Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / The Buzz: A Panel About the Future

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The Buzz: A Panel About the Future · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

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  G'day, humans. This is Uncomfortable Conversations. Welcome to The Bugs, which is technically a
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  panel chat show about science and tech-related news, but which actually uses nerd headlines
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  to discuss bigger questions of life at the universe and everything my co-chatterers.
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  Today, Joel Pearson and Radio, Joel Eure and Inventorate frequent guests this week.
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  It's just that by accident that you're on science.
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  We're not actually... More skeptical people will think that we're recording this
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  on the same day and being lazy, but there's actually a two-month gap between your last two
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  years from white to black. If you can't see Joel's t-shirt, you have to come to YouTube
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  instead of listening to the podcast and you'll see Joel's beautiful face and also the beautiful
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  face of Rad. Hello, Rad. Hello. Do you want to introduce yourself?
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  Maybe you can plug things at the end. Not now, but not now.
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  You can plug things whenever you want to.
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  My name is Rad. I'm a technology journalist and media presenter over everything and everywhere,
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  and I just really love nerdy stuff. Rad knows everything about everything, except for probably
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  cooking. Do you cook? No, I do cook. I'm actually really good at it.
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  Oh, really? Yeah. Is there anything that... What's the feel in which you're listening to?
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  Let's start there. What's the mass? I'm actually quite bad at maths.
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  Call yourself a nerd. Well, maybe you don't.
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  I don't think that maths is necessarily a key component of being a nerd. I think that there's
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  multiple disciplines that... Well, not with AI now, right? You don't need to, you don't need
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  to program. You don't need to do any of that anymore. It's true. And also, even if you look at some
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  of the mathier sciences, like physics, a lot of it's also conceptual. So while I may not be able
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  to do the calculations, per se, I can still understand and talk about the concepts.
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  You're sounding like those people who wear t-shirts that say, imagination is more important than
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  knowledge, Einstein. And it's true. It's always true, Josh.
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  The fact that Einstein once said that is now the bayon of his heritage because idiots use
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  it as an excuse to not know things. And choose the bigger idiot, the idiot or the idiot that
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  asked the idiot to do the job. It's a very good point. The first human has received a brain implant
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  from Elon Musk's Neuralink company this week. I love this. I mean, we'll be getting to the point
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  at which you can sort of just test on people the way you can test on rockets. And if you blow
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  their brains up, then that's just part of the process, the learning process. What do we make of this?
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  Is the future going to involve human brain interfaces? And is this brilliant or loopy on the part
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  of Mr. Musk? Rather, in fact, do you want to explain what Neuralink is? Do you know what Neuralink is?
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  Yes. So Neuralink is a brain computer interface, which essentially means they put implants into
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  the brain. It has hardware that reads messages or you know, you're neurons firing. It interprets
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  those messages. And then theoretically, it will control something. And where's the hardware?
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  Is it in your head or do you have to wheel around a little trolley with a computer on it?
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  Well, it actually depends on who's giving you the implant. So with Neuralink, they currently have
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  a little cable that comes out of your skull out of your head. Seriously? Yeah, which feels a bit,
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  I don't like it. No, it's wireless though, isn't it? It's like a little magnet thing like
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  the cochlear, isn't it? No, there are wireless ones. There was a university in China, which
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  has just announced the first wireless one that's gone really well, which was implanted. I believe in
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  October last year, but I believe Neuralink actually has a cable. You can double check that if you
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  want. But then the cable plugs into what? Other hardware that's required to run it. The battery pack,
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  I think the battery pack sits on the outside. And so the idea, like I've heard that the part of
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  the idea is that like one day Parkinson's patients could, you know, have be cured because you could
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  be what? We're sending a computer program into a part of their brain. I don't quite get it.
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  That's that's slightly different, I believe. I believe ones that deal with Parkinson's often
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  are trying to stimulate a part of the brain. That's that's deep brain stimulation. Yes,
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  Nancy and Niagara. Niagara. Yeah. What's the dopamine? I guess we should have gone to the
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  neuroscientist. Let's talk about brains. Shut up, Joel. You're only a neuroscientist.
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  So that's a different thing. Yeah. That is very promising and people can have stimulation
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  there and they'll go from doing this to dead still. So Parkinson's can't see you, but you're waving
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  your arm and YouTube people. Yeah, I'm shaking and then yeah, I'm doing it. Okay.
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  So, Neuralink is what exactly? So it's there to control devices. So think people that have had
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  accidents that like mean, so think people that have had like spinal cord injuries, for example,
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  and they can't move their limbs. It's that kind of thing. It allows them to, for example,
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  when I was talking about with the Chinese university, it allowed a stroke, not stroke,
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  sorry, spinal cord entry victim to move a air-powered glove that allowed him to like pick up
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  things and drink water. I don't think we call them victims these days, rad. They're people
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  living with spinal differences, not necessarily victims. But can't you do that using the spinal
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  cord and using the neurology of the person? Why doesn't need to come out of the person? And
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  so it depends, so eventually the way Elon must talk about this, we're going to be controlling our
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  computers or whatever our phones. We're going to be just, you and me is going to be telepathy
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  interacting, boom, boom, boom. I think the new device is called telepathy, isn't it?
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  So yeah. That's the name they go. So that's what they, that's the way they talk about it. And that's
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  like horizon stuff. That's where nowhere near there. And so Neuralink's not really even leading the field
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  in there. So other other universities, mainly, not companies, which is the big difference. So I
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  think Stanford has done it some, some maybe in Germany, they've done it. So yet last year,
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  there's a Stanford study came out where someone could had an implant and she could,
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  it would, they trained it on her intentions. She couldn't speak on her intentions to speak and
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  would decode that. So it is using an AI based algorithm. She can't speak. How do they know they've
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  got it right? Well, she's like, I want to see a picture of a trainer on looking at actually
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  if you want to see. And they get it. So it does work. And I think it was like 60 words a minute
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  or something like that to the speed. So really? Yeah. So it works. So you can, you can,
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  this thing can work just using your brain. Yeah. Already. Yes. I mean, but the thing you can do
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  that with an EG cap, basically, right? They're not 60 words a minute, surely. I don't know,
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  but with, that's the electrodes just sitting on your, in your, with gel on your hair, right? Yeah.
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  I thought you could think like, yes, no. It's getting pretty forward. It's getting, you can't
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  think like, no, the study incline the Apple tab or jumping on a paraglider through an ECG cap, can
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  you? Wait, what? So that again, you can't think a complicated sentence like paragliding. Yeah,
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  you can't think a complicated sentence and to have that translated by just wearing a cap with
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  some gel. I don't, you can with Ephraim right now. More or less, it catches the gist of what you're
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  saying, not necessarily word for word. So they've done that with Ephraim. That was published
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  here last year. They're naturally scientists at Metta who work for Metta, did the similar thing with
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  MEG or EG, I can't remember. But it's not word for word. It gets the gist of the sentence you
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  say. Yeah, right. But it's, it's, you don't have to drill a thing into your skull, right?
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  You're not drilling bone and putting a thing, right? Little, little needles into your cortex. So
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  it's, it's very different in terms of invasiveness. Right. But I'm sure it's different in terms of
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  accuracy, surely. I mean, if you've got a little needle that's identifying precise electrical
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  signals between neurons, that's going to be better than just something that's, but it's really
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  local. It's like a thing like this, right? If I put EG, I can get front to work and get visual
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  call. I can get the whole, not the brain, but the whole, the whole skull coverage, right? These
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  are like, you can't put a thing in that you will one day, but the moment you can't put it,
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  you can't open up a whole skull and put it like a sticker over the whole brain with little
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  pins and needles. So where are they sticking these things in in neural length? Do you know,
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  is there a part of brain responsible for language or something? It depends whether they're trying
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  to do language or motor. So it depends on the individual patient. So it'll be the motor cortex
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  if they want to get movement, do an arm or leg. So that, that was done in a patient in Europe last
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  year. What? Over the motor cortex. And I think he could start, he could walk. So they decoded
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  that wanting to walk signals and that translated to a motor pack here and his leg is, he's an official
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  limo. Yeah. Yeah. No, he had, no, he's real legs, but it was like an exoskeleton kind of situation.
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  Yeah. Right. Yeah. So how is that different from just being able to walk with artificial limbs?
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  The degree of control and the fact that like the device doesn't, you know, it lasts a lifetime,
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  it's implanted in a way that is less likely to break down. So one real big problem that has existed
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  with Procerc limbs for a long time is the degree of control. They tend to be really just gross
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  motor skills. You can't do a lot of fine movements with them. And a lot of that is owing to the
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  kind of control systems that are used there. If you imagine a like really low resolution screen,
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  right, with really big pixels and you can't see the fine details, it's the same kind of thing. So
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  by being able to plug in directly, so to speak, you're getting a lot more kind of nuance and detail
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  in the signals that are being sent and therefore in fine motor skills. Got it. So like a person who's
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  lost their hand could be able to delicately thread a needle or something like that using an
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  exactly an artificial limb, rather than your more classic artificial limbs that currently exist,
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  where they might be lucky to be able to pinch the thumb to the full fingers and pick something up
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  right without crushing it. Yeah, they can pop someone on the head and that's about it. So is this
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  so the the vision of Neuralink when you hear Elon Musk talk about it in his more whimsical modes
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  is that some day, well, this is not just going to be for fixing like brain problems or people
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  who've lost limbs or have spinal injuries. This is going to be the way that all of us enhance our
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  cognitive capabilities by expanding our minds into computers in some way. Does that make any sense?
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  Elon is a creature of novelty and ego would be my statement on that. He is someone who, I mean,
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  for better or worse, love and more hate him. He does love to dream big. And I think that historically,
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  we have seen a really mixed bag of whether or not that dreaming has resulted in the kinds of
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  results that he has promised or wanted, right? So I think Neuralink. But isn't that just a matter of
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  time sort of isn't like the visionary is sometimes he dreams up self-driving cars and he says
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  there are always one year away. But I think there will clearly be self-driving cars someday. He talks
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  about going to Mars, you know, maybe it's not going to happen as quickly as he wants to. But if
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  humanity survives, we'll probably do it. But I mean, those predictions are kind of like saying,
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  you know, computers and mechanized systems will continue to enhance our lives. Like we know that
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  already. That's not surprising. That's not new. So saying we're going to have self-driving cars. I
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  don't think that that's like a peak into the future. That's if anything a pretty logical, you
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  know, claim same with Neuralink saying we're going to have systems that are able to enhance ourselves.
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  I think that's a pretty logical claim. And I think that there's a really legitimate space where
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  this kind of technology is being worked on, which is this disability and regaining motor function
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  space. And then there is the pie in the sky space that he's talking about. But if BCIs become, you
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  know, what's a BCI? A brain computer interface. These these little devices we're talking about.
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  If they become commercially viable, they start getting implanted in people. He could say, oh, yes,
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  look, you know, I was correct. Neuralink, it works. And people are using it because it does have
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  a function and it probably will become, you know, usable sometime in the future. For what? What would
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  a non person who doesn't live with a disability use it for? I don't think it'll come to that space
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  anytime soon because you need to remember, these are deeply invasive kind of devices.
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  Right. But look at what some people do to themselves with cosmetic surgery or like, you know,
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  turning into looking like a Korean pasta or something. What would you do it, though?
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  Well, no, you can draw your phone and you can check your X feed. Oh, you have to do a massive
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  surgery. Yeah. It's massive surgery. It's cost. It's the fact that Neuralink at the moment,
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  I believe, yeah, doesn't have a wireless kind of charging system. They also implant deeper into
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  the brain, which means that cells can grow over it and that needs to be replaced or updated.
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  There are differences. But these are very, very early days. I feel like we're at the dawn of like
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  the automobile and we're saying, like, would you get in a car? Well, no, I wouldn't if it's like
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  1885. Yeah. Are you talking in the next five years? Are you talking 200 years? Exactly. I mean,
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  yes, I would if the question is if there was a safe, affordable, well-proven way of enhancing
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  my ability to understand concepts and for me to think much bigger than I currently do and glimps
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  visions of reality that here to fall have only been available to me when I'm on acid.
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  Then yeah, sign me up. Well, interestingly, there was a 2019 study that showed that while these
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  interfaces can positively increase a sense of the self and control, they also can induce radical
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  distress, feelings of loss of control and a rupture of patient identity. I won't get that one.
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  Well, I'll get the good one. Thanks. Because apparently it starts to blur your understanding and
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  bounds of body ownership, self-image, self-understanding between. Sounds like the dissolution of the ego,
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  baby. Come on. Drink the ayahuasca. Let's go. I'm in. That's one of the things that I was amazed
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  with. So didn't the locked-in syndrome where you can't communicate or you can just move your eyes
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  as different versions of degrees of that. And when people thought that human patient
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  saw a completion, they can communicate with their eyes like the person who they did there.
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  So for the first three to six months, those people have trauma and they show depression,
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  but after that they actually bounce back and show pretty normal questionnaires that you can get
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  them to respond to. They don't seem upset. They don't seem depressed anymore. And so the years
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  following that, they seem to be quite happy. All the indications we have that they're happy.
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  When we think about it changing from the life we live to a life like that, it seems horrific
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  and horrible. But it seems that's not the case for people living like that, which is an interesting
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  way to try and think about it. But what does that have to do with a brain computer interface?
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  You're saying we shouldn't do it because we could get used to being paralyzed?
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  Like Raja said, like if they're having, living a good life and they're enjoying themselves
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  and they this thing is actually a human's resilient and we get used to shitty circumstances.
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  It doesn't mean we shouldn't avoid. They would do it psychologically, right? They're
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  examples of individuals who have had eye surgery or genetic things down to their eyes and got
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  on site back in their thirties, right? And hate it. Befear that they go blindfold because they don't
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  like all the light and all that's fine. They can have the blindfold. The people who want to see
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  get to see. Yeah, I'm not saying I'm not against developing the tech or using it, but there are
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  psychological dimensions to this that we don't know about it all. And I think it's maybe an issue of
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  it sounds really cool, but maybe we're like fixing a problem that doesn't exist.
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  And it may just not be all it's cracked up to be that being said, yeah, develop the tech.
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  I'm all for developing the tech. I think that it's exciting, but I'm not sure that it is the
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  fun thing that it always sounds. Yeah, I mean, it depends if you're sort of a utopian
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  futurist, doesn't it? Because some like if you're kind of content with the way that humanity is,
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  then you just go, why do we need to who wants this stuff? But if you're the kind of person
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  likely on Musk who wants to become an interplanetary species and have brains the size of a universe,
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  then you do think this to make that happen. I don't agree because I think that there are already
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  things that augment our lives that also aren't invasive. Right, but we wouldn't have developed those
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  things if it weren't for people who had the mindset of Elon Musk, like Steve Jobs, for example,
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  who is responsible for the biggest expansion of our brain capacities that we currently live with.
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  Which is the elephant. Do you want to see a delineation between a device that you utilize
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  and something that changes the self? Of course, I do. And people prior to the invention of the
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  smartphone would have seen a delineation between tech prior to that and this device or the same
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  with the automobile or whatever. I have the biases of this particular time and place that I live in.
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  In the future, if this happens and becomes normalized, then people won't see that clear delineation.
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  I mean, one of the things we talked about in the last part we did was how so the human brain is
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  has one thing to focus that we're typically aware of a very narrow thing and we're only focusing,
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  I can focus on you and we can't multitask, right? And computers, AI, not like that, they can multitask
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  up to the million. They can do multiple things simultaneously. And the way Elon talks about,
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  you know, we'll be able to just, this is the only way we can combat AI to put it
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  add up to humans, right? So we can expand the number of things we do simultaneously,
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  but that's just not how the human brain or any sort of biological system really works,
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  right? And it's a, it's an issue with the Apple Vision Pro, right? This idea, we're just
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  terrible at multitasking. We have a very, think of it like a spotlight on a stage. That's how the
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  brain works. You can focus on one thing at a time. It feels like we can focus on more than one thing,
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  but we can't. It's really like, you know, I'm keenly aware of this.
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  Are you talking about cars? I mean, I am driving is terrible driving drunk, right? The data
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  shows that very clearly. And so all these people walking around with the headset, the Apple headset,
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  which I'm sure will get to in a second. Yeah, it's, you know, they're going to get hit by cars
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  and stuff, right? There's, there's, there's, we will get to that in a second, but so let me just
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  then drill into pardon the pun, you're like, really, let me do a brain. Let's do a brain.
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  So what if it was possible for a brain computer interface to not be used to enhance the number
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  of things that you can do and to facilitate multitasking, but to give you a greater capacity for
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  deep work and creativity by like just the way that you might insert more RAM into a computer,
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  just to give it more processing power. Is it conceivable that you could
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  augment my, like, there are some things that I just know that I can't write. No, but like,
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  yeah, I guess so. But like, you know, when you start to talk about the size of the universe,
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  you know, the gets to a point at which you, you notice the limitations of the processing power
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  of your own mind computer. Yeah. You just get to the point where you go, I've lost the thread
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  about the scales that we're talking about here. I've just decided that I don't like this because
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  it then becomes a, the rich get richer. This is my main concern. Yes, it is a egalitarian one.
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  Does it become like? Oh, absolutely. Yeah. You know, you'll have the people that can afford
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  the best, you know, enhancements and you'll have those that, yeah, does it become an
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  accelerant of inequality. Although I did hear, I think it was Mark Andreessen who was saying that,
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  you know, we do, we do fear that tech is going to create that more of the haves and have nots.
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  But actually, there's no greater democratizer than the smartphone, which if you think about
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  an era of kings and, you know, feudal societies and stuff, there were things that the king had
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  that nobody else had and there were things that aristocrats lived with that the poor never did.
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  And actually, today, there is, although there's vast economic inequality, the actual,
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  the tools that most change our lives are largely available to everybody.
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  Smartphones, sanitation, whatever I'd like to say. I think it's an interesting point, but I,
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  I am not sure that I think a brain computer interface is on par with a smartphone,
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  because I don't think there's the same level of kind of trickle down or used devices that would
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  be able to be passed on, which is one way that people from low socioeconomic backgrounds would be
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  able to obtain. I mean, it depends whether it becomes as simple as a counteract operation or,
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  you know, you know, something that's any kind of operation still continues to be pretty expensive.
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  Well, maybe it'll be something that you can just plug into your head at home.
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  Well, you can put in, you can feed in through your ear. I mean, we just don't know.
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  But I do think that it's hard when you're on the precipice of a new technology to
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  feel like it could be normal. And I do think that if 20 years ago or 25 years ago,
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  someone had said to you, it's going to be completely normalized that you'll walk around
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  with a supercomputer in your pocket constantly being bothered by what random people on the other
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  side of the world are saying about something. And you would just, and, you know, young people are going
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  to spend all of their time communicating with each other, even people have never met
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  on the supercomputer. Like that, you would be like, that's not going to be normal. I don't
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  think that's going to be widespread. Like that might be something that some people will want to do.
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  But not everybody's going to do that. I think I could see that being normal. I think the difference
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  here really is the surgery augmentation element of it. And I think it's very, very different
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  to use something that's outside of yourself versus bring something into yourself.
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  I'm not saying that I don't think it's going to become widespread because I think once people
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  start doing it, it's an advantage, if it is an advantage, and more people will want it. And
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  it's that slow movement towards. But at the same time, I think we continue to have conversations
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  about tech to the tune of just because we should, does that mean that we, just because we can,
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  does that mean that we should. And I think that is more where this conversation sits.
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  Lastly, Joel, how feasible is it that the utopian use cases for brain computing interfaces
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  will actually work? I don't understand enough about how close the analogy is between the way
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  that computers process information and the way that the human brain processes information
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  to understand how complicated it would actually be for me to go into surgery. And then when I come
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  out, I'm like, oh, I completely understand, you know, something that I wasn't able to understand
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  before. Like is that feasible or is not permanent? There's both scientific and engineering
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  challenges there, right? So, putting using fMRI, brain scans, or electrodes into the tissue,
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  and training a thing to decode the letters and, and, you know, some rough sentences is very
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  different to feeling the stream of the stock market or something like that, right? There's,
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  there's major scientific hurdles to get through in decoding. We don't really understand the way
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  the brain works, what the neural language of thought is yet. And so, it's not just engineering
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  and making things smaller, you know, shinier and better and faster. It is figuring out that language.
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  So, they're both those things have to happen really before we get to that utopian, you know,
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  telepathy thing with AI. Right. And what about memory capacity? Like, just when, if there's an
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  analogy to RAM that I made, then there could also be an analogy to storage. Like, could you put
• 23:20
  something in my brain now that would give me a greater, maybe not for past memories, but for future
• 23:24
  memories that would give me a greater capability of storing? Likewise, we don't understand
• 23:29
  where an N-gram of a memory is, right? It's distributed, the hippocampus, the different areas
• 23:33
  are very important, but we don't really understand how a memory is stored and distributed in the brain
• 23:38
  yet. And so, without knowing that, you can't, the best way to do it is to give chemicals and
• 23:42
  molecules to the brain or stimulate it electrically. You can do things like that and improve those
• 23:46
  things, but plugging in things, we don't know where to plug and what to do yet. I mean, surely it
• 23:53
  would just come down to further augmentation and it would record video and audio at all times,
• 23:58
  that it would store somewhere that you would then be able to recall through some sort of search,
• 24:02
  using AI that tells you everything that's in that image. Right. Yeah. So, it doesn't actually
• 24:07
  have to directly be stored. Yeah. And I don't. It wouldn't experience it like a memory.
• 24:12
  Yeah. I don't think that these devices are going to go in the way of just making you superhuman
• 24:18
  and enhancing your biology. I think it will give you the ability to use devices that enhance
• 24:25
  what you do. So, in that way, instead of, you know, making it so that your memory lasts forever,
• 24:30
  it records things for you that you can then recall in an easier way. This is the perfect segue
• 24:35
  to the other thing that I wanted to talk about. That's in the news this week, which is the Apple
• 24:39
  Vision Pro. It's been all over the place. This is Apple's new virtual reality headset. It's their
• 24:44
  first attempt to get into this game. We had the Google Glass glasses. What? Probably a decade ago,
• 24:51
  now, and Facebook has been playing around with its Oculus for some time. These are mostly used
• 24:57
  by gamers, but we're sort of waiting for the killer virtual reality piece of hardware that's
• 25:04
  going to change the way that we interact with computers. Is this a lame corporate attempt to sell
• 25:10
  us on a phony future? Will virtual reality ever go mainstream? How will we interact with computers
• 25:16
  in the long term? What do you make of it, Brad? Well, I can say, for damn sure, it's at least better
• 25:20
  than meta's little metaverse moment. Have you used an Oculus or one of these? Very early ones.
• 25:28
  I've used, like, early Oculus and Vive, and I've used PSVR. I haven't used the Vision Pro.
• 25:34
  Is PSVR a PlayStation product? Yes, it's a PlayStation. It's a gaming only, basically.
• 25:42
  What did you make of it? Was it transcendent? Some people are like, oh, my goodness, this is a
• 25:46
  different universe. Some people are like, it just makes you look too uncool. Well, it's very strange
• 25:52
  because you start to realize how much you believe what you see. Again, I've done this
• 25:58
  primarily in gaming contexts. I've done ones where you're sitting in a chair and using a controller
• 26:03
  and doing whatever. Those are interesting, but they don't really sell it. The ones that totally get
• 26:11
  you when you're moving your body in a space with the headset on. That's this really strange
• 26:19
  experience of knowing, for example, that you're not walking across a bridge with a 100-story
• 26:26
  drop beneath you. You're walking in a warehouse on a flat floor, but because you can see it,
• 26:32
  you believe it. You know you're not walking up a wall, but because the camera moves like you are,
• 26:38
  you fully believe it. It's this out-of-body experience that I think the Vision Pro has the chance
• 26:47
  of kind of enhancing upon because it's not looking to just bring those kind of wacky moments.
• 26:54
  It's looking to integrate into your everyday life. What's the pitch? What's that integration
• 27:00
  into your everyday life pitch? I think it's multitasking, quite honestly. It's really
• 27:06
  what I'm saying. It's a special computing because it's made to say the words.
• 27:09
  Yeah, I see one of the videos that went viral on social media about the Apple Vision Pro
• 27:14
  was a dude on the subway in New York who's typing on an imaginary keyboard. I mean,
• 27:20
  these are funny videos like please. I remember with Google Glass as well. All these like
• 27:26
  loser-insel kids who can't get a boyfriend or a girlfriend are just wandering around the streets
• 27:33
  wearing these daggy things on their face, annihilating any chance of getting any romantic love
• 27:42
  or affection from this universe. And now they're sitting on a crowded subway, tap, tap, taping into
• 27:49
  the air and swipe, swiping. I think it's a minority report style. You should all get a room
• 27:55
  together somewhere. So the idea is that, I mean, I'm somewhat sympathetic to the idea that there's
• 28:02
  going to be a revolution in the way that we interact with computers. It's unlikely that my kids
• 28:10
  when they're my age, surely, are going to be sitting down in front of a physical laptop or
• 28:16
  like a physical, rad is raising our eyes like you think it is. Do you think they're going to be
• 28:19
  typing on buttons? 40 years? You reckon they will be? No. Aren't they just going to be thinking
• 28:28
  and swiping and talking? Two things. One, I do think that keyboards are going to be a bit of a
• 28:33
  harder cell because the generations below are just touchscreen, obsessed touchscreen natives.
• 28:39
  Right, but the touchscreen has a keyboard on it. Yeah. You know what I mean? It's like everything
• 28:43
  we still do is still filtered through. Well, I suppose speech to text is getting better, but
• 28:48
  you're still correcting things using a keyboard, using the idea of letters on
• 28:52
  buttons. Speech to text also requires you to say it out loud, which also means that other people
• 28:56
  can hear you. Whereas a keyboard. The tech dude grows on the subway won't give a shit.
• 29:03
  But there are ways around that, right? You can have the thing, the like in the
• 29:06
  the spy films, they have the little microphone thing. You can have bone conduct into microphones
• 29:10
  to create the noise. But very, very quiet. I mean, there are ways around that.
• 29:13
  But yeah, it is it is looking up a spicy video. But the visual that the Apple Pro thing
• 29:18
  has that they're speakers are outwards facing. They're not outwards facing.
• 29:22
  Well, they're not because people go, oh, I want to use this for watching movies on flights,
• 29:26
  right? But there's nothing covering your ear. There's no noise cancellation. There's no, yeah,
• 29:31
  I mean, that's that. I'm pretty sure you can just then like pair it with headphones and use that.
• 29:35
  Hope so because it's yeah, there's no there's no noise cancellation. But I think that's part of
• 29:39
  their vision if you'll excuse the pun of having it be a device that you couldn't use while still
• 29:45
  that's a augmented. Yeah. I mean, again, coming back to this thing that I just sort of touched
• 29:50
  on earlier about it's hard to put yourself in the mind of an era when things that we regard as
• 29:55
  normal, weren't normal. But prior to the personal computer, like apparently the mouse was a real
• 30:02
  killer app, like a killer invention that prior to being able to, yeah, to scroll the the cursor
• 30:08
  around and click like that was the thing that was huge. Oh, yeah, that changed the game of
• 30:15
  computing. And there must be we must be on the brink of another mouse like another or bigger
• 30:25
  probably. Yeah, I haven't tried the thing either. But in some of the videos, what is a Casey
• 30:30
  nice that one was pretty interesting because towards the end, you see a moment where he's kind of
• 30:34
  he freaks out a little bit and kind of says like, I forgot I was wearing it. I had it on for multiple
• 30:38
  hours. It was just the new reality. I just had all this information at my fingertips. And you can
• 30:45
  kind of catch a glimpse of like you're saying, that's what computing is going to be. It's going to
• 30:49
  be integrated. We're going to have something a smaller version of that on our head all the time.
• 30:54
  And just to clarify for people, the reason why you're saying that case, you could say that he
• 30:58
  forgot that he was wearing it is because it wasn't in virtual reality mode. It would have been in
• 31:02
  all the media. So he works in the world and see everybody and buying donuts and it's, you know,
• 31:07
  so it's just like a pair of glasses. You're looking at the world and it's super imposing. No,
• 31:12
  it's it's using cameras to capture and then feeding it back to you on screens. But in high,
• 31:17
  that's the trick of it. It feels like it apparently feels like it is like transparent glasses when
• 31:22
  it's not. So is it going to come down to how unobtrusive the hardware is? I mean, I feel like
• 31:28
  ultimately the impediment here, putting cost aside because we know that cost will come down.
• 31:32
  Yeah. Is just clonkiness and dorkiness that nobody is going to get laid wearing that thing.
• 31:38
  I
• 31:40
  give away.
• 31:43
  I could still get it. No need to have a pair of ray bands that do this.
• 31:47
  I think that convenience is really the main one. I don't know that it's about like looking
• 31:54
  cool is part of it. But I think that humans are just such creatures of convenience that it doesn't
• 32:00
  matter how cool it looks because you could argue that the vision pro like it looks futuristic. It's
• 32:05
  sleek. It's beautiful in its design in many ways, regardless of whether you personally think it's
• 32:09
  talking or not. But if it's too heavy, people aren't going to want to wear it. If it runs hot,
• 32:14
  they won't want it. If the battery is inconvenient, it's not going to work. So it really comes down
• 32:19
  to convenience first, in my opinion. I mean, the blackberry was convenient, but it lost out to the
• 32:26
  iPhone because the iPhone became a consumer status good. I feel like when it becomes
• 32:32
  well, of course, but I mean, nobody got cool cred for owning a blackberry, whereas the iPhone
• 32:38
  was able to pitch itself like an Hermes handbag or something or like a pair of Gucci shoes.
• 32:45
  But backed up by convenient good design. Yes. So there's going to, at some point, we're going to
• 32:52
  get a way of interacting with our, I don't want to say documents because that sounds so. But now,
• 32:57
  look like the world of computers that is both cool and also super convenient. But do you have a
• 33:04
  sense of what that will be? Because I'm not sure if this is it. I think it'll be glasses and rings.
• 33:09
  Glasses and rings. What was that? Rings. Rings. Rings to get finger movement.
• 33:14
  Or gloves, but I think rings will be like the colors do as cameras now.
• 33:17
  They can do it with cameras, but I think there will be a desire or market to be able to like,
• 33:23
  for example, have your hands down and still be tight. Oh, micro movements. So you're not like
• 33:28
  doing this face. Well, you can apparently with the Vision Pro have your hands quite low.
• 33:34
  I think people naturally are going to try and minority reports wipe the screen. So I think having
• 33:40
  a little bit more tactile feedback of your hands can be down is going to, you know, influence.
• 33:45
  And also potentially even then mean that you can use like an invisible mouse, essentially,
• 33:50
  having your hands somewhere. Or just use the tip of your forefinger as a mouse, right?
• 33:54
  Yeah. On anything. Yeah. Or your eyes. Yeah. I also like your idea, Joel, of having something
• 33:59
  that you can just whisper to that is a bone, you know, condom. Maybe it'll have EEG. It'll have
• 34:05
  some brain interface things on one of the scrolls to just be like search naughty teenagers.
• 34:13
  ASMR version. Yeah. Exactly. And, you know, then the person that's you on the subway is like,
• 34:17
  what did you say? You're nothing. No. Just talking in my headset. I'm really split on this device.
• 34:22
  I can't like part of me that loves it. I'd love to get one. I'm dying to get one. And the other
• 34:26
  part of me is like watching this trend of, you know, the idea when I got my first iPhone was living
• 34:31
  in the US that was like, fantastic. I can email on the plane and then it will send it when I land.
• 34:35
  Or like all this. And then you see this, you know, our attention just changing over time. And people
• 34:41
  working more and getting stressed more and getting overstimulated and all the information, you know,
• 34:46
  is now in a pocket all day every day and next to our bed and just at our eyeballs. And now you
• 34:52
  wear this thing or a smaller version all day. And the information is going to, you know, you don't
• 34:57
  need to reach for a phone now. It's just going to be there, you know, our eyes all day every day.
• 35:04
  And again, it's going to have the same addiction, the same mental health challenges that come
• 35:08
  along with the phone are going to be there and they're going to be, you know, more addictive,
• 35:12
  easier to access. And I don't know how that's going to play out when this thing goes on to scale
• 35:17
  kind of thing. So there's something about our attention, what it's going to do to us that I don't
• 35:22
  think that Apple will not talk about because it's a dark kind of thing. Well, I mean, if any tech
• 35:29
  company talks about it Apple might, Facebook won't, Google won't. Yeah, right. That's so interesting
• 35:36
  because I do. I mean, one of the reasons why Australia's National airline Qantas has has
• 35:41
  dragged its feet on introducing Wi-Fi on long haul international flights is they say that Aussies
• 35:47
  are different culturally from other nationalities and don't want it. That we like the fact that you
• 35:53
  get on a plane for 14 hours. That's news to me. That's news to me. Well, maybe we just like the
• 35:59
  excuse of being able to tell our boss that we weren't contactable. But, you know, you get on a
• 36:05
  plane that has Wi-Fi now and everybody's working the little tits off. But you get to, you know,
• 36:12
  there was something I felt old for reminiscing about a time when you got on a plane and there was
• 36:16
  nothing to do and you just had to sort of look out the window or watch the movie on the overhead
• 36:21
  screen or read a book. You know, those moments are nice. I remember I was also living in New York
• 36:26
  when Wi-Fi was introduced or rather 3G boosting was introduced on the subway and I used to commute
• 36:34
  on the subway and it was a great, it was an incredible experience to just sit there and look at the
• 36:41
  life of New York and people would all sit around and occasionally make eye contact with someone and
• 36:46
  some people would be reading and some people would be daydreaming. And then I remember when the subway
• 36:51
  got mobile phone reception and it all changed. Everyone was just staring at their hands. We don't
• 36:57
  mind-wonder anymore. We barely mind-wonder as a nation or as a, as a species.
• 37:02
  Right. And we don't really know what the effect that's going to be long term. I don't think it's
• 37:07
  going to be good. I think that mind-wondering is a light version of sleeping and it does do
• 37:12
  interesting things to our brain, healthy things to our mind. It sort of things out in interesting
• 37:19
  ways. And if you take that away, it's going to be doing something like sleeping less. And we
• 37:24
  haven't really researched that well. The only form of mobile phone use that I can
• 37:29
  know is podcast listening, which people should do all the time. And you can subscribe,
• 37:33
  sub-stack. YouTube, come to conversationist.substack.com. Or reading a whole YouTube book called the
• 37:39
  Intuition Toolkit. Joel's new book is fabulous. The intuition to mention that. What's the sub-time?
• 37:44
  I was going with Joel's into my mentions of knowing what, without knowing why. And if you haven't
• 37:49
  heard this week's episode of the flagship uncomfortable conversations podcast, the main show,
• 37:56
  which is a one-on-one interview between me and someone fascinating. Joel is our guest this week.
• 38:01
  We recorded a few months ago. So Brian Johnson is a name that I can't believe I didn't know
• 38:07
  until Joel flagged it for me as someone to talk about. He's been doing the rounds promoting his
• 38:12
  life strategy of living according to an algorithm. Is this the way to live? Joel, who is he and
• 38:19
  what is living according to an algorithm? Fascinating on many levels. And I have to be careful,
• 38:24
  because I get hooked into the whole longevity thing and trying to hack my life. And then it gets
• 38:28
  a bit addictive and ends up being negative mental health-wise. So he started up what was a
• 38:34
  brain tree, I think, that company was called and sold it for something like $800 million. That was
• 38:39
  quite a while ago now. Is that one of those learning online? No, I think it was accounting. Do you remember
• 38:44
  it was accounting? I think it was $340 million. But I thought it was like, no, no, it was
• 38:51
  almost a billion. The self-confessed math. And he's been doing interesting things. I think I ran
• 38:57
  into him at MIT at an event one time. And he was putting money into certain interesting startups.
• 39:02
  And he has a brain, EEG, MEG company where they're building brain devices, which I've sort of
• 39:09
  followed that a bit. And then all of a sudden he started getting into this longevity space and he
• 39:13
  started putting thinking, you know, he spends over $2 million a year on his own personal things,
• 39:18
  right? And $2 million a year on his own money, on his own supplements, and he does weekly blood
• 39:25
  techniques. Everything is one of the levels of pill popping. Yeah, it's like 200 pills a day.
• 39:32
  There you go. Yeah. But it brings up some really interesting things that tap into some
• 39:36
  interesting philosophies. And it's worth hearing him say in his own words, but this idea of
• 39:42
  handing your life over to an algorithm. And if that algorithm, more or less guarantees,
• 39:48
  you're going to be healthier, happier, stronger, live for longer, be more spiritually happy.
• 39:54
  Every dimension of his life, he says is better, right? And he follows this algorithm,
• 39:58
  because he apparently doesn't trust his own brain. And by algorithm, just to clarify for people,
• 40:02
  you're not talking about anything to do with computers. You're talking about a set of rules,
• 40:05
  a set of rules first. And then he's updated that now to talk about it like a democracy,
• 40:11
  where they do all these measurements from his organs through his body, his skin, his liver,
• 40:15
  his this, his that. And the idea is the algorithm is adjusted on the every week or so,
• 40:20
  based on how the organs are going. So if he's it's going to try new supplement and this
• 40:26
  organ reacts and it looks younger, some methylation clock thing, then they'll adjust the algorithm
• 40:32
  for that, right? So we have to do exercise every morning, he has to go to bed at 830, he has
• 40:36
  got to do this, this and this, stop eating at 11 a.m. and a whole lot of other things, right?
• 40:42
  It gets the perfect sleep score on all these wearables. I just find that and he not only to say this is
• 40:50
  he says this is this is the future for everyone and it's inevitable, right? And I think that's
• 40:55
  interesting. What exactly is that we will all have to be that pathological about?
• 41:00
  Yeah, he's and he says we're all going to be at some stage following an algorithm,
• 41:04
  we can't trust our own brains to, you know, to go whatever late night snacking or whatever we're
• 41:09
  going to do, right? And so yeah, we're all going to be what he's doing. We're going to be
• 41:15
  him at some point in the future and it's inevitable, which is a pretty strong and controversial
• 41:20
  statement, right? And people freak out at this. Well, I interpret his messaging a little bit
• 41:25
  differently because I think he almost says those things as a bit of a hook to kind of draw people
• 41:30
  in. But when you listen to him talk more at length, he more is talking about like being an example
• 41:37
  and almost an experiment to show people possibility, right? Like like he said, he talks about
• 41:44
  this idea of everyone being on board and in an almost anarchistic way, he talks about
• 41:51
  everyone sort of needing to be working towards a common goal, which is don't die. And having
• 41:56
  this harmony between all intelligence in the world that being humans and artificial intelligence.
• 42:02
  And it's the idea that we could achieve this. It's possible. But he doesn't really, in my opinion,
• 42:08
  step into a more, I guess, future telling or prescriptive world of I think this is going to happen
• 42:16
  for everyone or we all need to do this. It's more this is some of his interviews. He says it's
• 42:22
  inevitable for all of us. I'm still wondering whether he believes that or he's just trying to get
• 42:27
  like he does, trying to get a reaction from people. I'm still unclear about how much of this is
• 42:31
  qualitative versus quantitative. Like if his claim is that it's inevitable that people are going
• 42:38
  to surmount the biases and inadequacies of their own brains by outsourcing a lot of decision-making
• 42:44
  to rules of thumb and that that's the way that will structure our lives in the future,
• 42:49
  that might be true. I mean, we ought to do that. I mean, I really do that if I need to lose a bit of
• 42:54
  weight, then I just cross the street or there's all these things, habits we all will do. Yeah,
• 42:59
  exactly. Brush your teeth every day. If I want to lose a bit of weight, then I just don't eat
• 43:02
  before noon. That's easier than making a decision every single time about what I'm going to have
• 43:07
  for breakfast. But if he's saying that it's a question of us all becoming as committed to the
• 43:14
  mission of life extension and of the tweaking of our physiology as he is, that would require
• 43:23
  changing people's priorities. I mean, I just don't care enough about heking out a final five
• 43:28
  years of, no, no, no, no, no, but an additional five years of life. But he's also saying you feel better
• 43:34
  and you're happier. He's saying it all dimensions of life. He is happier. But I wouldn't be happier
• 43:39
  being that anal anal. But his thing is health. You would. You think you wouldn't, but you
• 43:44
  actually would if you follow up. And that's his thing. So the only way to get to that point is to
• 43:49
  try it for whatever six months or something. He also talks about looking at the world from the
• 43:55
  perspective of living in the 25th century. What are you going to look back at and go, this was good,
• 44:01
  this was bad. What were the pivotal moments of today that we will look at far into the future?
• 44:07
  And I think it's honestly so fascinating hearing him speak because he does truly have
• 44:14
  like a very different perspective that he's very, very dedicated to. And while I don't agree with
• 44:20
  everything he says, I think that it's very interesting. And the dedication that he has, you're right,
• 44:27
  is kind of next level like here of all the things he does diligently every single day without fail.
• 44:35
  And you absolutely have to respect that. And I feel like he's just this incredible insight into
• 44:45
  what humans are capable of achieving, even if it's just about dedication, more than it maybe is
• 44:51
  actually living forever. Right. I mean, maybe I just have a bias against this particular way of,
• 44:56
  there's a, there's a cultish vibe in Silicon Valley at the moment that is very, that pants itself
• 45:05
  on the back for being galaxy brained geniuses who are masters of the universe for life hacking
• 45:12
  everything and for tweaking everything and for measuring everything. I sort of blamed Tim Ferriss
• 45:17
  for kicking this off. God bless him. But he's like, it got to a stage where I heard him talking or
• 45:25
  read a post of his about when he was starting his podcast. He like interviewed and hired a bunch
• 45:31
  of former NPR producers to analyze every single, you know, moment of his interviews and give him
• 45:38
  feedback on them. And then he like sort of life hacked his way to learn. It's like everything is
• 45:43
  measured. Everything is hacked. Everything is brought up. Everything is, yeah, bureaucratized.
• 45:48
  Everything is systematized. And to me that that drains some of the romance and messiness out of
• 45:55
  human existence. And you lose something ineffable in the process. Yeah.
• 46:00
  Don't I think Brian Johnson, I think he's got a very particular personality. So he finds doing
• 46:05
  that fairly easy. Exactly. That's why I think a lot of people, like he says, oh yeah, try it to six
• 46:09
  months. Well, okay, the only people who are going to try it for six months are people who are
• 46:12
  likely to find it fulfilling. People who think it's a, who are going to end up thinking it's a
• 46:16
  crop of shit aren't going to try it for six months. It's a self-selecting group of people. To say
• 46:21
  that there's a universal rule that, you know, micro managing your kidney function every morning
• 46:28
  is going to make everybody happier is ludicrous. People are different. What if it was true, though, Josh?
• 46:35
  Well, if we all did it and then we're like, fuck it, this is amazing. It could be true.
• 46:39
  I wish I'd done it around to be able to believe in it. No, I don't. But what if?
• 46:42
  And that's the catcher. That's his kind of twist, right? If you all do it, you'll realize. But
• 46:46
  if that's just like how the mentalist question is saying, like if you, you know, just follow the,
• 46:51
  I am the way the truth and the lines follow me and maybe it'll maybe you'll all go to heaven.
• 46:56
  Well, maybe, but I don't have any reason to believe for you. I also think that it really narrows
• 47:01
  down the human experience. Like, you know, you're already saying it's only the people that are
• 47:05
  going to find a feeling that'll do it. I think even more than that, it, it's kind of the
• 47:11
  shit of like, you know, upper middle class people in Western countries, right? Like, you know,
• 47:18
  someone living in rural Mongolia isn't going to like look at this thing and be like,
• 47:23
  yeah, sounds lit. Like I, I truly do think that I'll be happier. It doesn't, it's not. No,
• 47:27
  no. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, absolutely. At all. Um, so I, I don't even think that that's a question.
• 47:31
  There are too many people in the world for this to even be an option as something that's going to
• 47:37
  happen. The people in Mongolia could draw, dramatically enhance their yak hurting. If they were just
• 47:44
  more focused and diligent about the metrics of when to better date. He stopped reading. They measured
• 47:50
  the number of mills. They were squirting of milk out of there. And they're like, he's also
• 47:54
  talking about all of these supplements that are entirely a luxury that he even has access to. Like,
• 48:00
  people in Mongolia subsist on mostly meat and like dairy products, like, how do they get this?
• 48:05
  They're like, I'm from a deaf and ill. And yeah, yeah. I mean, it's also interesting that the
• 48:08
  cutting edge of these supplements, it's always changing. I mean, you listen to Huberman and,
• 48:13
  you know, guys like that. And they're, you know, they're saying, oh, actually, well,
• 48:16
  18 months ago, we talked about this incredible thing. But, you know, now it turns out that it
• 48:20
  actually kills you. It was, it was like that with this diabetes drug. I bought a whole bunch of it
• 48:24
  in Thailand, thinking that I was, you know, it was just so obvious that it was good for you. Do
• 48:28
  you know what I'm talking about here? Yeah, the, um, they're actually blunt and see effects of
• 48:32
  exercise and not a whole lot of it. Yeah. Yeah. It turns out that I never took it. Yeah. I just
• 48:36
  thought, what am I doing? But it was a phase in my life where I was in a huge health care. And I
• 48:39
  lost like 20 key lots. No, there were certain influences. There were a lot of, there was a lot of
• 48:44
  science about how this, uh, this diabetes medication, which is very safe. We're just taking
• 48:49
  about hundreds of millions of people every day, um, is a, is a, is a clear longevity drug because
• 48:56
  of the relationship, because of what it does to your insulin levels. And, um, and, uh, yeah,
• 49:01
  now they've just gone back on that. Yeah. So does it do anything for you if you don't have diabetes?
• 49:06
  Is it like dangerous if you don't have diabetes? Uh, yeah. There is some suggestion now that it
• 49:10
  is. That's my point. But at the time they were saying like, there's no harm in taking it, because
• 49:14
  people who don't have diabetes who take it seem to outlive, uh, even people with diabetes.
• 49:19
  I'm sorry, even people who don't have diabetes. I can't, I can't help but experiment with all
• 49:23
  these things as well. That's why it's my wife crazy. Like I just like, yeah, I just did like the
• 49:27
  four, four months of the carnivore. Oh, right. Yeah. But I added in the fruit and the honey
• 49:34
  and the, uh, X and cheese. Another friend of mine is on this. So I've kind of, do you feel great?
• 49:39
  Did you feel great? Because I run a bit and I do a lot of so on it. No, I found that the
• 49:44
  electrolyte wise, it just even with the fruit, it wasn't what I couldn't. She swears by it.
• 49:48
  She loves that. People go just meat. Love it. Can you, can you imagine that? No. She gets
• 49:53
  cute. Apparently without cucumbers. The texture of the meat. Yeah, honey. If you come
• 49:57
  text wise with fruit, honey, cheese. That sounds so unenjoyable. I'm just, I'm such an advocate of like,
• 50:04
  we are humans, we are messy, we're strange, just embrace it and live, you know, as well as you
• 50:11
  can. And like for Brian Johnson, that is absolutely analyzing every little crevice of his life.
• 50:17
  And I think it's so exciting because I do think that we're going to learn a lot through this,
• 50:22
  self-imposed and chosen human trial of a hundred different ways to try and extend your life. And
• 50:28
  that's cool, but just I don't know that extending life should be the goal. I think in just one of
• 50:35
  his goals, I think he says, but yeah, probably his main one. All things in life should be the goal.
• 50:40
  All things in moderation, including one of the things that I haven't heard him talk about.
• 50:43
  If you're listening, Brian, then we talk about free will, right? And agency is really important.
• 50:49
  We see lack of agency, learned helplessness, associated with a lot of negative mental health
• 50:55
  things. And handing over your liberty or freedom to an algorithm, I think for a lot of people,
• 51:02
  even if they can manage to do it, is going to have a negative effect psychologically that again,
• 51:06
  we just, we haven't measured or we don't understand, right? Because we've talked, I don't think we
• 51:11
  have free will. We've talked about that before many times. That may be controversial. I don't,
• 51:15
  there's no evidence we really do, but we feel like we do and it feels very much like we do have free
• 51:20
  will on agency. And if you take that away from people, it's devastating. Also, I mean, just what's
• 51:25
  the anxiety level of constantly monitoring yourself, maybe for him at zero, maybe for him at so
• 51:30
  a sense of empowerment, but for some people, for me, I get it builds builds. Yeah, exactly.
• 51:34
  Some people won't be able to hit the metrics that they're trying to hit and that would just feel
• 51:38
  awful. They're like, oh my god, I'm going to die. There's also, I think there's a huge,
• 51:43
  where we're missing, there's a conversation for another day, there's a massive blind spot,
• 51:47
  I think in the way that we talk about risks in public health as well. This is one of my bug
• 51:53
  bears, where in the period after 9.11, a lot of the messaging around terrorism and be alert,
• 51:59
  not alarmed, and having red days and orange days and things like that. What's the impact of that
• 52:06
  on our psychology? What other, how many cancers are caused by the anxiety that is caused by that?
• 52:13
  School drills as well. My kids had to stay back for a drill. They don't call it an active shooter drill
• 52:20
  because we're in Australia, but it's an emergency drill. Really? It's in case something bad happens.
• 52:24
  They get under the desk. They get under the desk. I really learn how to maybe be corralled
• 52:28
  where to go in case of an emergency. It's like a nuclear war thing. Yeah, exactly. I don't know
• 52:31
  what it's about. Like, where was it when there was a random dog that wandered onto school?
• 52:36
  So I think that I mean, it could be a bushfire, it could be a war, I don't know what they're
• 52:40
  thinking it could be, but I guess it's in case there's. So, what's the impact on the psychology of
• 52:46
  kids to feel like this is an ever-present threat? There's an ad campaign at the moment that the
• 52:51
  Australian government has put out against skin cancer, and it's really quite grizzly, and it says
• 52:56
  like, if you knew that every time you leave the house, you could die. You know, you could be
• 53:03
  sowing the seeds of cancer, and it shows a guy that's walking outside and then it zooms in on
• 53:08
  his forehead, and you go into inside the skin, and you see a black cancerous cell start to spread
• 53:14
  and these tendrils of like evil start to, you know, go into his head and his brain. And I'm like,
• 53:20
  Jesus, I'm scared of it. We all know about melanomas. Like, we are Australians. I get it. Yeah.
• 53:25
  Like, do I have to worry about this? Like, what's the impact on me of like having that additional
• 53:30
  layer of concern that I'm going to leave in the house just lock the doors? No, no. So anyway,
• 53:35
  yes, for the drugler and quit with the, I don't know, I don't want the algorithms to be contributing
• 53:38
  to that. It's the beautiful double-edged sort of tech and science, I think, that we continue to be
• 53:43
  able to look deeper into things and learn more, thus both do better with it and have our
• 53:50
  anxieties grow. And I think, you know, we can even see this in the way that reproductive kind of
• 53:57
  health and conversations have changed since people started to be able to look in and see,
• 54:01
  oh, that's what a fetus looks like. That's, you know, we can see the cells as they grow.
• 54:06
  It starts to change how you conceptualize. You're comparing embryos to cancers, basically,
• 54:11
  as we're just saying here. Just in right, as we are able to see more our perceptions of things change.
• 54:18
  And I think that it both helps in that we can, you know, treat cancer more effectively
• 54:24
  and hinders in that it brings that anxiety. Last thing I want to pick your brains about,
• 54:27
  that was in the news recently, there was a shark attack in Sydney and there was also Australia's
• 54:33
  biggest ever lottery. Now, Joel, you were making the analogy between these two things because
• 54:39
  one is bad and one is good, but they both pray. They both pray upon our misunderstanding of
• 54:47
  probabilities. Why? Yeah, so I put the radio on, the TV on, and
• 54:53
  days leading up to this, I watched a lot of news, which I don't normally watch. I try to avoid the
• 54:56
  news. And so I'm feeling anxious and depressed from watching the news. Yeah, well,
• 54:59
  thanks, Josh, your appearance on this podcast. Anyway, people were just like, I'm not swimming
• 55:03
  in the harbor ever again. And I'm not going to put my toe in and all this kind of talk, right?
• 55:07
  Even though the stats, the probability of a shark attack in the harbor during summer, you can,
• 55:13
  it's really rare, right? It's safer than getting in your car. What was one thing I saw? You're
• 55:18
  more likely to be injured by kangaroo than a shark. And people don't like true. That's the most
• 55:23
  strategy in that statistic. I didn't follow you. I'm sure. So I'm very good listeners.
• 55:27
  We'll be like, yeah, but what about the snakes and the crocodiles? No, the kangaroos,
• 55:30
  because people think they can pet them. Right. And they get punched in the face. They kick through.
• 55:34
  No, they get sent out. They simply kick their back. Isn't that a cassowary that disembells you?
• 55:38
  I think it's both. But kangaroos can with a kick, but yeah, they can. They you send a sharp
• 55:42
  nail, get a box, some and stuff. Yeah. Okay. Anyway, so yeah, so people get this and so it happens
• 55:49
  to me, right? I go for a swim and I, you know, I'm old enough to remember the jaws music and
• 55:53
  Spielberg. And I start thinking of the sharks. I swim underneath me. I can look down where is it?
• 55:57
  And you start freaking out. The limbic system, the emotional parts of your brain become active,
• 56:01
  because you're imagining things and you become really scared. It doesn't matter what the
• 56:05
  probabilities are, what numbers someone shows you. You start emotionally thinking, right?
• 56:09
  It doesn't even matter if the probability is zero once you get the the the worm in your brain.
• 56:14
  I mean, I was swimming in on a off a Greek island in very clear water. And I was swimming quite far
• 56:21
  out into a series of like rock caves by myself. And for some reason, the idea of a shark popped
• 56:26
  into my head. It's the Mediterranean. There are no many sharks in the med. But like just the fact that
• 56:32
  poor people are there and like the water was deep and I could see a long way. I just started
• 56:38
  getting the hibi gibis. But it's like a bit like, you know, starting to be afraid of a ghost or an
• 56:42
  alien when you're in bed and everything's dark. It's a monster reflex, isn't it? Regardless of
• 56:47
  probability. And then the lottery is right. We had this big lottery last week, 200 million,
• 56:52
  I think it was. And it's a similar thing, right? Everyone ignores the probabilities of winning.
• 56:56
  And more people buy it. And the probability of winning goes down as more people buy it. And
• 57:00
  but everyone's just imagines are you got to be in it to win it. And so everyone's imagines the
• 57:05
  change of life and all this. Even though the data on winning lottery is actually mixed. A lot of
• 57:09
  people regret it a year later. And there's midstream things with happiness there. But anyway,
• 57:14
  so both these examples of yet that we don't do well with probabilities, particularly low
• 57:19
  probability things. And low probability, L was actually going back to that I mentioned I have
• 57:25
  a book that just came out. I may not have mentioned it to you yet. Anyway, there's an acronym
• 57:30
  in there called Smile and the L in that is for low probability. And other sometimes call that
• 57:34
  the shark attack rule because don't use your intuition for these kind of things, right? Don't
• 57:39
  try and feel your way around lotteries or winning or shark attacks because the emotions take
• 57:44
  over. We just don't get probabilities playing crashes, playing crashes, right? We get emotional
• 57:48
  thinking we start getting scared. So that's one of the rules around intuition, which is to stay away
• 57:52
  from that. I just think it's interesting when these things take over and they spread almost like a
• 57:57
  virus horizontally through the nation. Are you vulnerable to this stuff around or are you like
• 58:01
  a hyper rationalist? Oh, I am a deeply anxious person. Really? Gift from my mother. No, I'm sorry,
• 58:09
  no, she she is someone who is very, very good at predicting outcomes and very, very motivated
• 58:18
  to avoid bad outcomes, right? And I think that that's in a lot of ways very natural. And I think
• 58:23
  you're right, it requires sort of active choosing to move away from that and go, I know that the
• 58:29
  probability is low and therefore I'm not going to make this decision. So one example is I have
• 58:33
  a very beautiful dog that I love very much and my mom is terrified of me tying him up outside a
• 58:39
  shop or something to go inside the shop because she's like, what if something happens to him?
• 58:43
  What if someone steals him? When I was a kid and there was that really, really awful story about
• 58:50
  I think a three or four year old boy who was taken by two eight year old boys in the middle of a
• 58:56
  like a grand area and killed. She really freaked out and she was like, what if that would have happened
• 59:02
  to you? And you know, you can start to take in all of those stories and go the worst case scenario
• 59:08
  is so bad that I am unwilling to even roll those dice. And that is something that has in a lot of
• 59:15
  ways been instilled on me. I try to move away from it and I go, look, Australia is a country where
• 59:21
  there is a culture of time dogs up outside. I generally am only ever gone 10, 15 minutes. I don't
• 59:27
  time up anywhere hot. I don't time up near the road. I take all of these precautions, but it still
• 59:32
  sits inside you this fear of the what if. And I think on the flip side, you have the hope of the
• 59:39
  what if with the lottery example. And maybe I think that's just being human. I mean, I don't think
• 59:45
  there's anything wrong is there with a with using the algorithm to go back to that of I want to,
• 59:52
  I don't want to tolerate any risk of X. Therefore, I'm not going to do why. You just have to be consistent
• 59:59
  about the application of that refusal. So like, I don't think it's irrational necessarily,
• 1:00:05
  but you want to rank right. So you don't want to go around being worried about it being hit by
• 1:00:10
  lightning. Like the things that are very low. You want to write them. Yeah, I'm
• 1:00:14
  kind of convinced that just to finish that to finish that point to actually be consistent would
• 1:00:19
  derange your your your life. So take the example to plane crash. I don't think it's unreasonably
• 1:00:25
  unreasonable to say I want the risk of dying in a plane crash to be zero. Therefore, I'm not going
• 1:00:29
  to fly. But you would also have to say, therefore, I'm not going to drive like it's so much. There are
• 1:00:35
  so many other riskier things that you know, to be consistent. You would also have to say, I'm not
• 1:00:40
  going to take all of these other risks. Why do you have to be consistent? Well, that's a good point.
• 1:00:44
  Maybe you don't. Maybe it's okay to be like, I just don't I don't want any risk of dying in a
• 1:00:47
  plane crash. What's wrong with that job? Well, I think no, I think with the point more is is
• 1:00:51
  around right, there's a cost to whatever you pay attention to as an individual or as a nation,
• 1:00:57
  right? And if we pay attention to all the things that are feel scary, the sharks, the snakes,
• 1:01:03
  the Tesla's taking control and smashing, you know, drive take the cars going create whatever the
• 1:01:08
  thing is that is most emotional, then we're ignoring the things that actually cost lives. So there's
• 1:01:13
  a cost to that. So we whether individual or as a nation or as a politician, you have to choose
• 1:01:17
  where the resources go. And you want to match that not 100% but more or less with the things
• 1:01:23
  that are most dangerous, right? So what's the Jerry Seinfeld thing that people are more afraid of
• 1:01:27
  public speaking than than dying so that rather be in the casket than give the eulogy, right? And so
• 1:01:34
  that's and it's funny, but it's kind of true as well, right? So as a nation and as individuals,
• 1:01:38
  the things that are most dangerous, we should put our resources towards and be and avoid or apply
• 1:01:44
  an algorithm to those and the things that are really maybe very scary and keep us up at night,
• 1:01:48
  but actually aren't very dangerous. We've got to find ways of psychologically dealing with that.
• 1:01:52
  I guess it depends whether or not we're just talking about do I not want to die or is there a
• 1:01:56
  particular scenario that I'm trying to avoid? Like I'm quite good at making my rational brain override
• 1:02:02
  my lizard brain. So I can force it is nice. It is nice. And it's I can understand how awful it must
• 1:02:09
  be to not have that ability because I spent the first half of my life judging people who don't
• 1:02:14
  have that ability for not having it and thinking that they should just tie it together. Low blood
• 1:02:19
  sugar, but that will change, right? When you're low, when you're late, absolutely. There are times
• 1:02:23
  when it's easier and times when it's not, you know, if I'm on a plane and you know, and I start,
• 1:02:28
  I freak out because I wake up and there's horrendous turbulence or something, I just, you know,
• 1:02:34
  force my rational brain to go, you know, this is vanishingly unlikely stopping. So,
• 1:02:38
  I'm so much hubris that you think that you're going to be in the plane crash. It's like,
• 1:02:41
  have you ever had like an anxiety attack or anything? Yeah, I have. Yeah. I've had it a couple of
• 1:02:46
  times, one of the worst, a couple of the worst experiences of my life. Yeah, sure. So you've,
• 1:02:50
  you've had that experience of body takes over. Yeah, total out of control was here. And I think that
• 1:02:56
  for that, for some people, that is like the experience of looking at any of these probabilities,
• 1:03:02
  that's you think about the what could happen. And it's unbearable. There is no rational
• 1:03:08
  brain that can come online. And that's a whole different conversation about
• 1:03:11
  Yeah, mental health and the way our brains work and everything. Yeah.
• 1:03:14
  Well, you've enhanced my mental health through this conversation. Thank you, Joel. Thank you,
• 1:03:18
  Rad. Love it. I hope you're on the hurt. That's good fun.