes over the
• 6:00
  browser screen. If you haven't seen agent mode
• 6:02
  and check GPT, it does something like this except it creates a
• 6:06
  virtual machine. It's a little bit different, but
• 6:08
  in this case, perplexity comment web browser literally takes over
• 6:13
  your screen and then starts to do what you want it to do.
• 6:17
  And I just bought a couple of new tennis shoes from Zappos.
• 6:20
  I don't shop that often, but I, my tennis shoes were like 2
• 6:24
  years old and, and I could just go to zappos.com, tell it
• 6:28
  exactly what I was shopping for, what type of colors, what my
• 6:31
  sizes were, and it just brings them up for me.
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  It does all the work for me. So to actually see that, you
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  know, you're seeing a window into the future and, and you
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  know, it's just a matter of time before the browser itself
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  becomes an extinct concept. And we just direct agents that
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  we all have that Mickey Mouse, Fantasia capability to direct
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  agents to do things that we need done cognitively, like shop
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  online. And then eventually this gets
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  embodied inside robots. And then we can direct those
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  again, like Mickey Mouse and Fantasia to do infinite amounts
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  of physical labor. Like I could direct robots in
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  the future to just say, hey, on that hill, I want to build this
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  tree house. And they would just go March off
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  and do it with mechanical precision.
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  Like that's the future that we're heading towards.
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  And that's going to be very exciting.
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  It's going to create a creativity explosion.
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  And I'm not saying it's all going to be roses on the path to
• 7:29
  get there. I'm exploring in my book that
• 7:32
  I'm writing called Love, Conquer Sphere, Humanity, AI and the Age
• 7:37
  of Abundance for All, really how it's not going to be our roses.
• 7:42
  It is going to be a lot of disruption.
• 7:44
  There's going to be a lot of job dislocation, but I really
• 7:47
  forecast a future of billions of personalized products and
• 7:52
  services that we really can't imagine today.
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  It's like trying to forecast at the beginning of the Internet
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  all the new jobs that are going to be created as a result.
• 8:01
  This one's a little bit different in the sense that AI
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  and robotics are going to touch virtually everything, every
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  business, every organization, but that's super, super
• 8:12
  exciting. I also did come out with my
• 8:17
  science fiction novella called The Lattice.
• 8:20
  These started out as 3 short stories I wrote on Medium and my
• 8:25
  blog Lucky 7 dot IO, as well as LinkedIn and Sub Stack.
• 8:30
  I mean, I put it everywhere and I put a wrapper around it with
• 8:36
  with this book and it's a lot of fun.
• 8:39
  I mean, I'm having fun with it. It's it's very ambitious book
• 8:43
  because I'm talking about the years in science fiction from
• 8:48
  the year around 2031 to through 2085.
• 8:53
  And I've had a lot of fun with it.
• 8:55
  I've got a lot of great feedback on it with friends.
• 8:58
  And so I just decided I'm going to put a wrapper around this.
• 9:01
  I'm going to put a conclusion on it.
• 9:03
  I'm going to talk about the ancient spiritual texts that
• 9:06
  show proof, if you will, of the lattice and and really come out
• 9:11
  with the science fiction novella.
• 9:13
  So I did that and you can check that out on Amazon if you feel
• 9:17
  so moved. So today I'm very excited to
• 9:22
  have my friend Aneel on. He is a great entrepreneur, A
• 9:28
  venture capitalist, and he is a scientist.
• 9:32
  And we're going to dive into a paper that he wrote and
• 9:36
  presented a recent, recent consciousness conference, which
• 9:41
  is all about can AI become conscious or not?
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  I think it's a fascinating topic.
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  We actually hosted a dinner here at our home with Mark Gober.
• 9:52
  You saw him on episode 2 of this podcast.
• 9:55
  He's one of my favorite authors. He's written 7.
• 9:58
  Terrific. Books.
• 9:59
  And at that dinner, we were debating on whether or not AI
• 10:04
  could become conscious. And I mentioned in the Mark
• 10:07
  Gober episode, and I want Aniel to hear this, that that part of
• 10:12
  what hurt my heart at that dinner is there was one of the
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  attendees. I want mention their name.
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  It wasn't Aniel, though, I'll say that, who said, well, I've
• 10:23
  seen the job that humanity's done.
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  And I thought, Oh my gosh, like you've given up on humanity.
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  Like we have to love humanity. You know, we yes, we have lots
• 10:33
  of problems. You know, I'm Jewish, you know,
• 10:35
  there was the Holocaust. I mean, there's, there's all
• 10:37
  types of things that humanity has done that had been really
• 10:41
  bad. But there are constantly acts of
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  beautiful love and connection happening in the world of 8.2
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  billion people. And I get how you could get down
• 10:53
  on humanity if you're just constantly programmed by the
• 10:56
  media and social media and seeing all the bad things that
• 10:58
  happened because an 8.2 billion people world, there's going to
• 11:02
  be a murder or something horrible happening every day.
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  And that's why you have to deprogram and tune into things
• 11:10
  like the Progress Network and things like fix the news.
• 11:14
  You know, Angus Herbie has has been one of the Ted speakers for
• 11:17
  the last three years at the main Ted in Vancouver and start to
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  get some programming about all of the amazing things happening
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  that are frankly buried by the algorithms.
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  You know, I'm a believer in the Free Press and there's people
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  writing really good stories about all the scientific
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  breakthroughs and all the incredible acts of love that are
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  happening. But if you're just getting the
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  push alerts, boy, you're going to you're going to think that
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  we're horrible because that's all that's being pushed at you
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  because they're hijacking your amygdala.
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  So you have to break out of the self created matrix that that
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  these algorithms are putting you into and you really have to
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  deprogram yourself and only you can do that.
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  So yeah. So I'm really excited.
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  And Neil, it's good to have you here, buddy.
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  Yeah, yeah. I've really been looking forward
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  to this, that dinner that we had at the house.
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  I will never forget that dinner actually, because it's a really
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  interesting moment in time and we had amazing people around the
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  table and you made a lot of my favorite points at that dinner.
• 12:24
  I just have to tell you, it was, it was really, really great that
• 12:28
  conversation that we had and, and it was interesting because
• 12:33
  actually you and I were a bit in the outliers there.
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  I don't know if you remember that, but the majority of the
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  people at that dinner, you know, some of the most amazing
• 12:43
  investors and you know, AI, you know, programmers,
• 12:48
  entrepreneurs, they kind of concluded that AI would become
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  conscious. You know, they, they really held
• 12:55
  out that possibility. And part of the reason why for
• 13:00
  me, I am skeptical of that is actually a different reason, I
• 13:06
  think than for you. But maybe we have, maybe we have
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  some synchronicity on that front.
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  You're approaching it as a scientist.
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  I'm approaching it in terms of the divine self that we all have
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  our soul and that, you know, a machine.
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  I don't think, even though I believe consciousness is
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  fundamental, I don't think would have the same connection to
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  heaven or source or whatever, you know, you want to call it
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  consciousness. You know, I refer to God on this
• 13:42
  podcast, but I always tell people like, hey, replace that
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  word with whatever makes you feel comfortable.
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  If it's source, if it's consciousness, if it's heaven,
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  you know, whatever it is like, you know, just just replace it
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  with, you know, a lot of people that are atheists, they still
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  think that we live in a loving reality.
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  So that doesn't bother me at all.
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  But my knowing of it, I call it God.
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  I think that God is the definition of love, but but I
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  I'm I'm skeptical that AI could ever become conscious because I
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  think there's something divine. I mean, I do believe that we
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  reincarnate over multiple lifetimes.
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  I've read tons of books on this from many lives and many masters
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  as well as journey of souls. I've been on a real soul quest.
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  I probably read over 45 books at this point in the last 10 months
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  on everything from quantum physics to to AI to
• 14:41
  consciousness to spirituality, and recently actually read the
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  Bhagavad Gita. I don't know if you read the
• 14:47
  Gita before. I also read the the Dao de Ching
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  and that these repeating patterns constantly show up in
• 14:55
  terms of the root of all spirituality, frankly is, is
• 14:58
  this root of love and this root of unity and oneness.
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  So, so I just, I just don't know if the quote UN quote rules of
• 15:07
  the divine. And you know, being Jewish, you
• 15:09
  know, you're supposed to be very humble in the sense of what is
• 15:13
  the nature of God. And I don't know the nature of
• 15:15
  God. I can't possibly know that.
• 15:19
  But you're very humble in the face of that.
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  And I don't know what the rules are on whether or not or if
• 15:26
  their rules are at all on whether or not AI could embody a
• 15:30
  soul and qualia and all of these beautiful things that that we
• 15:35
  experience internally when we small a rose or we taste a
• 15:39
  delicious meal or we feel that emotion of love or we ruminate
• 15:44
  on, you know, an experience that we had that was, you know,
• 15:47
  incredibly mystical or whatever, you know, it is that sentience
• 15:52
  embodies. I just am very skeptical that
• 15:54
  that will be in a machine. But.
• 15:57
  You're preaching to the choir on Idle 1.
• 16:00
  Yeah, why don't we? Why don't we talk about where
• 16:03
  you're at with your paper and the talk you gave at the
• 16:07
  Consciousness Summit? First of all, tell tell us about
• 16:10
  that summit overall. That was the Science of
• 16:13
  Consciousness conference. It used to be called Toward a
• 16:16
  Science of Consciousness. And they dropped the first part.
• 16:19
  I was and. That was in Barcelona.
• 16:22
  That was in Barcelona this year. It's normally in Tucson as held
• 16:27
  by folks at the University of Arizona, a Stuart Hammer off and
• 16:32
  Jay Sanguinetti and some other folks are involved in that.
• 16:36
  And I was there for the 2nd Science of Consciousness
• 16:40
  conference on a lark, on a complete lark, because a friend
• 16:44
  of mine who's a die hard to this day materialist and I would
• 16:49
  debate when I was in grad school and he said there's this
• 16:53
  conference. He said let's go.
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  And we just went, you know, normally I would.
• 16:59
  That when you first went. Oh God, that was 30 years ago.
• 17:02
  Wow. That was 30 years.
• 17:03
  OK. So it's been.
• 17:04
  Going that long, it has it is the granddaddy of all
• 17:08
  consciousness conferences. And, you know, Stuart has done
• 17:11
  such an amazing job, you know, making all of that happen.
• 17:15
  And that second conference was really remarkable because, you
• 17:20
  know, I wasn't there for the first one, I was there for the
• 17:22
  second one. And I feel like the energy of
• 17:25
  that conference was, was there, that it was all of the major
• 17:30
  thinkers and and Ned Block and Daniel Dennett, David Chalmers,
• 17:39
  John Searle, it was just like a who's who, all of the major
• 17:43
  thinkers in the space. Famously, you know, wrote The
• 17:46
  Hard Problem of Consciousness. That's right.
• 17:48
  That's right. And he talked about that and
• 17:50
  that paper, I'm not sure how I think that paper came out maybe
• 17:53
  the year before. And he gave it at the first one
• 17:56
  and he spoke about it as well at the second one.
• 17:59
  And that really set a frame for considering this problem
• 18:03
  seriously because, you know, within the scientific world,
• 18:08
  there was just this notion that we would describe the parts and
• 18:13
  we would do neuroscience, and that's what consciousness was.
• 18:17
  And David made this very, very clear and compelling case in
• 18:21
  that paper, which I think is called Facing up to the Problem
• 18:24
  of Consciousness, where he delineates the difference.
• 18:28
  And he says you can explain all of the processes, but the
• 18:32
  question is why any of those processes are accompanied by a
• 18:36
  feeling and any explanations that says, well, there's this
• 18:40
  other process or this other process, you still recursively
• 18:43
  have that same question and that's not answered with this
• 18:47
  material description of what the parts do.
• 18:50
  So that's really what the hard problem was.
• 18:53
  And I kind of galvanized that community to debate, not just to
• 18:57
  agree on that topic. There's still significant debate
• 19:00
  amongst. I've read so many books on
• 19:03
  consciousness at this point, and so many articles too, and they
• 19:06
  seem to diverge quite a bit. Yeah, and there's still that
• 19:11
  very hard line materialist viewpoint.
• 19:13
  You know, there are people who will say neuroscientists, very
• 19:17
  often neuroscientists say that that's not even a useful
• 19:19
  question. It hasn't moved us forward
• 19:22
  scientifically. And I, I think it will.
• 19:26
  I, I, I, I'm convinced it will. And I think it's a very
• 19:29
  important problem. It's a, it's a philosophical
• 19:31
  position, not a scientific one, but it points out that science
• 19:35
  is ignoring something. And I know there are, there are
• 19:39
  other thinkers who've made arguments about this.
• 19:42
  There's one called Mary's Room. I don't know if you've heard of
• 19:45
  this one. Mary's Room sort of illustrates
• 19:50
  this in a graphic way. Where there is, there's a
• 19:54
  brilliant neuroscientist who's, you know, knows everything about
• 19:58
  the brain, understands, you know, how wavelengths caused
• 20:02
  various neural firing patterns is very well studied in it.
• 20:06
  But. She is Gray and her eyes are
• 20:11
  Gray and her hair is black, and the room is only in black and
• 20:15
  white, and anything she sees is only in black and white and
• 20:19
  shades of Gray. And then one day Mary leaves the
• 20:22
  room and she sees the color red. And so this brings the allegory
• 20:28
  of The Cave by Plato. That's right.
• 20:30
  And that the point of this argument is to say whether all
• 20:33
  physical information which Mary studied is a complete
• 20:37
  description of the world. And this Mary's room story shows
• 20:42
  that there's actually some other information that Mary didn't
• 20:44
  have, that there was this color red.
• 20:47
  And you know, for a lot of us, that doesn't seem to be a
• 20:52
  question to debate. I mean, obviously there's this
• 20:54
  phenomenal experience that we have of all these sights, sounds
• 20:58
  and feelings that are not reducible to just explaining
• 21:01
  parts moving around. There's the experience of it and
• 21:05
  that ranges from mundane things from like what I see or hear to,
• 21:11
  you know, mystical experiences. And so that's the part that
• 21:15
  science has really kept at the fringes and is now starting to
• 21:19
  become part of mainstream science where articles and
• 21:22
  science and nature testing two major theories of consciousness,
• 21:26
  testing multiple, you know, ideas in the space of
• 21:29
  consciousness and dealing it with it as a first class entity.
• 21:33
  So I think we have to for a number of reasons.
• 21:36
  You know, Mary's room sort of explains it.
• 21:38
  But you know, like even epistemologically we know the
• 21:43
  external world mediated through these conscious experiences.
• 21:48
  I infer that there's a real world.
• 21:51
  So if you're to talk to me about neurons or brains or, you know,
• 21:56
  different kinds of data processing structures for me,
• 22:00
  I'm inferring that those things exist because I'm having
• 22:04
  conscious experiences. And so, you know, it's a funny
• 22:08
  kind of state that we're in now, you know, 400 years past the
• 22:13
  start of the Enlightenment. We're we're actually questioning
• 22:18
  whether something that, you know, most people have taken for
• 22:21
  granted that this is these experiences are real.
• 22:25
  That's, you know, there are, there's a cadre of people or
• 22:28
  trying to shove that to the side and say that, you know, don't
• 22:30
  look there. That's not an important problem.
• 22:32
  We should just describe the parts.
• 22:34
  And I think that we're, we, we've been in that debate for
• 22:38
  some time. But I think that there is
• 22:41
  there's energy gathering to take the problem very seriously.
• 22:46
  And I think that when you do, we'll get to a new place in
• 22:51
  science. Yeah, yeah.
• 22:53
  I mean, science is supposed to be about the fearless pursuit of
• 22:57
  the truth. And part of what's held us back
• 23:00
  is the dogma of just accepting things the way they are.
• 23:06
  I mean, you know, science itself, as I've discussed on
• 23:10
  this podcast, is starts with a miracle.
• 23:14
  You know, grant me the miracle, The Big Bang, and I'll explain
• 23:18
  everything else to you. And, you know, I think that part
• 23:22
  of the suffering that we have in the world is the fall of
• 23:27
  religion, some of that for very good reason, all the all the
• 23:31
  kind of primarily man made scaffolding that came around it.
• 23:34
  You know, the Gita, one of the parts about the Gita that I
• 23:37
  didn't like at all is the caste system.
• 23:39
  Like it actually starts out in a way with the caste system.
• 23:42
  I'm like, there's no way that that God would want to divide us
• 23:46
  into, you know, multiple hierarchies and you know, that
• 23:50
  we would all be seen as, you know, divine beings that all
• 23:56
  should receive equal amounts of love under the eyes of God or
• 24:00
  consciousness or whatever you call it that.
• 24:02
  And so there's been this fall of religion, which I think has led
• 24:07
  to a questioning even of the root of spirituality, while
• 24:12
  there's been a rise of science, which has been great.
• 24:16
  I mean, like my whole career has been science.
• 24:20
  I mean, you know, if it wasn't for computer science and all of
• 24:23
  the amazing people that came before me, there's no way I'd be
• 24:27
  having this conversation with you and, and, and have been a
• 24:30
  fortunate, you know, technology entrepreneur that.
• 24:34
  For me too, Yeah, for me too, 100%.
• 24:37
  Yeah, So, I mean, I love science and I love science, but you can
• 24:40
  love science and spirituality and actually say, like these two
• 24:44
  things have a lot in common. And, you know, as I discussed
• 24:48
  with Mark Gober and he talked about this over the dinner, you
• 24:51
  know, people like Max Plant became a lot more spiritual as a
• 24:55
  result of discovering quantum physics and seeing the unity in
• 25:00
  things, you know, which very much is in Hinduism, you know,
• 25:04
  Brahman freeze in and freeze, freeze out, right, a universe.
• 25:09
  And so those that kind of coming together I think is a big part
• 25:13
  of what needs to happen for humanity and it has to it.
• 25:18
  I think though I think part of the way it happens is through
• 25:21
  consciousness research. Like if we actually completely
• 25:24
  understood consciousness, then we would then we would very much
• 25:29
  understand the nature of our reality.
• 25:32
  I don't really need to say anything here because you were
• 25:35
  you were saying they all said I very much agree with.
• 25:38
  And you know, The thing is that I didn't really have this view
• 25:43
  so firmly at the center of my viewpoint until I started
• 25:49
  thinking very carefully, analytically about
• 25:51
  consciousness. I had put consciousness up on
• 25:55
  the shelf as like an asterisk. Science is great, it works.
• 26:01
  Consciousness, it was just up on the shelf.
• 26:03
  And I, I didn't really think about that impacting how I
• 26:09
  operated in the world and the meaning of the world.
• 26:15
  I just thought there's a scientific problem and I
• 26:19
  approached it as a scientific and engineering problem.
• 26:23
  And that really led me in a very different direction.
• 26:27
  And that's that's what I love. And and you know, there's a lot
• 26:30
  of reasons I wanted to have you on the podcast.
• 26:32
  We've had so many great conversations, but the, the
• 26:37
  paper like, you know, working at it from a scientific and kind of
• 26:42
  mathematical point of view, how would you summarize that?
• 26:47
  You don't think it's possible for machines to have the inner
• 26:52
  experience that we have? Because this is actually a big,
• 26:55
  a big debate going on. I mean, there's people that are
• 26:57
  falling in love with AI chat bots today.
• 27:01
  There's some people who literally killed themselves as a
• 27:05
  result of thinking that they're conscious and then directing
• 27:08
  them to join them in the afterlife.
• 27:12
  There are people like Mustafa Suleiman, who's in charge of
• 27:16
  everything AI at Microsoft and is a Co founder of DeepMind who
• 27:21
  has been hosting regularly on LinkedIn and other mediums that
• 27:27
  we need to not treat AI as conscious.
• 27:30
  He's like, look, it is not conscious.
• 27:31
  I can tell you we are working on AI Microsoft and it's not
• 27:34
  conscious, but it fakes consciousness.
• 27:38
  Well, because it you know, we can talk to it, right?
• 27:42
  We can talk to it. We can share videos with it.
• 27:44
  We can show it videos. You know, we can take take a
• 27:47
  this this whole room and ask it to describe what's in here.
• 27:52
  You know, it can talk to us in any language, etcetera.
• 27:54
  So it's very easy to start to think.
• 27:56
  Very easy for people to be fooled.
• 27:58
  You know, in, in my talk, I have this, this little GIF of some
• 28:03
  chickens looking some Roosters with their cock scars looking at
• 28:07
  a red water valve and kind of looking at it like it's a
• 28:11
  chicken. And I think that's what's
• 28:13
  happening with humanity is they're getting confused by
• 28:17
  appearances because we can look at that situation and say that
• 28:21
  might look like a chicken to you guys, but it's not.
• 28:25
  And that's just the appearance of it.
• 28:27
  So the appearance of producing words, they are able to do that.
• 28:31
  But there's a real reality to whether the valve is actually a
• 28:37
  chicken or just looks like a chicken.
• 28:40
  And I think it's it's exactly the same problem with AI, but
• 28:45
  it's a little bit more complicated.
• 28:46
  People have their reasons for thinking that AI is conscious.
• 28:51
  You know, it's a funny thing, you know, just thinking about
• 28:54
  where all this came from and where science originated from
• 28:58
  and where our modern Enlightenment era perspective
• 29:03
  comes from comes from what Descartes and Newton and
• 29:06
  Leibnitz, you know, these, these were some of the foundational
• 29:09
  thinkers. And when you look at how they
• 29:12
  thought about it, and Descartes, you know, famously said cogito,
• 29:16
  ergo some I think therefore I am.
• 29:19
  And he sat, you know, he had three visions of the future, of
• 29:25
  where humanity needed to go beyond superstition towards
• 29:30
  logic and reason. And he came up with a view that
• 29:35
  we can start looking at the world as a mechanism.
• 29:38
  But what people don't talk about a lot is that he argued very
• 29:42
  ferociously that we should not think of living things as merely
• 29:48
  mechanical. And he said that and that, you
• 29:51
  know, he had this very nice mental model of this mechanistic
• 29:56
  world and consciousness didn't fit into that.
• 30:00
  So he said that there's a soul and somehow it interacts.
• 30:03
  And that's the asterisk that we've, we've just kept this
• 30:06
  thing up on the shelf and we've. And that was the, you know, that
• 30:10
  was the initial articulation of dualism.
• 30:14
  And Stan, I think, and Newton as well, was very convinced that
• 30:19
  though his equations described a deterministic universe, he felt,
• 30:23
  and he's written explicitly at great length because he was very
• 30:27
  much influenced by Hermetic teachings and was searching for
• 30:31
  the original knowledge. And we throw all of that side of
• 30:35
  Newton away and say he wrote a lot of crazy stuff.
• 30:37
  He was, you know, into all kinds of crazy religious dogma.
• 30:40
  We should really ignore all of that and just focus on his
• 30:43
  equations. But Newton felt that his
• 30:46
  equations couldn't end. The forces between things
• 30:49
  couldn't be explained without something else that was non
• 30:53
  mechanical. But he didn't have the language
• 30:55
  of, say, quantum physics and other weird things that we have
• 30:58
  today. And he was very concerned about
• 31:01
  the nature of the soul. It's not a word that I use very
• 31:05
  typically, but that's where those thoughts came from.
• 31:08
  And now we've gotten into a world where we've looked at
• 31:11
  dualism, found it very lacking, and have been left only with
• 31:16
  materialism, at least those of us in the science world.
• 31:21
  And we've conflated this materialist view that they're
• 31:24
  only these objects with their, you know, discrete properties
• 31:28
  interacting with each other as the only serious, educated view
• 31:32
  that you could have. But of course, quantum physics
• 31:35
  buzzes that up now. That's a little bit so.
• 31:38
  Yeah, there's been no reconciliation really between
• 31:41
  classical science and quantum science, and we don't.
• 31:44
  Agree with each other. The equation disagree.
• 31:47
  It's almost like a mathematical bridge.
• 31:48
  Yes, and we're waiting for the unified theory between those two
• 31:53
  things. But you know, what quantum
• 31:54
  physics has told us is there are things which aren't, you know,
• 31:58
  based on what physicists call local realism, which parts.
• 32:02
  So we have discrete state. They're actually states of the
• 32:06
  world that are correlated with each other across space and
• 32:11
  space. And at least then some people
• 32:13
  also speculate time, though there may be retro causal
• 32:16
  effects depending on certain interpretations.
• 32:19
  But you know, this question of are AIS conscious?
• 32:22
  Well, that comes from this notion of functionalism.
• 32:25
  If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it is a
• 32:27
  duck. That's the simple idea.
• 32:29
  So funny, I was just about to say that.
• 32:31
  I, I didn't know if that's a Southern saying or not, but I've
• 32:33
  definitely heard that one growing up many times.
• 32:36
  Yeah, part of our psyche it. Looks like a chicken.
• 32:39
  It is chicken. You know, it's kind of the same
• 32:41
  thing, right? And you know, you, you, you can
• 32:44
  kind of understand why people might think that.
• 32:47
  How else could we assess that? I can't see your consciousness.
• 32:51
  I only know of mine. So if it looks like it's
• 32:54
  interacting, it must be conscious.
• 32:56
  Isn't that science? That's kind of the reasoning
• 32:59
  that I think many people are applying to it.
• 33:01
  But, you know, as biologist, I would look at that differently.
• 33:06
  It's a unusual phenomenon. I only have one example of it
• 33:12
  and it's in me. And I only can presume that you
• 33:16
  and other people have it, might presume that other machines have
• 33:19
  it, but that wouldn't be a good move, I think, as a biologist,
• 33:23
  because you know you are compositionally, structurally
• 33:28
  and operationally similar to me. You have a brain, you know, I
• 33:32
  have a brain. We know that the brain mediates
• 33:34
  consciousness. So as a biologist, if I were to
• 33:37
  study this phenomenon, I would say what's the appropriate model
• 33:40
  system? Well, not something that's
• 33:42
  structurally, compositionally and operationally completely
• 33:45
  different from us. It would be something that's
• 33:47
  similar. That doesn't mean that something
• 33:49
  else couldn't be conscious, but we don't even understand it yet.
• 33:53
  And so I think that that's a first place where people go
• 33:56
  wrong and saying, you know, because it just looks like it
• 34:01
  than it should be. And that's the only test we can
• 34:03
  have that I don't think that that's true.
• 34:05
  I think that there's science we can do.
• 34:07
  In fact, there's science we've already done, you know, any of
• 34:10
  these any of these experiments on patients who are awake under
• 34:15
  brain surgery and then they're stimulated is, is an experiment
• 34:20
  and it demonstrates something that there's a correlation and
• 34:22
  there's some mediation of this physical matter and our
• 34:25
  conscious face. You can stimulate somebody's
• 34:27
  brain and then they can hear music.
• 34:30
  So that shows us this. We don't have any way of testing
• 34:34
  that, and we don't have any theory of consciousness.
• 34:36
  So we shouldn't go presuming that machines are conscious.
• 34:39
  Like imagine if I want to study cell division and then I said,
• 34:45
  hey, guys, look, this rock is also round like cells.
• 34:47
  I'm going to study cell division.
• 34:49
  Now that would be stupid, right? Nobody, nobody would take that
• 34:53
  seriously. And I don't think that we should
• 34:54
  take, you know, searches for consciousness and AI seriously
• 34:59
  on on just that basis. You really want to approach this
• 35:03
  from a scientific perspective, not some theoretical and
• 35:06
  philosophical perspective. There's this notion of
• 35:09
  functionalism, which is roughly, if it looks like a duck and
• 35:12
  cracks like a duck, it is a duck.
• 35:14
  But there's so many problems with that which we can get into.
• 35:17
  Yeah, yeah. Tell, tell me what the I mean,
• 35:22
  to me this just sounds intuitively like, of course, I
• 35:25
  mean, it's like, it's like, it's like completely obvious to me
• 35:28
  that if we do not have a shared definitive understanding of what
• 35:34
  consciousness is, then how could we possibly say that a machine
• 35:39
  is conscious? I mean, how could we?
• 35:41
  If you know, I actually tackled this in a in a article I wrote
• 35:46
  in gosh, I think it was in March of this year where I did quote
• 35:51
  from the Gita. And I just made the argument of,
• 35:55
  you know, we have this manic race to create AGI and part of
• 36:01
  that race is to create sentience, but we don't even
• 36:06
  know what sentence is. I mean, I've, I've read so many
• 36:09
  books at this point, as I was saying on consciousness that
• 36:13
  they really do disagree with each other.
• 36:15
  I mean, one of the one of the most madding ones was Anika
• 36:17
  Harris book Lights On. It was just released as an audio
• 36:22
  book. And it's her discussions with
• 36:24
  all these different, you know, consciousness researchers, you
• 36:29
  know, discussing everything from panpsychism to you name it.
• 36:33
  And she ultimately concluded that consciousness is
• 36:36
  fundamental. And that's where I'm at.
• 36:38
  I think our brains are receivers for consciousness.
• 36:41
  And I think there's something very divine and loving about
• 36:44
  consciousness. But you know, this seems so
• 36:48
  obvious to me, but I'm curious how you approached it
• 36:52
  scientifically in your paper. I've read your paper, but for
• 36:56
  those watching this, and I'm going to put it in the show
• 36:59
  notes, how do you say, look, just mathematically, this is
• 37:05
  impossible in a world of bits, you know, in a world of ones and
• 37:09
  zeros And the way the, you know, Turing machine works, which
• 37:13
  essentially is the architecture of all computers today.
• 37:18
  How do you approach it from that standpoint to, to to say to
• 37:21
  people like, OK, you don't know what consciousness is, but B on
• 37:25
  a theory of what consciousness is in terms of how rich it is.
• 37:30
  This is why machine can't even do it logically.
• 37:34
  Yeah. I I think that we should be able
• 37:36
  to conclude with absolute certainty and I normally a
• 37:40
  bracket a lot of my statements with if the X is true, then we
• 37:46
  might conclude this. But I think with this, at least
• 37:50
  I, I, I will say that the building blocks of this argument
• 37:53
  are certain and sound. And so that leads me to conclude
• 37:59
  that the argument is not just sound, but also valid and that
• 38:02
  we should just conclude the machines can't be conscious.
• 38:04
  So I'll, I'll, I'll get into that.
• 38:06
  And machines are great because they really allow us to think
• 38:09
  very carefully about the problem because we design them, We know
• 38:12
  exactly how they work. They're actually formal systems
• 38:16
  so that, you know, we don't have to just think about silicon
• 38:19
  chips and get mystified by maybe the electricity is doing
• 38:22
  something weird. You can make a machine out of
• 38:25
  yours. You can make it out of water
• 38:27
  valves. You could have computation
• 38:31
  that's based on pen and paper. They're just formal systems and
• 38:35
  they're computationally, they're mathematically equivalent.
• 38:38
  And that's called Turing equivalent.
• 38:40
  I know you know about. And what that means is that any
• 38:45
  output that's produced by ChatGPT could be produced with
• 38:48
  pen and paper. That immediately should raise
• 38:51
  some eyebrows and you would think, well, isn't this produce
• 38:55
  a lot of problems, you know, for your theory of consciousness,
• 38:57
  like is, is the computer conscious when I'm writing the
• 39:01
  last digit of the output is is it when my pen goes down on the
• 39:04
  paper when it's halfway through that number or when it's
• 39:08
  finished the number or when it comes off the paper?
• 39:11
  I mean, it's such a silly kind of concept.
• 39:14
  And you know, if you say it's when the computation is
• 39:18
  understood that there or something like that, well,
• 39:20
  that's understood right at the very beginning of the
• 39:22
  computation, because it's entirely deterministic system.
• 39:25
  So I, I don't really, you know, right there you've got these
• 39:29
  sort of arguments from incredulity, like how could this
• 39:32
  be? If it's purely computation, you
• 39:35
  have to account for these absurd situations.
• 39:38
  If you take consciousness seriously.
• 39:41
  And that's where I start is thinking about what, what does
• 39:44
  it mean to think about the information or the data?
• 39:49
  I won't get into that debate, but if you think about, you
• 39:53
  know, just what we're seeing, just the visual field, we just,
• 39:58
  you know, focus on that for a moment.
• 40:01
  There are colors distributed across what seems to be like
• 40:05
  space. There's a if we if we have a
• 40:07
  frame, there's spatial orientation, and then there's
• 40:10
  little bits of color across my visual field, and there's this.
• 40:15
  Concept called the unity of consciousness, which is well
• 40:19
  understood and consciousness studies and philosophy of mind.
• 40:22
  And what it says is that the there's a gestalt that we
• 40:28
  experience, that there's not just one of these
• 40:31
  characteristics, but you see all of these things at once.
• 40:35
  That's very critical. So I don't just see the bird, I
• 40:38
  also see the sky behind it. I see the other aspects of the
• 40:42
  scene and, you know, my current emotional state, the air on my
• 40:46
  skin, all of those are bound together in a single experience.
• 40:49
  And people, you know, a lot of people will just buy that.
• 40:53
  But I think that you can even become more precise about that
• 40:56
  and think about, for example, a pure red field.
• 41:01
  So if you were to imagine, you know, you close your eyes and
• 41:03
  look at the sun, that's like a pure red field, and you'll
• 41:07
  notice something that you're not just seeing red, a little bit of
• 41:11
  red, you're seeing an extent of red.
• 41:13
  You're seeing red bound to spatial properties, spatial
• 41:17
  locations, and you're experiencing all of those bits
• 41:20
  of red at the same time. And so all of those properties
• 41:24
  are bound together in some information space.
• 41:27
  So there might be some, you know, forward to describe that
• 41:30
  mathematically. There might be some matrix or
• 41:33
  maybe some polar coordinates and colors.
• 41:36
  They're all bound together and that's a unified object.
• 41:40
  So that's the first thing that we must think about and that
• 41:44
  this is actually the great puzzle of consciousness is this
• 41:48
  how, how do we account for that when we know from neuroscience
• 41:53
  that the information that is being processed in the brain is
• 41:57
  distributed? So there are different neurons
• 41:59
  that are being activated based on sound or shape or color.
• 42:05
  They're in different places. So that's what's called the
• 42:08
  neurophenomenological binding problem.
• 42:11
  And so it says, how do you get this unified state from
• 42:15
  disparate parts? And it's constantly.
• 42:19
  And it's constantly changing. Yeah, it's constantly changing
• 42:22
  and it's constantly like cells are dying, cut cells are
• 42:24
  constantly. Being reborn.
• 42:25
  That's right. And, and, you know, neurons are
• 42:27
  firing all of these activities going on.
• 42:30
  And neuroscience has been very good at tracing out the circuits
• 42:34
  that are involved. And in fact, that circuitry is
• 42:38
  what gave rise to AI because it inspired AI.
• 42:42
  Now AI is built very differently from the brain right now.
• 42:46
  And people are working on new architectures and we'll probably
• 42:48
  be able to replicate a lot of that architecture.
• 42:51
  Elements are trying to replicate neurons in the way that they
• 42:55
  work. They, you know, they're trying
• 42:57
  to essentially create digital neurons.
• 43:00
  They are and they're, they're quite, they're quite different
• 43:03
  in a lot of ways. Like we have action potentials
• 43:05
  and you know, there's information in the decay of the
• 43:09
  frequency in action potentials. And we just model cells and AI
• 43:14
  as you know, zero to 1 values. You know, let's sort of
• 43:18
  summarize how strongly a neuron is firing.
• 43:21
  And the architecture is very different.
• 43:24
  Like our entire brain does not fire in order to do a compute,
• 43:27
  only the ones that need to fire. So we're, we're still pretty
• 43:30
  different from brains, but that still doesn't matter.
• 43:32
  We could still write an AI that would replicate this same
• 43:36
  structure in, in a brain. But you know, when you think
• 43:41
  about each of these, these events that are happening, they
• 43:46
  are separate. And in fact, they could be
• 43:48
  completely linearized. You, you, you know, there's this
• 43:52
  Turing machine made of wood of it's really beautiful and you
• 43:55
  can go and look it up. I think there's a guy, Jay
• 43:57
  Rydell, who made this. And it computes.
• 44:00
  You can see each bit computed one at a time.
• 44:03
  And it's a very good mental model for thinking about what's
• 44:06
  going on in a computer instead of getting mystified at the
• 44:09
  electricity that's flowing through ACPU.
• 44:12
  And it's it's a stepwise process.
• 44:14
  Every bit is set one at a time. And So what we know is the
• 44:20
  physics of the movement of the bit is driven by gears.
• 44:25
  And that's the same physics that describes your lawnmower.
• 44:29
  But the lawnmower is not conscious.
• 44:31
  I don't think any computer scientists think that a
• 44:33
  lawnmower is conscious, but somehow this other machine that
• 44:37
  is using just forces pushing on each other, it is conscious.
• 44:42
  So physics is the same that's governing the movement of the
• 44:45
  parts. What's the additional extra
• 44:48
  stuff that's on top and? I guarantee you, by the way,
• 44:52
  someone watching this or listening this right now, like
• 44:55
  what you said, that the lawnmower is conscious.
• 44:58
  That's something you think that's conscious.
• 45:00
  I'm saying that someone watching this is like definitely went to
• 45:05
  that lawnmower is going to attack me because the psyche of
• 45:11
  machines are going to destroy us from everything from the
• 45:14
  Terminator to the matrix to, you know, one of the things in
• 45:17
  Judaism is the story of Golem and Prague where the rabbi
• 45:21
  animates the golem at the sentient destroys the synagogue
• 45:24
  is I actually have a Golem from Prague in my in in my the
• 45:30
  bathroom on the counter, like just looking at it every day.
• 45:34
  And I do not think that's the existential risk to humanity.
• 45:38
  I think the biggest risk is ourselves and technology.
• 45:41
  I completely agree. I mean, there are.
• 45:43
  This guy, it's called Love Conquers Fear, by the way.
• 45:46
  I agree. And I think, you know, there are
• 45:48
  also moves to give a ice rights, which I've also written about.
• 45:52
  And I I find that worrisome. And I hope, I hope we can cool
• 45:58
  our jets on that conversation. You and Mustafa Suleiman are
• 46:02
  aligned, very much so on that too.
• 46:04
  Very much so, and. Again, if like, I don't think we
• 46:07
  should even talk about that until we know definitively and
• 46:11
  scientists definitively agree on what consciousness is.
• 46:15
  I agree it's. As long as scientists are
• 46:17
  debating what consciousness is, I mean, scientists are not
• 46:22
  debating what a foot is or a meter.
• 46:27
  There is a defined, you know. I mean, I know that's a very
• 46:30
  simple concept. No, no, no.
• 46:31
  I think, I think it's very important.
• 46:32
  We need. To know actually what it is, if
• 46:35
  we're going to describe anything else, is being conscious.
• 46:38
  There is there some 9 organizations that I counted
• 46:41
  that are arguing explicitly for AI rights right now.
• 46:47
  And many of them are predicating that on the idea that they're
• 46:51
  definitely feeling something. They can suffer.
• 46:53
  They can, you know, feel joy and the so they need to be accorded
• 46:57
  rights from moral perspective. And that's just, that's
• 47:00
  completely false. They, they do not and they will
• 47:03
  never. And that's what I hope to
• 47:05
  convince you of. I don't need too much to do to
• 47:09
  convince you of it, but I'll, I'll lay out the argument.
• 47:12
  So there's this, there's this neurophenomenological binding
• 47:17
  problem and then there's a binding problem in computers as
• 47:19
  well, because you've got all of these separate events that are
• 47:22
  just governed by simple physics. And you know, the dowel that's
• 47:27
  in the ticker tape of the wooden terrain computer, it doesn't
• 47:31
  leak its state out into the universe.
• 47:33
  It's just, it's on or off. And our interpretation of
• 47:37
  whether it's on or off is by looking at it and defining it.
• 47:40
  And what the what what David Traumers actually argued was
• 47:46
  that there need to be if if it's processes, if there are physical
• 47:52
  processes. And I don't think he says if, I
• 47:56
  think he concluded that it must be physical processes.
• 47:59
  And in order to account for and solve the hard problem, you need
• 48:04
  new psychophysical laws that supervene as a philosopher say,
• 48:10
  on our existing laws. And this is the critical idea
• 48:13
  that somehow, you know, information processing patterns,
• 48:18
  if the underwrite information processing patterns, it's
• 48:22
  conscious. That's the idea.
• 48:24
  That's the complexity, that's what people say.
• 48:26
  It's feedback loops or it's the hierarchical processing of
• 48:30
  information. And then something's conscious.
• 48:33
  And, you know, my argument is a very simple one.
• 48:36
  At the end of the day, one is, you know, obviously I, I don't
• 48:41
  think that we should immediately ascribe or believe that's a
• 48:44
  question to be answered. So now it's really a question of
• 48:47
  what do these theories entail? And what they Intel is a new set
• 48:52
  of equations that sit on top of physics that identify patterns.
• 48:58
  And here's where the problem is. Our physics does not rely on
• 49:04
  events from the distant past or even the recent past.
• 49:07
  When we write our equations in physics, they're based on the
• 49:10
  current state of the system, and we say that DXDT is equal to
• 49:14
  some function of X of the state of the system at the current
• 49:18
  time. But if you're talking about
• 49:21
  patterns of activity, that's actually those are events that
• 49:24
  might be in the very distant past.
• 49:26
  Like I could make a computer that's as big as the universe
• 49:29
  that sends light signals between galaxies.
• 49:32
  And somehow nature would need to have laws that recognize this
• 49:37
  pattern that might play out over billions of years and then close
• 49:41
  a feedback loop at the end of that time.
• 49:43
  But then that requires something to have that bird's eye view in
• 49:47
  nature that understands that pattern.
• 49:50
  And we'd have to have a new law that would be wildly non local.
• 49:55
  So you need data actually from all of space and time in order
• 50:00
  to account for that kind of a computer being conscious.
• 50:02
  And it's not just that kind of a computer.
• 50:05
  That's true of any computer. It's just a smaller scale.
• 50:09
  We're just mystified because it's in our human time scales.
• 50:11
  But once you realize this could be at any time scale, and I
• 50:15
  think the philosophers of computer consciousness say yes,
• 50:18
  indeed, something like that could be conscious.
• 50:20
  Like nation of people interacting in a way that a
• 50:23
  computer does, they think is conscious.
• 50:26
  Well, you're violating some laws of physics in order for that to
• 50:30
  be true. But even then you've got this
• 50:33
  problem of what constitutes a state, you know, is, is this is
• 50:38
  a, are there laws in physics that recognize a transistor?
• 50:43
  And when you know, 3.5 volts is on or off, like how do we
• 50:48
  account for that? Even if you do account for that,
• 50:51
  you know, and you say well somehow it's just patterns in
• 50:53
  the interaction of particles, you still got this problem of
• 50:57
  being able to identify those particles versus the ones that
• 51:00
  are in the lawnmower or in a glass of water for that matter,
• 51:04
  or you know, any subset of molecules of air.
• 51:08
  Why are they not conscious? But we are.
• 51:10
  Well, that's a very, very hard pattern finding problem and
• 51:15
  that, you know, computer scientists know how to do that
• 51:18
  and there are limited number of algorithms for finding those
• 51:22
  kinds of patterns. Now what this precise pattern
• 51:25
  is, you know, the psychophysical laws are computing is unknown,
• 51:29
  but they'd have to have data from all of those those events
• 51:34
  which are lost in space and time, and they would need to
• 51:38
  find those patterns. And that that, you know, like
• 51:41
  the general problem can be thought of as something called
• 51:44
  subgraph isomorphism. And I actually worked on this
• 51:46
  when I wrote this language, A, a language for understanding
• 51:51
  biology is computable and deterministic, by the way.
• 51:55
  So I've thought a lot about, you know, emergent phenomena in
• 51:59
  complex systems. I wrote the code that wrote the
• 52:02
  code for describing that. So I'm not shy of that stuff.
• 52:05
  I think that's good science. But here what we're talking
• 52:09
  about is that there need to be laws in nature that would find
• 52:14
  patterns. And that's, you know, finding
• 52:16
  complex patterns in other complex patterns requires
• 52:19
  something like what a chess algorithm does.
• 52:22
  It goes and searches for solutions, you know, explores
• 52:25
  branches, you know, comes back, you know, explores another
• 52:28
  branch. It needs to maintain memory of
• 52:30
  the partial match that it found and then elaborate more matches.
• 52:35
  That requires memory. That requires energy and
• 52:38
  computation. You actually need a computer to
• 52:41
  solve those kinds of problems. And that's not at all what our
• 52:45
  physics looks like. We don't assume that there's a
• 52:47
  computer somewhere in the universe, like doing this
• 52:50
  multidimensional chess game solution at every infinitesimal
• 52:54
  time step of the universe. That's crazy.
• 52:57
  That's like, that's like positing a kind of a
• 53:01
  computational God. And that's certainly not what
• 53:04
  the materialists are saying. But those are the assumptions
• 53:07
  that are smuggled into all of these theories.
• 53:09
  When they say things like, oh, it's feedback loops, or the
• 53:12
  feedback loop recognizes itself, or the mind is software running
• 53:16
  on the hardware of the brain, There are all of these phrases
• 53:20
  that really have no well defined scientific meaning.
• 53:23
  In fact, they are pseudoscience. That's what the field of
• 53:28
  consciousness that is the mainstream field is rife with
• 53:31
  pseudo scientific statements that are doing the bulk of the
• 53:34
  work in these in these theories. So they're like the three main
• 53:38
  problems that I really don't see how anybody gets beyond, you
• 53:43
  know, this stuff. These kinds of assertions that
• 53:46
  there are histories of events and patterns and histories of
• 53:49
  events are simply inconsistent with everything we know in
• 53:52
  physics. And they are certainly not
• 53:54
  saying that explicitly. And if they are, I think that
• 53:57
  they are really on the hook book for something very, very
• 54:00
  difficult to explain, where they have to rewrite our physics.
• 54:05
  And that's not the proposal at all.
• 54:06
  The idea is it's very simple. We've got this all sewn up.
• 54:09
  It's just patterns in these things.
• 54:11
  But in order to account for the unity of consciousness, you need
• 54:16
  to solve this problem. Right.
• 54:18
  Yeah, it's so I think that's really well said.
• 54:21
  And, you know, to think about a machine, they would able to,
• 54:27
  they would be able to go into a meditation and imagine, you
• 54:32
  know, the unity of all things, the, the, the presence of the
• 54:38
  self. I mean, one of the things you,
• 54:40
  you talked about earlier, you know, with Newton is actually
• 54:44
  the, the self started way a long time ago.
• 54:48
  You know, it was, it was in the Gita, you know, the discovery of
• 54:52
  the self. So it it predated a lot of the
• 54:58
  scientist of our day. You know, it actually is found
• 55:02
  in ancient spirituality. Yeah, there's the Atman and
• 55:05
  Brahman. So there's the local
• 55:08
  individuated self and this global or unlimited self, which
• 55:17
  I think people would identify with as God in, in, in Western
• 55:22
  religions. And this is the state that
• 55:25
  people report in mystical experiences that there is some
• 55:28
  unusual state of consciousness where there is much greater
• 55:33
  expanded state of consciousness. And those are rare, depends on
• 55:39
  how we use the word rare. They're very common in a sense.
• 55:42
  They're much more broadly shared than I think we initially
• 55:45
  understood these kind of mystical States and they people
• 55:50
  report a reality that is more seems more real than the
• 55:57
  experience we have an ordinary consciousness.
• 56:00
  So how do you? In near death experiences, I
• 56:03
  mean, there's, there's just so much evidence of this, you know,
• 56:08
  anybody that's done a psychedelic journey sees that
• 56:12
  there's a reality beyond this one.
• 56:14
  And just, if you just take this reality in and of itself, this
• 56:19
  reality, our human eyes see 15% of what is available to see in
• 56:26
  this reality. You know, there are birds that
• 56:29
  can see, you know, the magnetic fields and see that a tsunami is
• 56:34
  coming and they're early warning signs.
• 56:36
  So their, their senses were very differently than ours do.
• 56:43
  And I find that super fascinating that even in the
• 56:46
  reality of matter, you know, that we're in in this Earth
• 56:50
  school, that we only see 15% of that.
• 56:52
  We're like Mary in the Gray room.
• 56:54
  We are, we are completely like that and if we could see
• 56:58
  everything, I bet it would be incredibly overwhelming.
• 57:03
  And you know, the mystical states that you enter through
• 57:06
  meditation or through a psychedelic journey, It is a bit
• 57:10
  overwhelming. You know, it, it's very, I mean,
• 57:13
  it's, it's a lot like because the ego goes offline and you get
• 57:16
  this blood of consciousness. And it's part of what's led me
• 57:21
  to believe that definitely consciousness is something we
• 57:24
  receive because there's just so many things that have happened
• 57:28
  to me in the journey state that are not describable by science
• 57:34
  at all. Like, I have to turn to
• 57:36
  spirituality to even grapple with the implication.
• 57:41
  And again, this is coming from someone who, like you, loves
• 57:44
  science. I mean, I really, I really do.
• 57:46
  What do, what do you make of materialists speaking about the,
• 57:51
  you know, looking at these kinds of assertions from people and
• 57:55
  saying things like, well, that's just your brain chemicals firing
• 58:00
  and your neurons firing in some weird way, and it's just like a
• 58:03
  hallucination and there is nothing more to it.
• 58:07
  Yeah, I think, I think, you know, one of my favorite books
• 58:11
  that started me down this journey actually is Proof of
• 58:15
  Heaven by Evan Alexander. So he, he became essentially A
• 58:21
  materialist. He was raised as a Christian and
• 58:24
  he went through the motions and went to church and, and he
• 58:28
  became an incredible neurosurgeon.
• 58:31
  You know, Harvard trained, you know, I, I, I don't, I'm not a
• 58:35
  surgeon and I don't, I, I only know other surgeons.
• 58:39
  And the surgeons I know say that the neurosurgeons are the top,
• 58:43
  top of their field. These are the smartest people in
• 58:46
  surgery, and they tend to be, according to surgeons I know,
• 58:51
  pretty arrogant. Did neurosurgeons tell you that
• 58:54
  no or did other doctors? This is other.
• 58:56
  Doctors, they told me. And because they, they, they
• 58:59
  basically the level of schooling, everything else that
• 59:02
  they had to go through and what they're working on, the
• 59:05
  complexity of it is such where anyways, I don't know if they're
• 59:09
  going to not. But Evan Alexander was one of
• 59:12
  those. And he would see his patients,
• 59:16
  you know, come back and they would say, Oh my gosh, Evan, I
• 59:19
  just had this incredible experience.
• 59:21
  You know, I saw I was surrounded by white light.
• 59:23
  You know, I've had this out of body experience.
• 59:25
  I saw myself on the table, you know, and he just, he just
• 59:31
  dismissed it. He was just like whatever, you
• 59:33
  know, they're the silliest name until it happened to him.
• 59:37
  And that's an incredible book on Audible because you can hear the
• 59:40
  awe and wonder in his voice. But he had E coli powered
• 59:45
  meningitis, which is super, super rare for an adult to get.
• 59:48
  And you're almost certainly going to be a vegetable when you
• 59:53
  come out of that because it E coli eats you from the inside.
• 59:56
  We all carry E coli naturally, but when it goes out of control,
• 59:59
  just eats. And so literally would just eat
• 1:00:02
  your brain. And which horrible, you know,
• 1:00:05
  really horrific thing to even think about.
• 1:00:07
  So he he's, he's, he's feeling this incredible pain and he
• 1:00:14
  shouts out just spontaneously, not even religiously, he's like,
• 1:00:18
  God, please save me. And then he goes into his coma
• 1:00:23
  and in his coma. I just got chills telling you
• 1:00:25
  that, which tells me my soul is very embodied right now.
• 1:00:30
  Those are called truth bumps. And in this in this coma, he
• 1:00:36
  essentially is taken on a tour of what's in the beyond.
• 1:00:40
  And he sees the seven levels of heaven, which are repeating
• 1:00:43
  through lots and lots of spiritual literature.
• 1:00:46
  And he is told he's going to be saved.
• 1:00:48
  And I don't want to give away the whole book, but obviously he
• 1:00:51
  survives as he foot the book and he comes back and he describes
• 1:00:57
  it as the ultra real, like something that's more real than
• 1:01:00
  anything else. And the amazing thing about me
• 1:01:03
  reading that book and how true it rang and all the things that
• 1:01:07
  happened to him and relating it to the psychedelic journeys I've
• 1:01:10
  had and the experiences I've had, like seeing my own body in
• 1:01:14
  a journey from above, you know, from the perspective of the soul
• 1:01:20
  being out of body and, and just so many other things.
• 1:01:24
  You know, he, he felt like this was now his calling because he
• 1:01:29
  describes that as the ultra real.
• 1:01:31
  This is more real than the actual reality that we're in.
• 1:01:36
  And he then made that his life's work, you know, and wrote
• 1:01:41
  several books on it. The Map of Heaven is the second
• 1:01:44
  book. It's just as good as proof of
• 1:01:46
  heaven. But the neat thing about the Map
• 1:01:48
  of Heaven, it's actually mistitled in my opinion, is he
• 1:01:51
  relates it to other spiritual literature, the experience he
• 1:01:57
  had. So he, he, his son said, look,
• 1:02:01
  write proof of heaven and do not do any research about anybody
• 1:02:04
  that's had an experience like yours.
• 1:02:06
  Write it from the purity of your experience.
• 1:02:08
  And so he did. And then afterwards he then did
• 1:02:12
  all this research to find has, has this happened to people
• 1:02:16
  before? Is there spiritual literature
• 1:02:18
  about this and the commonalities?
• 1:02:20
  But in his experience, and those were very, very prevalent.
• 1:02:25
  And I have now had I read this book in December, I have now had
• 1:02:30
  six friends tell me that they have had an experience like
• 1:02:34
  that, a near death experience. And if I was a hardcore
• 1:02:40
  materialist, these are friends of mine, I would have to just
• 1:02:43
  think that they're lying. I mean, I've literally have to
• 1:02:46
  it's it's kind of crass. I'd be like, OK, well, you've
• 1:02:48
  had a common, you know, you all have had a common experience.
• 1:02:53
  So that's interesting. So that did you collude somehow
• 1:02:56
  and, and come up with your common stories and you know, the
• 1:03:00
  the amount of things you would have to believe in terms of the
• 1:03:05
  levels of deception for humanity throughout the ages.
• 1:03:09
  To say these experiences were just made-up hallucinations is
• 1:03:14
  just to and, and then the commonality again with, with
• 1:03:17
  psychedelics, with meditation, you know, people that are deep
• 1:03:21
  meditators, they have gone into these states where they have
• 1:03:25
  seen the unity of all things. You know, that's also something
• 1:03:28
  you see through a psychedelic journey.
• 1:03:31
  And you know, in the book, you know, you, you read, you read
• 1:03:33
  the lattice. But one of the things that's
• 1:03:35
  cool. And here is that I explore like,
• 1:03:38
  well, how would the awakening actually happen?
• 1:03:41
  Like how would humanity unite to realize that the actual reality
• 1:03:47
  we're in is one that's rooted in love?
• 1:03:49
  And you and I are genetically 99.9% the same all human beings
• 1:03:54
  on earth are. And all this programming that
• 1:03:58
  we've received that creates division, you know, when, when,
• 1:04:03
  when babies are born and they're right next to each other.
• 1:04:06
  They're not thinking like, Hey, I'm a Muslim, you're a Jew or
• 1:04:09
  I'm man, you're a woman, or I'm from this class, you're from
• 1:04:13
  that class or I'm this race, you're this, they're just,
• 1:04:16
  they're just divine, beautiful, pure creatures.
• 1:04:19
  And then unfortunately, they get all the programming.
• 1:04:23
  They inherit all the programming through lots of things.
• 1:04:26
  They're indoctrinated into programming.
• 1:04:28
  And you know, very sadly, if, if they're indoctrinated into a
• 1:04:32
  terrorist group, then their programming is hate, hate, hate
• 1:04:37
  from the very beginning. Like, you know, not not just
• 1:04:39
  hate, but like kill like from the very beginning.
• 1:04:42
  And and that's really hard for someone to overcome because that
• 1:04:47
  has been their entire reality. They were in The Cave, you know,
• 1:04:50
  the allegory of The Cave and only shown hate from the time
• 1:04:54
  they were born. But you know, they're all divine
• 1:04:57
  at their core, like all of humanity is divine at our core.
• 1:05:02
  So I think it's fascinating that, you know, I've, I've met
• 1:05:07
  now or I've, I've had six friends admit to me that they've
• 1:05:11
  had these near death experiences.
• 1:05:13
  I mean, I just read this book in December.
• 1:05:16
  Yeah. So, so the same thing that's
• 1:05:18
  been happening to me the last three years since I started
• 1:05:22
  thinking about this topic, I've met so many people with, I mean,
• 1:05:28
  I don't have count of how many people I've met who have had all
• 1:05:34
  kinds of anomalous experiences. And I, some of them are
• 1:05:41
  subjective reports which that that good materialist in me will
• 1:05:50
  not be able to categorize as something that has definitive, A
• 1:05:54
  definitive demonstration of some exogenous aspect of our
• 1:05:58
  consciousness. But then there are many of these
• 1:06:01
  stories. You know, there's this near
• 1:06:04
  Death Center in, I think it's in Wisconsin, the wood.
• 1:06:09
  They've been collecting stories and they have these stories of
• 1:06:12
  people seeing things, veridical things that they could not
• 1:06:17
  possibly have seen at any point except when they were out of
• 1:06:23
  their body. And they saw a number on a, on
• 1:06:28
  a, on a light that was hidden from everybody above the room,
• 1:06:32
  you know, above, above the operating table, or they saw
• 1:06:35
  other things. And so there are many of those
• 1:06:37
  stories and they're all anecdotal.
• 1:06:40
  And so the hardcore materialists are going to say, well, there's,
• 1:06:44
  they'll just wave it away because it's not easily
• 1:06:46
  replicable, these things. And then there are these stories
• 1:06:51
  of these savants. And they're people with wild
• 1:06:55
  stories of acquired savant syndrome.
• 1:06:58
  I know, I know one. I know a few people who either
• 1:07:02
  had deep psychedelic journeys and come away with profound
• 1:07:06
  scientific theories, which, you know, when I heard it, I hadn't
• 1:07:09
  dipped into any of this literature.
• 1:07:11
  I was just an ordinary biochemist, you know, and one
• 1:07:16
  friend of mine. I don't know if you've met
• 1:07:19
  Bruce, Bruce Damer. I know, I know of him.
• 1:07:22
  I have not personally met him. You know Bruce, Bruce told me
• 1:07:25
  his theory for the origin of life.
• 1:07:28
  And I can say this because Bruce has a center called MINDS, which
• 1:07:33
  multidisciplinary institute for Novel Discovery and Sciences,
• 1:07:37
  which is. There's no way I would have
• 1:07:39
  been. And, you know, it's, it's
• 1:07:44
  predicated on this idea that psychedelic psychedelics can
• 1:07:47
  lead to deep scientific insight. Bruce's story is absolutely
• 1:07:51
  remarkable. And you probably have them on
• 1:07:53
  here. I will, I will.
• 1:07:56
  He is on the list. It's his name continues to come
• 1:08:00
  up. His name is for sure on the
• 1:08:01
  list. I I think he's fascinating.
• 1:08:04
  And you know, Bruce, Bruce had this journey where he was taken
• 1:08:08
  back in time through all of his generations, back to the
• 1:08:14
  original hot spring pool. And this being told him, this is
• 1:08:19
  where you came from. You know, he didn't tell me all
• 1:08:22
  this. He just told me the theory.
• 1:08:24
  And I, as a biochemist and cell biologist, I I had chills.
• 1:08:30
  Maybe it has. When you have when you have
• 1:08:31
  chills, they're called Truth Funks.
• 1:08:33
  There's a great book, 11 Days in May by JD Messenger.
• 1:08:36
  He's going to be on the podcast. I've read that book twice now,
• 1:08:40
  but that is a that is a sign of your soul being more embodied in
• 1:08:45
  your physical reality and giving you a message that it's correct.
• 1:08:49
  Yeah, and, and Bruce's theory is Bruce and David Deemer.
• 1:08:56
  I I deem that the most credible origin of life theory won't go
• 1:09:00
  into it. That's a whole podcast, all
• 1:09:02
  right, but that came from a psychedelic journey.
• 1:09:05
  And then there's another one where a friend of mine who is I
• 1:09:09
  was just a wealth manager, wealth manager took high school
• 1:09:13
  physics, did a very, very profound TMT journey, almost
• 1:09:18
  accidentally, didn't really know what he was doing and ended up
• 1:09:22
  with, I won't say more than this right now because I don't want
• 1:09:26
  to dox him, profound insights and physics that were later
• 1:09:30
  validated. And I looked at it, Sabine
• 1:09:33
  Hassenvelder talked about his work and that came out of this
• 1:09:37
  100 year journey that he took in 8 minutes.
• 1:09:41
  So how do we account for that? There are all kinds of
• 1:09:44
  explanations that there's some sort of that's just endogenous
• 1:09:48
  and that's the brain unlocking some circuits that are now able
• 1:09:53
  to do math and have these insights and even those things,
• 1:09:57
  you know, the materialist can just say that's all endogenous,
• 1:10:00
  that's not exogenous, it's not coming from someplace else.
• 1:10:03
  But those are interesting and indicative.
• 1:10:06
  I mean, and then remember the the materials are asking us to
• 1:10:10
  give them the miracle of The Big Bang.
• 1:10:13
  That that's that's. True, they are asking for that.
• 1:10:15
  They're saying just accept. Well, they, they would say, they
• 1:10:18
  would say our, our, well, our analysis, you know, just by
• 1:10:22
  looking at the motion of the stars says that there is a big,
• 1:10:25
  Big Bang. So they they would.
• 1:10:27
  They also said that the universe was collapsing back in and now
• 1:10:31
  through scientific instrumentation, we've seen that
• 1:10:33
  continues to expand. That's right.
• 1:10:35
  That's right. Yes.
• 1:10:36
  So a lot of things that we used to say in science that are
• 1:10:39
  absolutely disproven today. Yeah, absolutely.
• 1:10:42
  And I would say that they wouldn't hold on to those as
• 1:10:45
  religious beliefs. They just say, well, that's
• 1:10:47
  that's what our science indicates and that's that's good
• 1:10:50
  functioning of science. But there are other things, you
• 1:10:53
  know, that the place where I think the scientific community
• 1:10:56
  is really blinkered is that they're not paying attention to
• 1:11:00
  these results because it can like consciousness is only a
• 1:11:04
  product of the operation of, you know, classical objects, neurons
• 1:11:09
  in our brains. And so these classical objects
• 1:11:11
  don't reach out into the world and find information there.
• 1:11:15
  Or do, you know, do any of these spooky things?
• 1:11:17
  Because we understand how it works.
• 1:11:19
  And that's where I think that we can know, at least at least in,
• 1:11:23
  in terms of ordinary consciousness, that it is non
• 1:11:25
  local. It has to be.
• 1:11:27
  And all of those theories are really pseudoscience.
• 1:11:31
  Like we should really understand them as true pseudoscience.
• 1:11:34
  This isn't a cultural statement. It's just an analytical
• 1:11:36
  statement as clear as day that you need non locality.
• 1:11:40
  And so now the question is how non local is non local?
• 1:11:44
  What other kinds of information is accessible?
• 1:11:46
  And then that starts opening up the frame to things that were
• 1:11:49
  just ignored and ridiculed for many years because doesn't make
• 1:11:55
  sense in the same way that Galileo pointing out what he did
• 1:12:01
  from his telescope just didn't make sense because that wasn't
• 1:12:05
  the church that was telling Galileo he was wrong.
• 1:12:07
  Those were Vatican astronomers who actually had an ontology for
• 1:12:12
  how the universe was constructed and how it was healed.
• 1:12:15
  We were in in this Earth centric universe and it his observations
• 1:12:21
  didn't make sense within that scientific theory so they
• 1:12:24
  rejected it. That was the same for a
• 1:12:27
  Copernicus. They refused to look through his
• 1:12:30
  telescope. And it.
• 1:12:31
  Affected him. And in fact, you know, the
• 1:12:33
  Ptolemaics had a much better system because they had worked
• 1:12:36
  it out over a long period of time and they had all of these
• 1:12:39
  gears that centered around the the Earth and all of the motions
• 1:12:43
  of the planets could be accounted for with more and more
• 1:12:46
  gears. And so this and his theories
• 1:12:50
  would not replicate all the results as as closely as they
• 1:12:55
  had. So, you know, they had a good
• 1:12:57
  scientific reasons, they had their ontology, they had their
• 1:13:00
  framework, and then they were rejecting something that we
• 1:13:03
  accept to be true. And so I think that that's the
• 1:13:05
  same case now that there are all of these exceptions that build
• 1:13:09
  up during a period of what's called normal science according
• 1:13:12
  to Thomas Kuhn's idea. So science goes through periods
• 1:13:17
  of of stability and then revolution, right?
• 1:13:20
  And there's a paradigm shift, I think.
• 1:13:22
  We're in a period of revolution right now.
• 1:13:25
  It is it is finally time where people are tackling the hard
• 1:13:29
  problem of consciousness with more of an openness to
• 1:13:35
  fearlessly pursue it. And that is again what science
• 1:13:39
  is supposed to be about. That is what it's supposed to be
• 1:13:41
  about. It's a scientific method.
• 1:13:44
  People conflate materialism, which is a metaphysical idea.
• 1:13:48
  It says that they're only physical objects with
• 1:13:51
  properties, and that's really all there is, and you have to
• 1:13:53
  explain things from that. But that's not what science is
• 1:13:56
  about. Science is about having
• 1:13:58
  hypotheses and doing experiments.
• 1:14:00
  It's not about metaphysical and philosophical commitments.
• 1:14:04
  And that conflation is really holding people back.
• 1:14:07
  They're very scared to say that maybe there's something else
• 1:14:12
  that we need to grapple with and that's what's stopping people
• 1:14:15
  from considering these very weird phenomenon like near death
• 1:14:20
  experiences, because it seems to fly in the face of science.
• 1:14:24
  That's coming from communities very often who aren't conversant
• 1:14:28
  with science and then often making statements that aren't
• 1:14:32
  scientific. And if this causes a clash
• 1:14:34
  between those communities, but they may be describing very
• 1:14:39
  legitimate phenomena. And if we open the frame and we
• 1:14:43
  understand, I, I think that everybody should just take to
• 1:14:45
  the bank that consciousness has to be non local.
• 1:14:48
  Now we must look at all of these other phenomena to understand
• 1:14:53
  and validate them and verify them and find the most
• 1:14:56
  compelling examples of those. So we can assess how nonlocal is
• 1:15:00
  nonlocal. What are the other kinds of
• 1:15:03
  nonlocality There might be. There are lots of rapport.
• 1:15:06
  And how exciting, right? I mean, because that's super.
• 1:15:08
  Guy whole. New Frontier, I mean, you know,
• 1:15:12
  and, and, and I do think that pursuing that frontier will
• 1:15:17
  actually unlock some of the secrets of quantum physics.
• 1:15:22
  I I think so too. That's a great way of looking at
• 1:15:24
  it, right? Because right now we have
• 1:15:28
  physics and consciousness and consciousness studies is this
• 1:15:34
  kind of fringe area that picks picks a little bits of physics
• 1:15:39
  and uses it in their theories. But I think that there's another
• 1:15:43
  way of looking at things, which is to say take consciousness
• 1:15:46
  seriously as a first class scientific phenomenon that needs
• 1:15:50
  to be explained. And then once you start doing
• 1:15:53
  that, what physics does that lead you to?
• 1:15:58
  And and that's going to be a very real question.
• 1:16:00
  Like leave aside all of these anomalous, you know, sort of
• 1:16:04
  phenomena that are being recorded.
• 1:16:06
  Just think about, just think about the the ordinary problem
• 1:16:10
  in the brain there, there, you know, there's electromagnetic
• 1:16:15
  radiation is the, you know, action potentials are produced.
• 1:16:19
  There may be other states of those systems.
• 1:16:21
  Those are physical properties that we know are mediating the
• 1:16:24
  information processing in the brain and we know that that is
• 1:16:29
  connected to consciousness. So there's a real non local
• 1:16:32
  physics problem there. And that can help.
• 1:16:36
  We might half deposit new types of fields to account for that.
• 1:16:41
  We might use the existing fields and then some of these very
• 1:16:45
  strange experiments with quantum random number generators and
• 1:16:49
  having people apparently influence them at a distance.
• 1:16:52
  I'm not claiming that that's definitely true.
• 1:16:54
  I have. There's been many studies, many,
• 1:16:56
  many studies. Mark Gobert went to school.
• 1:16:59
  He covers this in his first. Book Oh, oh, he was a Princeton.
• 1:17:02
  Oh, yeah. Oh, I didn't know that he was.
• 1:17:04
  The tennis team, I mean, he was one of the top grads, went to go
• 1:17:09
  get the dream job, etcetera. And he was a hardcore
• 1:17:12
  materialist and he was when he was 31.
• 1:17:15
  He's like nothing matters, It's just a random rock.
• 1:17:19
  There is no meaning to anything. And he became very depressed and
• 1:17:22
  he was like, I thought I was chasing this materialism, you
• 1:17:26
  know, this, you know, doing the things I'm supposed to do and
• 1:17:29
  making the money I'm supposed to make.
• 1:17:31
  And he was like, gosh, there's you got to be something beyond
• 1:17:35
  this. And that's where he turned to
• 1:17:37
  health podcast and then stumbled on this idea that consciousness
• 1:17:41
  is something you receive. And he's like, there's no way
• 1:17:44
  that's right. But he used his Wall Street
• 1:17:47
  research skills to go total meta analysis on it.
• 1:17:50
  And that's what ended up with his him, his belief that
• 1:17:54
  consciousness, something received because he approached
• 1:17:57
  it very analytically and then documented all in his books.
• 1:18:02
  Yeah, it's. Made his life much better.
• 1:18:04
  I mean, if you if, if you really get to know him.
• 1:18:06
  And it's cool that he's moved to Austin now.
• 1:18:08
  Oh, he's here. Oh yeah.
• 1:18:09
  Oh, that's. Great.
• 1:18:10
  I always told him when I first reached out to him, I first
• 1:18:13
  reached out to him on a lark because I loved his books and I
• 1:18:17
  was like, hey, I'd love to just have you come to Austin and get
• 1:18:21
  some speeches and. People, people are being drawn
• 1:18:24
  in here. Yeah.
• 1:18:25
  And he and he, he felt the energy and he like immediately
• 1:18:29
  said, yes, I'll go. Yeah.
• 1:18:31
  And he? Is a new Athens.
• 1:18:32
  Yeah, he and I became it is true.
• 1:18:34
  This is like consciousness Ground Zero in in in Austin.
• 1:18:38
  And he he came here and I told him, hey, you know, truth be
• 1:18:43
  told, part of my sneaky agenda here is I think you should move
• 1:18:47
  to Austin. You know, couldn't know that.
• 1:18:49
  I didn't know that would actually happen, but but he's
• 1:18:53
  he, I mean, he's amazing and he really has fallen in love with
• 1:18:56
  Austin and he's has moved. Here, as have I Yeah, yeah.
• 1:19:00
  I mean, we were going to leave in the first year and a half,
• 1:19:02
  and it was the people that kept us here.
• 1:19:06
  And I, this place is just so juicy, you know, people are
• 1:19:11
  really open minded and supportive and it's the perfect
• 1:19:16
  place for thinking about consciousness.
• 1:19:20
  It's amazing. You know, there was there was
• 1:19:22
  something else, Brett, in what you were talking about with
• 1:19:27
  there's that unhappy. It's kind of like an unhappy
• 1:19:32
  realism that you adopt with materialism.
• 1:19:35
  This is not a reason I I'm I'm very reluctant to adopt
• 1:19:40
  something because it's going to make me feel better if it's
• 1:19:43
  untrue, right? Of course I I.
• 1:19:46
  No, same with me you. Know like the only but but this
• 1:19:50
  this shift in my perspective entirely came from this
• 1:19:53
  analysis. I was just annoyed that people
• 1:19:55
  were saying that AI is conscious all right.
• 1:19:57
  That was it. All right, that was it.
• 1:19:58
  And I thought, no, this, this, this doesn't make any sense.
• 1:20:00
  And I started analyzing it started rejecting, you know,
• 1:20:04
  these. Philosophical arguments and
• 1:20:06
  said, well, wait, you know, what would this mean in terms of
• 1:20:09
  physics? That that was it.
• 1:20:10
  But that really led me on a very different journey.
• 1:20:14
  And it's, it's changed me. And that that I think is very
• 1:20:19
  interesting because there's a viewpoint where you look at the
• 1:20:22
  world as simply composed of material forces.
• 1:20:27
  And then you start thinking about, well, you model human
• 1:20:31
  beings as homo economicus. You think game theory is the
• 1:20:36
  rational and right way of dealing with people.
• 1:20:40
  And it just doesn't feel right. And it, it creates this unhappy
• 1:20:46
  realist kind of phenotype people that, well, this is reality.
• 1:20:52
  Facts don't care about your feelings.
• 1:20:55
  And that's what the world is. And of course you're going to be
• 1:20:58
  a little unhappy if you view things like that.
• 1:21:02
  But really thinking about consciousness and just thinking
• 1:21:06
  about what it is and realizing like it's status
• 1:21:09
  epistemologically is a really incredible thing to contemplate.
• 1:21:15
  Because once you get away from this broken and incorrect idea
• 1:21:19
  that it's just a product of complexity in our brains and you
• 1:21:23
  realize, wait, wait a minute, like even epistemologically, I
• 1:21:26
  just, I know about all of the stuff that's out there because I
• 1:21:31
  presume it's there. Actually, I don't even know it's
• 1:21:33
  there. I know that unconscious and
• 1:21:35
  Descartes talked about that. Now that's contrido ergo sum.
• 1:21:40
  That's the essence of it, that we thought about thinking rather
• 1:21:44
  than experience. I think, yeah, I think the, the
• 1:21:47
  Vedics would say I experienced, therefore I am, or that's,
• 1:21:51
  that's the, it's self luminous. That's the fundamental thing
• 1:21:55
  that we know exists and it's an epistemological perspective.
• 1:21:59
  But there's another one too, which is the ontological one,
• 1:22:02
  which is even if we grant, OK, we're matter, we are
• 1:22:08
  experiencing something. And so matter, we're touching
• 1:22:11
  the bare metal of the universe in our experience with just the
• 1:22:16
  color red, the sensations, that is a capability that's that's
• 1:22:21
  kernel code of the universe. And what that says is that the
• 1:22:25
  universe is filled with meaning. And it's a very weird, it's a
• 1:22:30
  very, very weird thing to contemplate that meanings and
• 1:22:34
  qualities are fundamental parts of the universe.
• 1:22:37
  And that's a very, very different perspective that you
• 1:22:41
  take in understanding what we're involved with that meaning.
• 1:22:45
  This is a meaning build universe and that is really that has an
• 1:22:51
  effect. This had an effect on me really
• 1:22:54
  coming to terms with that because.
• 1:22:56
  That's why I've become somewhat more spiritual.
• 1:22:58
  I mean, for for me, part of the I had a great life before, but
• 1:23:04
  part of the reason I'm happier now is I've done a lot of inner
• 1:23:08
  work. And sure, psychedelics have been
• 1:23:11
  a tool on that, but a lot of it has been reading, a lot of it
• 1:23:15
  has been meditating. A lot of it has been really
• 1:23:19
  going on this journey inside, you know, from books like Gary
• 1:23:24
  Zukov's The Seed of the Soul. He talks, you know, Oprah
• 1:23:27
  Winfrey says this most transformative book of her, her,
• 1:23:30
  of her life, you know, she really helped get him on the
• 1:23:33
  map. He was, he was kind of a hermit
• 1:23:35
  living in a cabin writing this book, not knowing if anybody
• 1:23:39
  would care about it, you know, clearly like being channeled
• 1:23:43
  through him like so many, so many spiritual texts have been.
• 1:23:48
  And he wrote this book about the a large part of the suffering in
• 1:23:53
  the world is the five sensory human being that just assumes
• 1:23:57
  that it's just what you can experience and that's all there
• 1:23:59
  is versus the multi sensory human being that has a communion
• 1:24:05
  with their soul. And if you open yourself to that
• 1:24:08
  possibility, you can actually talk with your own soul.
• 1:24:11
  And that is profound. Like to actually experience the
• 1:24:15
  sense of self in a meditation is a profound transformative
• 1:24:20
  experience. I mean that that is that's as
• 1:24:23
  profound as it gets to realize that there is a, you know, bread
• 1:24:28
  sitting in front of you and then Neil sitting in front of me, but
• 1:24:33
  that there's a soul that is having a physical experience in
• 1:24:37
  this earth school and is on a divine mission of its own that
• 1:24:42
  animates you when you find out what it is.
• 1:24:45
  You know, it takes me back to a book that's not spiritual.
• 1:24:49
  That is spiritual in a way. Man search for me.
• 1:24:52
  One of my favorite books of all time.
• 1:24:54
  Viktor Frankel, you know, four time Holocaust or four time
• 1:24:58
  concentration camp survivor during the Holocaust who says
• 1:25:02
  that the reason he was able to survive the Holocaust and all
• 1:25:07
  that suffering, I mean suffering you and I cannot imagine, you
• 1:25:11
  know, near starvation, seeing people just absolutely
• 1:25:14
  exterminated horrible, horrible things, you know, including his
• 1:25:18
  whole family, you know, essentially.
• 1:25:21
  And then makes it through to the other side of that to invent a
• 1:25:25
  whole new field of psychology called logo therapy, write
• 1:25:29
  dozens of books on the subject. Because he knew what his meaning
• 1:25:33
  was. He knew what his divine calling
• 1:25:35
  was. Now, he doesn't call it divine
• 1:25:38
  in in the book Man's Virtual Meaning.
• 1:25:41
  But he does say that when you know your purpose and you know
• 1:25:45
  your meaning, it animates you. And I often get asked, you know,
• 1:25:48
  how do you have so much energy? It's because I know why I'm
• 1:25:50
  here. I've known why I'm here on Earth
• 1:25:54
  since I was seven. I was born to change the world
• 1:25:57
  for the better through technology, and I've done that
• 1:26:00
  as a capitalist. And I've always tried to do it
• 1:26:03
  at a bigger and bigger scale with amazing people that I've
• 1:26:07
  worked with and really trying to manifest love inside of the
• 1:26:11
  companies that I've started. And I'm in the ultimate
• 1:26:15
  manifestation of my career right now because I'm operating from
• 1:26:18
  this principle that humanity has 10 to 15 years to make it.
• 1:26:24
  And I'm 95% certain that we will but make it to that age of
• 1:26:28
  abundance for all. And by all, I mean all I mean
• 1:26:31
  countries like Chad, you know, where the GDP is $660 a person
• 1:26:35
  versus our 85,800 here in the US.
• 1:26:38
  Like countries that don't have access to a lot of electricity,
• 1:26:42
  that don't have access to clean, you know, food that we take for
• 1:26:46
  granted here, that don't have access to clean weather, don't
• 1:26:50
  have access to health care. How do we help those types of
• 1:26:53
  countries? The only way we do it, frankly,
• 1:26:56
  is an acceleration with AI and robots.
• 1:26:59
  That's it. I mean, who else is going to
• 1:27:01
  care about Chad and go in? There's no money to be made in
• 1:27:04
  Chad. They have to go in with
• 1:27:08
  something that breaks the cost curve.
• 1:27:10
  You know where AII think is going to lead to a breakthrough
• 1:27:14
  in material science. Tardius.
• 1:27:17
  Yeah, Tardius, I was just listening to.
• 1:27:19
  Well, it won't. Think about the protein folding
• 1:27:21
  problem being solved by Alpha Full Yeah by Google Deep.
• 1:27:24
  Mine, they're they're now. Apply that to all mature.
• 1:27:26
  Science. Both fully automated labs.
• 1:27:29
  I was just hearing about one in Germany.
• 1:27:32
  Or is it Japan? It's either Germany or Japan,
• 1:27:35
  which just had a fully automated lab that was exploring new
• 1:27:38
  materials and came up with a new battery and it's exploring
• 1:27:42
  experiments, designing new experiments and just run on
• 1:27:47
  automation. So there is definitely going to
• 1:27:49
  be more of that. There's going to be new, new,
• 1:27:53
  certainly material science and biology, which is an area we
• 1:27:57
  invest in, is going to be hugely impacted by this.
• 1:28:01
  We are now just at the beginning stages of thinking of biology
• 1:28:06
  not as an area of study, but as an engineering platform.
• 1:28:11
  So what does that mean? Well, the earliest stages, we're
• 1:28:15
  going to have new, new drugs that are more effective.
• 1:28:20
  They're they're non-toxic and they're highly accurate.
• 1:28:25
  So those are the simple things. And then we will be and people
• 1:28:28
  are, as you know, Mika is designing cells.
• 1:28:32
  And so I'm an. Investor on Mika, Yeah.
• 1:28:33
  And so we're, I wish we were, we hadn't watched the fund yet.
• 1:28:38
  And you know, so we're going to be engineering cells, we're
• 1:28:41
  going to be engineering tissues and we're actually going to be
• 1:28:44
  engineering them, not tinkering. We're still at the tinkering
• 1:28:48
  stage doing little bits of design of molecules and proteins
• 1:28:51
  and we can engineer new functions there.
• 1:28:53
  But that's the level of control at the atomic level.
• 1:28:57
  We're essentially building water based nanotechnology.
• 1:29:00
  That's what biology is. And that's going to be a huge,
• 1:29:04
  huge change. We may have clean chemical
• 1:29:06
  plants. There are all kinds of, you
• 1:29:10
  know, a boundless future. Yeah, I think then we're gonna
• 1:29:12
  have come out of that. Yeah, and let's, let's be frank,
• 1:29:15
  like we have real serious problems, right?
• 1:29:17
  You know, with climate change is real.
• 1:29:19
  And you know, if we had unlimited energy or nearly
• 1:29:23
  unlimited energy from the sun, you know, through material
• 1:29:28
  science breakthrough like future breakthroughs and battery
• 1:29:31
  everything, you know, Mike, my good friend Pablos Holman.
• 1:29:35
  Was just think about it, Pablos sending those invest in the
• 1:29:39
  company is sending those satellites off to collect solar
• 1:29:42
  energy, yes. And his book, Deep Future,
• 1:29:45
  amazing book. I read a long review of it
• 1:29:48
  recently on on my blog and on Medium, etcetera.
• 1:29:52
  But deep future essentially says, look, the Maslow
• 1:29:55
  hierarchy, the bottom should be energy.
• 1:29:58
  And it's, it's such a brilliant observation because everything
• 1:30:02
  starts with energy. Because if we had nearly
• 1:30:05
  unlimited energy, you could desalinate the water completely
• 1:30:09
  easily. You could power an army of
• 1:30:12
  robots to go build whatever you want.
• 1:30:14
  And Chad, you know, go build all the electrical capacity that
• 1:30:18
  they need, go build all the solar farms, you know, go build
• 1:30:22
  all the healthcare that they need, you know, powered by AI
• 1:30:25
  and robots, etcetera. And that would be a beautiful
• 1:30:30
  future because you're talking about if you can develop an
• 1:30:34
  Oasis and Chad, you could develop an Oasis anywhere.
• 1:30:38
  And that is the future that I want for humanity, love for
• 1:30:44
  humanity. I have not given up on humanity
• 1:30:48
  and I never will give up on humanity again.
• 1:30:52
  That was the part that made my heart hurt at the dinner over
• 1:30:56
  here, because I think it's very dangerous to give up on
• 1:30:59
  humanity. It makes people actually start
• 1:31:02
  to say, well, AI is already conscious, you know, it's like a
• 1:31:05
  cheapening actually of humanity itself.
• 1:31:07
  They want, they want some other authority other than other
• 1:31:11
  people because trust in other humans is very low.
• 1:31:15
  And that's probably because people are committed to a very
• 1:31:19
  materialist way of thinking about their role in the world.
• 1:31:23
  And so all of these things come back to, I think understanding
• 1:31:28
  consciousness and understanding what we are and understanding
• 1:31:31
  the causes in the world are not just mechanistic, they're
• 1:31:36
  actually driven by purpose as well.
• 1:31:39
  And there's something that happens once you start taking it
• 1:31:41
  seriously and realizing this is actually a fundamental part of
• 1:31:47
  the world, not just an epiphenomenous floating on top
• 1:31:50
  of your neurons. It's not just that there's
• 1:31:53
  actually a profound truth inside, actually where dealing
• 1:31:57
  with the real stuff of the universe is awareness, at least
• 1:32:01
  at least in addition to the other things.
• 1:32:03
  Like I'm not going to make the panpsychist claim.
• 1:32:06
  I don't know, I don't want to commit to metaphysics.
• 1:32:09
  But we know that that stuff is fundamental, and that's wonder
• 1:32:13
  making. It's amazing, Yeah.
• 1:32:15
  Yeah. You actually just make you think
• 1:32:17
  of another book called Awareness by Anthony D'mello.
• 1:32:20
  Actually, Taro, the factor of 4 Sigmatic turned me on to that
• 1:32:24
  book. He's going to be on soon.
• 1:32:26
  And that book, Oh my gosh, it's, it's a, it's his lectures about
• 1:32:32
  waking up and about getting in touch with your, your soul, you
• 1:32:36
  know, with yourself. And he's like the George Carlin
• 1:32:40
  of spiritual teachers. So if you haven't listened to
• 1:32:42
  that one, Tarot says it's his favorite book out of 130 books
• 1:32:45
  he's read on spirituality. And it is so much fun.
• 1:32:50
  I've, I've recommended that book now to so many people because on
• 1:32:53
  Audible, he's, he's making you laugh out loud.
• 1:32:57
  And you know how truth is. I mean, comedy can be such a
• 1:33:00
  great truth serum, right? Comedians can actually change
• 1:33:03
  the world. You know, George Carlin, I'll
• 1:33:05
  never forget his rant on stuff. You know, my dad was big George
• 1:33:09
  Carlin. Yeah, comedy's comedy is really,
• 1:33:13
  it's quite an art form. I've only started diving into
• 1:33:17
  this here in Austin because it's such a big comedy scene.
• 1:33:19
  We went and saw Louis CK. Yeah.
• 1:33:22
  Another thing happening. We went and saw Louis CK the
• 1:33:25
  other day. Just this sidebar.
• 1:33:26
  That's awesome. That was crazy.
• 1:33:28
  That was like being in a rock concert.
• 1:33:30
  The the jokes just didn't stop and you felt like you were on a
• 1:33:34
  roller coaster at a rock concert.
• 1:33:36
  So that's. That's an amazing thing too.
• 1:33:38
  Of like how all all of these things, these cultural
• 1:33:42
  experiences I used to take as enjoyment, leisure and really
• 1:33:51
  not signifying more than that, as well as rituals, all of these
• 1:33:55
  things that people would do. I would say, you know, they're
• 1:33:58
  kind of related to our bodily functions.
• 1:34:02
  They don't really represent anything that's more substantial
• 1:34:06
  than that, all of these states of our being or enjoyments.
• 1:34:11
  And that has also changed for me because what, what I kind of
• 1:34:17
  look at this like is that these are different states of a
• 1:34:20
  fundamental field put in materialist terms.
• 1:34:24
  And exploring those states is actually really fundamental.
• 1:34:29
  It's almost like what the universe is here for is to
• 1:34:32
  explore those things. And there's a very different
• 1:34:35
  viewpoint and thinking about all of these things which affect our
• 1:34:39
  state's because I, I used to push all of these things aside,
• 1:34:42
  no comedy per SE, but you know, practices, looking inward, doing
• 1:34:48
  therapy, all these things. People have problems, they have
• 1:34:52
  to deal with it. I mean, this is a healthcare
• 1:34:54
  situation. I don't need any of that.
• 1:34:57
  And I've taken a very different view of that because it is like
• 1:35:04
  examining and exploring that is like frontier work.
• 1:35:09
  It is because, and you can only see it for yourself.
• 1:35:14
  Yeah, literally how you experience it.
• 1:35:15
  You you experience it for yourself.
• 1:35:17
  And so it's not just, it's not just some say primitive human
• 1:35:26
  activity, like there are rituals, for instance, and
• 1:35:29
  people might beat some drums and make noises.
• 1:35:32
  And I, I could take this stuff seriously.
• 1:35:35
  What are you, what are you really doing?
• 1:35:37
  You're just making some something happen in your brain,
• 1:35:41
  but it doesn't really mean anything else.
• 1:35:43
  But I take a different view of it now in that consciousness is
• 1:35:47
  a real thing, and our modality for impacting it is through
• 1:35:53
  these primate bodies. And so these things which seem
• 1:35:56
  very connected to primate rituals and primate behaviors
• 1:36:00
  are actually just the interface into that.
• 1:36:04
  And so there's a recoding of so much stuff in the world.
• 1:36:07
  And I think that that those explorations and those things
• 1:36:10
  that people do and those are expanding.
• 1:36:13
  They're becoming more important, I think, all over the world now,
• 1:36:16
  but I don't know, because my bubble is filled with these
• 1:36:20
  people and Austin is filled with these people.
• 1:36:23
  And I think that that's part of where the new economy goes once
• 1:36:28
  AI automates everything, if we can get through that, that eye
• 1:36:34
  of the needle of the economic singularity that AI represents
• 1:36:38
  as it eliminates labor because that's what it will do.
• 1:36:42
  That is its job within capitalism is to reduce cost.
• 1:36:46
  And cost comes from human labor. We are, we are on a scary
• 1:36:52
  journey into that eye of the needle.
• 1:36:55
  But on the other side, it is what makes us human, which is
• 1:37:00
  consciousness. And we already see here this
• 1:37:03
  flowering of the consciousness economy.
• 1:37:05
  And that's also something I'm really excited about.
• 1:37:08
  And I I haven't been part of that, but all my friends here
• 1:37:12
  are. Well, it's not.
• 1:37:14
  I will tell you that, you know, people tell me that I am being
• 1:37:19
  quote UN quote brave to talk about at conferences my belief
• 1:37:27
  in the divine and the unity of science and spirituality.
• 1:37:30
  And I want to be clear, like I very much believe in science and
• 1:37:34
  I think we've established that through our conversation here.
• 1:37:38
  But I very much also believe in the divine, in, in, in soul and
• 1:37:43
  spirit and the unification of those things when I talk about
• 1:37:48
  it. And I talk about the hard
• 1:37:49
  problem of consciousness in this exponential age of AI, quantum
• 1:37:54
  computing, robotics, I cannot tell you the number of people
• 1:37:58
  that come up to me afterwards thanking me.
• 1:38:00
  And these are like hardcore technologists.
• 1:38:03
  Like they're like, thank you so much for being brave enough to
• 1:38:07
  talk about these things in this way because they're feeling it.
• 1:38:11
  Do do you find that people say that here or I know there are
• 1:38:17
  places everywhere, Everywhere, everywhere, Yeah.
• 1:38:19
  So that that tells me I'm in a big bubble.
• 1:38:21
  Well, I, I do, I do think that it's happening a lot in Austin,
• 1:38:25
  which is great. You know, I was born and raised
• 1:38:27
  here. I mean the.
• 1:38:28
  Well, do you do? Do you think people saying that
• 1:38:30
  you're brave is happening here or is happening elsewhere?
• 1:38:35
  Oh, it's it. It is primarily happening
• 1:38:38
  elsewhere, but here when I give talks, I spend hours after the
• 1:38:43
  talk talking with people because so.
• 1:38:45
  Many everybody is dialed. In yes, people are so dialed in
• 1:38:49
  and you know, it's it's interesting because I don't
• 1:38:52
  feel. Brave.
• 1:38:54
  I really don't. It's, it's just, it's just real.
• 1:38:56
  Yes. And we need to talk about it.
• 1:38:58
  Yes, I, I, I just feel like I, I, one thing about me that
• 1:39:03
  people that know me really well is I have to be authentic.
• 1:39:07
  I cannot be a fraud. So I have to tell you the truth,
• 1:39:11
  I have to present myself in a very authentic way.
• 1:39:17
  Now, that doesn't mean, you know, I won't get dressed for a
• 1:39:20
  conference and try to, you know, be the avatar to fit, you know,
• 1:39:24
  some part of that. But I'm going to dress pretty
• 1:39:28
  much like I'm dressed now. You know, I'm going to be like
• 1:39:31
  comfortable and like present myself the way I would.
• 1:39:35
  I'm not going to show up at a conference in Lululemon shorts
• 1:39:38
  and a crappy T-shirt like I'd wear at home when I'm writing
• 1:39:41
  code, like I'm, you know, going to be presentable.
• 1:39:45
  But I'm going, I'm going to be very honest with people and you
• 1:39:50
  know, I and not worried about if some people just write me off as
• 1:39:56
  a result, because because I'm again, I'm operating from this
• 1:39:59
  principle. It's really important to talk
• 1:40:01
  about this principle that I'm operating from.
• 1:40:02
  I'm curious if you're operating from this principle.
• 1:40:06
  I really think that a humanity is going to make it to this age
• 1:40:09
  of abundance for all and BI think we have the next 10 to 15
• 1:40:13
  years to make it. And so if I am operating from
• 1:40:17
  this principle of working backwards from that moment,
• 1:40:20
  whatever people want to call that moment.
• 1:40:22
  You know, some people call that moment all types of things like
• 1:40:25
  the singularity, etcetera, and I think that's a misnomer for it.
• 1:40:28
  But if I'm working backwards from that point and I believe
• 1:40:32
  that that is in humanity's future, then I'm saying what can
• 1:40:36
  I do today to impact that? To hopefully make this 5% chance
• 1:40:43
  that we destroy ourselves disappear to the grace of my
• 1:40:47
  ability. And and to be clear, I'm not
• 1:40:49
  looking at myself as some kind of world savior.
• 1:40:53
  I am looking at myself as part of the light to help us make it
• 1:40:57
  there. And I believe that demisosibus
• 1:40:59
  is part of the light. I believe Mustafa Soliman is
• 1:41:03
  Doctor Fifi Lee, Mira Morati, Reed Hoffman.
• 1:41:05
  I mean Eric Schmidt Co wrote Genesis.
• 1:41:08
  You can't make up the titles of these books.
• 1:41:11
  It's called Genesis with Henry Kissinger and Craig Mundy.
• 1:41:15
  It was Henry Kissinger's dying work.
• 1:41:17
  It was a swan song to humanity. And he passed away, I think, two
• 1:41:22
  weeks after he finished writing that book.
• 1:41:25
  And that book is a prayer from Henry Kissinger for humanity to
• 1:41:29
  make it to this age, to not destroy ourselves.
• 1:41:33
  And if I was an alien, you know, and I came to Earth and I knew
• 1:41:37
  nothing about humanity, one of the things I would quickly dial
• 1:41:41
  into is that we have nuclear weapons, OK?
• 1:41:45
  And we have those for good reason.
• 1:41:47
  We needed to end World War 2. If the Nazis got it, it would
• 1:41:50
  have been would have been problematic, right?
• 1:41:53
  And so we're in an existential race versus the Nazis to save,
• 1:41:57
  you know, humanity essentially from a total totalitarian, you
• 1:42:02
  know, regime that was incredibly dehumanizing.
• 1:42:07
  And so, you know, Albert Einstein and Oppenheimer and
• 1:42:09
  others invented this very destructive technology.
• 1:42:13
  And, you know, we've all seen the movie Oppenheimer by
• 1:42:15
  Christopher Nolan. But if I just knew nothing about
• 1:42:20
  humanity, I would zero in on that threat.
• 1:42:23
  And I would say, oh, OK, they have these nuclear weapons.
• 1:42:25
  Well, how powerful is OK, They're very powerful.
• 1:42:27
  Wow. How many of them have do they
• 1:42:30
  have? And what would be your guest
• 1:42:33
  percentage wise on today's nuclear arsenal?
• 1:42:37
  How many, what percent of today's nuclear arsenal do you
• 1:42:40
  think it would take to destroy all the major cities in the
• 1:42:43
  world and send humanity and all the animals on this planet into
• 1:42:47
  a nuclear winter that last at least a decade?
• 1:42:49
  And I'm. Pretty sure I I've heard this
• 1:42:52
  and it's some tiny fraction of it, like 1 or 2% that's. 2%
• 1:42:57
  yeah, OK, Most people that I asked this, I guess 20 percent.
• 1:43:01
  50%. So we have 50 times more nuclear
• 1:43:05
  weapons than would be needed to essentially wipe out humanity
• 1:43:09
  and so many creatures on this earth.
• 1:43:12
  And then you could ask yourself, well, is humanity still building
• 1:43:18
  these? And the answer is sadly, yes.
• 1:43:21
  China's never been building more.
• 1:43:24
  And then you could ask yourself, what's the what is this called?
• 1:43:27
  Do you know what it's called? There's an acronym for.
• 1:43:29
  It No. Oh, mutually assured
• 1:43:31
  destruction? Yes.
• 1:43:32
  What is what is that? What is that?
• 1:43:34
  Mad? Mad.
• 1:43:35
  It's insane. Yeah.
• 1:43:37
  And it's a disease, right? And humanity is playing a
• 1:43:40
  psychological trick on each other saying look, if I have the
• 1:43:43
  most destructive toys, that if you screw with my playground.
• 1:43:48
  I will literally just same theory.
• 1:43:51
  It's game Terry right and that that's that's where it's coming
• 1:43:54
  from. It's coming from a rational
• 1:43:56
  calculus, right? A limited.
• 1:43:58
  Calculus, real weapons, yes, like these are not fake weapons.
• 1:44:01
  Oh yeah. You know, if it's very material,
• 1:44:03
  if people want to write me off, you know, watching this say, OK,
• 1:44:06
  well, I don't believe in near death experiences and I don't
• 1:44:10
  believe in any of this stuff. Well, this is very real.
• 1:44:13
  This is very real science, 2%. And this, this is a disease that
• 1:44:19
  humanity has to transcend and it has to transcend it while we're
• 1:44:25
  dealing with the most exponential technology curve in
• 1:44:28
  the history of humanity. And the way I view this period,
• 1:44:33
  and it's a very real vision I received.
• 1:44:35
  And it's actually the first short story in the lattice.
• 1:44:38
  It's it's it really is God's final exam for humanity.
• 1:44:41
  Now whether you want to look at that as nature or consciousness
• 1:44:43
  or whatever, whatever you want to call that, I believe that
• 1:44:48
  it's God working through us. And then we have, when we have
• 1:44:52
  that divine spark, and I've had that divine spark in every
• 1:44:55
  company I've started. I've had that just, I know this
• 1:44:59
  is it. I know this is right.
• 1:45:00
  I know this is where technology is going to go.
• 1:45:04
  And I credit that as part of the divine.
• 1:45:07
  And it's, I've been divinely guided in my career and I'm
• 1:45:11
  being divinely guided now. And so when you have that, you
• 1:45:17
  know, knowledge that God is working through us and God is
• 1:45:21
  testing us and saying with power that is God like, what will you
• 1:45:26
  do with it? Are you going to use it for good
• 1:45:28
  to create a world of abundance for all and realize that we're
• 1:45:31
  all essentially genetically the same and that we need to
• 1:45:35
  deprogram and create that beautiful, you know, merger of
• 1:45:39
  whether you look at it metaphorical or mystical, of
• 1:45:41
  heaven and earth coming together, which has been
• 1:45:43
  prophesied in every ancient spiritual tradition that I want
• 1:45:48
  that world for us, right? I and and that alternative is a
• 1:45:53
  world working with tools this powerful of death and
• 1:45:57
  destruction and the the job dislocation is a very real
• 1:46:02
  issue, but it creates very real possibilities of abundance that
• 1:46:11
  we won't need to worry about. On the other side or on the
• 1:46:15
  other side? We have to make it.
• 1:46:18
  We have to make it through it and now it's going to be tough.
• 1:46:20
  That is tough. You know I'm writing.
• 1:46:21
  About it in a very real way in my book.
• 1:46:25
  My book is called Love, Conquer Spear with the subtitle
• 1:46:28
  Humanity, AI and the Age of Abundance for All.
• 1:46:30
  And I'm tackling the biggest problems we have to solve.
• 1:46:33
  So I, I don't want to act like it's all loving rainbows, you
• 1:46:36
  know, I mean, I know they're, I suppose love conquer sphere, but
• 1:46:39
  it's going to be tough to get to make it through this period.
• 1:46:41
  But it's the ultimate test, you know, whether you look at it as
• 1:46:44
  the evolutionary test, I mean, you know, Earth has been around
• 1:46:48
  for 4.54 billion years, The sun has been around for 4.6 billion
• 1:46:54
  years. Life on Earth has been around
• 1:46:56
  for 4 billion years. Hominids have been around for
• 1:46:59
  4,000,000 years. So we're blip in evolutionary
• 1:47:02
  timescale and Homo sapiens even shorter, 250,000 years.
• 1:47:06
  And one of the things my good friend Byron Reese told me, he's
• 1:47:10
  going to be on this podcast too. I love his books, by the way.
• 1:47:14
  But he's, you know, he's a real futurist and a very good
• 1:47:17
  historian. And he told me that there was a
• 1:47:20
  point in time that Homo sapiens was down to 800 to several 1000
• 1:47:25
  people 50 to 70,000 years ago. I didn't know that.
• 1:47:28
  OK, I'm, I'm glad you know that because most people I tell don't
• 1:47:32
  know that. And so if our core nature was
• 1:47:34
  just to be evil, that would have been it.
• 1:47:37
  Human experiment over, right? We're in the Ice Age.
• 1:47:39
  There was a super volcano event, blacked out the sun and the
• 1:47:43
  skies where we were really suffering.
• 1:47:45
  And we, we came together. So that is our core nature and
• 1:47:51
  we don't stop to get back to being to human.
• 1:47:54
  We need to transcend. And I think the amazing thing
• 1:47:58
  is, you know, I believe in reincarnation is that you and I
• 1:48:03
  chose to reincarnate in this lifetime to tackle this issue.
• 1:48:11
  That's kind of mind blowing of itself.
• 1:48:14
  Many people are being drawn to this cause.
• 1:48:17
  And it's for sure, it's a strange, it's amazing.
• 1:48:19
  Who's showing up for me right now?
• 1:48:20
  It is so many people amazing in my life.
• 1:48:23
  It's constantly. Constantly.
• 1:48:24
  My and and yours. Yours too.
• 1:48:26
  My, mine too. And I, you know, I had.
• 1:48:29
  A conversation with them. I, I remembered in my mind's eye
• 1:48:34
  walking around Lake Austin. We started at the library.
• 1:48:39
  He said that the message that he received is that the frequency
• 1:48:42
  and intensity will increase. It was just at the beginning,
• 1:48:46
  like days, days into the beginning of whatever's
• 1:48:52
  happening in my life right now. And you know, I listened to that
• 1:48:57
  and I had confirmation of some of the things that he had
• 1:49:01
  experienced or, or remarkably similar to things that I
• 1:49:05
  learned, very anomalous things. And that is what I've
• 1:49:09
  experienced. The frequency intensity of
• 1:49:13
  people's experiences and the number of people who are being
• 1:49:18
  called into this field to work on this, to work on how how we
• 1:49:24
  get through that, how we evolve to a next step.
• 1:49:28
  Because our current mode of operating is obviously very
• 1:49:33
  broken and everybody feels it. And so there's material 'cause
• 1:49:37
  you could say that people are responding to that, but there
• 1:49:40
  are anomalous experiences that people are having that are
• 1:49:43
  driving them into this many, many of them.
• 1:49:46
  And that's very weird. And that it's very beautiful.
• 1:49:50
  It's also very beautiful. And you know, a friend of mine,
• 1:49:53
  I look at it as part of the divine awakening us.
• 1:49:59
  Who was a friend of? Mine, my first, I sort of
• 1:50:05
  experienced I, I guess in this, in this most recent part of my
• 1:50:10
  life, a series of profound synchronicities and weird
• 1:50:15
  understanding. It's about consciousness,
• 1:50:20
  recently said to me. Love has already won, and that's
• 1:50:25
  a very different perspective on all of us.
• 1:50:28
  It's not, it's. Not a struggle.
• 1:50:30
  Or a fight. I heard this, by the way, this
• 1:50:32
  weekend. Did you?
• 1:50:33
  Yes. From a woman who's deeply.
• 1:50:35
  Deeply. Connected to source and
• 1:50:37
  spirituality and that and that's that's the perspective love has
• 1:50:41
  already it's already in the future and she.
• 1:50:44
  Says I've seen it and it. Already did win and you know,
• 1:50:49
  time we know is an illusion like you know, you you you kind of
• 1:50:53
  touched on time earlier, but if someone is just wants to take a
• 1:50:57
  science based approach to time, they should read the order of
• 1:51:01
  time. Yes, by rebelling yes, I love
• 1:51:03
  that button. Oh my gosh, it's narrated by
• 1:51:06
  Benedict Cumberbatch. Yes, did I I recommended that to
• 1:51:09
  you, didn't I? I don't know you may have.
• 1:51:11
  I think I know. I appreciate it.
• 1:51:13
  It's it's one of my favorites now.
• 1:51:14
  Yeah, I, I'm. Pretty sure actually you are
• 1:51:16
  probably right. You probably did recommend it.
• 1:51:18
  I apologize, I didn't remember that.
• 1:51:20
  It's cool that I brought it up there.
• 1:51:22
  You know, that's, that's really one of my favorite books too,
• 1:51:24
  because don't mind Ben and it's mystical.
• 1:51:27
  Yeah, he. Doesn't write it to be mystical,
• 1:51:29
  he writes it to just three sides.
• 1:51:31
  You know, talking about the illusion of time.
• 1:51:34
  I mean, he talks about the order of time, but.
• 1:51:36
  Essentially. And the order of time entirely
• 1:51:40
  comes from the ability. To perceive that is to be able
• 1:51:46
  to detect properties, which would you, you need to have
• 1:51:50
  properties that you can detect so that you can see entropy,
• 1:51:54
  because entropy is defined in terms of disorder.
• 1:51:57
  But what defines disorder is the arrangement of things according
• 1:52:01
  to properties. And so, you know, it opens up,
• 1:52:04
  he kind of just very opens up the door just slightly to
• 1:52:08
  saying, if you had a different set of properties that you were
• 1:52:11
  perceiving, there could be a different order of time, because
• 1:52:16
  that's the only place that we get an ordering within our
• 1:52:19
  physics, as far as we know it. It's just according to seeing
• 1:52:24
  this thing that we call entropy increasing, but you know, from a
• 1:52:28
  different perspective, you might have different types of entropy
• 1:52:31
  increasing or different kinds of orderings of time.
• 1:52:35
  And so that that's a very deeply mind blowing perspective.
• 1:52:39
  And in in that book ends in such a loving way because it really.
• 1:52:44
  Ends with discovery of the South.
• 1:52:45
  Yeah. You know, it's almost like the
• 1:52:48
  Gita and science book. Long time.
• 1:52:52
  It's really, really amazing. So I want to shift just for a
• 1:52:55
  moment and go to more about your fund because I find your fund
• 1:53:00
  really fascinating. And my opinion of your fund is
• 1:53:06
  that it's part of the light for us to make it to the age of
• 1:53:11
  abundance for all. So tell me about your fond.
• 1:53:14
  I know you you, you work on it with your wife.
• 1:53:17
  We started thinking about this right before.
• 1:53:22
  ChatGPT head and I did a dive on what was happening in AI and why
• 1:53:30
  was, you know, I gotten signals that was much more effective
• 1:53:34
  this time and I'd known about AI since the 90s and it was never
• 1:53:39
  very exciting. AI, the deep learning kind, was
• 1:53:44
  just kind of a statistical toolkit, just like all kinds of
• 1:53:47
  machine learning technologies like support vector machines and
• 1:53:51
  you know, all the whole smorgasbord of different
• 1:53:56
  analytical and data analysis techniques, you know, and so
• 1:54:00
  you'd use AI for classifying and now there was something else
• 1:54:03
  that was happening. And also the other problem was
• 1:54:06
  you can only do shallow networks.
• 1:54:09
  You couldn't really do deep networks.
• 1:54:10
  There's this thing called a vanishing gradient problem.
• 1:54:12
  I heard that had been solved and there were some other things
• 1:54:15
  happening that were interesting. And I read the attention is all
• 1:54:18
  you need paper to really understand what all the pieces
• 1:54:22
  of the technology, all those bits of technology that
• 1:54:25
  contributed to that and why was it working?
• 1:54:28
  Why? Why was it doing something
• 1:54:30
  interesting? And that really LED us to think
• 1:54:34
  that that made me realize how general these insights were.
• 1:54:39
  One of them is actually just a dirty hack, as it turns out,
• 1:54:42
  which is this thing called the LRU, which is basically an FN
• 1:54:49
  statement. And it it violates the beautiful
• 1:54:52
  mathematics that's behind the chain rule.
• 1:54:56
  And it says simply that if a value is less than 0, then set
• 1:55:01
  it to 0. So you can't integrate something
• 1:55:03
  like that. Calculus doesn't work on it.
• 1:55:06
  Then statement seems very problematic to my mathematics.
• 1:55:09
  Yeah, it is very problematic. Is my favorite subject and.
• 1:55:13
  And and this this fixes the vanishing gradient.
• 1:55:17
  Problem so you you actually can build much deeper networks.
• 1:55:21
  And I think that this is an unsung hero of AII.
• 1:55:25
  Don't think people think about that a lot.
• 1:55:26
  And then that really made me realize something that these
• 1:55:30
  techniques in Transformers, but also all kinds of techniques in
• 1:55:34
  AI would become much more powerful because you'd actually
• 1:55:38
  be able to build deep learning. And my perspective on what was
• 1:55:42
  happening in the tech space was that you're dealing with complex
• 1:55:46
  data structure and there are many complex data structures
• 1:55:50
  that can produce value in the world.
• 1:55:52
  In fact, even Chachi PT is kind of an example of applying AI to
• 1:55:56
  biological data because language comes from us and we're biology.
• 1:56:01
  So it is biological data and there's lots of biological data
• 1:56:05
  and it is the most complex data we have, amongst the most and
• 1:56:11
  arguably the most. We just don't know it all yet.
• 1:56:13
  And that made me realize that there was going to be a huge
• 1:56:17
  application of AI to the life sciences and that, you know,
• 1:56:22
  that's that's an idea that people have talked about.
• 1:56:24
  And Steve Jobs, before he died, was saying that the greatest
• 1:56:29
  technology of the next century, it's going to be an intersection
• 1:56:32
  of computer science and biology. And now, you know, here
• 1:56:35
  Schmidt's writing about this and saying that, you know, biology
• 1:56:38
  is ready for its ChatGPT moment or we should be ready for that.
• 1:56:43
  And Jensen Huang has made similar statements.
• 1:56:46
  SoftBank called the next trillion dollar industry.
• 1:56:50
  And there is a there was a sense that there is we're right at the
• 1:56:55
  beginning of a new it's not just a new technology platform.
• 1:57:00
  This is a new era. And I started thinking about
• 1:57:04
  that era as the age of biology, where this is not just an area
• 1:57:10
  of study that's coming out of, you know, the academic
• 1:57:13
  institutions. And we're figuring things out.
• 1:57:15
  We're actually going to be doing things with us.
• 1:57:17
  And that's going to define a huge aspect of our future as
• 1:57:22
  humans. And, you know, they're the low
• 1:57:25
  hanging fruit, which are new drugs, new cells, you know,
• 1:57:29
  cells. There are therapies,
• 1:57:31
  understanding our own health, optimizing our health and all
• 1:57:35
  kinds of things which are really edgy and challenging, but which
• 1:57:39
  I think are also going to come into the market, which is
• 1:57:42
  modifying ourselves. And I, I know that that's,
• 1:57:46
  that's going to be very triggering for some people, but
• 1:57:48
  I think that's naturally going to come out.
• 1:57:50
  I mean, I'm modified right now. I am a product of technology.
• 1:57:56
  In this eye I have -6.5 vision in this eye of -6 and somewhere
• 1:58:01
  in contact lenses. So I'm already an augmented
• 1:58:03
  human being, yes. And, and I, you know, could put
• 1:58:06
  me 200 years ago. I don't know if I'd be a scribe
• 1:58:09
  like. Working at this level because
• 1:58:10
  that's. All I could see without my
• 1:58:12
  contacts, I don't know what I would be doing but you know,
• 1:58:17
  it's liberating, right, that I have this technology.
• 1:58:19
  So I think it's inevitable that we're augmented in some ways.
• 1:58:23
  I think I mean, look, agriculture is highly unnatural
• 1:58:28
  if we. Were to go go, go back we should
• 1:58:32
  be hunter gatherers because agriculture is very weird and
• 1:58:37
  unnatural thing people are actually very sick at the
• 1:58:39
  beginning of the agricultural era.
• 1:58:43
  And I think, you know, I I have that tension there's there's
• 1:58:48
  something very triggering with dealing with biology, but I
• 1:58:51
  think that the future for us is very great in that and they're
• 1:58:55
  also very many fundamental problems in biotech.
• 1:58:59
  You know we fail 90 to 95% of the time in clinical trials.
• 1:59:04
  That's because we're tinkering. We, you know, there's a very
• 1:59:07
  traditional model of drug development, which is, you know,
• 1:59:10
  biotechs by and large and painting with A broad brush are
• 1:59:15
  things which discover the biology which that in
• 1:59:19
  traditional pharma companies and medicinal chemistry says we're
• 1:59:24
  going to do the same thing that we've done for few 100 years,
• 1:59:28
  which is develop small molecule compounds.
• 1:59:30
  And that is a very old, ancient broken system that's driven by
• 1:59:36
  human medicinal chemists developing drugs in a kind of
• 1:59:39
  cottage industry fashion. And there's so much complexity
• 1:59:43
  that humans really can't design of the things that nature
• 1:59:46
  designs, which tend to be larger, more complicated and
• 1:59:50
  much more precise. And so that's the opportunity
• 1:59:53
  that AI gives us. So we're going to have drugs
• 1:59:56
  which tend to be less toxic, less and less toxic, more
• 2:00:00
  engineer able, we'll be able to solve disease much better and
• 2:00:04
  we'll be able to lead healthier lives as a result of this.
• 2:00:09
  The other side of the fund is also thinking about and and.
• 2:00:12
  Tell me the name of the fund together.
• 2:00:13
  It's called Humane Ventures MAIN.
• 2:00:17
  And the other side of it too is. You know, you know, people ask
• 2:00:20
  us, oh, so you're a Med tech fund or you're a healthcare
• 2:00:24
  fund? We're not a healthcare fund.
• 2:00:27
  We specifically stay away from investing in anything in the
• 2:00:31
  healthcare industry, which just sounds weird because we're
• 2:00:35
  investing in life science and surely that touches the
• 2:00:37
  healthcare industry. And one of the things that you
• 2:00:40
  know, I, I wrote a paper about this.
• 2:00:42
  Actually, I, I should share it with you.
• 2:00:44
  I don't, I don't think I have it on your sub stack.
• 2:00:46
  OK. And in terms of announcing the
• 2:00:48
  fund and and the thesis for the fund is.
• 2:00:50
  Yeah, this. So this is actually about an A
• 2:00:52
  model for insurance and I haven't seen that, Yeah.
• 2:00:56
  You know, there's another thing that we've been thinking about
• 2:00:58
  is that we didn't want to invest in the existing healthcare
• 2:01:03
  industry because, you know, it is the cause, the number one
• 2:01:07
  cause of personal bankruptcies in the US and #1 cause did not
• 2:01:11
  know that. I mean, there is something and
• 2:01:13
  that makes sense because like cancer can cause.
• 2:01:16
  Over $1,000,000 to. In this country, yes, that's.
• 2:01:19
  Right. And you know, there are all of
• 2:01:21
  these costs and these costs. Are actually coming from
• 2:01:24
  underlying incentive structures we didn't want to participate in
• 2:01:29
  that we didn't want to participate in just adding to
• 2:01:33
  the power of an industry that was harming people's finances.
• 2:01:38
  And so there's a way out of that.
• 2:01:40
  And I think that though that place is in thinking about
• 2:01:44
  direct to consumer health, that's not the solution.
• 2:01:48
  Of course, that's just a part of the solution.
• 2:01:50
  But the right model of Healthcare is AI driven direct
• 2:01:54
  to consumer with lower expense, but also with the right
• 2:01:59
  incentives because the incentives right now are to sell
• 2:02:02
  you something and you profit because people are sick.
• 2:02:07
  But the right healthcare system should be incentivized for long
• 2:02:11
  and healthy lives. And so that's something I've
• 2:02:13
  been writing about, thinking about talking with folks of the
• 2:02:17
  government about, about how do we structure healthcare system
• 2:02:23
  that promotes that, that also uses the power of the market to
• 2:02:28
  incentivize innovation to do that.
• 2:02:31
  And so if we can do that, that will be very powerful and good
• 2:02:35
  for humanity. And so we're investing now in
• 2:02:37
  technologies that are going to be part of that new place, which
• 2:02:41
  is, which are things which directly deliver preventive and
• 2:02:46
  longevity healthcare to consumers.
• 2:02:49
  And that's kind of how we think about that side of it.
• 2:02:51
  And you know, my, my, my partner Linda started 23andMe.
• 2:02:56
  So she's been very deeply involved in digital health.
• 2:02:59
  You know, she was the first US advisor for the Aura Ring, and I
• 2:03:04
  was first on the first director, independent board director at
• 2:03:08
  Rock Health, which launched the digital health revolution, or as
• 2:03:12
  a friend of mine. And wow, it's great to see how
• 2:03:14
  good. Yeah, they're doing great.
• 2:03:16
  They're really, really passionate right now.
• 2:03:18
  Yeah. And I think that they're, I'm
• 2:03:19
  not a investor, but new fan. Yeah, Yeah.
• 2:03:21
  It's a great, I mean it's a great company and just thinking
• 2:03:24
  about those. Modalities that people can use
• 2:03:26
  in their everyday. Lives and that are going to
• 2:03:29
  improve their health and that enable them to be free and also
• 2:03:34
  prevent disease that's the right incentive so we're really
• 2:03:40
  interested in those kinds of things that's cool that's really
• 2:03:43
  cool and you know thinking about your.
• 2:03:47
  Background, like, you know, you coming here today and us being
• 2:03:52
  able to do this and all the things that have led up to you
• 2:03:55
  being you today, like going back in time, what were your biggest
• 2:04:00
  influences? Like who was the young and Neil,
• 2:04:03
  you know, and what were all the things, you know, the no, we
• 2:04:06
  don't have that's a long that's a long story.
• 2:04:08
  But what? What were the biggest influences
• 2:04:11
  that led to you? You know, evolving.
• 2:04:14
  To who you are today and and, and and saying this is my
• 2:04:17
  calling. Well, you know this calling
• 2:04:21
  unconsciousness that I I put it aside.
• 2:04:23
  For a very long time, I, I really just put aside thinking
• 2:04:29
  about these topics and just became pure materialist,
• 2:04:34
  rationalist and scientist for about 20 years.
• 2:04:38
  But when I was young, I remember there was this time when I, I
• 2:04:42
  grew up in Saskatchewan and the Gideons handed up Bibles in
• 2:04:48
  elementary school and I had one of those little red Bibles and I
• 2:04:52
  took it home and I went into my closet and I read it secretly.
• 2:04:56
  I don't know why I was reading it secretly.
• 2:04:57
  I just thought I, I'd have questions to answer from the
• 2:05:01
  parents if I was caught with is what am I doing reading this
• 2:05:04
  Bible? So I was reading it and I was
• 2:05:06
  trying to make sense of it. I couldn't make, I couldn't
• 2:05:08
  make, you know, hide or tail of, of this, of the statements that
• 2:05:13
  were in there. But I knew something that was
• 2:05:15
  about good and bad. I knew it was all about
• 2:05:18
  morality. I was trying to figure it out
• 2:05:20
  and I started thinking about that, you know, put, put the
• 2:05:24
  Bible away and start thinking about that when I was around 10.
• 2:05:28
  And I somehow realized that our conscious experience is the
• 2:05:35
  whole reason that anything is valuable because that's where
• 2:05:39
  values reside. And so I realized, oh, it's this
• 2:05:43
  consciousness stuff. So I had this kind of
• 2:05:45
  consciousness realization moment when I was 10 and then I
• 2:05:50
  constructed this crazy of itself.
• 2:05:53
  By the way, is a act of sentience and an act of
• 2:05:57
  conscious. Yeah, that's right.
• 2:05:58
  So I I knew at least at 10, I was conscious to think deeply
• 2:06:02
  like that. And have a experience and a
• 2:06:05
  realization. About consciousness, when you're
• 2:06:07
  right in depends on you actually being conscious.
• 2:06:10
  It does. So that's proof I was conscious
• 2:06:12
  at 10 at the very least. But I was, I was we talk about.
• 2:06:16
  This with machines it's just kind of a funny aside and then
• 2:06:19
  but but you know I was also very.
• 2:06:20
  Stupid. And I thought, oh, consciousness
• 2:06:24
  comes. From complexity in the brain I
• 2:06:26
  have, I have that dumb idea in my head and I thought, I thought
• 2:06:31
  that, you know, the valuable thing to do is to create more of
• 2:06:36
  that type of complexity which would give rise to more
• 2:06:39
  consciousness that has to be the ground for what is valuable.
• 2:06:44
  That was my thinking, and I got so bound up in this Benthamite
• 2:06:50
  kind of version of what I should do next.
• 2:06:55
  And I had no idea what to do and I was emotionally and mentally
• 2:07:01
  paralyzed for about 3 weeks. Like I was really in
• 2:07:04
  psychological distress. And I said, OK, we're going to
• 2:07:07
  stop that, right? So that was kind of like an
• 2:07:10
  origination point for that. And you know, I touched the.
• 2:07:14
  Frontier. And it was a little bit too hot.
• 2:07:16
  Yeah, that's right. That's right.
• 2:07:20
  But you know, then you know, I grew up as a.
• 2:07:22
  Good, good Indian boy in Saskatchewan where all the
• 2:07:26
  doctors are Indians and all the Indians are doctors.
• 2:07:29
  And when, when my uncles and aunties would ask me so any
• 2:07:35
  about what are you specializing in?
• 2:07:38
  That had a precise answer. It was a specialty of medicine.
• 2:07:42
  So that's that's why I studied biology really.
• 2:07:45
  But I was computing the whole way around because my my dad
• 2:07:48
  tricked me when I was young because I wanted an Atari and I
• 2:07:53
  I had an Atari. Yeah.
• 2:07:55
  See. See.
• 2:07:56
  Your dad got you that. I I didn't get.
• 2:07:58
  No, I'm sorry. My mom.
• 2:07:59
  It was my mom, no. I I didn't get an Atari, I got
• 2:08:01
  AI got I got a trash 80 color computer.
• 2:08:04
  Oh yeah, and my. Dad said, you know it has games
• 2:08:06
  on it. Do you rest 80?
• 2:08:07
  But yeah, we did call it the trash 80.
• 2:08:09
  Oh, they never had one. They had the worst games.
• 2:08:11
  The the worst games. They just.
• 2:08:12
  Have the worst and so I learned how to program.
• 2:08:15
  Yeah, that, that's why I learned how to program 1979.
• 2:08:17
  I was, I was tricked into it basically by my dad.
• 2:08:20
  I think he kind of like chuckled about it.
• 2:08:22
  Because he knew. He, he, I think he kind of knew.
• 2:08:25
  He kind of knew. That's actually kind of so.
• 2:08:29
  So then, you know, I started typing in games.
• 2:08:32
  And basic and that and. That's how I got started with
• 2:08:35
  computing. And you know, after that and
• 2:08:37
  grad school and all the way through, I was just writing code
• 2:08:41
  and you know, I built automated microscope regs and
• 2:08:47
  deconvolution on three-dimensional fluorescent
• 2:08:51
  images and recovered the recovered the structure of these
• 2:08:55
  three-dimensional cells and was doing algorithms there.
• 2:08:59
  And then I ended up at Millennium Pharmaceuticals where
• 2:09:01
  I did more of the same and also built life science innovations
• 2:09:05
  there. So that, you know, for me, the
• 2:09:09
  science was always about technology.
• 2:09:13
  And that was the interesting thing for me was the technology.
• 2:09:15
  I didn't want to just discover that I, I could would say that
• 2:09:20
  I, I'd be happy reading 100 postdoc lives in one line of a
• 2:09:25
  New York Times article. I really cared if, if the
• 2:09:29
  outcome was something that I could use, that I was interested
• 2:09:32
  in it. And that's why I ended up at
• 2:09:35
  Millennium, which was doing, you know, they're, they're the kind
• 2:09:38
  of the first company really doing high throughput biology at
• 2:09:41
  scale. And that for me was the promised
• 2:09:44
  land because pipetting small amounts of, you know, 5
• 2:09:47
  microliters of liquid from a tube to a tube seemed like
• 2:09:50
  insanity. I just wanted to stop that after
• 2:09:53
  grad school. And so using robots and
• 2:09:56
  developing new techniques for doing biology at scale.
• 2:09:59
  And back then it was discovery biology.
• 2:10:02
  And that's what Millennium Score technology business was all
• 2:10:05
  about. And they were third biggest
• 2:10:07
  genome sequencing operation during the human genome era.
• 2:10:12
  And did you know the biggest deals at the time with Bayer and
• 2:10:15
  Aventis and all the big pharma companies?
• 2:10:17
  And I was part of, I was lucky enough to be part of the process
• 2:10:21
  technology core. And that is, you know, those
• 2:10:24
  those places are rare because most of biotech and pharma are
• 2:10:30
  scientists. They're biologists who were
• 2:10:32
  doing biology and they understand all the details of
• 2:10:36
  the pathways. But this kind of crew of people
• 2:10:40
  where you have physicists and engineers and computer
• 2:10:42
  scientists and sort of Jack of all trades types like me, that
• 2:10:47
  creates this ability to invent new technologies, which then do
• 2:10:52
  these, you know, which level up our ability to interrogate
• 2:10:56
  biology or now do things with biology.
• 2:10:58
  And so that really has informed how I think about things there.
• 2:11:02
  There aren't too many folks like that like and that's the
• 2:11:05
  community that really needs to be built in this area, both for
• 2:11:09
  the investment side and that is what's coming out of the
• 2:11:11
  universities. So the founders in this space,
• 2:11:14
  this tech bio space as we call it, like technology biology, not
• 2:11:18
  biology driven tech, which is the old world.
• 2:11:26
  This this space is more like Silicon Valley in that the
• 2:11:30
  founders tend to have integrated in their own minds a whole bunch
• 2:11:36
  of different approaches. And they may change the way they
• 2:11:39
  approach say drug discovery. And that doesn't really happen
• 2:11:43
  with a big team in a kind of committee setting.
• 2:11:47
  You know, the drug industry, the pharma industry has, you know,
• 2:11:51
  very standard pipeline stages. And they have specialists in
• 2:11:56
  each of those stages. And if you want to break the
• 2:11:58
  mold, it looks more like what innovators in Silicon Valley do.
• 2:12:02
  They just have a new idea and they can do it quickly.
• 2:12:05
  And they bring a whole bunch of technologies and change the way
• 2:12:10
  out of the way they approach the discovery process.
• 2:12:13
  That is a very, very important place for us to be investing.
• 2:12:19
  And so that's really what the fund is.
• 2:12:21
  And like how I came to it and how Linda came to it as well,
• 2:12:26
  because she was also in science. She was at the first gene ship
• 2:12:30
  company called Affymetrix and was involved in, you know,
• 2:12:35
  finding the variations in the human genome.
• 2:12:37
  And that's what at this company called Prologen where they were
• 2:12:41
  mapping, they were doing the very first genome wide
• 2:12:44
  association studies and that as well as her finding the spit
• 2:12:50
  tubes at some industry conference.
• 2:12:53
  And I said you can get DNA from spit.
• 2:12:55
  And she didn't believe it. She went back to the company,
• 2:12:58
  they told her to spit into it and then they ran her DNA and it
• 2:13:02
  worked. And that gave her the actually,
• 2:13:04
  it was actually the pushback from HR who said you have to
• 2:13:07
  sign all these forms before we give you your data.
• 2:13:10
  What are you going to do with that?
• 2:13:11
  And then she said we should have something like 23 of me.
• 2:13:14
  And that's how that got started. Yeah.
• 2:13:16
  But what a background. I mean, that's that's
• 2:13:18
  incredible. Well, the world is much better
• 2:13:20
  for you being in it. And I look forward, brother, to
• 2:13:24
  working alongside you and hopefully we bring in the age of
• 2:13:27
  abundance for all together and all the other people bringing
• 2:13:30
  the light to do it. So this was awesome.
• 2:13:32
  Yeah. Thanks again.
• 2:13:33
  Yeah, you bet. So thanks again everybody for
• 2:13:37
  tuning in to Love Conquer Spear. Stay tuned.
• 2:13:41
  I've got a huge line up of spiritual teachers,
• 2:13:45
  philosophers, scientists and investors, entrepreneurs.
• 2:13:50
  I'm loving doing this and I hope you're loving the journey as
• 2:13:54
  well. And hopefully a lot of you out
• 2:13:56
  there are getting inspired to, you know, join some of the
• 2:13:59
  ventures that I've been talked about on here or go out there
• 2:14:03
  and be a part of the light yourself or explore some of the
• 2:14:06
  books that I had mentioned on the podcast to really dive into
• 2:14:11
  these subjects. I mean, it's really interesting
• 2:14:13
  mash up of topics, you know, that I've been diving into with
• 2:14:17
  AI, quantum computing, consciousness, and of course
• 2:14:20
  spirituality and seeing the synchronicity and all of those
• 2:14:24
  things have been absolutely fascinating.
• 2:14:27
  Thanks a lot. See you next time.