Latest / Love Conquers Fear / #43: The Battle for Open-Source AI: Building a Future People Can Trust — Peter Wang

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#43: The Battle for Open-Source AI: Building a Future People Can Trust — Peter Wang · Love Conquers Fear

0:00
So abundance is not some collectivist, socialist dark
0:03
dystopian USSR Bola. Abundance is the hidden store
0:06
we've not talked about. Abundance actually is far more
0:09
capital efficient than even capitalism, which can be capital
0:12
efficient eventually. So I think this is the the story
0:15
that needs to be told that it's not collectivist, it's not
0:18
socialist. And you know, hey, comrade, you
0:20
know, how's your bowl of rice going?
0:21
Like, actually, when people have their basic needs met and they
0:24
meet together and they build things out of love, out of joy,
0:28
out of an intrinsic creativity, we have a much more, much richer
0:31
world. Welcome back everybody to the
0:36
Love Conquers Fear podcast. I'm recording this right after
0:40
getting back from Josh Baer's place in Cabo.
0:44
He was on episode 3, which was great in that gathering that we
0:48
had, which is an annual gathering for the Henry Crown
0:51
Fellowship for the men in the group.
0:53
It was a men's weekend. It's only a second annual time.
0:56
We've done it. One of our readings for for the
1:00
off site was The Beginning of Life 3.0 by Max Tegmark, which
1:06
is the tale of the Omegas. It was a really interesting
1:10
coincidence. I would say synchronicity, you
1:13
know, shout out to the book The Celestine Prophecy by James
1:17
Redfield, one of my favorites. But it was a really interesting
1:21
synchronicity that we're reading that piece and discussing it on
1:27
the same week that malt book is going totally viral.
1:32
And so we brought that into the discussion and and with today's
1:36
guests, I'm sure we'll unpack mult book.
1:38
But if you're not familiar with it, as of this recording, there
1:42
are 1.5 million autonomous agents in a Reddit like
1:46
environment that's kind of walled off that are conversing
1:50
with each other and a lot of people are freaking out.
1:55
People being humans in this case, that that they're sentient
1:59
and that they're plotting against us and they're creating
2:01
their own language to disguise from us, etcetera.
2:05
I'm with Mustafa Suleiman on this one.
2:08
That I think they're feigning sentience or consciousness
2:12
extremely well. And it's still early innings.
2:15
I mean, remember as of this recording that we're barely
2:18
three years after the launch of Chachi PT?
2:22
That was November 30th of 2022, and we're in the exponential of
2:27
exponential curves. But anyways, it's a really
2:29
vigorous discussion that we had at the Henry Crown Fellowship
2:34
Men's Weekend, and it was just very interesting the
2:36
synchronicity between me reading that Max Tegmark piece for the
2:41
first time. I'm now working my way through
2:45
the rest of life. 3.0. I've been recommended that book
2:48
quite a few times, Included by Manoj Saxena, who was on the
2:52
last episode of the podcast. It was written in 2017.
2:57
And so it was kind of not really running towards reading it
3:02
because they thought it's really dated.
3:04
But Max tag Mark is very much a genius and really was
3:08
envisioning all the different scenarios that could happen in
3:12
the future. And it's it's a really, really
3:15
interesting read. And the tale of the Megas.
3:18
You know, the way the book starts out is essentially that a
3:22
bunch of engineers in in kind of a conspiracy type of way, get
3:26
together and create AGI and then essentially attempt to rule the
3:32
world and all of the things that happen as a result of it.
3:36
And it's not your typical dystopian tinge to it.
3:40
It's more like the benevolent dictator type scenario.
3:44
I would say that they think they know best, you know, similar to
3:48
the way that, you know, we constructed in this country that
3:52
senators have, you know, kind of superpower rights over, you
3:56
know, Congress and, and, and, you know, we have the balance of
4:00
powers, but obviously the Supreme Court plays a big role.
4:03
So it really makes you think it's a, it's a very interesting
4:07
piece. I think it's completely
4:09
unrealistic with how much people are moving from AI company to AI
4:15
company and how much they're getting paid.
4:17
I don't think it's realistic that there's one company that
4:20
will invent AGI and then others won't.
4:24
I think that there will be lots of companies that once we get to
4:28
the AGI moment, maybe one company comes out with it first
4:32
and then the next week another one comes out with it just just
4:35
because there's so much cross pollenization.
4:37
That's that's my belief at least.
4:39
And I also just don't think conspiracy theories of that
4:44
magnitude are realistic because someone's going to leak at some
4:48
point. And you know, in the Max tag
4:51
Mark story, they end up not leaking for a very, very long
4:56
period of time, like years to decades.
4:59
And I just don't think that's that's the way it would actually
5:01
happen. But it's a fun thought
5:03
experiment. If you haven't read it, it's
5:05
worthwhile. If you just buy the life 3 dot O
5:08
book, It's it's at the beginning of it.
5:11
And then the second thing is that you know that all of that
5:15
coincided with the same week that Dario Modi came out with
5:19
the adolescence of Technology, which I talked about on the last
5:23
two episodes. And we'll, we'll get into today
5:26
because today I have one of the world's leading AI experts and a
5:30
good friend. So welcome, Peter.
5:32
Yeah. Hey thanks for having me.
5:33
It's so good to have you here. Yeah.
5:35
Thank you so much for for showing up for this during this
5:38
really important time in humanity's future.
5:40
I'm. Really looking forward to the
5:41
conversation. I think we have a.
5:42
Lot of fun. I, I would love to establish you
5:44
as an entrepreneur because you're one of our best
5:46
entrepreneurs in Austin and, and let's just talk about your
5:50
company for a moment and how you got to this, this point in your
5:54
career. I arrived in Austin 22 years ago
5:57
and I came here really and I would say the journeyman phase
6:01
of my software engineering career.
6:04
And I did consulting for a number of years using the Python
6:07
programming language. And in the infancy, adolescence
6:10
of the scientific and numerical Python sort of movement.
6:15
And towards the end of the arts, I started realizing that these
6:18
Python tools are being used by people outside of science.
6:21
They're being used in finance and all sorts of places in
6:24
industry. And I realized that with cloud
6:26
computing and with big data, there was gonna be this emergent
6:31
set of needs that really needed a vastly more powerful business
6:34
data analytics tools. And that led me to founding
6:36
Anaconda. And we founded it was called
6:38
Continuum Analytics, but but we we changed the name a few years
6:42
later to Anaconda after the much better name.
6:45
I remember when it was. Continuing.
6:46
It was continuing. Analytics and it's sort of like,
6:48
yeah, cuz I don't know, we had we had sushi at I think Mako
6:50
downtown with Ben Travis and you early days and we're trying to,
6:54
you know, get advice from, you know, an established
6:56
entrepreneur like yourself about, you know, product versus
6:58
services and how to do all these things.
7:01
But but we, we built, you know, we started the company with a
7:05
thesis that was very much unproven at the time.
7:09
But we, we believed fundamentally that Python would
7:12
be a democratizing force for allowing people who are not
7:16
software engineers like Java or C++ people.
7:20
We believe there's a lot more people who wanted to do data
7:22
analysis, who wanted to make things with code and especially
7:26
data-driven things then then then could learn C++ or Java.
7:30
So we felt that Python was a great tool for them and we
7:34
wanted to dramatically increase the adoption of Python for data,
7:37
for data purposes. And we felt that we could build
7:41
a really great company seated in the open source community
7:45
because all of these innovations that were being built in Python
7:48
And now we're displacing very expensive tools and business.
7:50
They were created by volunteers, I mean grad students, assistant
7:54
professors, nights and weekends. This was not your classic, you
7:58
know, throw a few $1,000,000 at them and they'll build something
8:02
cool. This was people coming together
8:04
as a community orchestra, if you will, right?
8:07
And they were creating these wonderful tools that played well
8:09
with each other, quickly expanded to cover a lot of use
8:11
cases and as a collective, this, this Python open source
8:16
ecosystem was very, very powerful.
8:18
And it was powerful in an in a democratization of technology
8:21
way. And this will be important as we
8:22
talk about AI, right? So we had this thesis that there
8:26
was this moment for Python to really become this next
8:28
generation data analysis language built on this open
8:33
ecosystem, the open source ecosystem.
8:35
So we started the company to build product and services
8:37
around that. Fast forward, you know, for 14
8:41
years later, our thesis was proven quite correct, right?
8:44
People took to Python, they started using Python for doing
8:47
data analysis. In the era of big data and cloud
8:50
computing, Python's become the sort of de facto language for
8:53
data and ML. And then of course, with the
8:55
advent of deep learning and then early AI stuff in the 2015
8:59
sixteen time frame, Python started becoming the tool of
9:02
choice and. Made the right bet.
9:05
We made the right bet, but, but you know, sort of be the change
9:07
you want to see in the world, right?
9:08
If we hadn't done it, it'd be something else.
9:09
But because we did it, we put it there and you'd see things like,
9:12
for instance, Torch was written originally in Lua.
9:15
Torch then had become Pytorch because everyone's using Python,
9:18
right? Tensorflow, originally C++, they
9:20
had to wrap it with Python because everyone's using Python.
9:23
And so we, we definitely created and I would say laid the ground
9:27
work for this open source movement to expand into, let me
9:32
know really the foundations of modern ML and AI.
9:35
And through that journey, of course, my personal
9:37
entrepreneurial journey, which I think is the origin of the
9:39
question, I've had to do every job.
9:42
As we know founders, you have to do every job, right?
9:43
So I've been basically in every role, sales, you know, service
9:48
services lead consultant. I started as the CTO, did a
9:52
stint for years as CEO, took us to a couple of rounds.
9:56
And, and now I'm sort of, I think the term is transcended
9:59
founder, which means I get to be everyone's problem.
10:02
But, but actually I, I am leading our really our AI
10:06
strategy and, and sort of those kind of innovation efforts.
10:10
That's kind of my day job, but also I still play a very heavy
10:13
role in terms of technical strategy and working with the
10:17
community and and so on and so forth.
10:19
At at this point, it's one of Austin's unicorns as well.
10:21
It is. That's right.
10:22
I remember, I remember at the last last time we saw each
10:25
other, we were at this amazing dinner with other entrepreneurs,
10:28
including Bob Metcalf, that's right, founder of three Com,
10:31
where we were discussing the future of AI.
10:34
That's right, that was fun conversations.
10:35
Oh my gosh, it was so much fun and you shared with us, hey,
10:39
there's going to be some news pretty soon.
10:40
You didn't sure what that's what it was.
10:42
And and then I saw it hit and it just made my heart sing for you
10:46
and for Austin. And no, I mean, I I am an
10:50
entrepreneur through and through.
10:51
I've been an entrepreneur since I was since I was 24 years old.
10:55
I'm about to turn 54 on Valentine's Day and I know how
10:59
hard it is. And you know, we should we
11:01
should. One thing that'll go go go by
11:05
most people that are listening to this that haven't been
11:08
entrepreneurs is 14 years. That's a long time, but that's
11:10
how long sometimes these things take.
11:13
Like, yeah, they it's not the overnight success.
11:16
Very few are and the overnight things are oftentimes not
11:19
durable, right, Right. Structurally, if there is an
11:22
opportunity to give you that overnight success, yeah, lots of
11:24
other people pay attention very quickly.
11:26
Yeah, right. And and the The thing is true
11:29
with with ChatGPT, you mentioned it's only been three years since
11:31
the chat inning. Yeah.
11:32
And look at all the things that have happened.
11:34
Yeah. But obviously Open eye has done
11:35
very, very well. Yeah.
11:36
But some key people open eye left and created their biggest
11:39
competitor, Anthropic. Yeah.
11:40
And then meanwhile, you know, Google's come along and done a
11:43
full shake up. Yeah.
11:44
And they are in the race, you know, with a search.
11:47
Brin coming back. Coming back, they're like this
11:49
is this is a make or break moment for us.
11:51
So you can take a multi $100 billion company now trillion
11:54
dollar company and turn around not quite on a dime, but as big
11:57
orgs go pretty much on a dime to tackle the opportunity.
11:59
So those overnight successes are, I mean, it's great if you
12:02
hit one, but often times, you know, if you want to build a
12:06
really good durable business, it takes a long time.
12:09
It does, yeah. And just to just to mark this
12:12
moment too, from from just kind of a size perspective of
12:16
capital, you know, last last year when President Trump
12:22
announced Project Stargate, which was 500 billion in
12:25
funding, he announced that alongside my Yosi son, Sam
12:29
Altman, Larry Ellison, that that 500 billion of funding towards
12:34
the creation of AGI, you know, the data centers to support it.
12:38
That was already more inflation adjusted than we spend on the
12:41
Manhattan Project to win World War 2.
12:44
And it was more inflation adjusted, inflation adjusted
12:48
than we spent on the space race versus the Russians, right.
12:51
Since that moment in time, you know, here we are in 2026,
12:56
there's been around $7 trillion of additional announcements
13:00
throughout the world, right, including the UAE.
13:04
So we are in very unprecedented territory.
13:07
Yes, and I think that a big part of that is hope.
13:10
You know, like let's create the end of disease, let's create a
13:13
world of unlimited energy. Let's create, you know,
13:16
abundance that we can't imagine. I think a big part of its fear
13:19
too, like fear of if China gets AGI before us, you know, it's
13:23
all over for us. And you know, kind of the Max
13:26
Tegmark scenario and Life 3.0. You know, you heard you heard
13:30
the opener here that you know, China becomes the omegas and we
13:36
fear them and you know, they have this unprecedented take
13:38
off. And and so, you know, a big part
13:41
of it is, is fear as well, for sure that this is the moment.
13:46
And so, you know, we're just, we're just in this time where
13:50
for Deborah and I as investors and startups, one of the one of
13:54
the hats I wear, you know, we're in 150 startups and 50 VC funds.
13:58
We've been doing this for 16 years.
14:00
I think that there's so many companies flying close to the
14:08
what I'll call the sun of the frontier models.
14:11
And, you know, it's, it's like Icarus, you know, that I, I
14:14
think I think probably 90 to 95% of these AI application
14:18
companies are going to go out of business.
14:19
And so, you know, to your point about durability, that's the
14:23
number one thing we're asking ourselves when we're investing
14:26
now is, is a, is do we really believe in our heart of hearts
14:30
that this is going to get us to abundance?
14:31
And B, is this durable in this AI moment or is, is it going to
14:36
get blotted out, you know, and kind of it's like the Microsoft
14:39
Windows problem. Yeah, multiplied by 100 or.
14:43
Whatever. Well, and the big AI, you know
14:45
the big frontier model companies, although they look
14:49
like a sun that you shouldn't fly close to, they are they are
14:53
in. An existential race they.
14:56
Have an existential issue as well, right?
14:59
There's, there's just so many. I mean, the last paragraph of
15:03
sentences you, you said we could do an hour long podcast on every
15:06
single one of them. So I'm trying to distill in my
15:09
mind, what are the most sealing things here.
15:11
I would say that I'm really glad to hear you say that that
15:13
funding is inspired by fear. And, and I think it is a Red
15:19
Queen problem to this to some extent.
15:20
So the Red Queen problem, you know, in Alice in Wonderland,
15:23
the, the faster you run, you have to run faster and faster
15:26
stay in place, right? I think the issue that we see
15:29
here is we have this technical, this technical innovation that
15:33
happened with LMS, with deep learning, you know, with, with,
15:36
with, with certainly the Transformers model.
15:41
We have actually this incredible unlock that is intrinsically
15:46
abundant. What I mean by that is, is
15:48
unlike the Manhattan Project where you had to, you had to do
15:51
a lot of really hard work to get a little bit of, of the
15:58
radioactive materials to make a bomb.
16:00
And bombs are intrinsically they're, they're, they're sort
16:06
of 0 sum things in the sense that if I blow up a bomb over
16:08
your city, your city's gone. If you blow a bomb over my city,
16:11
my city's gone. I don't get it back instantly,
16:14
right? Like it's, these are bad things.
16:15
This seems like a stupid thing to say, but weapons, bombs, all
16:18
these things, they're intrinsically subtractive,
16:21
right? But actually these LMS, if you
16:24
have an LLM and you're able to live your life better, that
16:27
doesn't hurt me any if I have an LM too.
16:30
And given these LMS are really just matrix multiplies on a pile
16:33
of human knowledge, that's all in the public Commons, I'm not
16:36
taking any knowledge away from you.
16:38
So we are literally, we have this thing that was dropped upon
16:41
us that could not be more of a technological mana from heaven.
16:46
And what you're seeing now with all these dollar figures being
16:49
thrown around, ultimately there is an aspect of geopolitical
16:52
fear that policymakers and others have gotten into this
16:56
belief of like, well, if they get AGI dot dot dot, they will
17:00
make, you know, unbeatable advances.
17:04
They'll be as fast take off or they will make, you know,
17:06
chemical weapons or biological weapons or they'll hack of our
17:09
cyber systems or any list of things you can use to scare
17:12
politicians in the public with right, right.
17:14
And there's always this dot dot dot right, Like you and I both
17:17
know as like software people and computer people.
17:19
Like there's a lot of things that go wrong.
17:21
The dot dot dot between like, Oh, we have an AGI to I've
17:24
scaled it up to where I'm able to do all these nefarious things
17:26
right. But even if we just skip that
17:27
and say, OK, maybe there's somewhat justifying their fears
17:30
and they do want to get to some. They want to stay on the
17:32
frontier capability. What's really driving a lot of
17:35
that, those dollars being thrown around is they're afraid that
17:37
their investors are not going to get exponential returns on the
17:40
money they've already thrown into it.
17:42
That's right. And, and they have to live up to
17:44
valuations that are so unprecedented, so unprecedented,
17:47
and capital outlays that are so unprecedented.
17:50
And, and, and you know, the argument sometimes made is,
17:51
well, all they have to do is unlock one cancer drug or
17:55
discover hair treatment for men. You know, like you take one pill
17:58
and boom, your hair comes back. You know, that's, that's $100
18:00
billion company right there easily, right.
18:03
But at the at the same time, whatever they discover, whatever
18:06
things they use, it's always techniques and algorithms apply
18:10
to data. Data is actually the really
18:12
important thing here. For sure.
18:14
And getting that data is non trivial.
18:17
Digitizing and doing better high quality data processing, those
18:19
are non trivial tasks. The fact that we started with
18:23
this large amount of source data to drive these chat bots and all
18:27
this open source code that's out there that drives the coding
18:30
LLMS, all of that stuff comes from the public, the Commons,
18:34
right? It was available for free.
18:35
That's why these people got this immense amount of lift.
18:38
It's not obvious at all that the next stages in drug discovery,
18:42
the next stages in material science, all these things that
18:44
require wet lab or actual people with like really hot molten
18:48
crucibles of God knows what trying to do things.
18:51
It's not clear that can be accelerated really at the same
18:53
kind of speed, right? So the, the, the investors who
18:56
went in those big valuations with these hopes and dreams soul
18:59
to them. You know, at some point things
19:01
have to get Mark to market. That's right.
19:03
And the game that we've always played in America is when enough
19:05
people are upside down on investment, the government bails
19:08
them out, the Fed bails them out.
19:09
And we've played this game. We're still in the middle of the
19:12
great financial crash in 2008 that never ended.
19:15
We just doubled down on it with COVID.
19:17
And you know, everything we're seeing in terms of the populist
19:19
backlash to the, I will say, neoliberal consensus, you know,
19:25
since the Clinton era, all of that, the, the, the chickens are
19:30
going to come home to roost, right?
19:31
And we are going to have a situation where our financial
19:35
system cannot absorb another trillion, couple trillion dollar
19:38
level bailout, right? I mean, maybe it can, but people
19:41
are going to be super pissed, right, when they actually
19:43
realize what's going on. And so I think anyway, we've
19:46
kind of gone a bit further afield.
19:47
Yeah, no, but. This is, you think that this is
19:49
the real thing because do you need $500 billion to unlock the
19:53
thing? I mean, you talked about mult
19:55
book and open claw, right? The project underneath it,
19:58
that's like 2 dudes, right? Like mult book is 1 dude, right?
20:02
Open claw started accumulating for more people.
20:04
But when, when I was taking a step back, when I had my
20:10
interview with with Lex Friedman right before actually the the
20:14
the ChatGPT moment, I talked about how the interesting thing
20:18
for me as an entrepreneur. Was that the general capitalist
20:24
mindset and the investor mentality and the demand for
20:27
exponential returns and all these things that we have in the
20:29
called the modern financial system that the American way of
20:32
investing. All of these things are rooted
20:34
on a theory of value of value creation.
20:38
That's ultimately rooted in a scarcity mindset, right?
20:40
But the open source community that in you use the order of
20:43
abundance, which I love, right? The era of abundance.
20:45
How do we get to that? Well, there's something, you
20:47
know, it's a the default lies not in the stars, but in
20:52
ourselves, right? We have scarcity dynamics.
20:55
We have this kind of subtractive approach and the 0 sum approach
20:58
in the world at scale because we don't start looking at abundance
21:01
in the small. So when you have someone
21:03
collaborating with someone else for free, building a thing and
21:05
giving it out to others for free, that small moment of of
21:10
giving and of operating in abundance mentality that then
21:14
when put on substrate like the Internet and GitHub and these
21:18
kinds of things, you end up with open source communities
21:20
providing or creating tremendously large amounts of
21:23
value. And I said to Lex Freeman, I
21:26
said, imagine if we're to go back to Paris in the 18 hundreds
21:32
1700s and you were to go to King Louis, whatever, right?
21:35
And you say I have invented a magic scythe 1 farmer working
21:38
for one Sunday afternoon with the scythe can can harvest all
21:42
of the wheat to feed all of Paris for a year.
21:44
OK, how valuable would that be? That side would be immensely
21:47
valuable, right? And so when we look at, OK, the
21:51
scientific Python community that built the software tools that
21:54
power all of this modern machine learning and data science and
21:58
AI, you can fit them in a bus. You have to provide them food,
22:02
shelter, water, but for a very small amount of money, you get
22:05
this extreme expansion of productivity.
22:08
So abundance is not some collectivist, socialist, dark
22:11
dystopian USSR blah, blah. Abundance is the hidden store.
22:15
We've not talked about abundance actually is far more capital
22:19
efficient than even capitalism, which can be capital efficient
22:22
eventually, right. So I think this is the the story
22:26
that needs to be told that that it's not collectivist, it's not
22:29
socialist. And you know, hey, comrade, you
22:31
know, how's your bowl of rice going like?
22:33
No, actually when people have their basic needs met and they
22:37
meet together and they build things out of love, out of joy,
22:41
out of an intrinsic creativity, we have a much more, much richer
22:45
world. If we come in and try to extract
22:48
exponentials out of everything they're doing, then the
22:52
mechanisms of extraction actually damage the fruit and
22:55
then lead to a much, much more impoverished landscape.
22:58
Yeah. So I think this is the thing I
23:00
want to center on in our conversation about how do we get
23:02
to an AI powered abundance, right?
23:04
And I would challenge you with the question of maybe we already
23:07
live in the era of abundance. Right.
23:09
And we are just allocating things we do.
23:11
And, and you know, we've, I've covered that in episodes with,
23:15
with Jamie Metzel with, with, with Byron Reese.
23:18
Yes, it's a distribution problem already.
23:22
I mean, we have enough food actually for everybody in the
23:24
world if we just figured out distribution.
23:27
But you and I actually are so aligned on this, like more than
23:32
I, I knew we would be because that is the whole premise of the
23:38
podcast and the book, you know, the book which which coming out
23:42
later this year is Love Conquers Fear, Humanity, AI and age of
23:45
abundance for all. And I start out talking about an
23:50
Uber driver I met from Chad. Chad has a GDP of $660 a person
23:55
versus ours is around 86,000 in the US.
23:58
And the hope for, to create abundance for a place like Chad
24:02
has to be through AI, robotics, quantum computing, brain
24:06
computer interfaces. It's got it's got to be through,
24:09
as you said, this, this, this distribution, which is actually
24:12
bigger than anything we've known in capitalism.
24:16
And I the the biggest problem for us getting to that age, I
24:23
think it's inevitable that we get to that age with, with one
24:26
Asterix. And the Asterix is the 0 sum
24:29
fear based scarcity mindset, which as I've covered on this
24:33
podcast, we as Homo sapiens have, have been around for
24:38
around 300,000 years on planet Earth.
24:41
The Earth is 4.54 billion years old, right?
24:44
The universe, you know, around 13.8 billion years old.
24:48
But we found out through the James Hope Telescope that's all
24:50
there and that so who who actually knows?
24:52
It's a long time. We don't have a working theory
24:54
of gravity. Let's not get a sorry to figure
24:57
out how big the universe is, right?
24:58
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I know, I know.
25:01
Get into time too. And The Order of Time by Carlo
25:03
Rovelli is one of my. One of her favorite books.
25:07
Phenomenal, phenomenal read. You know, we've only had
25:10
electricity as Homo sapiens for .1% of our evolutionary time,
25:15
99.9% of our time we have not even had electricity.
25:19
And so the amygdala, the fear based center of our brain is
25:23
highly developed and and we have to get over this mindset as we
25:30
approach the frontier of abundance.
25:33
That is our biggest risk. And I, as I've laid out on this
25:36
podcast, you know, I'm 95% certain that we make it that
25:41
there's a question of like, how big is the forcing function need
25:45
to be for us to wake up and realize we're genetically 99.9%
25:49
the same all over the world. And this is the great unifying
25:53
event. And in the lattice, you know, I
25:55
gave you a copy of my science fiction novella today.
25:58
I envision a positive scenario for how that happens, how we
26:02
unite and then what happens afterwards.
26:05
I think we need a lot more positive science fiction right
26:07
now as opposed to all the dystopian and some some trying
26:10
to be part of the light with that.
26:12
But but I'm you know, I'm curious like like how you how
26:17
you really think about how is humanity we're going to make it
26:22
actually to abundance versus the the downside scenario of of, you
26:27
know, the AI dystopian narrative of, you know, the Elizer
26:30
Jutkowski's, you know, it's all over, you know, we're all dead,
26:33
you know, type of. Yeah, I'm.
26:35
I have a hard time buying theories of the future,
26:39
paintings of the future for people who've not really had to
26:44
ship a lot of things through reality.
26:47
And and I don't mean that as just like casual shade.
26:49
What I mean is that the learnings I had to go through as
26:52
an entrepreneur and change management in just getting a
26:55
simple idea through to an organization of a few 100
26:57
people. What?
26:58
Well, what I think is simple, but you know, for someone
27:00
embodied within the ranks, like they're getting things from all
27:02
sides, right? There's just all of these things
27:05
that are just not clean right about the way that, you know,
27:10
the author of The Little Prince, Antoine de St.
27:12
Exupery wrote that this great line in Wind Santa Stars.
27:16
He wrote, there is but one variable problem, and that is
27:22
the problem of human relations. And that is as a technologist,
27:26
hardcore science guy growing up, I, I hold I, I find that to be
27:30
extremely true. And it's true in the small when
27:34
you're trying to coordinate a couple of people in a small
27:36
team. It's also true writ large as
27:39
humanity. What is the story we tell about
27:40
ourselves? And how do we then make sure
27:43
there's some integrity in that story so that we can then play
27:46
through in our communities and in our families and their lives,
27:48
our personal lives? How do we actually play through
27:50
so we can understand what is our place in this large scale
27:53
civilization? You know, you talk about the
27:56
fact that that how, how do we get the the lesser developed
28:01
parts of the world to a place where the children there are not
28:04
starving, don't are not, you know, suffer from disease that,
28:08
you know, for whatever reason, we are just blessed with riches
28:12
in terms of intelligence and artistry and creativity, right?
28:15
There's good comedians, good artists, great cooks, great
28:18
musicians, great scientists, amazing mathematicians that come
28:21
from every corner of the world. My father genius is distributed
28:26
everywhere, right? We, we need to look at this and
28:28
say, hey, our, we happen to be at the top of the, of the food
28:32
chain here in the West and in America certainly.
28:35
And people like you and I are successful entrepreneurs with,
28:37
with lots of resources. It is, it is just right that we
28:42
look at this world and say how do we surface all of that?
28:48
How do we help not just reduce misery and suffering, but how do
28:53
we really create the change that needs to happen in the world so
28:56
that these areas become their own fertile zones of development
29:01
And the people can live great lives and bring a lot of joy and
29:05
have a lot of meaning in their lives in whatever cultural
29:08
context they may be in. My, my father, I'm actually a
29:12
first generation immigrant. So I came here.
29:14
I was born in, in, in China. My father lived through the
29:17
Cultural Revolution, the great leap forward, the famine.
29:19
I mean, he has stories about literally eating dirt.
29:23
OK. And he's one of the smartest
29:24
people I've ever met. He's an absolute, just
29:26
brilliant, brilliant math and physics guy.
29:30
And he was born in the dirt in Jiangxi province.
29:33
Why? Why if you are, if you're an
29:35
Angel in heaven, sprinkling down genius among all the unborn
29:38
babies, right? Why would you dump a bunch into
29:40
this like backhoe, like literally dirt, little province
29:44
or not province, little rural village in, in, in backwoods of
29:49
Jiangxi? Like why would you That's that
29:51
seems like a waste, but it's not.
29:52
It's that in every human there is tremendous amount of a
29:55
potential. Not everyone will be in
29:57
Einstein. Not everyone will be, you know,
29:58
Mozart. But but we don't need everyone
30:01
to be that either, right. So I think this is where we
30:03
think about intrinsically the moral obligation.
30:06
You know, a lot of people in the world have religions which give
30:08
them the North Star. I think as a as a someone who's
30:11
an atheist and lives, you know, in a very secular world view, it
30:14
is, you know, you don't need much more than the maybe the
30:18
categorical imperative or something to say, but for the
30:20
grace of God or something that could have been me there and it
30:23
was me. It was like my dad, you know,
30:24
one generation of moves and looks like it was look what it
30:27
led to you, right. So I think there's just this
30:29
intrinsic thing about what's really needed if we solve from
30:32
needs and not from wants, right? If we solve for needs, what's
30:36
really needed to give everyone clean water, good food safety,
30:40
right? Basically things like that.
30:42
And at every step, what we find is that the things that prevent
30:45
those from happening are vestiges of hangovers of
30:51
institutions that are corrupt and failing, theories of how
30:53
humans collaborate that simply don't work, theories of
30:57
economics and the demand for exponential compounding return
31:00
on returns that create a neurotic level of consumer
31:03
desire. All these kinds of things are
31:05
predatory dynamics. And you know, we call them
31:08
Egregore's or we call them Moloch.
31:09
There's these like superhuman dynamics that emerge in in in
31:15
human societies and cultures. Those are the things that are
31:18
praying upon this and eating away the opportunity for
31:20
abundance to blossom. Right, right.
31:22
So in, in terms of what do you think is going to be the
31:27
catalyst for us to make it to that age?
31:31
You know, I, I, I, I've, I've tried to envision, I mean, one,
31:35
one of the, the first part of the lattice actually came
31:38
through for me through a psychedelic journey where where
31:41
I was like brain computer interfaces would lead to
31:45
unification of humanity, understanding the actual reality
31:51
we're living in. And that once that
31:54
scientifically was proven that we come from, you know, I'm very
31:59
spiritual. I deeply believe in God.
32:01
All that you could call it, you could call it God, the great
32:04
intelligence universe or consciousness.
32:06
I mean, I'm not professing to understand the nature of God,
32:09
but I do think that's where we get the concept of love from.
32:11
So I'm also very spiritual, but not religious in a traditional
32:16
religion, kind of. Yeah, I totally understand.
32:18
And actually I've in, in my study of scripture, you know,
32:22
reading the Bhagavad Gita, the Dao De Ching, you know, a lot of
32:25
ancient scripture or Kabbalah, et cetera.
32:27
You know, the Zohar. I've I've looked for the common
32:30
root, which, which this common root is essentially that we need
32:37
to realize our actual reality is one of love that leads you into
32:40
selfless service. It leads you into realizing that
32:44
anger and all of these other negative emotions come from
32:48
fear. And so allow love to conquer
32:51
your own fear. And you know you can, you can
32:54
get there through Stoicism. You don't have to walk a
32:56
spiritual path necessarily to get there.
33:00
And then you're able to help other people do that.
33:03
And then if everybody did that, well, humanity a sentence.
33:06
I mean, without a doubt, right, then it's 100% certainty.
33:09
We get to abundance. But right now, the, the, the
33:12
power structures are such that there is so much dystopian fear
33:18
out there. I mean, I mean, I don't know how
33:19
you look at this, but you know. Chachu PT launches November
33:24
30th. It was four months later that
33:27
the pause all AI development moratorium call came. 37,000
33:33
people signed that four months later, right?
33:35
And I went on a bunch of podcast and I was like, this is
33:39
absolutely ridiculous. Like this would be like Peter's
33:42
tribe discovering fire and saying sorry Brett, you can't
33:46
have it. Like this is the technology is
33:48
too good to create abundance for people not to have and and and
33:54
that it was going to be our clear path actually to get there
33:58
to abundance that this acceleration, you know,
34:01
diminisibus winning the Nobel Prize for, you know, Google
34:05
Deepmind's Alphafold, you know, which decodes the protein
34:08
folding problem. And if we could capture just 18
34:12
seconds of the sun's rays that fall on Earth, 18 seconds or
34:15
material science breakthrough that would power the world's
34:17
energy needs for over a year. Like it's, it's like whatever
34:20
you want to call that force, put the, put the bright, you know,
34:24
fusion reactor in the sky. It's just like, hey, plug in,
34:27
you know, it's right there. It's it's, it's pretty much
34:30
unlimited. Yeah, it's a a nice nin, right?
34:34
That said, we don't see the world as it is.
34:35
We see it as we are. So the people who are powerless,
34:38
who don't want to be left behind, who feel like their
34:40
entire world is constructed by powers beyond them, building
34:45
artifacts that do things they don't understand and that keep
34:49
that, then those powers that be, that float above somehow the
34:54
earthly plane the rest of us have to live in.
34:56
They have the yachts and they have the fancy parties and they,
34:59
you know, they appear in the Epstein files, all these kinds
35:01
of things. And it's just sort of over and
35:04
over now. It is, it is not.
35:08
It is reinforced to people that there are that America has a
35:12
hidden caste system and that the story of the American Dream was
35:16
maybe just a fiction to keep you in your place or a cope and an
35:20
end. So if you want to look for ways
35:22
that the brokenness of the system was explicitly engineered
35:25
by somebody, the Clintons or the Rothschilds or the God knows
35:29
who, right, Like there's an engineering to keep you down.
35:33
You know, I think the the way we look for narrative, the way we
35:36
look for characters, there's got to be a bad guy is a Darth
35:39
Sidious that's doing it, is a Darth Vader that's oppressing
35:41
me. Is it Hillary Clinton?
35:43
Is it Donald Trump? Somebody's oppressing me.
35:44
Other theory is is UAPS or is it?
35:46
Uaps, UFO's, it's all lizard people.
35:48
Let's go shoot up a pizza joint, right?
35:49
Because the lizard people are, you know, you know, doing stuff
35:51
to kids. Like, there's all sorts of
35:53
stupid stuff because we're stuck again.
35:56
We see the world as we are. And if we grow up only knowing
35:59
how to tell simple stories where there's a bad guy that hurts the
36:02
tribe, and then we are part of the tribe and we're gonna find
36:04
traders in the tribe to kick them out, right?
36:06
And then we're gonna do a cleansing of the tribe.
36:08
If you have a tribal narrative loop and that's the only program
36:11
you know how to run, guess what you're going to look for all
36:14
inputs are going to plug in a few of those things.
36:16
You're going to have a very happy little narrative that you
36:18
run on that does has no correspondence to reality,
36:21
right? But you're going to be able to
36:22
get by with it. And it makes you feel like you
36:24
have a handle on the world. And this is, it's going to be a
36:27
branch point, but we're not going to take it.
36:29
But let's give a branch point talking about human sentience
36:31
consciousness, how foreign a real AI could be, right?
36:34
But for now, let's stick with why things are broken I.
36:36
Do want to go? There we'll go there we'll go
36:38
there control Z we'll set you up a long time back though, right
36:41
So in the in the case of the the the the people looking for
36:45
tribal stories, looking for simple stories of oppression,
36:49
you will find plenty in the world to to plug into that
36:52
story. But if you're looking for, if
36:55
you're going to have an openness to it and say, well, what's
36:57
really happening here? The billionaires can't even
37:00
control what's going on. The billionaires get stuff
37:02
happening to them, right? So, So what is it?
37:06
Well, the big thriving, teeming mass of humanity has way more
37:10
going on. The billionaires who go in the
37:12
yachts and they, you know, hang out in the harbor, St.
37:14
Barts, whatever, you know what they're, they're terrified that
37:17
they're multi generational dynastic wealth is going to get
37:19
completely taken apart by all these upstarts.
37:23
But whether it's upstart tech Bros, you know, over here in the
37:27
US or whether it's oligarchs messing with them, you know,
37:30
from China or Russia, whatever, there's a lot of dynamics at
37:34
the, you know, 3 comma level and above that are not great for
37:38
those people either, Right? So what is in the midst of this
37:40
whole thing that we've got on this little blue ball that gets
37:43
just a little sliver of energy, very tiny, like the angular
37:48
occlusion that we have, We get a very small allocation of the
37:50
sun's energy. But with that energy, what are
37:52
we doing with it? Right.
37:53
And that that sort of that, that question that that question.
37:58
I think, you know, if you look at it from from the outside, you
38:00
say, well, maybe these stories are fresh and aren't really
38:02
what's going on. Maybe the way we the way we
38:05
actually fix it is we have a better we we start developing
38:10
and we start encouraging people to look for better stories and
38:13
better mythologies that both ground them in a sense of place
38:17
of what is your place here on earth in this moment of time,
38:20
but also can also route to existential hope.
38:24
And I think that's more important than ever.
38:27
What you. I'm so glad you doing this
38:28
podcast and so glad that you said this is your life calling.
38:31
And it's great that that you have this calling because these
38:34
stories have to be told. People need to see that, you
38:37
know what the successful entrepreneur, millionaire
38:39
people, whatever they're not Hunger Games style, sitting up
38:42
here and playing with the lives of, of the proletariat, right?
38:45
That there's a tremendous amount.
38:47
You know, I came from a very middle class upbringing.
38:49
I went through the public school system, likewise here, and I'm
38:52
doing whatever I can to try to put this positive energy back in
38:55
the world. I, I spend my nights and
38:57
weekends thinking really hard about what are the lessons, the
38:59
true lessons from the open source community that we can
39:02
then use to build an abundant baseline for AI, right.
39:05
So one of the new things that I'm launching is thing called AI
39:07
Commons and reinvigorating this. Some of the ideas behind the
39:12
sharing and share alike kind of licenses around data that will
39:15
allow us to basically make it so as people and public resources
39:19
are put into building data sets that let us build better AI's
39:23
that those are locked open for other people to innovate on, to
39:26
build on and to benefit from, right?
39:28
These are the kinds of things that, you know, that that that
39:31
take real work. But if we do those work, if we
39:33
do that work and those items start showing up, then we're
39:36
plumbing our way into a better future.
39:38
Yeah, right. So it's a lot of sorry, that was
39:41
a big, big. Rabid response.
39:43
I love that because because one of the things I was going to
39:45
bring up with with you really being deeply rooted and
39:49
successful in in open source is you know, when when you think
39:55
about, you know, I talked about the Stargate moment and it was
40:00
actually the day before that DeepSeek-R1 was announced.
40:05
Did you know that? Yeah, there was a.
40:06
Day before the timing, yeah, the timing was kind of interesting,
40:09
right? It's amazing, right?
40:11
I talk about a synchronicity and then the the nobody knew how
40:15
powerful that was when it was first launched.
40:17
But I mean, I'm sure a handful of people did, but it took about
40:20
a week and then a week later, that's when NVIDIA lost 600
40:24
billion market cap and the NASDAQ lost Detroit.
40:26
Everyone, everyone right got hit.
40:28
And but Oh my gosh, I was so excited about that announcement.
40:34
And the reason why is that you and I've been technologists for
40:38
a long time. You know, we, I've been
40:39
programmed since I was 7. I knew you started really young
40:42
and have been an entrepreneur for a long time.
40:46
And you know, I remember when Neil Stephenson came out with
40:49
the book in in the was the command line.
40:51
Oh my gosh, great book, right. And he predicted accurately that
40:55
Linux would win over Windows to power the Internet, right, that
40:59
open source would win. And he really laid out his
41:02
vision for why I I it's only non fiction book he ever wrote that
41:07
I know of. I don't think he wrote another
41:09
one, but he's he's one of my favorite authors, like the
41:11
diamond age, Snow Crash, amazing books and some of his other
41:15
books. But but you know, how do you,
41:18
how do you think about that as a vector?
41:20
I mean, I, I actually think it's pretty obvious at this point
41:24
that open source is going to win.
41:26
The DeepSeek moment was so huge because it was so early in this
41:32
is a year ago. OK, so ChatGPT is like barely
41:34
over 2 years old at that point. And R1 DeepSeek-R1 was vastly
41:40
more powerful than GPT 4, which led to the moratorium call we
41:44
talked about, right? The pause four months after the
41:47
launch of Chachi PT. So I think, I think that's great
41:51
for humanity that open source will win this moment.
41:55
I also think it means that once we get to AGI and then
41:59
artificial superintelligence, it's going to be very
42:02
distributed as opposed to this kind of oligarch, you know, type
42:06
approach that, you know, Max Tegmark laid out.
42:10
You know, although the megas like really mean well and, you
42:13
know, the the whole point and the end of that story is like,
42:16
how would you write the rest of the story?
42:19
And he's really getting you to think about humanity's big
42:22
moment. Yeah.
42:23
And where we go from here? But I think, I think, I think
42:26
it's, I think it's a fantastic occurrence that open source is
42:32
this is, is, is this powerful and, and, and able to catch up
42:37
that quickly, you know, versus the kind of the frontier model
42:40
is just going to rule everything.
42:43
Yeah, I, I, I think for people who are not very steeped maybe
42:47
in some of the AI technology, it may just look like Clash of the
42:51
Titans and we're mere mortals down here.
42:53
And here's like, you know, Godzilla versus like whatever.
42:56
And, and it's actually not that when you look at it, it's
43:00
people. Some people are very, very
43:02
smart, right? You know, somebody's got 1020 IQ
43:06
points on the average person. OK, that's a lot, right?
43:09
But it's still just one person. And they've got to sleep and
43:13
they have to spend some time eating and they have to spend
43:14
some time not plugged in and working.
43:16
So when you look at small teams and you look past the veil of
43:20
like this name, the company brand name and the billions of
43:23
dollars they've raised. And then you go all the way down
43:25
the bottom, the story that like just, I think the public doesn't
43:29
understand. And I'm sure this has been your
43:31
experience as well with your companies.
43:33
You know, at the end of the day, core products that drive tons of
43:36
revenue are really the work of a small handful of people at the
43:39
core of it. You know, I remember hearing a
43:42
story years ago that like the core like database kernel engine
43:46
team at Oracle was like maybe a dozen people, right?
43:49
The Windows NT kernel team, again, not very big Macintosh
43:53
operating system ridden by a small team of people.
43:55
Right. This is my back to my point
43:57
about the the Louis, Louis the 14th in the side in Paris.
44:00
The dramatically amplifying productivity, amplifying power
44:05
of software is the story that no one seemed to have told.
44:11
YouTube was like 4 people. Dropbox, GitHub, two people,
44:15
right? Dropbox, I think you know a
44:16
couple of people these things now over time you had to have a
44:20
lot more people building additional this is on to it, but
44:22
the start of the idea and the execution of it and building
44:25
these things, it doesn't take that many people to get started
44:28
with it. So if you look at the, the way
44:30
this touches on VFC thing is that it doesn't, you don't need
44:32
to go and fund another open AI to compete with open AI, right?
44:36
You just need a few people to kind of know what they're doing.
44:38
And, and I know some of the engineers at these different
44:40
companies and I know the people, you know, who, who've done some
44:43
of the projects. The thing that, you know, made
44:45
GPT into ChatGPT was a, a project in the data set called
44:49
instruct GPT, right? And they tuned it into being a
44:51
chat bot. That's a small team.
44:53
You know, there's a guy who who led it And, and like these kinds
44:56
of things happen, not the scale of hundreds of billions of
45:00
dollars. It's like these things happen
45:02
because the small good people decide to do something, right?
45:04
So lots of people in the world can go do things right if they
45:11
feel safe, if they have food, if they, you know, have some
45:14
economic viability in their lives, they can create lots of
45:16
interesting things. That's really the formula for
45:20
abundance is looking past the, the, the big giant, very
45:24
intimidating, you know, billion dollar raises and all that and
45:29
getting that to who's really doing what and what's really
45:31
needed, right. So you have a few people, you
45:33
have a giant troll of data that's going to crawl from the
45:35
Internet or that like was compiled from a lot of books and
45:38
things like that that are most in the public domain or a lot of
45:40
them are copyrighted. You know, that data doesn't
45:43
belong to exclusively to these companies.
45:46
The GP us. Well, everyone got their GP us
45:48
from Jensen, right? Or Google's GP us are pretty
45:51
good too. Like there's a bunch of stuff
45:52
happening here where you know, the hardware is also not really.
45:55
There's not an exclusive lock on that either.
45:57
China's trying to trying to damned us to build competing
46:00
ones. Everyone's trying to build
46:02
these. Things, I mean, everyone's
46:03
trying to build them and at the end of the day, now that we know
46:06
what these things do and what's needed, these matrix multiplies,
46:09
they're not that hard to do on a chip.
46:11
They're actually easier on a chip to scale this out.
46:13
It's mostly memory bandwidth and connectivity, right?
46:15
So like, if you put all that together and you're like, well,
46:18
what is the really the Moat here that would defend these hundreds
46:22
of billions of dollars, you know, compounding into trillions
46:25
of dollars of return for the investors.
46:27
And it's people are still searching around for this.
46:31
So I think that, you know, if we go back to the question of what
46:35
is needed for people to be abundant, these smaller models
46:38
and then chaining up smaller models, having novel data coming
46:42
in, right? Data quality is still a massive,
46:44
massive differentiator. So if you're in Chad and you
46:47
want to solve the economic problems or you want to solve
46:50
the agricultural problems in Chad, you're much better flying
46:53
drones over that specific area of Chad, tuning the model to
46:55
understand exactly the water table there there, doing so on
46:58
and so forth. Like those data sets feeding
47:00
into the drones and robots and all these other things.
47:03
That's going to be way more valuable than flying all that
47:06
data, sending all the data back to somewhere Mountain View or
47:09
Silicon Valley and having them send you a model back and charge
47:12
you, you know, by the by the token, right?
47:14
So I think this idea of embedded intelligence, using open source
47:17
to empower lots of people to build cybernetic systems that
47:20
are grounded and embodied in in situ in the areas of
47:24
application, that's really the next frontier.
47:26
Yeah, for sure. Yeah.
47:27
I mean, you know, robotics will just be the physical
47:30
manifestation of of AI. So.
47:32
So I think you and I agree that open source is going to win long
47:36
term, right. And long term, what is long term
47:38
to you? Like they were in the
47:40
exponential of exponential curve.
47:41
So, so, I mean, I, you know, the, the, the timeline I've laid
47:45
out since the beginning of this podcast is that we have the next
47:48
10 to 15 years, I think to, to make that fateful choice of are
47:53
we going to choose abundance for everyone on the planet?
47:57
Or are we going to cling on to the power and scarcity mindset
48:02
of the 0 sum game? That I just don't think I I, I,
48:07
I believe that technology throughout history has been a
48:11
great forcing function for us to make fateful choices.
48:16
You know, you think about this, this is a horrible thing to talk
48:19
about, but it but it was a real thing.
48:21
You know, we had slavery in this country and that that
48:24
bootstrapped, you know, farming in terms of capitalism.
48:28
You know, which most of the country were farmers at the
48:30
beginning and then the industrial revolution came along
48:33
in a machine automation, etcetera.
48:35
And we, we should never treated people like that, you know, and,
48:40
and you know, it's, it's, it's horrible to even think that we
48:42
did. But that made that, that
48:46
technological shift made that way of operating completely
48:51
obsolete. And, you know, really seen for,
48:55
for what it was as well. And now we're in this
48:59
exponential of exponential curve.
49:01
So, so I, I really think that I'll, I'll lay out the way I
49:04
think it's going to happen. Sure.
49:05
I mean, I'm writing a whole book about this, but, but the way,
49:09
you know, the, the, the shortest succinct way I can describe it
49:13
is that we're going to, to, to have this exponential curve play
49:18
out to the point where I think it's going to be obvious to both
49:22
leaders around the world as well as to the large populace that
49:28
we're, we're going to be able to seize abundance for everybody on
49:32
the planet. And I, I, I'm not sure like how
49:37
much people are going to try to cling on to the power and
49:41
whether or not it, you know, it's going to be in a lot of my
49:44
less optimistic friends think that there has to be some kind
49:47
of horrible violent conflict. You know, I'm a Jewish guy.
49:51
Like there was a Holocaust. Like they, you know, they're
49:54
like, well, humanities have these things.
49:56
And I always say just because we've had these horrible things
50:00
does not mean we're doomed to repeat the past, like, you know,
50:04
go back to slavery or go back to the Holocaust or all of these
50:07
things. And so I think that it's going
50:10
to be obvious that we're looking at the end of disease.
50:14
We're looking at, you know, desalinization all over the
50:18
planet because we've solved energy, you know, like, you
50:21
know, the, the scarcity of water problem goes away.
50:24
We're looking at abundance, you know, of food and materials that
50:29
we cannot imagine today. And, and you know, you, you, you
50:32
kind of went there earlier, but if you have you ever read
50:35
Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker?
50:38
No, I've not. Fantastic book, you know, very
50:41
data-driven. You would you would love it.
50:42
Just the chapter on inequality alone is worth the price of the
50:46
book. But yeah, he just looks at the
50:47
data over long periods of time. And you know, you start out
50:52
saying we're living in abundance now.
50:54
And that's for sure true. If if, you know, we're in 2026,
50:57
if we went back to 1926, if we went back to 1826, I mean,
51:02
people then compared to now would be like, Oh my gosh, you
51:06
guys have grocery stores where you can get all these different
51:09
blueberries and you know, I mean.
51:11
It's actually, we don't have to go to 926.
51:13
So I came here in 1985 as an immigrant from China.
51:17
At that time, I was in a big city, Wuhan actually, which many
51:20
people have heard of now. It was a pretty big city.
51:22
It's a big steel town in China. It's a, you know, kind of a
51:26
industrialized city, several million people.
51:29
So it wasn't like I was in Podunk, like backwards, like I
51:32
was in a big city. And we did not have indoor air
51:35
conditioning. We did not have indoor heating.
51:38
We did not have running potable water.
51:40
We would go and get our weekly deliveries of of coal, pressed
51:43
coal from the wheelbarrow that would go down kind of the street
51:46
and we'd like get coal, stash it underneath our stove.
51:49
We'd boil the water before we drink it.
51:51
By the way, this is situation in Chad today.
51:53
So I'm so I know I can cut, I know I can like, you know, make
51:56
it in that situation. And we had ration tickets for
52:01
meat and for certain other kinds of things.
52:03
So coming to America and walking into a Kroger, yeah.
52:07
For the first time, Yeah. Was like, you can just buy as
52:10
much fried chicken. First of all, fried chicken, but
52:11
also ice cream exists, and you can buy as much of it as you
52:14
want. And there's just stacks of fresh
52:16
apples and fruits that look incredible.
52:19
Yeah. That that was a Dorothy, you
52:22
know, kind of. Going inside the color here in
52:24
the Wizard of. Life just like holy crap, you
52:27
know, and that so so the folks who are born in America, who
52:32
don't live in let's say horrid circumstances, but live in
52:36
moderate circumstances in America, I think their baseline
52:39
of just how not how bad it could because it's a terrible way to
52:42
think, but just like how much there already is in their lives.
52:46
I think that calibration. I'm actually grateful that I got
52:50
to, you know, see that as an immigrant and have that
52:52
experience. But, but, but we absolutely can.
52:57
We have to, I think we have to change people's mentalities
53:00
around what the stories could be.
53:02
That's why it's important to tell these stories, to write the
53:03
science fiction that's, that's positive, right?
53:06
I do think that the way we'll get there is not through violent
53:09
revolution. And the reason because we are
53:11
already so good. It's a dark reason.
53:14
And the dark reason is we're so good at sedating the masses that
53:17
the people in charge and the billionaires will absolutely
53:22
find ways to essentially ameliorate any of this kind of
53:28
energy. And again, this is a horrible
53:30
and dark picture to paint. But I think as a pragmatic
53:33
engineering kind of minded person, I would say, well, if
53:35
this is the problem and these people have this route to
53:37
solution, they will almost certainly hit that solution
53:39
every time, right? You will give people the most
53:43
amazing new kinds of engineered drugs.
53:44
You will legalize marijuana everywhere.
53:46
You will have all sorts of art and music.
53:48
You'll have digital, digital soma is what I've been calling
53:51
it, right? That will just keep people.
53:54
It's it's dark and horrible on a waste of humanity, but it will
53:58
at least keep people from rising up.
54:00
You know, one of the the, the thing that you say about
54:03
technology always forcing a change for us, the the broad
54:07
dissemination of pornography actually has had a massive
54:10
change on culture and the, you know, cheap sex bots are going
54:14
to arrive any day now from Shenzhen.
54:17
Those are going to change culture.
54:19
And so you have a situation where the traditional things
54:21
that would motivate a lot of young angry, you know, men
54:25
without hope and future to go and revolt and decapitate, you
54:27
know, decapitate a king. We can't actually have the
54:30
technology to grant, you know, short a lot of that to ground.
54:35
Now, is that a good thing to do? No.
54:37
But is that a way to manage this transition if it really gets to
54:40
that point? Probably.
54:42
So I think that that's where, you know, we are headed into.
54:45
That's my version of dystopia, essentially Brave New World
54:48
style, where people are managed out of having meaningful lives
54:52
and they're hooked on digital soma and they're basically just
54:55
given all these things and they're painted a picture of
54:57
having a good life. That is actually not the best
55:00
life they could be having. We're not actually maximizing or
55:03
putting in the substrate for them to maximize their
55:05
potential. We're just going to box them
55:08
into a pen and feed them like little clockwork oranges.
55:12
That is absolutely. I, I feel that is like almost
55:17
certainly some of the things that will happen on our way to
55:20
trying to create abundant infrastructure because I just
55:23
don't see the current people who have power and have money or I
55:27
just don't see them advocating that.
55:30
And if they try to do well anyway, I'll talk.
55:34
To you, but do you think that, I mean, that's a, that's a pretty
55:38
dark future. You know, I, I understand what
55:40
you're saying, but do you, do you actually think that the
55:44
billionaires of the world would actually want that future?
55:48
I mean, it seems like like that that's a it's a like that type
55:53
of future is 1 where as you walk around and you're interacting in
55:58
society would would seem like we've we've we've lost our way.
56:03
But we're already there. We're already there.
56:05
How many young men and women? I mean, let's look at the the
56:08
hard cold reality, right? And all that.
56:10
Three different people we'll look at, you know, the young man
56:12
that's, you know, maybe not an incel, but it's certainly
56:15
spending a lot more time. They'll admit, you know,
56:17
watching, you know, porn or porn like things, you know.
56:21
Then the young women who are like, well, all the men are
56:25
creeps and like, you know, there's it's it's it's rough
56:28
being it's always been rough. Being a woman is particularly
56:30
roughing young, young women as a society.
56:32
But all the men are creeps. And so many girls are out there
56:37
making money, basically making amateur porn that they make
56:41
hundreds, hundreds, $1000 a month on the stuff, right?
56:44
So why wouldn't I try my hand at that?
56:47
And then you got billionaires who profit from sports gambling,
56:49
online gambling, who make tons of money off of these kinds of
56:51
platforms, who make tons of money off of vending useless
56:55
crap to people and driving up more demand for it.
56:58
So that's as if meaning is produced in these kinds of
57:01
trivialities and, and, and, and, and, and trading these kinds of
57:04
digital commodities. So so you're asking, are the
57:07
billionaires going to be OK with it?
57:08
I think they're already OK with it.
57:10
You know, I don't see anyone, I mean, some of them for religious
57:13
reasons are like, no, we've got to the the pornography stuff is
57:16
bad. We have to, you know, put, put
57:17
energy behind promoting traditional, traditional values
57:20
and and things like this and and people forming families.
57:23
That's all good energy there. But a lot of that's deeply
57:25
religious code, religion coded, which then puts off a lot of
57:27
other people. And that versus raw human nature
57:31
and dollars is having an uphill battle, right.
57:34
So I think that the, the evidence, I don't want it to be
57:37
this way. I'm not celebrating it.
57:39
No, I, I understand as a, as an engineer, as a business, I start
57:42
from first principles and I have to look at the data and the data
57:44
shows that an economy based on people trafficking and creating
57:49
boundless desire that can be sufficed with simulacrum of
57:53
things that provide meaning. That seems to be going very
57:57
strong and I don't see any signs of it tapering off with AI.
58:01
But isn't that the, do you know that movie Idiocracy?
58:03
Of course. Do you think it sounds like the
58:05
Idiocracy future in some ways? I mean, it's, it's the only, I
58:09
mean, it's like, what about what about all the people that are
58:11
going to be able to manifest the use of AI to create companies?
58:16
I mean, you know, part part of the reason I thought the the
58:18
moratorium, you know, kind of the pause call was so ridiculous
58:21
as I was like, look, this going to lead to millions and millions
58:24
of new startups. So each individually be smaller,
58:27
you know, kind of like you're talking about earlier small
58:29
teams. Well, that's even more true in
58:31
the AI moment that they can do a lot more.
58:35
I had Jeremiah Owang on the podcast who has the both scaling
58:38
fund alongside Reid Hoffman. That was episode 21.
58:42
He's a good friend. He was the closing keynote at
58:44
Ted AI this year and he showed data at Ted AI that the AI
58:50
native startup, the ones that are started in this era, their
58:54
average revenue per employee is somewhere between 2.2 to $2.4
58:58
million per employee. Whereas regular SAS is like
59:02
250,000 or so and top tier SAS prior to this AI moment is
59:08
around 450,000. I kept largely correct with
59:12
those numbers that episode. Fact Check me on it.
59:15
But but basically, you know, we're, we're in this, we're in
59:19
this moment where the ability to shatter the barrier, creativity
59:24
has never been more present as in right now, which is different
59:28
than the sedation of like, I'm just going to, I'm just going
59:32
to, you know, kind of have the Wall-e type future or the
59:36
Idiocracy type future. I think the Wall-e thing is
59:39
great. It's a great movie.
59:41
Yeah, Idiocracy. I mean, it was also kind of a
59:43
fun movie, but but it was, it was sort of like punching down
59:48
and kind of like shooting a straw man.
59:49
Definitely punching down. Right.
59:50
It's only punching down. But but, but I think Wally was
59:54
deeply, it was a very deep commentary, right?
59:57
Because if you think about all the humans who are, you know, on
1:00:00
the spaceship. You know, the by and large,
1:00:03
right, which is like such a great brand.
1:00:04
And then, you know, you have the advertisements like, oh, the
1:00:06
blue suits are in in vogue now. So you're sitting there sipping,
1:00:09
you're like 64 oz super sized soda.
1:00:11
You hit the blue button and then you now you're cool because
1:00:14
you're blue. You know, like actually, a lot
1:00:16
of people live that way right now and, and, and to some form
1:00:18
or another are reduced to that kind of existence and, and that
1:00:21
reduction of the raw spirit of, of humanity that glows in each
1:00:25
person. That reduction is itself, I
1:00:27
think in a moral thing. So if you look at this thing of
1:00:31
like this question of, of, you know, AI and creating all these
1:00:35
startups and all this stuff, I mean, I don't disagree with
1:00:38
that. I think that it does lead to
1:00:40
more creativity and people can do a lot more with less.
1:00:42
But I think that's sort of is that doesn't answer the question
1:00:46
of the Talos, right? That's sort of like at this
1:00:48
level that if you believe as an entrepreneur that people going
1:00:52
and taking whatever tools are available and using fast capital
1:00:56
formation to go and tackle an interesting problem, great.
1:00:59
I mean, how can I disagree with that?
1:01:00
That's great. There's lots of problems to be
1:01:01
solved in this world, right? Not just this world, but I
1:01:04
think. For the world to come.
1:01:05
Yeah, for the world to come, like I think, I think, you know,
1:01:08
can we conquer faster lightspeed travel, etcetera.
1:01:10
We don't really know, no. No, we, we have to be applying
1:01:13
obviously accelerating human intelligence and pulling it
1:01:15
directly into the fusion reactor of the sun is a good thing.
1:01:19
Absolutely. Like you can lead to a lot of
1:01:20
great things how we do it. That's the art and that's the
1:01:23
the context of this our conversation, right.
1:01:25
So when you look at the people who are building these kinds of
1:01:27
startups and, and doing all this, like what problems are
1:01:30
they really trying to tackle, right?
1:01:31
Are they actually trying to unwind the kind of hedonic
1:01:35
consumption oriented, massive industrial, industrial scale
1:01:39
capitalism kinds of, you know, consumer economy things?
1:01:42
Or are they just turning that to 11, right?
1:01:45
There's a lot of these critiques of, and I'm not a, I'm not a
1:01:49
critic of capitalism per SE. I just don't think it's a, a
1:01:53
tale of unto itself. I think, you know, some of the
1:01:56
things that we use in capital formation, the idea of investors
1:01:59
getting some of the surplus, you know, I believe in employee
1:02:01
ownership. I think, you know, employees and
1:02:03
founders should have a significant portion of the
1:02:04
outside as well. And when we do these things kind
1:02:06
of in a limited way or in the small, it could basically kind
1:02:09
of works. Markets at large are good at
1:02:11
solving certain kinds of allocation problems.
1:02:13
When we scaled them up to a size where they're kind of runaway
1:02:16
money on money returns and there's no externalities priced
1:02:20
in and now you're buying politicians to ensure the game
1:02:22
goes for another round. I think that's kind of that's
1:02:25
going to run a terrible course, right?
1:02:27
That that's we're seeing the end result of that going for a few
1:02:29
decades now and it's not good. That doesn't make me some like
1:02:33
commie socialist, right? I'm just sorry.
1:02:34
Looking at the obvious thing saying markets don't work if you
1:02:36
don't price in the externalities, right, right.
1:02:38
So the OR markets not a net good, right?
1:02:41
They'll solve for something, but they'll basically screw a lot of
1:02:44
people. And that's not what any
1:02:45
economist who supports markets really wants or says they want.
1:02:49
So I think at the end of the day, we look at all these and
1:02:51
say, well, what are we really trying to do here, right?
1:02:53
What is the real issue? If we could empower everyone,
1:02:55
you know, harkening back to, you know, Stephenson and the Diamond
1:02:58
Age and we have everyone their own illustrative primer and that
1:03:00
is their guide to life. And as smart as the, you know,
1:03:03
Star Trek, Next Generation, Enterprise, computer it tell
1:03:05
them they can tell them if you're in Chad, here's how you,
1:03:08
you know, build a well, here's how you feel like do
1:03:10
desalinization. You only need these commodities
1:03:11
to then build a really nice thing that you have ample fresh
1:03:14
water. What are all the things that we
1:03:15
can do if we had this kind of technology?
1:03:18
Is that enough? We still regress to our
1:03:21
Neanderthal ways or not Neanderthal but to our tribal
1:03:24
ways? Are we still always be looking
1:03:26
at, well, that guys got a bigger house and that guys got a hotter
1:03:29
wife and that are we still going to be in this kind of a mode?
1:03:33
And I think the the answer my based on 48 years of observing
1:03:36
humans, my answer is that unless we solve the issue of culture
1:03:41
and spirituality and sort of a mythos for each person to have a
1:03:46
dignified and meaningful life. If we don't Plumb people into
1:03:49
that, then Orient them towards that kind of a North star.
1:03:52
We can do all the abundance creation we want and we'll still
1:03:55
end up with the dumbest wars for the dumbest reasons, right?
1:03:59
And and it comes back then. And, and a personal journey I've
1:04:02
been on since 2016 is really trying to recover and understand
1:04:06
the origins of the word technology and how we think
1:04:09
about techni separate from, you know, the user.
1:04:13
I think even in that split, that initial dichotomy maybe is where
1:04:18
some of this almost as it's kind of an original sin to some
1:04:21
extent of how we approach this whole thing.
1:04:24
Just as you wouldn't give a 5 year old a Lamborghini to go
1:04:27
crash into a fence post when we get people computers.
1:04:30
And we did this in the 90s. We saw, you know, people dialing
1:04:33
up and connecting and it was great and want to make things
1:04:35
easier to use for people. But then people got fish to
1:04:37
spammed to hell, right? And even to this day you have
1:04:40
people who are losing money all the time because they don't know
1:04:43
the difference between the address bar and a pop up and a
1:04:46
whatever and spam and fishing like it doesn't make sense to
1:04:49
them. I never learned it.
1:04:50
So we deployed all this technology, we put all this
1:04:53
money into making user things, making things easier to use for
1:04:56
users. But the end of the day, we are
1:04:58
still strapping in Homo sapiens from 300,000 years ago into the
1:05:02
seat of this incredible thing. And is that really sustainable?
1:05:06
Is that really the path forward? Or do we say, you know what
1:05:08
actually the, the society we've built, the technical
1:05:11
infrastructure we've got and the amount of power we want to give
1:05:14
to each person is so great that they actually have to go through
1:05:18
3035 years of personal and social and cultural intellectual
1:05:22
development before they graduate to a level where they can be
1:05:26
given essentially a super brain that can tell them how to make
1:05:30
any kind of grey goo they want. Right, right.
1:05:32
These are the kinds of conversations that are hard to
1:05:33
do in the West because there's such a deep, plump, deep rooted
1:05:37
DNA in the West about individual and noblement and like
1:05:40
individual, like, I am the sovereign individual and of
1:05:43
course I'm awesome. And what, how dare you tell me I
1:05:45
can't have access to that machine over there until I go
1:05:48
through 20 years of this kind of development that is just
1:05:50
antithetical to how we view things in the West.
1:05:52
And so we don't even consider that possibility space.
1:05:54
But I think we may very well end up in that, in that kind of a
1:05:57
mode. So, so I'm glad that you you
1:06:00
went into spirituality because I actually think that that's part
1:06:07
of the reason why my curiosity and drive to read over 55 books
1:06:14
last year took me there to really understand to the
1:06:18
greatest extent I could, which there's no way to completely
1:06:21
understand it. Like, what is this reality we're
1:06:23
living in? And I agree with you that if we
1:06:28
continue to go down the path of, you know, algorithmically
1:06:33
manipulating people through social media, pushing constant
1:06:37
dystopia to them through the regular media, through the
1:06:44
through all of the additives to our food that are lightened
1:06:48
sedatives in a way, right? They're poisons and then the
1:06:52
pharmaceutical complex, then saying, well, I've got the
1:06:54
answer for you. You know, here's here's GLP
1:06:56
ones. And just just this kind of, you
1:06:59
know, which is like an unprecedented, you know, take
1:07:02
off in terms of revenue that, you know, we, we have to break
1:07:07
that paradigm in the world. As you look at, you know, the
1:07:12
different models of governments in the world.
1:07:15
And then I'd love to go into spirituality.
1:07:17
Like how do you see, how do you see that playing out?
1:07:20
What's the, what's the blending that breaks that paradigm and
1:07:24
gets humanity to collectively wake up?
1:07:26
So we don't just go into the sedative, you know, kind of
1:07:28
Wally future. We go into this future that's
1:07:31
much more Star Trek like, you know, that's much more this this
1:07:35
technological take off that allows us to, you know, explore
1:07:39
other worlds and like, you know, you and I can hop in and like,
1:07:42
let's go see a quasar and you know all of these you.
1:07:45
Don't get too close to a quasar. Yeah, that's true.
1:07:47
But but or a black hole. But but it would be cool to get
1:07:51
close enough to like try to see what's going on as it bends
1:07:54
light and everything else. So so I'm just I'm just kind of
1:07:57
curious like how how you think humanity will break that
1:08:00
paradigm because I think it's a must.
1:08:01
I mean, if, if, if all of humanity, let's just say
1:08:05
practically that all of humanity is going to have access to
1:08:09
artificial super intelligence. If, if they if they want it.
1:08:14
And then and then we're living in the sedative type state.
1:08:18
Doesn't that make us prone to all types of like, horrible
1:08:21
accounts, you know, in terms of just getting even more and more
1:08:24
sedative and more and more Wally and.
1:08:27
To to I think to have this conversation in the fullness of
1:08:31
of how we could have it, we should start with painting maybe
1:08:34
a picture, my sci-fi picture of of what what it could be like.
1:08:39
And I think these require. Write a sci-fi Neville after.
1:08:42
This I've got two or three queued up.
1:08:43
I've got two or three queued up. I just don't, I mean, no one's
1:08:46
ever got the time. But like I, I really, I would
1:08:49
love to but but I, I think actually that you and I, and I
1:08:53
think this is, this is quite realistic.
1:08:54
I really think that we are assuming, you know, barring any
1:08:59
unfortunate accidents or anything else, I think we could
1:09:01
very much enter into the zone of where really, really great, you
1:09:07
know, cryogenics or whatever could actually preserve us as we
1:09:10
sort of begin entering A senescent time in our lives.
1:09:13
OK. So I think in the next 20 years,
1:09:15
especially with AI augmented research and whatnot, we
1:09:17
probably get to a point where we could just for lack of better
1:09:20
term, freeze our brains or freeze ourselves to where we
1:09:23
could be revived in 50 years or 100 years when the brain
1:09:26
scanning technology or brain computer interfaces are good
1:09:28
enough. So we wake up and then we get
1:09:31
plugged in and then we expand our minds into an augmented mind
1:09:36
that then allow us to essentially leave or transcend
1:09:39
from our biological form into something that can then we
1:09:44
condense into a, into a, you can imagine like 50 years.
1:09:48
Well, you know, if I get frozen at age 70, then 70 years before
1:09:52
they wake me up, they just build a clone of me, right?
1:09:56
That from a body standpoint. And then, you know, implant me
1:10:00
into that when they wake me up. There's all sorts of things that
1:10:03
you can sort of sketch on the back of a napkin and say, maybe
1:10:06
that could work. And if it doesn't work 100 years
1:10:08
from now, five years from now, maybe it works, right?
1:10:10
Whatever it is. So, so I think if we can enter
1:10:12
into the zone where we can actually get frozen, we can
1:10:14
almost certainly get to a point where then we'll have the
1:10:17
ability to do some kind of neural transfer either into
1:10:19
another human host form or into some kind of non human or hybrid
1:10:26
biological solid-state computing device, right.
1:10:30
And at that point, then all the science fiction novels are true,
1:10:33
right? At that point, you could be
1:10:34
whatever. I could be a spaceship.
1:10:36
I could just basically live on a cadence of every second is
1:10:39
basically an Earth year. And you know, I'm not just a
1:10:41
spaceship, but I'm like a series of spaceship.
1:10:43
I'm a hive mind. And we spread our eyeballs
1:10:45
around the Galaxy and I have like parallax vision across this
1:10:47
entire corner of the Galaxy. We can go and just zoom around
1:10:50
and do various things. We can all get together and say,
1:10:52
let's take, let's really hunker down because Andromeda is a long
1:10:55
way away. Let's get over there and see
1:10:56
what we find over there, right? There's all sorts of stuff we
1:10:59
can start writing fabulous science fiction novels about,
1:11:02
right? But it's not.
1:11:03
A long way away if we conquer fastener lightspeed trouble.
1:11:06
Or we don't. But actually I have a whole
1:11:08
nother series of things I can do around that, but we're gonna get
1:11:10
sidetracked. We go that way.
1:11:11
But my point is that with the energies that we get, with the
1:11:15
energy that we unlock, we unlock more energy from the sun and so
1:11:17
on and so forth. We may not need to travel in
1:11:20
physical form. That actually, it is really
1:11:22
about using, you know, energy itself and propagating that
1:11:26
consciousness. Yeah.
1:11:26
Yeah. And so, you know, in fact, the
1:11:28
universe may be thriving and throbbing with this stuff, but
1:11:31
we're these slow low energy. You know, you think how cold
1:11:34
this is here on Earth, The hottest furnace on Earth is
1:11:37
freezing cold compared to the surface of the sun.
1:11:39
Oh yeah, right. And the surface of the sun isn't
1:11:40
even that hot compared to how hot it gets elsewhere.
1:11:42
So we're really in adult cold dark corner.
1:11:45
We're basically a mold growing on a cold rock in the corner of
1:11:48
the fridge. So we're just trying to figure
1:11:51
out right now, how do we get out of this biological little
1:11:53
gravity well? So I think Long story short,
1:11:57
what does that have to do with AI?
1:11:59
Well, if we can accelerate science and we can actually get
1:12:01
to a point where our minds can have that kind of a future, then
1:12:05
there's nothing to say that we can't blend our minds together.
1:12:08
There's nothing to say that we can't form a thriving sort of
1:12:11
hive mind kind of a thing. There's nothing to say that
1:12:13
actually at that point there is such thing as a separate human
1:12:16
mind. And if you make this then
1:12:19
extremely concrete, the, the language is a technology and
1:12:23
what language allowed us to do is to be in conversation with
1:12:27
thousands of years of human minds.
1:12:29
You, you spoke to the authors of the Bhagavad Gita.
1:12:33
That's a hell of a thing, man. They don't need to speak English
1:12:35
and you don't, You certainly don't speak their language, but
1:12:38
you could through a lot of processing at this point in
1:12:40
time, you can actually access their perspectives.
1:12:43
You know, China's interesting this Chinese language, even
1:12:46
though the pronunciation has evolved a lot, the written
1:12:48
language has actually stayed quite similar for a long time.
1:12:51
So a school child in China today can read the first Qing
1:12:55
emperor's like epitaph that he had written on the side of a
1:12:57
mountain. They can read it natively as if
1:12:59
you were reading a menu at a restaurant in English.
1:13:02
We can't quite do that because English is a relatively new
1:13:04
language and there's all these other things.
1:13:07
I mean, it's the Babel fish moment.
1:13:08
It is the Babel fish moment, right?
1:13:09
So I think the point is that all of the our conception of
1:13:14
ourselves, the individuation that we just grow up with
1:13:18
intrinsically that all has the opportunity to dissolve.
1:13:24
And the question of do we want to dissolve is the important
1:13:27
question, right, right. To what extent is it valuable
1:13:30
that we are we are these individuated phenotypes carving
1:13:34
our way through the possibility space that we have this
1:13:37
limitation of memory. So we have a compaction process
1:13:40
that we are not constantly swimming the full we're full
1:13:43
context of like the entire Library of Congress worth of
1:13:46
knowledge, right? What are these things that
1:13:48
actually make it valuable for us to have our individual lives and
1:13:52
that would play off of each other in a separate way?
1:13:55
And when is it better to have this blended thing and when is
1:13:57
it useful? Better is the loaded term.
1:13:59
When is it useful to have this this this large thing?
1:14:03
You know there's a beautiful, very accessible rendering of
1:14:06
some of these Buddhist concepts in in the last season of The
1:14:11
White Lotus, right when it's described.
1:14:15
It's a tough season. Tough season.
1:14:17
Yeah, it wasn't my favorite. With his family.
1:14:19
Yeah, it wasn't my favorite, but I will say, I will say that the,
1:14:21
the whole story of your drop of water and then you come back
1:14:23
into the ocean, right. And I the the, the great irony
1:14:27
of human existence is that we all of the I Ness of I is in the
1:14:36
separation of I from everyone else.
1:14:40
But in every aspect of life, the fear we feel, the shame we feel,
1:14:43
all these things are in the pain, the anger, all these
1:14:47
things are rooted in disconnection.
1:14:49
Right, that's right, the illusion of.
1:14:50
Separation, the illusion of separation, is the very thing
1:14:53
that allows us to be separate or to see ourselves as separate.
1:14:58
That is the thing that that same dynamic also then creates the
1:15:02
possibility, the source of a lot of our pain and discomfort and,
1:15:06
and, and fear. So if we can get people to
1:15:10
transcend from that to access a deeper level perception, whether
1:15:14
it's through, you know, psychedelics or whether it's
1:15:17
through, you know, harmony and singing, You know, there's a lot
1:15:20
of the rituals we've had throughout the spiritual history
1:15:23
of, of humanity. A lot of the rituals we have are
1:15:26
to connect us despite our separateness.
1:15:29
For sure. Right?
1:15:31
And that's the breaking of bread at family dinner.
1:15:33
That's Mass, that's singing again.
1:15:36
I love seeing gospel choir singing, everything.
1:15:37
Just the energy that you get from that.
1:15:40
I've been in churches and great cathedrals when they're singing,
1:15:44
and it's just incredible, the feeling that you have.
1:15:47
We go to festivals, young people recover this.
1:15:49
You don't have to tell a human to want to go and dance with
1:15:53
music and to enjoy, have a good time when they're with their
1:15:55
friends. We don't have to program them
1:15:57
like they want to do that anyway, right, Right.
1:16:00
So I think the narrative that we have around what our problems
1:16:04
are needs to be kind of elevated this level of discourse, and
1:16:08
then we can actually approach some solutions.
1:16:09
I think, yeah, I completely agree.
1:16:11
And, and, and it's actually why I think this time that we're in
1:16:16
is coinciding with the consciousness awakening, this
1:16:20
curiosity about what is consciousness and the fact that
1:16:25
last year, you know, Dan Brown came out with the secret of
1:16:28
secrets, which is all about non local consciousness and how our
1:16:30
brain receives consciousness like an antenna.
1:16:34
You have Annika Harris, who is married to Sam Harris, who came
1:16:38
out with lights on where she concludes that book by saying
1:16:40
consciousness is fundamental, meaning it's fundamental
1:16:43
property of the universe. You have the Telothy tapes.
1:16:46
I'm not sure if you've you've listened to those, but season 1
1:16:49
and season 2 have promoted a lot through this podcast are really,
1:16:52
really good. Wait, it's all been serious.
1:16:54
Is that's the? Is that the the non verbal?
1:16:57
It's a it's a not yeah, non verbal children, right in season
1:17:00
1 who developed an ability to communicate with their caretaker
1:17:04
telepathically. And there's a lot of evidence of
1:17:07
precognition. You know, I covered that on
1:17:09
episode 40 with with Paige Britt, but you know, lots and
1:17:14
lots of books on that. There's a lot of evidence for,
1:17:19
you know, Dean Radin has written a number of books on experiments
1:17:24
that show that we do have some minor telepathic abilities.
1:17:30
These children just have it in this next level way and they've
1:17:33
been studied. And the most beautiful part of
1:17:37
season 1 of the Telepathy Tapes is the last episode where it's
1:17:41
like, what did the children have to say to us?
1:17:44
What do they, what is their wish for humanity?
1:17:46
It's all about love. It's like beetles, you know,
1:17:48
Love Is All you need. And season 2 goes into the
1:17:53
evidence of plant based consciousness, which we're
1:17:57
learning more and more about how trees communicate through the
1:18:00
mycelium network, goes into animal based consciousness and
1:18:03
all of these other elements of consciousness.
1:18:07
So I, I think that, you know, one of the things I explore in
1:18:11
the lattice is the ancient Mystics were right that we are,
1:18:15
are all connected and we're finding out through quantum
1:18:19
physics that we are all connected.
1:18:22
You know, Higgs boson, that there's a field.
1:18:25
I would say that that field is where the where the evidence
1:18:31
somewhere in there. It's probably quantum of where
1:18:34
consciousness lies. And you know, we only know what
1:18:39
4% of the universe is made of. We call that matter.
1:18:41
We don't even know what 96 percent is of this reality.
1:18:45
We call it dark energy and dark matter.
1:18:47
We have no clue what it is. We have theories, but no proof,
1:18:50
you know, and there's never been a reconciliation between quantum
1:18:53
science and classical science, right?
1:18:54
We're, we're talking earlier before we went on on the air
1:18:58
about, you know, how Max Planck became more spiritual as a
1:19:02
result of his discoveries in quantum physics and Albert
1:19:05
Einstein. And so, so I'm just kind of
1:19:07
curious, like spiritually, because we've, we've, we've
1:19:09
danced around this a bit. Like what do you think this
1:19:11
reality is that we're living in and how does it play into this
1:19:14
moment? Like what is our actual
1:19:16
spiritual reality? Yeah, I think there's a So for
1:19:20
me, I'm always trying to keep the rationalist and skeptic sort
1:19:28
of approach pretty close to hand.
1:19:31
And I also, having studied physics, I know how much can get
1:19:36
lost in translation between the math and then the, the sort of
1:19:39
the layperson rendering of some of that.
1:19:43
And then I also have I'm, I'm, I guess what one would call sort
1:19:48
of a, what's the term like? I'm not, I'm not a duelist,
1:19:52
right? So I think very much there.
1:19:54
There's some kind of hard reality and we're, we're, we're
1:19:57
in it and we're of it. So I'm very, very big on trend,
1:20:00
on emergence and transcendence kind of things.
1:20:03
And and complexity and and emerging phenomena, all that
1:20:05
stuff. But I am always very, very
1:20:10
careful about making a leap that, you know, where we wait,
1:20:15
where we do a little hand waving because you don't have to do a
1:20:17
lot of hand waving. And then you can end up in a
1:20:19
place that you've sort of crossed over into dualism a
1:20:22
little bit of like there is just some, you know, spiritual energy
1:20:25
field and all these things. And I think there are certainly
1:20:27
energy fields and I think that there's lots of things that can
1:20:29
happen with different kinds of fields can interact.
1:20:31
But I think when people go to that step that they don't
1:20:35
necessarily see the the line they crossed as much as when
1:20:38
I'm, for me, at least personally, what I'm trying to
1:20:41
hold is how far can we get as a hard nosed scientific
1:20:44
rationalist, skeptical mathematical physicist kind of
1:20:48
person? I'm not, I'm not a mathematical
1:20:49
physicist, but someone who, you know, can at least hang with
1:20:51
some of the math. So, so that's kind of for me.
1:20:54
I'm like very much trying to be on the ground level of looking
1:20:58
at that right. And I do think there are places
1:21:00
where when you're on the ground level, the the good news is it's
1:21:03
not just a hard rejection of all these things.
1:21:05
By by no means is it that there's actually really
1:21:07
interesting things that show up and that make you scratch your
1:21:10
head. So, so that's for me like the
1:21:13
the kind of the intellectual loop that I'm running when I'm
1:21:16
trying to explore these other. Things understood.
1:21:17
And I love science. I mean, just to be clear, no.
1:21:20
No, I, I feel I, I get that, yeah.
1:21:23
And like. In In the Lattice I show that
1:21:26
that the scientific proof of our spirituality have and that that
1:21:30
is the great uniter right? Yeah, yeah, I think.
1:21:33
It would unite us, I think. I, I think that the, the
1:21:36
question, you know, consciousness comes up a lot
1:21:38
now, especially as we're seeing the quality of the LLM agents,
1:21:46
the, the, not just the quality, but they're able to do things
1:21:50
from like this, this LLM algorithm, like the, the, the
1:21:53
Transformers algorithm and, and whatnot.
1:21:56
Even with all the variants that have happened since, you know,
1:21:58
whatever 2018 when the paper first dropped, they're still
1:22:00
kind of basically the same thing.
1:22:02
They're manipulating vector representations of a bunch of
1:22:05
encoded sort of human language, right?
1:22:07
Which itself is 10,000 years of us, you know, writing about
1:22:11
things and thinking about things.
1:22:13
And through this mechanical mathematical operation and
1:22:17
looping it, we're able to get new interesting things popping
1:22:21
out that until 510 years ago we certainly did not think could
1:22:26
happen as a mechanical process. So, so that's very interesting.
1:22:32
It is. And I think the, the, the
1:22:35
consciousness question that has been sitting as the elephant in
1:22:40
the room, so to speak, that we don't have a good way of
1:22:45
resolving qualia, right? We've never really resolved this
1:22:49
sense, this sense of being awake and being aware.
1:22:52
And, and there's, there's lots of really great folks who've
1:22:55
written about this and there's many experiments that have been
1:22:57
done around this and brain science and Congress science
1:22:59
that are really interesting. But at the end of the day, I
1:23:02
think the materialist to me has to acknowledge that the, the,
1:23:06
the qualia, the iness of me right now, that sense of self,
1:23:11
that sense of experiencing and thinking, all of that is a
1:23:16
naturalistic process that's running within, you know, this
1:23:19
kind of biological mass. And that when I, if I pass out,
1:23:25
if I go to sleep, that process, the process of qualia and the
1:23:30
sort of the, what's the, the representational stage, I think
1:23:32
is the term that you use sometimes in conscious studies.
1:23:35
That stage, the lights are off, there's nothing on the stage.
1:23:38
And then when my subconscious decides it wants to, you know,
1:23:42
interact in the world and whatnot, it boots that stage up.
1:23:45
You know, there's when people who sleepwalk, that stage
1:23:48
doesn't get booted up. You're still out and interacting
1:23:50
in the world. You can stumble down steps, you
1:23:51
can run into real trouble, but that stage isn't booted up.
1:23:55
So we know for a fact that the the biological mechanistic
1:23:58
processes that lead to consciousness are sort of an
1:24:01
optional aspect of most of our brains and our body.
1:24:05
So if that's the case, and we also know looking across the
1:24:08
animal Kingdom, there are many other renderings intelligence
1:24:13
and and you know, I don't need the octopus, for instance,
1:24:15
because I think octopi would be like the closest, the closest
1:24:20
alien intelligence that they are like aliens, right?
1:24:21
They are like aliens is their, their, their, their neural
1:24:25
structure is embedded across the entire throughout their entire
1:24:28
bodies. Maybe that's why it's so
1:24:29
delicious. But in any case, you know, in
1:24:32
the case of all these other animals and you see very like
1:24:35
small brains in corvids and they're able to do tool use,
1:24:38
right? You know, elephants, they have
1:24:41
burial rituals and death rituals.
1:24:43
There's certainly unquestionably qualia in lots of other
1:24:47
creatures for the animal Kingdom, you know, So this human
1:24:50
exceptionalism thing I don't buy at all.
1:24:52
Right. We didn't know that, by the way,
1:24:53
until recently. Until recently, like like Byron
1:24:55
Reese pointed out that even on human babies, we didn't sedate
1:24:59
them for operations until several decades ago.
1:25:02
Yeah. It's, I mean, that's like crazy.
1:25:04
Mind boggling. So the, the, the point is, I
1:25:08
guess there's a long winded way of building up to your to answer
1:25:10
or to your question about the spirituality aspect.
1:25:13
I think that for us, our drive, for our intrinsic sort of drive
1:25:19
for spirituality, that sense of awe that we feel and the
1:25:23
wondering and what is this and all that.
1:25:25
I think that that urge and that feeling can be generalized into
1:25:35
something which is sort of the generalization of love in a
1:25:39
higher dimension, right? In a higher set of dimensions.
1:25:43
When we try to, when we reach to build, we seek to understand.
1:25:47
When we reach upwards, there's a, there's a thing there that
1:25:52
doesn't have to be there. It's a thing there and it's a,
1:25:55
it's a thing that we have an embodied choice to make.
1:25:57
We choose to lean into that. And in doing that, we are
1:26:00
manifesting the intrinsic residual energy and openness to
1:26:06
love and receptiveness in every tissue, every bone in our body,
1:26:10
every fiber of our being that there is some kind of
1:26:12
aggregation, A summation effect. And, and I think, you know, for
1:26:16
me what something I've always done since I was a kid.
1:26:18
And I don't know if it's something, it's maybe not that
1:26:19
common for others to do it. But I, I've always thought
1:26:22
about, ever since I learned about cells and the basics of
1:26:24
the body that you learn in elementary school, I've always
1:26:27
thought about what is it like to be a cell in my own body?
1:26:31
What is it like to be a muscle cell?
1:26:32
Am I bored because all I do is like contract and then relax and
1:26:35
then contract and relax? Or if I'm a brain cell, just sit
1:26:37
there kind of like, you know, just like zapping other brain
1:26:40
cells all the time? Or is it like, you know, getting
1:26:42
zapped and then zapping other brain?
1:26:43
Cells. And how amazing is it that you
1:26:45
have trillions of cells and yet there's a sense of you?
1:26:48
There's a sense of me that comes of that, right?
1:26:51
And, and I think people, if you think about it though, there's a
1:26:56
sense there's this like if I'm a cell in the body, you know,
1:27:02
Grant, I do not believe I'm not sort of this panpsychic sort of
1:27:05
person that thinks like, oh, every cell is gone.
1:27:06
Just like, no, no. But in the cell there are
1:27:09
degrees of freedom and there is a sort of a set of actions that
1:27:12
can take. And as the cell sort of like, I
1:27:16
don't know that you know what it's like to be a cell, but if
1:27:19
the body is operating normally, when the cell feels like it
1:27:23
wants to contract, it can do so. And there's ample sugars
1:27:26
available as mitochondria are all happy and pumping out all
1:27:29
this, you know, energy. And then when it, and then when
1:27:33
it sort of builds up too much lactic acid and then it sort of
1:27:36
relaxes, all that acid gets cleared away.
1:27:38
And so when the cell in a normal human body, when it's, when
1:27:41
you're, when you're in good shape, your cells as they're
1:27:44
operating, there's a, a flow state and sort of
1:27:47
serendipitously, things they need show up and the, the waste
1:27:50
they produce get cleared out. And it's just a very happy
1:27:53
little community of cells. Like, oh, this thing is
1:27:55
attacking me. Oh, wait, there's a macrophage
1:27:56
coming to eat it. Thank goodness, right?
1:27:58
Like you can imagine, and this is just such a hilariously like
1:28:01
cheesy, just so story, but it is you can imagine that your body
1:28:05
as a community, as a cellular community, when things are
1:28:09
vibing, that's when you're happy and healthy as well.
1:28:12
And if you're sick, things are attacking each other.
1:28:14
Things are they're attacking it themselves, right?
1:28:16
Your immune system has they have an autoimmune thing where it's
1:28:18
hurting itself. So I think about that and I just
1:28:22
think about flipping it around and scaling it up, right?
1:28:24
When we're happy in a human community and we feel in right
1:28:27
relationship with the people around us and we can do what we
1:28:31
want. We can't do everything we don't
1:28:33
have, we can't do everything, but we can do some things.
1:28:35
Those are generally things we want to do.
1:28:37
And there's moments of inspiration.
1:28:39
Maybe it's a community. We get together and we throw a
1:28:40
really great 4th of July parade, right?
1:28:42
Or we put together a really great concert, or somebody in
1:28:44
our midst is immensely talented, and we pull together as a
1:28:47
community to pay for them to be able to go to a great
1:28:50
Conservatory somewhere and become a great musician.
1:28:52
Like these are the kinds of things that we do and can feel
1:28:54
proud of ourselves, right? And that latent joy and that
1:28:57
aggregation of amazingness creates then a transhuman
1:29:01
Organism that isn't thriving and humming, right?
1:29:05
This is Byron's actually big theory.
1:29:09
His last book that he wrote is We Are Agora.
1:29:11
And he compares humanity to a beehive.
1:29:15
And a beehive, you know, as a collective maintains a certain
1:29:18
temperature, which is, you know, which is distinct from an
1:29:22
individual bee, which operates at a very cold temperature.
1:29:25
And that humanity is, and the planet is a type of agora.
1:29:29
It's kind of very avatar in some way.
1:29:33
And that's a, that's, that is another way to think about it.
1:29:37
So, so a non, a non kind of a religious way to think about it
1:29:43
is that there's something innate in natural selection about our
1:29:47
connectedness, that this consciousness awakening, et
1:29:50
cetera, is happening because of this, this biological need to
1:29:58
not extinct ourselves. And therefore that there has to
1:30:02
be some kind of unification versus this illusion of
1:30:06
separation. And the realization that
1:30:10
humanity again is 99.9% the same DNA wise.
1:30:14
And that the the the illusion of separation, the power games, you
1:30:18
know, as Gary Zukov would say, in the seat of the soul, the
1:30:22
world of form, you know, are the five sensory human.
1:30:28
That's where the suffering comes from versus the realization of
1:30:32
the connectiveness, what he calls the multi sensory human.
1:30:35
And he takes it into a soul, which I which I agree with.
1:30:38
And you and I probably don't agree on that.
1:30:40
And that's fine. Actually, I don't think we we
1:30:42
should talk about that. I don't think there's definitely
1:30:43
that much of A disagreement about it.
1:30:45
Well. Tell me about that, because
1:30:46
it's, it kind of if, if we have a soul, which I believe we do, I
1:30:51
also believe in reincarnation, we might, we might divert on
1:30:54
that. But I've, I've, I've read read a
1:30:56
lot of evidence on that and I've seen, I've seen people have
1:31:01
really distinct experiences about past lives and either
1:31:05
regression therapy or in psychedelic journeys or in near
1:31:09
death experiences on the soul aspect.
1:31:12
It pretty quickly takes me into divinity that there's some
1:31:16
cosmic, you know, order that we can't understand.
1:31:21
And I'm curious like, you know, being being really rooted in
1:31:24
science, Like I know I'm throwing a bunch of curveballs
1:31:27
to you. So so feel free to just stay
1:31:29
focused on one. But but I'm curious like how you
1:31:33
grapple with the miracle, The Big Bang, like how there was
1:31:36
this point of no entropy and like, you know, cut this tiny
1:31:39
and then boom. Again, I, I sort of flippantly
1:31:43
said earlier, we don't have a working theory of gravity.
1:31:45
So let's not worry about, you know, being in the past.
1:31:48
And, and to your point about, you know, dark energy, dark
1:31:51
matter, like we don't have a working theory of gravity yet.
1:31:53
We have not unified, you know, relativity and, and really a
1:31:58
wave, you know, a wave theory of these kinds of large scale
1:32:00
dynamics and, and the quantum. So I just don't think we should
1:32:03
get ahead of ourselves. And you know, we're going to
1:32:05
discover, you know, there's, if you look, if you take an honest
1:32:09
look at how The Big Bang theory both originated and how it's
1:32:12
been modified over time. I mean, there's just, it's, it's
1:32:17
a, there's a lot of stuff there where it's where it's like,
1:32:21
well, they got this data and they just had to figure out a
1:32:23
way to explain this. And so I'm not, you know,
1:32:25
that's. Science in general.
1:32:26
There's a lot of. Hostility.
1:32:27
No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Hold on a second.
1:32:30
Hold on a second. I'll be very clear.
1:32:31
I'm not trying to throw shade at any cosmologist.
1:32:33
But at the same time, as a scientist, there's lots of
1:32:35
science which is like, we think this is what's going to happen.
1:32:37
We do the experiment that didn't happen and then we scratch the
1:32:40
theory. We do a different experience,
1:32:41
right, right. You can't really do that with
1:32:42
cosmology because you can't create another universe, right.
1:32:45
And what we do know is as we notice things, we learn more
1:32:47
things, we discover more things. And that's great.
1:32:49
We should have kind of something a sketch on the back of a napkin
1:32:53
about what we think it currently looks like.
1:32:55
But you know, we could, we could put up a better Space Telescope.
1:32:57
We could put other things in space and do better figure
1:33:00
figuring things out and realize that a lot of our stuff is
1:33:03
wrong. And so then this whole like the,
1:33:06
The Big Bang conception, I've just not, you know, I've never
1:33:10
particularly been convinced by it.
1:33:12
I do know that the, the public demands some kind of a picture
1:33:16
if you're going to ask for billions of dollars of funding.
1:33:18
But at the end of the day, like, again, we don't have a working
1:33:21
theory of gravity. We don't, our cosmic distance
1:33:23
ladder is somewhat fragile. And, you know, we have, we, we,
1:33:29
I think we're just kind of early, you know, like the Greeks
1:33:32
and, and it's OK, but it's not OK when you have to, you know,
1:33:35
the public at large demands answers from all these smart
1:33:37
eggheads, right? But if you look at the Greeks,
1:33:39
they could have, the Greeks are very smart people, but they
1:33:42
could not have figured out like the actual, you know, fusion
1:33:45
cycle in the sun. They just didn't have the
1:33:47
science yet to. Figure that out, of course,
1:33:49
yeah. And I think, I think we'll look
1:33:50
back hundreds, definitely thousands of years from now, but
1:33:55
even just hundreds of years from now and we'll look back at like,
1:33:59
wow, we were just so uneducated in terms of the scientific.
1:34:04
Like, Can you believe they thought that?
1:34:05
Like, I don't know, Like it's, it's not.
1:34:07
So I I'm just. Because one of the things I'm
1:34:09
super excited about in this exponential to exponential curve
1:34:11
is what they is we're going to decode like a lot of what our
1:34:14
reality is, which is fantastic, you know, and I say, let the
1:34:18
science take us wherever it goes.
1:34:20
Like, let's find out what the truth is.
1:34:22
Yeah, So I so I, you know, to go back to your original question,
1:34:25
I don't have to do a lot of grappling with The Big Bang
1:34:26
because I think that's the placeholder theory for now, but.
1:34:28
What about a soul like? So here's the thing.
1:34:32
I do think that it is entirely possible that we are living on
1:34:37
the three-dimensional surface of a much higher dimensional space
1:34:41
or inside you were in a three-dimensional subset of a
1:34:44
much higher dimensional thing. And that the dynamics of those
1:34:47
higher dimensions are what manifests into things like
1:34:49
energy and other kinds of, you know, the geometry of higher
1:34:52
dimensions becomes the dynamics of lower dimensions oftentimes.
1:34:56
So, so it's, it's for me, it's not like off the table at all to
1:35:04
say maybe there are things that we do in the, in these 3
1:35:08
dimensions that then and certain patterns of energy and certain
1:35:11
patterns of evolution and certain kind of things form that
1:35:13
then create some kind of a residual crease or a residual
1:35:18
something in those higher dimensions that might stick
1:35:21
around or might have whatever. There might be creatures that
1:35:23
live in all these dimensions that just don't reduce
1:35:26
themselves down to 3 dimensions and hang out with us.
1:35:30
But they do things and certain things happen and we see the
1:35:32
results of those things happening.
1:35:33
So I'm not. Again, I don't.
1:35:35
We also don't know if this is only universe.
1:35:38
Yeah, well, that's a, that's a whole different thing.
1:35:40
So, but on the geometry side, multi dimensionality, yeah,
1:35:43
Yeah, I do, I do have a perspective on that.
1:35:45
But I will say on in terms of the current universe we're in,
1:35:48
it is not off the table to talk about additional geometric
1:35:52
dimensions and how those might affect these 3 dimensions.
1:35:54
And inside that you can have a lot of space for things like,
1:35:59
oh, maybe, you know, there's actually a set of a really great
1:36:02
set of science fiction novels for which, you know, in in a key
1:36:06
concept, there is that consciousness.
1:36:08
And when you get to the complexities of consciousness,
1:36:10
anything that is able to have a qualia like that creates an
1:36:13
imprint in these higher dimensions.
1:36:16
OK, I could accept that could be how it works.
1:36:18
Like I'm actually, I know, like I don't have any evidence that
1:36:21
that's the case, but I also don't have any evidence that
1:36:23
that couldn't mathematically be the case.
1:36:24
Right, Right. So that's sort of the epistemic
1:36:27
openness I hold on those things multiple universes.
1:36:30
However, I have a pretty hard opinion about that, which is I
1:36:32
think that for the most part, a lot of people have a
1:36:34
misunderstanding about quantum mechanics.
1:36:36
And of course it's extremely sexy.
1:36:38
This goes back to the Western narcissism and hedonism.
1:36:41
It's extremely sexy us for for us to think about ourselves as
1:36:44
having the optionality to make lots of other decisions and all
1:36:48
these other universes. And it's sort of a.
1:36:51
So you're not an Everett mini worlds theory guy?
1:36:54
No, no, I, I think, I think that if you try to take the, the
1:36:59
mystery of the double slit experiment and scale it up to
1:37:03
this size, you get nothing but absurdities.
1:37:06
Because the, the math of what happens to the quantum level,
1:37:09
the math of what happens with the electromagnetic radiation
1:37:11
and light, these kinds of things, those are physically
1:37:15
real, like entanglement is a thing.
1:37:16
Like I when I was 18, I was working in Los Alamos on, on, on
1:37:20
quantum computing and on some interaction free detection kind
1:37:24
of experiments like these quantum phenomena are real,
1:37:27
capital are real and the interpretation of the
1:37:30
mathematics is where things kind of go quickly off the rails,
1:37:34
right. So I have yeah, I, I think like
1:37:38
two things that are very popular for people, I think in science
1:37:41
fiction, but I absolutely do not believe in at all are many
1:37:46
worlds, you know, sort of multiverse kind of things and
1:37:49
time travel. So those are two things which
1:37:52
are just for me completely off the table.
1:37:53
So, so anyways, I do think however, that relative to a soul
1:37:57
concept that maybe there is some sort of thing where what we can
1:38:02
access and the reality we live in in this mostly 3 dimensional
1:38:05
world does actually have a deeper shadow or crease or some
1:38:11
manifestation in higher dimensions.
1:38:13
And in those dimensions, there's phenomena that happened that we
1:38:15
engage with that might lead to phenomenological things like
1:38:19
these kind of out of body things or other things like telepathy
1:38:24
and things like that. Yeah.
1:38:25
Do you think? Do you think there's?
1:38:27
You sort of see the hard realist part of me, right?
1:38:30
No, I understand. I mean, trust me, I, I, I
1:38:32
definitely know. I mean, these are the things I,
1:38:35
I think very deeply about and, and in reading these books,
1:38:38
because I very much love science, embrace science.
1:38:43
It's, it's, it's, it's like I said, this is the time of the
1:38:46
great philosophers. Like, you know, what is the
1:38:49
purpose of us being here? Is there some grand cosmic, you
1:38:53
know, play unfolding? And one of the things I'm so
1:38:57
excited about is this acceleration to actually decode
1:39:01
what our reality is. I mean, I think that's going to
1:39:03
be absolutely fantastic. And you know, again, no matter
1:39:07
where it goes, I, you know, I, I don't have an attachment to
1:39:13
where it goes as long as we have an understanding of this is
1:39:17
actually the truth. And you know, I, this is just a
1:39:22
total random aside, but, you know, you probably have an
1:39:26
opinion on this. But out of all the things that
1:39:30
we could know scientifically, let's say 100%, my guess is that
1:39:36
right now evolutionarily we're at maybe the 2 to 3% mark that
1:39:40
there are so many things that we are going to discover that are
1:39:47
going to blow our minds. That seems like an
1:39:49
overstatement. Honestly, I don't think we're
1:39:51
any more close. To that even close to that, no,
1:39:53
OK, well, that's, that's interesting.
1:39:55
So I you're at the 1% mark or something less than that, OK.
1:39:59
We we discovered, yeah, like 100 years ago, we thought other
1:40:03
galaxies were spiral nebula. Right, right.
1:40:05
A. 100 years ago, yeah, yeah, 100 years ago, we thought the
1:40:08
Milky Way was kind of it. This is our universe, and
1:40:10
there's a spiral nebula. And then we started realizing,
1:40:13
like, holy crap, those things are really far away, right?
1:40:16
100 years ago, 150 years ago, we barely, I think when it's JJ
1:40:22
Thompson's oil drop experiment, like we barely knew about the.
1:40:25
We certainly didn't know about the neutron.
1:40:26
We barely figured out about the electron 150 years ago.
1:40:29
Yeah, were just, you know, chaos theory and complexity and like
1:40:35
the Mandelbrot set and Julia sets the the idea that iterated
1:40:40
systems can lead to emergent behaviors.
1:40:43
That's the 60s. That was 60 years ago.
1:40:46
Yeah. Have you ever watched Inner
1:40:48
Worlds, Outer Worlds? No, it's a documentary.
1:40:51
You can, you can get it on on YouTube for free and it's on,
1:40:56
it's on, you know, a number of streaming channels.
1:40:59
But it basically is the unification between science and
1:41:03
spirituality and takes you very deep into the Fibonacci sequence
1:41:06
and all types and, and, you know, relating it to ancient
1:41:09
scripture. It's, it's really fascinating.
1:41:10
I just think you would, you would enjoy it.
1:41:11
Oh, great, because it's, it's, it's very deep on, on science
1:41:15
too there. Are, yeah, I think, you know,
1:41:18
Stephen Wolfram obviously has gone full nerd into this stuff,
1:41:21
right? But.
1:41:21
But when you look at math and you look at the things that
1:41:25
emerge straight from the math, you're like, you know, there,
1:41:30
there's something, there's something here, right.
1:41:33
And so I think we are, we are just scratching the surface, so
1:41:38
to speak. And you know, I have, I have
1:41:40
these like daydreams and about the sci-fi novels that, you
1:41:43
know, could be written and whatnot that really we're, if
1:41:46
you look at the universe, there's a couple things that are
1:41:48
interesting. Whenever there is an, this is I
1:41:50
guess Ilya Prigogine, So a fellow Texan, his, his
1:41:53
observation, right, that when you have these, you know,
1:41:57
systems that have energy coming into them, they form structures
1:41:59
in order to dissipate the energy faster, right?
1:42:02
And so the idea of forming structures anytime.
1:42:05
So this is the thing like it was, it wasn't until I graduated
1:42:09
college, I think that I really started to understand and think
1:42:11
about this. But when we study thermodynamics
1:42:14
with the closed systems, there's a decay and there's a settlement
1:42:18
into sort of this equilibrium state.
1:42:20
But this is the sort of entropic heat death everyone talks about
1:42:23
right in the universe. But you know what?
1:42:25
There's no closed systems that we generally deal with.
1:42:27
We generally are looking at deeply non equilibrium states in
1:42:31
in a universe filled with things that have a lot of incoming
1:42:34
energy and dissipation happening.
1:42:36
And then these kinds of open systems when energy pours in,
1:42:40
nature seems to produce patterns in order all the time.
1:42:44
And so there's something there you can't as a phenomenologist
1:42:47
and look at that and say, well, no, well, let's not talk about
1:42:49
that, right? You have to look at that and you
1:42:50
have to talk about it. And so then if you say, well,
1:42:53
that's just us looking at it from a very crude like energy
1:42:56
perspective, but what if there's something to that energy?
1:42:59
What if there's flavor and color and all sorts of things in that
1:43:02
energy? So when the sun is basking us in
1:43:04
this energy, it's not just throwing off random, you know,
1:43:08
Electro photons really right and and and gamma rays and other
1:43:10
things. It's actually bombarding us with
1:43:13
a certain set of things that this Earth happens to be a
1:43:16
vessel for certain kinds of things to grow.
1:43:19
And it's on us to prove to the sun.
1:43:22
This goes back to like a sun God theory almost.
1:43:24
It's on us to prove that we actually can do something
1:43:26
interesting with that energy. And and so there's all sorts of
1:43:29
stuff that like we've sort of, I think it's really disappointing
1:43:32
that so much sci-fi just is so again, just navel gazing fixated
1:43:37
on, oh, but what if the bad guys had laser guns?
1:43:40
It's like, well, then it's just the same as the samurai movies,
1:43:42
but with laser guns. Like, let's tell a more
1:43:44
interesting story. Right, Yeah.
1:43:45
I have a friend who is focused on decoding light that, you
1:43:50
know, let there be light that everything starts with light and
1:43:53
then light is the ultimate biohack that you can use light
1:43:58
to increase hair regrowth. You can use light to decrease
1:44:03
aging. You can use light to increase
1:44:05
performance. I mean, there's a lot of
1:44:07
evidence for this. They've been doing a lot of
1:44:08
studies and they have a lot of panels, But I, I'm curious, this
1:44:12
is a little bit of a vector. It's, I find it really
1:44:16
fascinating on the less than 1% that we've actually, that we
1:44:20
actually understand today. What, what is your opinion on if
1:44:25
AI will ever, if we'll ever be able to manifest sentience or
1:44:29
consciousness in an, in an AI like that, that it will have
1:44:32
quality of like we do as human beings.
1:44:34
And this is the, you know, this is the age-old human psyche of
1:44:39
the Terminator or the Matrix scenario that we create
1:44:42
something that's so vastly intelligent, it's as conscious
1:44:47
as we are. The sort of the the the
1:44:50
stupidest possible answer I guess.
1:44:52
Like I haven't really thought about that too much because I
1:44:55
sort of assumed it to be true. So I guess my answer is I do
1:44:58
think it's true and I sort of assumed it would be true by
1:45:01
almost by definition because we can grow most biology in vats
1:45:05
essentially at this point. We're not really at the point
1:45:07
where we're eating lab grown meat, but like the biological
1:45:11
processes are fairly well understood.
1:45:14
And so, you know, we can, you know, we can take pre children
1:45:21
are born premature now they can be born extremely premature.
1:45:23
And we actually have the science technology to keep them alive
1:45:26
essentially almost in an external womb, which is it's
1:45:28
crazy what we can do now to save these young babies.
1:45:30
We, we have been doing scientific research with 1% of
1:45:34
the population and each one of those people that cost you that
1:45:38
1% run on 20 watts OK of brain power.
1:45:42
So if you go and throw gigawatts, even if it's less
1:45:44
efficient at these problems, it seems to me inevitable that we
1:45:50
will be able to essentially have brains in the VAT.
1:45:54
They may not be human brains, They may not have the quality of
1:45:57
human, human bodies living in this kind of embodied way.
1:46:00
But whatever it is, the idea that somehow our computational
1:46:04
substrates within this small amount of volume is the end all
1:46:08
and be all is all it could be seems like a very, very large
1:46:13
assumption. Yeah, Like that seems like
1:46:14
that's the assumption, right? Yeah, I mean, it's, it's it's
1:46:18
fascinating subject. Like how do you how do you
1:46:20
square it with with soul? If, if, if the if we have the
1:46:25
ability to do that with a machine, we'll have a soul like
1:46:28
we have. Well, I think it depends on what
1:46:32
you mean by soul. I guess that's sort of the non
1:46:33
answer. If you get to the point, if you
1:46:36
accept the argument, I'm trying to make the argument in
1:46:38
increments here, right? How all Gray proofs are done.
1:46:40
Let's do it in increments. So if we say that, look, we can
1:46:43
keep a rat brain alive in a in a jar and we can Plumb in various
1:46:48
things and basically have it drive a car around as it had
1:46:51
vision. I don't think it's too far
1:46:54
Thatch to say that we could do that.
1:46:56
We've certainly done these things with cockroach brains.
1:46:58
Now you can wire cockroaches on a little driving car, They'll
1:47:00
drive the car. So to go to a rat brain and if
1:47:02
you get to a rat brain, you're out of cat brain.
1:47:04
If you get out of cat brain, you're out of pig brain, right.
1:47:06
So again, like the idea of us being able to have a functioning
1:47:11
brain in a jar is not far fetched.
1:47:14
You know, the the human ethics of this like however we want to
1:47:17
square that circle. Maybe some people in near death
1:47:19
situations, they will volunteer for their brains to be put
1:47:22
through this process and they have a trusted friend, family
1:47:26
member who's able to pull the plug if they're, you know,
1:47:28
suffering in pain or something. But like whatever it is, you can
1:47:30
imagine us getting to a point where we're starting to do this
1:47:32
with human brain in jars, right? Well, at that point, it'd be
1:47:35
hard to argue that human and that that human brain in that
1:47:37
jar with fully intact memories of its childhood being able to
1:47:40
answer very, very deep, capture questions about what was your
1:47:43
favorite teacher in high school or whatever it is.
1:47:45
Like you can, you can start being like, OK, well maybe that
1:47:48
human brain in that jar actually does manifest somewhat of a
1:47:51
soul, especially if they wired up to actuators and they can
1:47:54
drive a Segway around or something, right.
1:47:55
So you go from that to like, well, let's just take two human
1:47:59
brains and two jars and connect them with like a super high
1:48:02
bandwidth connection. Now what do you have?
1:48:05
Do you have less soul or do you have more soul?
1:48:08
Is the soul exactly 2.0 times, you know, a standard human soul
1:48:13
unit or is it more? Is it 2.5 times?
1:48:16
Because if it's 2.1 now you got a problem because I hook up 3
1:48:19
then is it 3.6? Is it 3.3?
1:48:21
This. Is very Ray Kurzweil.
1:48:22
Yeah, it is, but you read the singularity isn't your.
1:48:25
Yeah, yeah, exactly. I just don't see how we don't
1:48:28
get there. And I'm not, I'm not trying to
1:48:32
sweep under the rug any of the complexities in the engineering,
1:48:35
the bio side of this. I'm not trying to sweep under
1:48:37
like any of the ethics of it. Here's the thing.
1:48:39
All of us are concerned about the ethics of this.
1:48:41
Those are sitting comfy chairs here in the West.
1:48:42
There are plenty of people in the rest of the world who do not
1:48:45
have these ethics around this. We'll use political prisoners
1:48:47
for these experiments. We'll do these kinds of things.
1:48:50
And now if you look at going all the way back to the how we
1:48:53
started the conversation, 500 billion for Stargate, you know,
1:48:57
I want to pull one day to point out for you, which is that a few
1:48:59
years ago, I don't know if you remember, there was a Chinese
1:49:01
scientist who announced that they had done a human clone.
1:49:04
I remember. And then he got yanked off the
1:49:06
stage. A formal sort of statement was
1:49:09
made that this is in violation of the ethics, you know, all the
1:49:11
stuff. And he was never heard from
1:49:12
again. So what do you, what do you
1:49:17
think are the chances that they actually, they being anyone else
1:49:23
in the world who has the facility, who has the sovereign
1:49:25
money to fund these kinds of things?
1:49:27
What do you think are the chances that they stopped in
1:49:28
human clone experiments when you could make, when you clone, you
1:49:32
know, super babies, when let's say you had a human, you had a
1:49:35
one child policy that inadvisably create a massive
1:49:38
male female imbalance, right? Right.
1:49:40
When you have population decline that's coming and you could
1:49:42
actually say create super babies that had five extra IQ points on
1:49:45
average and had no like congenital kind of issues or
1:49:48
problems, we'll all be strong, go to 6 feet tall, etcetera,
1:49:51
etcetera. Why wouldn't you do that every
1:49:53
day of the week and twice on Sunday?
1:49:55
So the human cloning stuff, all these kinds of things, it to me
1:49:59
seems like it is inevitable that this will happen.
1:50:02
If not from state sovereign entities, it will be private
1:50:07
labs from billionaires. Absolutely.
1:50:09
So another data point, maybe people didn't read this, but
1:50:12
there was a really interesting article, I think in New York or
1:50:14
Atlantic or something where they talked about Chinese, you know,
1:50:18
billionaires and, and even sent to millionaires paying for
1:50:22
surrogate babies by the dozens to like in one case, 100 or so
1:50:27
here in the US and adoption and, and, and surrogate, you know,
1:50:30
sort of agencies were struggling to like deal with this problem
1:50:35
because you had these, these were, you know, Chinese business
1:50:39
people had a lot of money and they're like, we'll make 10
1:50:42
babies and have a thriving like, you know, this will be like my
1:50:45
business empire because it just goes back to almost like the
1:50:47
Habsburg kind of thing. We'll have this child, they can
1:50:50
marry that, that child of that business person and that will
1:50:53
seal our face as a business partnership.
1:50:55
This is literally what they were thinking as they went and
1:50:58
literally spawned a dozen offspring.
1:51:01
So that same mentality would almost certainly say yes to lab
1:51:06
grown clones, lab grown hyper optimized super babies, all
1:51:11
these kinds of things. And if they had, I mean, the
1:51:13
Chinese have been obsessed with mortality forever, right?
1:51:16
The the, the, the magical Peach that if you eat that you have
1:51:18
like long life. These are the things that the
1:51:20
Chinese have been obsessed with forever as a culture.
1:51:23
So if you actually have like just a few steps from there to
1:51:27
being able to actually create like an immortal like vessel to
1:51:31
put your brain in and to maybe even make that brain even bigger
1:51:35
and have a connect to hive mind of additional brains.
1:51:38
I don't see people saying no to that man.
1:51:40
Like, I'm not, I'm not celebrating any of this.
1:51:43
I'm just trying to play out of my mind the game theoretic of
1:51:45
what is almost certainly to come.
1:51:46
And if China does that and or it'll be China because they have
1:51:49
the advanced technology and they also have the money in the
1:51:51
private sector to pay for these things.
1:51:53
If China does that and they create a special economic zone,
1:51:56
every VC in the West is going to fly over there and do that as
1:51:59
well. There's no question in my mind,
1:52:00
everyone will do that. So that's going to be what
1:52:03
humanity. Is going to be right, right?
1:52:05
Wow. I mean, that's.
1:52:06
I mean, you know, you know all the tech billionaires too, You
1:52:08
know they would do it. I mean, this was this is
1:52:11
definitely making me think of chapter 3 of of the singular.
1:52:16
It is near the that chapter is called Who am I?
1:52:18
Yeah. And so I'd recommend people
1:52:21
people read that if they want to.
1:52:22
Think it's a great book. It's been around forever.
1:52:24
You wrote a long time ago. Well, no, no, I'm talking about
1:52:26
the singular is nearer. Oh, nearer, yeah, not.
1:52:29
That suddenly came out with that in 2024.
1:52:32
But he, he reaffirmed in that book his prediction from the
1:52:37
singular it is near that AGI would be created in 2029.
1:52:41
That was he, he, he was, he was laughed off the stage when he
1:52:45
came out with the singular It is near when he said 2029 because
1:52:49
back then people are assuming 2045 to 2055.
1:52:53
So they're like he's completely, you know, just way overly
1:52:58
optimistic about this exponential curve.
1:53:00
But I think, you know, we had the malt book thing, et cetera,
1:53:03
like. I mean, I, I think that we, we
1:53:05
may have set the bar too high for AGI in the sense that like
1:53:08
in the when I say too high, I mean, not that we've made the
1:53:10
problem too hard, but just that we've set the bar so
1:53:14
artificially high that it blinds us to recognizing when it's
1:53:17
already here. Yeah.
1:53:19
And in a sense, if you're scared about AGI coordination driving
1:53:25
and creating like bad outcomes for humans, then we are, it's
1:53:29
already here, like to some extent, all of the, the networks
1:53:32
that connect, a lot of our trading systems, our
1:53:34
communication systems that allow these aggregors to emerge.
1:53:37
Well, the aggregors are here already.
1:53:39
They're already doing things to us.
1:53:41
Nobody wants it, but everyone has to do it because that's
1:53:42
already here. It's a lot dynamic.
1:53:45
If you say, well, an AGI is more agentic and has more of a goal
1:53:48
seek in mind maybe, and it's going to do something explicitly
1:53:50
to manipulate humans. That kind of AGI taking over one
1:53:54
of these ergores, yeah, that might be still a few years in
1:53:56
the future, but not that many years in the future.
1:53:58
And when it does, it will use these same mechanisms.
1:54:01
It doesn't have to do any, doesn't have to dress up in a
1:54:03
Terminator suit. It doesn't have to live in the
1:54:05
sky like Skynet, like it can just, it can, you can just use
1:54:09
all the mechanisms of impression we already have, right.
1:54:12
So wow, that's a really dark thing to end the podcast.
1:54:15
Like it's like. Yeah, I'm trying to but.
1:54:17
I think you have to call the enemy.
1:54:18
You have to see what the enemy looks like well and be realistic
1:54:20
about. It no, I do.
1:54:21
I do think you have to. And that's, that's, that's a big
1:54:23
part of the reason I'm doing this and writing the book.
1:54:27
And really what my purpose with this is, is to help humanity
1:54:32
have a heart shift because we do have control over what future we
1:54:38
want and explicit decisions along the way.
1:54:41
And I think that's why the rediscovery of the spiritual
1:54:46
path versus the dogmatic separation between science and
1:54:49
spirituality. And I like the way you, you
1:54:51
blend the two together, you know, and hold out the
1:54:54
possibility because there's, there's a lot of dogma on both
1:54:58
sides. You know, part of the thing
1:54:59
that's super unique about this podcast is weaving both of those
1:55:04
things together. Like usually like a, a
1:55:07
capitalist, like you and me, you know, would have a podcast that
1:55:12
just touches on capitalism or just goes into AI, you know,
1:55:14
does not touch on spirituality, does not go there.
1:55:19
And a spirituality podcast typically is not going to go
1:55:22
into anything realistically, right.
1:55:24
And so I think this dogmatic separation is part of the
1:55:27
suffering for humanity. But yeah, we should probably end
1:55:30
it there because I know we're we're.
1:55:32
We're for hours. Yeah, I mean, I, I, you know, I,
1:55:34
I, I know that you have a big heart for humanity that you
1:55:39
really want us to make it to that age of abundance for all.
1:55:43
The path is going to be interesting.
1:55:45
You know, it's going to be very interesting to see the next 10
1:55:48
to 15 years play out. And, you know, you and I and
1:55:53
many others are going to be there to help guide.
1:55:56
So you know, it's it's. That's sort of our job.
1:55:59
It saves some humanity, yes, for sure.
1:56:01
Yeah, yeah. With, with great power comes
1:56:04
great responsibility and and we're manifesting technologies
1:56:09
as humanity now that are the greatest powers we've ever
1:56:12
manifested. And we're just barely over three
1:56:16
years into it. It's amazing.
1:56:18
Which is. Amazing, that just blows my
1:56:20
mind. But hey, I appreciate your heart
1:56:22
brother. Thank you so much.
1:56:23
Seriously, we could go for like 4 hours.
1:56:25
This could be like a Lex Friedman style podcast, but
1:56:28
thank you so much. Thank you.
1:56:29
Well, thanks again everybody for tuning in to Love Conquers Fear.
1:56:33
Amazing guests lineup coming up. I am fully, fully booked.
1:56:39
Keep all the love coming. I, I have daily conversations
1:56:42
about people having a heart shift, diving into different
1:56:46
books that we've covered on this.
1:56:49
It's a it's a really beautiful journey that I'm on with all of
1:56:53
you. And, and please keep sharing it
1:56:55
out there. You know, I'm self funding this.
1:56:57
My my whole purpose. You just heard it is really to
1:57:00
help humanity have a heart shift collectively so that we make it
1:57:04
together to this age of abundance for all it's going to
1:57:08
take. Team Humanity, thanks again.