Latest / INSPIRE STORY / #0118 _STORY INSPIRE: Decisions that transforman, with Chamath Palihapitiya

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#0118 _STORY INSPIRE: Decisions that transforman, with Chamath Palihapitiya · INSPIRE STORY

0:04
Speaker 1: The Joe Rogan Experience.
0:06
Speaker 2: Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. Yeah,
0:12
I was listening to Tim. First of all, hello. What's up?
0:15
Good to see you, my friend.
0:16
Speaker 1: Great to see you.
0:18
Speaker 2: We were listening to Tim Dillon. I was listening to
0:20
it on the way over here, and he was talking
0:22
about Anna Paulina Luna and Tim Burchett and Trump. They're
0:25
all talking about the UAP disclosures and, like, why now? Like,
0:30
what are they doing? Like, why are they distracting us
0:32
with this? Tim Burchett said that whatever they're going to release,
0:36
it will be indigestible.
0:39
Speaker 1: What does that mean?
0:40
Speaker 2: Right.
0:41
Speaker 1: Indigestible as in– well, then it doesn't mean that it's
0:45
real then.
0:46
Speaker 2: Well, I think it means that it will be so
0:48
crazy if it's real. So crazy. He's the one that's
0:52
been saying that there's these confirmed bases under the ocean,
0:56
that there's these specific locations. I think you talked– you're
0:59
shaking your head. You don't believe a word of it.
1:01
Speaker 1: No. How come? I think it's true that there are– look,
1:07
it's completely implausible that there aren't other species. Right. Completely implausible.
1:14
Just the vastness of what we're dealing with. So the
1:17
real question is like why haven't we encountered people or
1:21
those things, those beings? Right. And it's probably because they
1:25
just– they have bigger fish to fry. So by the
1:28
time that we meet them and they meet us, We're
1:32
going to kind of be at the edge of like
1:33
we've kind of been there, done that on our own planet.
1:37
And then we've kind of like developed the technology, I guess,
1:40
to get beyond it. But somewhere along the way, there
1:43
must have been a few. Just mathematically impossible. So then
1:45
the question is, is it buried? Or were people confused
1:48
when it first came? You're like, if you had a
1:50
spaceship land in like the 1800s, what would people have done?
1:54
They would have just freaked out. They wouldn't have understood it.
1:56
Maybe they would have buried it. Depending on where it was,
1:58
maybe they started to pray to it. Right. And you
2:01
would have just moved on. And then that isn't documented
2:04
in history.
2:05
Speaker 2: But it is.
2:06
Speaker 1: But how?
2:07
Speaker 2: It is. There's a lot of it documented in history.
2:10
Speaker 1: Oh, you mean like hieroglyphics and like monuments?
2:12
Speaker 2: Well, the Book of Ezekiel. The Book of Ezekiel goes
2:15
in depth about some sort of a UFO encounter that
2:18
Ezekiel experiences.
2:20
Speaker 1: Right.
2:20
Speaker 2: Where it's a wheel within a wheel and a cloud
2:25
with fire flashing forth continually in the midst of a
2:28
cloud as it were gleaming metal. And from the midst
2:30
of it came the likeness of four living creatures and
2:33
the creatures darted to and fro like the appearance of
2:36
a flash of lightning. This is all in the Bible.
2:39
It's also in the Mahabharata. They talk about Vemanas, these
2:44
flying crafts. And I think it's entirely possible that we
2:48
have been visited periodically and that we are– we have
2:52
been monitored and that we are monitored currently. And if
2:56
I was going to hide– I would hide in the ocean.
2:59
Speaker 1: Well, to be honest, as I get older, I'm convinced
3:03
we're basically in some form of a simulation. There's like
3:06
all these little ingredients that if you start to see
3:09
these little clues, you're like, they all seem so odd
3:13
in isolation. And then when you put them together, I
3:15
feel like a crazy person. So I ignore myself. Right.
3:18
But I wonder like, why did this happen? Like yesterday
3:20
I was, um, at a dinner in LA before I
3:23
came to see you. And, um, I told this very
3:26
interesting story, or I thought it was interesting at the time.
3:31
You know that, like, so 2000, right? If you think of, like,
3:35
what happened in tech since 2000, so the last 26 years,
3:39
people can give you all kinds of, like, fancy theories.
3:44
But there's just, like, this weird word that's been at
3:49
the center of every single technological revolution for the last
3:53
30 years, and that word is attention. Let me explain
3:56
this to you. Google, they invent Google. What is Google?
4:00
Google is an algorithm. It's called PageRank. But if you
4:05
look inside of it, what is it? It says, well,
4:07
Chamath's website has five links to it. Joe's website has
4:12
two links. He's getting more attention.
4:15
Speaker 2: Okay?
4:15
Speaker 1: Chamath's website is more important. That's the sum total of Google. Now,
4:18
they've made that a lot more refined, and they've done
4:21
all these other fancy things. But it's all about attention.
4:26
Fast forward to 2007, 8, 9 when Zuck and then
4:30
when I went to work for Zuck and we got
4:31
on the scene, we're like, what does everybody care about? Attention.
4:37
And so what is like the Facebook algorithm? What's the
4:40
Instagram algorithm? How do we construct newsfeed all around attention?
4:46
Joe had 35 likes. Jamie had 12 likes. Your thing
4:48
is more important. Let's give it more importance because it's
4:52
seemingly meeting all these human needs. Attention, attention, attention. So
4:56
phase one, attention. Phase two, attention. And this is where
5:00
I'm like, how can this be possible? In phase three,
5:03
we're like looking at AI. And when you look backwards
5:06
four years, the seminal paper is called attention is all
5:08
you need. It's about this word again. And when you
5:13
look inside of the core part, if you peel apart AI,
5:19
the little brain that makes it so capable is called
5:22
an attention mechanism. It's just attention. It's all about, again,
5:26
this idea of I'm going to scour all this information
5:29
and I'm going to figure out what patterns repeat itself
5:31
and I'm just going to double down on the stuff
5:33
that I see more of because that attention must mean
5:36
it's more important. It's more true. It's more knowledgeable. And
5:40
then I think, how could it be? Why is it
5:44
that these things are just repeating over and over again?
5:46
And I just get confused. I don't exactly know how
5:49
to explain it. So are there other ways to In
5:52
which we should be doing things?
5:53
Speaker 2: Absolutely.
5:54
Speaker 1: Have we even explored it? No. So then I think, well,
5:56
is this just a simulation? Some kid in his house
5:59
just playing some simulation and we're all just party to
6:02
it and that's all he understands is attention?
6:04
Speaker 3: I don't know.
6:05
Speaker 2: I don't think it's that simple that there's a person
6:08
playing a game. But if you break down just attention, well,
6:12
that's all of human history is paying attention to the king,
6:17
paying attention to the war. paying attention to resources, paying
6:22
attention to who says the thing that resonates the most
6:25
with the people. It's all about what human beings are
6:29
paying attention to.
6:31
Speaker 1: I think it's part of it. Then there's also what
6:33
is actually true. And I think sometimes what is true
6:37
and what people pay attention to are not the same thing. True.
6:41
And sometimes the thing that you should be paying attention
6:45
to gets lost because the thing that you are paying
6:48
attention to gets more attention because it's more interesting and useful.
6:52
That's sort of where we are right now. We're in
6:54
this really weird phase, I think, where you actually like
6:58
should be focused on this thing over here. And instead,
7:02
we're all focused on all these things over here.
7:04
Speaker 2: Give me an example.
7:08
Speaker 1: Here's like a very big one. I think like it's
7:12
pretty fair to say since the last time you and
7:13
I saw each other on the show, The attitude towards technology,
7:20
I think, has been pretty profoundly negative. It's kind of tilted.
7:23
It's relatively like anti-AI, anti-billionaires. It's anti all of this stuff.
7:32
And it manifests in all of these interesting ways. There's protests.
7:37
There's data centers. There's all of this stuff that's happening.
7:41
People are worried about job loss. All of that stuff
7:44
is real.
7:45
Speaker 2: Do you want a cigar?
7:46
Speaker 1: No, I'm OK. But what should they really be focused upon?
7:51
And I think what they should be really focused upon
7:54
is we're at the tail end of a cycle that
7:57
doesn't work anymore, which is all about like this tension
8:00
between labor, people that do the work and capital, the
8:03
people that fund it and then make all the returns.
8:06
And over the last 40 years, we've basically gone to
8:08
this completely upside down world where capital extracts all of
8:13
the upsides. And labor has extracted less and less and
8:17
less and less. And all of this pushback, it manifests
8:21
in AI. It manifests in politics. It manifests in social issues.
8:24
It manifests in, you know, Israel. Whatever you want to
8:27
talk about, all of these issues, I think symptomologically, come
8:31
from this other issue, which is we are out of balance.
8:34
This total compact that we used to have, a liberal
8:38
democracy and a free market, has totally collapsed. And there
8:42
are simple ways to fix that. But that never gets
8:44
the attention because it's not what you want to talk about.
8:46
The attention is here. You know, vote no to the
8:50
data center. You know, this model is going to take
8:53
out all the jobs. You know, this social issue is
8:58
really important. That war should not be fought. That war
9:01
should be fought. All of these things, while important, distract
9:07
us from what the core issue is. And the core
9:09
issue is that we as a society, I think, are
9:11
out of balance. The natural compact between all of us
9:16
is broken. And there are some simple ways to fix
9:19
that compact, get people more invested, get people more engaged
9:22
in the upside, have people have a positive some view
9:24
of what's happening. And that isn't happening.
9:27
Speaker 2: What simple solutions are there to this one very particular issue?
9:32
Speaker 1: Okay, I'll get your reaction to this. Let's assume that
9:36
you still lived in California because I think it tells
9:38
this example in a more extreme way. Let's say you
9:42
make a million bucks a year, which is a lot
9:44
of money, but it makes the point more cleanly. You'd pay,
9:51
I think, 30% federal tax and you'd pay another 15%
9:57
or 16% in state taxes. tax and Medicare tax and
10:01
all this tax. So if you're a wage earner, 50%
10:06
of all your upside goes to the government. If you're
10:12
a capital earner and you make that same million dollars
10:17
via capital gains, you pay half that tax. Why did
10:22
that happen? That happened because in the 40s and 50s,
10:25
but really in the 60s and 70s and 80s, what
10:29
we were trying to do or what the American government
10:31
and what Western societies were trying to do was to
10:35
convince people to invest their money. Hey, Joe, go build
10:39
that factory, go hire those people, and we're going to
10:42
incentivize you to do so. And by doing that, there
10:47
was this idea that that all of those profits that
10:49
you would get would then diffuse, right, trickle down into
10:52
everybody else. The workers participated, everybody participated. But technology allows
10:58
you to do more with less and less. So now
11:01
what happens is the capital owners can accrue infinite almost,
11:07
it seems like, value. And the workers get less and less.
11:11
But now if you get less and less and you're
11:12
taxed more and more as a percentage of what you own,
11:15
you're going to feel really out of sorts. You're going
11:17
to be like, why am I paying 50 cents of
11:19
every dollar? And I see these other ways where folks
11:21
are paying 25 cents on their dollars, but their dollars
11:24
are compounding way faster and they have hundreds of billions
11:28
more of those dollars than I have of my dollars.
11:31
If you take that example and you expand it across society,
11:34
I think people understand that now. There's enough information and
11:37
there's enough people talking about it where it's pretty clear
11:40
that that's happened. So the question is, how do you
11:43
fix it? I think if you think about AI... And
11:45
if you believe that we're going to get into this
11:47
world of abundance and we're not working, what does it
11:52
mean for governments to tax our labor? There is no labor.
11:55
You're not working anymore. I'm not working. We're doing things
11:57
out of leisure. Why should I pay 50 cents of
12:01
every dollar? Why aren't the companies that are going to
12:02
be making trillions of dollars, why don't they pay more?
12:06
Why isn't there an expectation that they then help our
12:11
lived society do better and thrive? As a result of
12:16
all of that winning, that's the real conversation that I
12:19
think is bubbling. And I think that we're probably another
12:25
12 to 18 months where all of these other issues
12:29
are going to be important, but they're going to be
12:31
viewed for what they are. They're going to get demoted,
12:34
I think, in importance. And it's this core structural issue.
12:38
It's what is the economic relationship that we have together
12:41
as a society? What is the relationship between Joe, Chamath,
12:45
Jamie and all these companies? And how do we feel
12:50
about a few and an ever shrinking few making more
12:55
and more and more? And then how do we feel
12:59
about their ability to share that with a small amount
13:03
of people? And then what is the expectation for everybody else?
13:09
I think that's mostly at the core of what's happening.
13:12
And so back to like, you know, all of this
13:15
attention that we give to these other issues distracts from
13:18
that one. Because I think you can get organized to
13:19
fix this issue. You can't get consensus on any of
13:22
these issues. You know, you bring up Israel, it's like this.
13:25
You bring up social issues, it's like this. You bring up,
13:28
you know, whatever you want to bring up, people just
13:30
kind of take aside. Nothing happens. This is actually where
13:34
people are universally actually much more aligned than you think.
13:38
Because there's reasonable ways. One simple way is you'd say, well,
13:40
let's flip the taxation model. Corporate taxes should exceed personal taxes.
13:49
They've never. We should have an expectation that then corporate
13:57
actors can buy down their taxes if they want, but
14:00
if they do social good for society. I'll give you
14:02
an example. The Industrial Revolution, there's a table like this
14:07
and the leading lights of that era, Andrew Carnegie, Nelson Rockefeller,
14:11
Jay Gould, J.P.
14:13
Speaker 2: Morgan.
14:15
Speaker 1: They sat together and they said, guys, this is going
14:18
to benefit us, this industrial revolution. It may not benefit everybody.
14:23
What is our responsibility? What is our collective responsibility? And
14:27
they allocated tasks. Carnegie went and built libraries all throughout
14:33
the country. Rockefeller built universities. Hospitals were built. And I
14:38
think what happened is society was like, wow, these are
14:40
living testaments to us doing well. And so then they
14:44
were okay with this transition. But if you think about
14:47
it today, what are the living tributes that, you know,
14:52
capital builds and leaves behind for society? It's fewer and fewer.
14:57
I think that's a very big opportunity for somebody to fill.
15:01
I think it's like, especially for folks in tech, I think,
15:05
if they can get themselves organized to do that, I
15:08
think we land in a good place. If they cannot
15:10
get themselves organized to do that and say everyone for themselves,
15:16
I think it's going to be really complicated, super messy.
15:20
Speaker 2: Super messy because— Super messy. That sentiment that the wealthy
15:24
are getting wealthier and the middle class is disappearing and
15:28
the poor are being taxed into oblivion.
15:30
Speaker 1: Well, look, an $ 80, 000- a- year teacher pays 40% tax. But if
15:36
you're a multibillionaire, most of your wealth is not W-2 wages.
15:42
It's cap gains. But there's all kinds of ways to
15:44
shelter cap gains. There's all kinds of ways to defer.
15:48
And so even though you pay more on an absolute
15:51
dollar basis, on a percentage basis, you're paying way, way less.
15:55
And all of those tricks have been exposed. They've all
15:59
been exposed. These are all mechanisms that were invented from
16:04
the 1980s to now, right, by all the banks and
16:08
all the folks that wanted to come to folks that
16:10
had wealth and So it's– and it's all known and
16:14
I think people are kind of like, hey, hold on
16:15
a second. This just doesn't feel fair anymore.
16:19
Speaker 2: Absolutely. But the other problem with that is if you
16:25
do tax correctly, where does that money go and who's
16:30
managing it? And ultimately who's managing it is the federal
16:34
government and they have been shown to be completely inept
16:38
at managing your money correctly. the fraud and the waste
16:42
is off the charts the amount of ngos that have
16:46
insane amount of funds at their disposal i mean all
16:48
this is exposed by doge right and you realize like
16:51
how much fraud and waste there is and how much
16:54
money so the solution being tax people more that doesn't
16:59
sit with a lot of people because it's like well
17:01
where where is it going and who's managing it if
17:05
if The federal government was being forced to handle money
17:10
the same way a private company does. If it was
17:13
all out in the open, everything was exposed, they would
17:17
have gone bankrupt a long time ago. They would have
17:19
gone under a long time ago. There's no way they
17:22
would have been allowed to function the way they are.
17:25
The people that are managing that money would have all
17:27
been put in jail. There's not a chance in hell
17:31
that Giving them more money is going to solve anything.
17:35
They're going to find more ways to put more of
17:38
that money into NGOs that puts more of that money
17:41
into Democratic coffers and Republican coffers. They're going to figure
17:44
out a way to funnel that money around where it's
17:46
not going to benefit people. I mean a good example
17:50
of that is like where– let's look at the LA
17:53
Fire thing for instance. All right. So the LA Fire Fund.
17:56
There's a giant fire in the Palisades. All this money–
18:01
gets raised. It's over $ 800 million. It goes to 200
18:05
plus different nonprofits. None of it goes to the people.
18:10
Spencer Pratt, who's running for mayor of Los Angeles.
18:13
Speaker 1: He's doing a great job, by the way.
18:14
Speaker 2: Fucking phenomenal.
18:16
Speaker 1: Those ads are unbelievable. Those ads are fire. They're fire.
18:19
Speaker 2: They're so good. They're fire. And he's doing it all
18:22
out of a trailer on his burnt out land. I mean,
18:25
he's the most righteous guy running in that regard. But
18:28
just that being exposed- Like, OK, we're going to help
18:33
out these people. We're going to donate money. We're going
18:35
to raise money. We're going to do some good. We
18:38
feel terrible about the people in our community that have
18:40
lost homes. Well, what happens? Well, the same people that
18:43
you're saying we should give more taxes to take that money.
18:47
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18:50
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19:30
Speaker 1: I'm not saying give them more tax. What I'm saying
19:32
is people are taxed too much.
19:34
Speaker 2: Yes.
19:34
Speaker 1: Corporates are not taxed enough. Flip it.
19:37
Speaker 2: Right. But even if you do flip it and the
19:39
corporates are taxed more, where's that money going? This is
19:43
the problem.
19:44
Speaker 1: I suspect that if you put the burden on Wall
19:47
Street and corporates- Um, they'd be a lot more organized,
19:52
and they'd probably create a lot more change than a
19:53
diffuse electorate. Meaning, let's just say the government spends a
19:58
trillion dollars and wastes it. I'm generally roughly aligned with that.
20:04
If you waste a trillion dollars from 300 million people,
20:09
It's hard to organize that 300 million people. But if
20:12
you waste a trillion dollars from 300 companies, those companies
20:15
will get their shit together really fast and they will
20:18
force a lot more change.
20:19
Speaker 2: I would hope so. But you're still dealing with incompetent
20:22
people that are tasked with taking care of that money. Yeah.
20:25
Not just incompetent.
20:26
Speaker 1: Don't get me wrong. I'm not defending these people.
20:27
Speaker 2: Decades of corruption, decades and decades of all these mechanisms
20:33
where they can take this money. And funnel it into
20:37
these NGOs and these nonprofits and all these different weird
20:42
organizations that don't seem to have accountability for what they
20:45
do with that money. That gets real slippery. And if
20:50
those people in turn make deals with those corporations that
20:54
allow them to do certain things and push things through
20:57
that maybe they would have difficulty doing. But then you
21:00
have a different kind of a working relationship with the
21:02
same groups of people and the same government. You just
21:06
take money from corporations and move it into a way
21:09
where the corporations ultimately benefit from it. But yet it
21:12
doesn't do any good to the people.
21:14
Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean I can see where you're coming from.
21:16
I just think that if we go on the track
21:18
we're going down, it just seems like we're going to
21:23
hit a crisis. Yes. The crisis is you can't expect
21:26
people to pay more and more and more. Again, I
21:29
agree with you. The premise is we're all paying for
21:31
a system that's broken. That should change. But we still
21:36
continue to have to pay our taxes. But if taxes
21:38
keep going up like this at the individual level and
21:42
we don't manage this transition to something where we may
21:45
be working less and less, what are we getting paid
21:47
to do? And then at that point, how are we
21:49
expected to pay what? 90% of what? Right.
21:51
Speaker 2: 50% of what? I think people do have this weird
21:56
feeling of dread that the people that are in control
22:03
of a lot in this country, the tech companies in particular,
22:07
particularly the tech companies like Google and Facebook that are
22:10
essentially involved in data collection and then ultimately dissemination of information,
22:16
that they have acquired enormous amounts of wealth and power
22:20
and influence and they're essentially– a new form of the government.
22:26
Are you aware of Robert Epstein? Do you know about
22:28
his work?
22:30
Speaker 1: Not Robert Epstein.
22:31
Speaker 2: No, different guy. Different guy. Robert Epstein is a guy
22:34
who specializes in understanding what curated search results do and
22:42
what Google is able to do with– in particular, with
22:46
curated search results in terms of influencing elections. Like say
22:52
if you– you have two candidates that are running. Let's
22:54
just take LA for instance. I'm not making any accusations.
22:59
But I'm saying if they wanted Karen Bass to win
23:03
and you searched Karen Bass, you would find all these
23:06
positive results. If you searched Spencer Pratt, you would find
23:10
all these negative results. And there's a bunch of people
23:13
that are always– undecided voters. And those are the ones
23:17
that you really want. They're like, I don't know. I
23:19
don't know. And come election night, those are the people
23:21
you want to try to grab. And it's generally a
23:23
large percentage. You can influence an enormous percentage of those
23:27
people just with search results where you can shift an
23:30
election one way or another.
23:32
Speaker 1: I believe it.
23:32
Speaker 2: Yeah. And he's demonstrated this and shown how this is possible.
23:38
That freaks people out that tech companies are in control
23:42
of narratives, that tech companies are can censor information, especially
23:47
tech companies that work in conjunction with the government. This
23:51
is what we found out when Elon purchased Twitter. When
23:54
Elon purchased Twitter, we got all this information from the
23:57
Twitter files when all the journalists were allowed to go
23:59
through it and they said, oh, this is crazy. You've
24:02
got the FBI, the CIA. You've got all these companies,
24:05
all these government organizations that are essentially controlling the narrative
24:11
of free speech in the country. And they're doing it
24:14
in a way that benefits them. They're doing it in
24:16
a way that benefits what political parties in charge at
24:18
the time was the Biden administration. And they were allowed
24:22
to do a bunch of weird shit, which should be illegal,
24:25
but it's not technically illegal. And that freaks people out
24:29
because there's no real laws and rules in regard to
24:33
what they're allowed to do and what they're not allowed
24:34
to do. Like curated search results should be illegal.
24:37
Speaker 1: They're shaping attention.
24:38
Speaker 2: Yes. Attention. Again, it goes back to attention.
24:42
Speaker 1: Shaping attention.
24:43
Speaker 2: Yeah. That's a big concern for people and I think
24:48
then when you find out that these people are able
24:51
to amass enormous sums of wealth and have incredible amount
24:54
of power and influence because of this enormous wealth and
24:59
this control over these tech companies that have essentially become
25:03
the town square of the world. That freaks people out
25:07
and that these– Very small number of people. You think
25:11
of Zuckerberg. You think of Tim Cook and I don't
25:13
know who the new guy is now. Who's the new guy?
25:16
Speaker 1: John Furness.
25:17
Speaker 2: Right.
25:17
Speaker 1: Furness. No.
25:18
Speaker 2: I forgot his name.
25:20
Speaker 1: Furness. John Furness.
25:21
Speaker 2: But that kind of thing gives people a lot of concern, right?
25:28
It's like these people, these unelected people are in control
25:32
of a giant chunk of how the world works.
25:38
Speaker 1: I think that this is the existential question that we
25:40
are dealing with. You're going to have five or six
25:44
companies concentrate, like whatever power you think has been concentrated
25:51
up until now, I think we're going to look back
25:53
and it's going to look like a Sunday picnic 10
25:55
or 15 years from now. Because on the one hand,
25:59
it's going to be an even smaller subset. And on
26:01
the other hand, the capability is going to be an
26:03
order or two orders of magnitude. So can you imagine
26:06
what that must be like? It's kind of like showing up,
26:08
getting dropped into the 1800s and you've invented the engine
26:12
and everybody else is a horse and buggy. You can
26:15
just decide to your point. That is where we're going.
26:20
Speaker 2: It's even more crazy. It's like everybody else is on
26:23
a horse and buggy and you've got an internet connection
26:25
and a cell phone.
26:26
Speaker 1: Right?
26:27
Speaker 2: Exactly. It's even more crazy.
26:29
Speaker 1: Exactly.
26:29
Speaker 2: Because it's– What we're dealing with with AI right now is,
26:34
first of all, it's already lowered children's attention spans. And
26:39
it's shrinking their capacity to acquire or absorb information because
26:45
what they're doing now is just relying on AI to
26:47
answer all their questions for them. Now, is that their fault?
26:50
Kind of, right? Because it doesn't have to be that way.
26:53
You can still acquire information the old-fashioned way. You can
26:56
still learn things the right way. But a lot of
26:58
kids are just concerned with passing examinations and getting into
27:01
good schools and what they're doing is just using AI.
27:04
And they're getting better test results but they're also not
27:08
as smart, which is really weird. It's like we're relying
27:12
on it like we– it's like it's essentially like replacing
27:20
our mind and– That's just– this is the beginning. This
27:25
is like– these are the toddler days of AI and
27:30
where it's going to be a super athlete in a
27:32
few years.
27:34
Speaker 1: I think we have to figure out how– first of all,
27:38
kids need to learn and I think this is where
27:40
like we have to do a better job as parents.
27:42
Kids need to learn how to be resilient thinkers. I
27:44
don't even know what that term meant before but I
27:46
know what it means now, which is like you take
27:48
this AI slop and you just kind of like pass
27:51
it off. And if like the teachers in the school
27:53
system aren't trained, they're just like, wow, this looks good.
27:57
They have to be able to push back. Parents need
28:00
to be able to look at this shit. But then
28:01
all of this stuff, I'm just like so frustrated because
28:03
it's like one more thing that I have to do
28:05
as a parent.
28:06
Speaker 2: Right.
28:06
Speaker 1: Every time technology gets better, it's one more thing, you know? Right.
28:10
We're going to make the world, you know, super connected
28:12
and social and all of that stuff. It sounds great
28:14
to me until I have to be the one that
28:15
has to tell my kid they can't get Instagram. And
28:18
then they're up my ass every day.
28:20
Speaker 2: Right.
28:20
Speaker 1: You know? And it's just like, I don't want to
28:22
have to deal with this stuff. I want this to
28:25
be handled in a way that just allows me to
28:27
do what I want to do. I don't want to
28:30
say no to my kid. I don't want to police
28:31
his schoolwork and make sure he's not cheating or not
28:35
learning and just like, you know, passing off this AI slop.
28:38
What am I, where are my tax dollars going? Where's
28:43
everybody else in all of this? It gets very frustrating.
28:46
And again, it goes back to like this feeling of like, Well,
28:49
is this all getting better for me or is this
28:51
kind of like not– people start to be nostalgic for
28:55
what it used to be because it was just simpler.
28:57
But I think that's a different way of saying easier.
29:00
Speaker 2: Well, we're just dealing with– we're at the edge of
29:04
great change, like great change that has no real understanding
29:09
of how it turns out. Yeah. And I think that
29:13
understandably freaks people out. It freaks me out. It freaks
29:16
me out, but I've kind of gotten to this place
29:18
where I'm like, well, it's going to happen.
29:19
Speaker 1: Did you see this thing? It's a CEO of Verizon,
29:23
Dan Schulman. He put out this very public forecast, very
29:28
smart guy, well-regarded in business. And I think he said
29:31
something like 30 percent of all white-collar jobs will be
29:36
gone by 2030. I don't know. Jamie, maybe you can
29:38
get the exact thing. But it's something like that.
29:39
Speaker 2: That's probably. optimistic.
29:41
Speaker 1: And I thought at first my initial reaction was like,
29:44
this is totally not credible. But then I'm like, hold
29:46
on a second. That's my bias because I want to
29:48
believe that that's not possible. Honestly. And as I've gotten older,
29:52
I'm a little bit better now. I'm like, okay, hold
29:54
on a second. Let's weigh the probabilities. And then I
29:56
was like, man, if I'm going to be fair, maybe
30:00
there's a 10, 20% chance of that. There's a bunch
30:05
of other outcomes that are much better than that, but
30:07
that's part of the set of outcomes that you have
30:09
to consider. And then I was like, well, what's my
30:13
antidote to that? And the only thing that I can
30:15
say is don't worry, it's going to be better. I
30:19
don't think that that's a good answer. So there has
30:21
to be, like all of this kind of goes back to, look,
30:27
my wife and I had this conversation. We're like, If
30:29
it were up to us, who can you trust to
30:33
have some super intelligence? Now, we're biased because we're friends
30:37
with him. But the only person that we can trust
30:38
is Elon because he seems to be like– he has
30:42
a bigger– like it's kind of like he's like over there.
30:44
He's like, I need to get to Mars. I'm going
30:47
to first terraform the moon, but then I'm going to
30:49
Mars and I'm going to build like a fucking magnetic catapult.
30:52
I'm going to do all this shit. And so I
30:55
just need this thing. I feel like he's the least corruptible.
31:01
Speaker 2: He's the most independent thinking.
31:03
Speaker 1: And I think he's the one that has an actual
31:05
empathy for people. Then there are folks where there's just
31:09
an insane profit motive. Right. They're less in control of
31:13
the businesses that they run. Those businesses are really out
31:16
over their ski tips and the amount of money they've
31:18
gotten from Wall Street and other folks who expect a return,
31:22
who will put a ton of pressure on these folks.
31:25
And if they get their first I don't know where
31:27
the chips fall. We don't really know. We can kind
31:29
of guess. And then you see in the press just
31:33
enough snippets of their reactions in certain moments where you're like, hey,
31:36
hold on a second, question mark here. You see OpenAI
31:40
react one way. You see Anthropic react another way. And
31:42
you're like, where is this going to end up? And
31:45
the honest answer is nobody really knows. So it comes
31:49
back to like we need a few people that can organize.
31:52
Those guys need to self-organize. and actually present a really
31:56
positive face. And they need to show why those 20%
32:01
of outcomes that Dan Schulman paints, the truth is it's possible,
32:06
but here's why it's not probable.
32:09
Speaker 2: But it's not in their best interest to do that
32:11
because it's in their best interest to generate the most
32:13
amount of money possible. That's the obligation they have to
32:16
their shareholders. That's the obligation to they have the people
32:18
that have invested money in this company. Their obligation is
32:22
not to make sure the white-collar jobs stay in the
32:25
same place that they are now.
32:27
Speaker 1: That's not true. No? No. I actually think their incentive
32:31
should very clearly be to tell people with details and
32:35
facts why there's a positive future. And the reason is
32:39
the following. Right now, there's a vacuum. There are no facts.
32:42
And there's fear-mongering and then there's this belief that this
32:45
is going to be cataclysmic to human productivity and white-collar
32:49
labor and all of this stuff. What's people's natural reaction? Well, today,
32:53
if you look at it, think about AI as a
32:56
very simple equation. Energy in, intelligence out. So if you
33:01
want to cut the head of the snake, what do
33:02
you do? You cut off the energy supply, right?
33:05
Speaker 2: Okay.
33:06
Speaker 1: If you're afraid of all of this super intelligence coming,
33:09
the natural thing to do would be to go to
33:11
the point of energy and unplug it. What is the
33:14
equivalent of unplugging it today? It is to go all
33:16
around the country, find the data centers, protest them, And
33:21
get them to be mothballed. That is an incredibly successful
33:25
strategy right now. Today, about 40% of all of these
33:32
data centers that get protested get mothballed.
33:38
Speaker 2: You're talking about emerging data centers?
33:40
Speaker 1: Yeah, just like I need to. So if you're one
33:43
of these companies, the first thing you should realize is
33:45
I need to paint a positive vision because 40% of
33:49
my energy is getting unplugged every day. And if that happens,
33:54
my revenues will crater and my investors will be super pissed.
33:57
So the right strategy is what is the positive fact-based argument?
34:02
And there are some incredible examples, number one. And then
34:06
number two is you have to give people some tactical
34:10
benefit that they see. Because AI, differently than search or
34:16
differently than social media, there's no exchange of value. Let
34:21
me explain what that means. So let me just go like,
34:24
so the first thing is that if you can go
34:28
and actually show people, here's an example of AI. I
34:33
heard about this last night. It's pretty incredible. You can
34:37
now take pictures of a woman's fallopian tubes and you
34:40
can see pre-cancer ovarian cysts and all of this stuff,
34:46
cervical cancer before it forms. And then you can intervene
34:51
and you can fix it so that women don't get
34:54
cervical cancer. In a different example, I actually told you
34:58
about this example when I was here before. I finally
35:00
got FDA approval. There is a device now that is
35:04
allowed to be in the operating room with you. And
35:07
if you have a cancerous lesion or a tumor inside
35:11
of your body, the most important thing when they go
35:13
to take it out is make sure you don't leave
35:15
any cancer behind. You couldn't do it because what would
35:18
happen is you take it out, A doctor, Joe, is
35:22
literally fucking eyeballing it and saying, yeah. They send it
35:26
to a pathologist. You get an answer in 10 days.
35:30
For women with breast cancer, a third of these women
35:32
find out that they have cancer left behind. They go
35:35
back in. They scoop some more stuff out. A third
35:37
of those women. OK, so I'm like, this is bullshit.
35:41
We can solve this problem. It took us a long time,
35:45
a lot of money. I had to build an entire
35:47
machine imaging all of this stuff, AI algorithms. We had
35:52
to prove it all. We finally get approval, okay? But
35:55
you know how hard it is to tell that story?
35:57
In all of the attention that people are looking for,
36:00
it's hard. But those are positive examples. No more breast cancer.
36:06
No more cervical cancer. A different example is most drugs
36:10
in pharma fail, right? And it's a very complicated problem
36:15
in pharma. It's kind of like a jigsaw puzzle of
36:18
the ultimate complexity. It's like, think of your human body
36:21
as like a Himalayan mountain range. You have to design
36:25
a drug that's an equivalent Himalayan mountain range that plugs
36:28
into it perfectly. One millimeter off, you grow like a
36:33
fourth eye, a third nipple, you die, you know? Now
36:37
you can use computers to make sure that that drug
36:41
hand in glove to your body solves the exact problem.
36:44
Couldn't do that before. So there's all of these body
36:47
of examples and you're probably only hearing them superficially at best.
36:54
That should be 99% of the attention is showing all
36:57
of the constructive, tactical ways in which our lives.
37:01
Speaker 2: Will be better.
37:02
Speaker 1: Your mom, your daughter, your wife, us, Jamie, his family, everybody.
37:08
That's the number one thing. Nobody talks about it. I
37:11
don't understand why.
37:12
Speaker 2: Well, I think because people are terrified of losing their jobs.
37:15
So that's the primary concern. The primary concern that I
37:18
hear from people is that there's so many people that
37:20
are going to school right now, college students, that don't
37:23
know if their job is going to even exist in
37:26
four years when they graduate.
37:27
Speaker 1: And that's the second part of, I think, what this
37:30
industry has to do better. I had lunch with Jeffrey Katzenberg.
37:35
He told this crazy story. I'll tell you. Steve Jobs
37:39
gets kicked out of Apple. he starts next, and he
37:45
buys Pixar from George Lucas. But then he hits a
37:48
rough patch, and he's got this financing issue. Katzenberg flies up,
37:54
spends time with Steve Jobs, says, I'll buy Pixar. Jobs says,
37:58
absolutely not. And then Katzenberg proposes a deal, and he's like,
38:03
how about a three-picture deal? Jobs says, okay. He flies back,
38:07
and apparently all the animators... were up in arms because
38:11
they're like, hold on a second. Steve Jobs is going
38:13
to use these next computers to animate this movie, which
38:17
ultimately became, I think, Toy Story. And they're like, this
38:20
is going to put all of us out of a job.
38:22
That perfect argument. And people were really upset. Roy Disney
38:28
was upset. All the animators were upset. And they all
38:30
went to Mike Eisner. And they were like, Michael, you
38:33
need to fire Katzenberg. And they had a deal which
38:37
was like, look, man, You do you, but just give
38:40
me the ability to say no if I think that
38:43
this is you're about to jump off a cliff. They
38:45
talk about it and he's like, I got your back.
38:47
Do the deal. Make the movie. They made the movie.
38:50
It was a huge success. Fast forward 10 years, 15 years,
38:53
there's 10x the number of animators. Now, it's a small example,
38:57
but why is that? You were able to use computers
39:00
and now all these new people were able to come
39:02
and participate in that. I get it. It's a small example.
39:07
But I think if we had better organized leadership and
39:10
we could try to tell some of these examples, try
39:12
to go back and document how some of these things
39:16
have actually helped people, it expanded the pie. There's a chance.
39:20
But if we don't, I agree with you. Where we're
39:22
going to end up is everybody basically saying, hey, hold
39:25
on a second. This is crazy. We need to stop this.
39:28
That's the worst outcome. Because that's when you will have
39:32
a high risk of a dislocation. Like the worst outcome,
39:35
like the black, what's the black swan event, right? Let's
39:37
think about the black. The black swan event is when
39:39
you get a model that's good enough to automate a
39:46
bunch of labor. But not good enough that it can
39:52
build new drugs and prevent cancer and make you live
39:55
for 200 years and all of this other stuff, right?
39:57
So there's like a gap, right? And if you can
39:59
stop it here and it doesn't get to there, now
40:01
you do have the worst of all worlds. You have
40:04
this thing that kind of displaces labor. No new things
40:07
come after it because we stop innovating. And that's like
40:12
a non-trivial possibility now.
40:15
Speaker 2: No, it's a huge possibility. And then there's also this
40:17
thing that you brought up earlier where we have this
40:20
place of abundance where no one has to work anymore.
40:23
That freaks people out.
40:24
Speaker 1: I think that's a big problem.
40:26
Speaker 2: Well, because if no one has to work anymore, first
40:29
of all, what is your identity, right? Because so many people,
40:33
their identity is what they do, whatever it is. If
40:36
you're a lawyer, if you're an accountant, if you run
40:38
a business, whatever it is, this is your identity, right?
40:41
You have built this thing. You look forward to going there.
40:45
You work at it. You look forward to doing a
40:48
good job and getting rewarded for it. The harder you work,
40:51
the more you get paid. There's all these incentives built
40:54
in and then there's this, again, identity problem. If all
40:58
of a sudden you have universal high income, which is
41:02
what Elon always talks about, well, what gives people purpose then?
41:05
And also– If you have a person who's– they're 43
41:10
years old and their entire life they've worked towards this
41:14
idea that the harder they work, the harder they think,
41:16
the more innovative they are and the better they are
41:19
at implementing these ideas, the more they get rewarded. And
41:23
then all of a sudden, that's not necessary anymore, Mike.
41:26
Time for you to just relax and do what you
41:28
want to do. And Mike is like, well, this is
41:30
what I do. I don't have any fucking hobbies. I
41:34
enjoy doing what I do. And now what I do
41:36
is completely useless. And now I'm on a fixed income.
41:40
Even if that fixed income is a million dollars a year,
41:43
whatever it is. If all of a sudden you are
41:47
in this position where everything is being run by computers,
41:50
you feel useless. You feel like, what am I doing?
41:52
I'm just taking money. I'm on high welfare. Like what
41:57
do I do?
41:58
Speaker 1: I think that that's a really important question to answer.
42:00
I don't know.
42:01
Speaker 2: Some people are going to write books. Some people are
42:03
going to do art. Some people are going to find
42:05
things to do.
42:06
Speaker 1: What do you think we would have done if we
42:10
were– go back to the 1800s example. There was no
42:15
office culture. There's no like ladder to climb. How did
42:21
people find meaning then?
42:24
Speaker 2: Well, they had jobs. People still did things. If you're
42:27
a farmer, you had meaning in your labor and what
42:31
you did and keeping the animals alive and your chores.
42:34
And there's people that find great satisfaction doing that. You
42:37
have all these animals that rely on you. You have
42:39
people that rely on you for the food that you generate.
42:41
There's meaning there. It doesn't have to be an office
42:45
to be something that gives you purpose and meaning. But
42:47
when all that is animated, then what happens? Because then
42:51
you have no purpose, no meaning other than recreational activities. Now,
42:56
if everybody just starts playing chess and doing a bunch
42:58
of things that they really enjoy, I mean, look, there's
43:01
people that would love to just play chess.
43:05
Speaker 1: Like eight people. I don't know about that.
43:07
Speaker 2: I think if people really got into it, I mean,
43:09
there's a lot of people that get addicted to whatever
43:12
their recreation is, like golf or whatever it is. For me,
43:14
it's playing pool. If you told me I never have
43:17
to make any more money, I could just play pool
43:19
all day. I might just play pool all day. But
43:21
I don't know how many people think that way. I
43:25
don't know how many people would be able to find
43:27
meaning and purpose in a recreational activity. There's so many
43:31
people where their entire being is focused around productivity and
43:36
generating more wealth.
43:37
Speaker 1: What about religion as a source of meaning?
43:40
Speaker 2: Well, that would help.
43:42
Speaker 1: Did you see this article in the New York Times?
43:44
I think it was this weekend about how popular and
43:46
sold out churches have become as social constructs in New
43:50
York City. It was totally fascinating. It's like young women
43:55
dressed to the nines going to church on a Sunday
43:59
for social belonging, community meaning. I thought I was so
44:04
fascinated by it. I was like, wow, that's incredible. Because
44:07
I think if you graph just like people's use of
44:11
religion as an anchoring part of their value system, over
44:15
the last 40 years, it's basically gone to zero. Nobody
44:18
celebrates it the way– it's not a part of the
44:20
community the way that it used to be. Maybe that's
44:22
the thing that we have to find. There has to
44:24
be a renewal of some older things, and then there
44:27
has to be new things that replace it. What's the
44:30
Chinese answer to this? You know, the Chinese have a
44:32
very orthogonal answer to this. If you look at how
44:35
China is organized, it's super interesting because they don't reward
44:40
based on the way the American system rewards. In fact,
44:42
it's like almost orthogonal, where we, it's we are rewarded
44:47
with money and rewarded with sort of fame and recognition.
44:52
the system, the American capitalist system. But if you look
44:55
inside of China, it's constantly testing who has this judgment
44:59
and what they are rewarded with is influence and power
45:02
in a very, again, it's a very specific social contract.
45:05
It doesn't, I don't think it's going to work in
45:06
the United States, nor am I an advocate of it,
45:08
but it works for them. You'll start off as like some,
45:13
you know, low rung person in like some small village
45:16
town somewhere and your job is like the, you know,
45:19
The functionary is to do good in that community. And
45:22
the more you do well, you get promoted. Then you get,
45:24
let's say, to like a reasonable size city and you
45:26
get a budget. And now what happens is you actually
45:29
become a little bit like a VC, like a venture capitalist.
45:31
You're given a budget and you'll get a memo. And
45:35
it'll say, hey, Joe, we have a priority over the
45:38
next 15 years. It's batteries. And you have enough money,
45:42
put a team on the field. So you go in
45:46
your local community, you find a bunch of guys. You're like,
45:48
all right, guys, we're going to start a battery company.
45:51
And you do it. And let's say they're good. And
45:55
they're like innovative. And what happens is in the town
45:59
beside it, that battery company dies. Now you kind of
46:03
subsume the capital from Jamie, right? Because Jamie's like, fuck,
46:07
I fucked up this thing that I wanted. I was
46:08
told to do batteries. Okay, Joe, I'm just going to
46:10
align with you. And what you happen, what happens over
46:13
time is you get this filtering effect. And the people
46:18
that are better at meeting these long-run priorities and objectives
46:22
are the ones that are celebrated. But they're not celebrated
46:25
with Forbes articles and all this other bullshit. They're just
46:30
celebrated by giving more responsibility. And then eventually you get
46:34
to the upper echelons of China and what you have
46:36
are folks over a course of 40 or 50 years
46:38
who in their eyes have demonstrated incredible prowess. There's a
46:43
version of that reward system which is very foreign to America,
46:47
but that's worked for China. Now, that also works because
46:50
they're more Confucian, you know, we're too individualist. But my
46:54
point is like, you know, there are these different ways
46:57
that we can find of giving people meaning that don't
47:01
have to be always around money. But meanwhile, I think
47:06
we have to answer the question, if we are expected
47:09
to do less, we probably should not be taxed more. That's,
47:12
I think that's like a very basic, in my mind,
47:15
I think that is like, that must be explored and
47:17
figured out. And on the other side, there's just a
47:20
ton of obvious mechanisms that corporate actors can use to
47:25
minimize that. And they should find off ramps, by the way,
47:28
if they want to build hospitals, they shouldn't have to
47:30
pay taxes. Like that's a perfect example, by the way,
47:32
of like the thing in like, if you look, if
47:35
you walk around New York city, there are living tributes
47:38
to corporate success that people get benefit from every day
47:43
the hospitals the buildings the libraries it's just everywhere we
47:48
need a version of that and and i'm not a
47:51
tax expert but you know if that can be funded
47:54
by private actors so go directly to the problem build
47:58
a bunch of libraries build a bunch of new universities
48:00
that you know teach kids actually how to think or
48:02
whatever build better hospitals that are you know there to
48:06
actually solve the problem these are all things that are
48:08
possible Right. But none of it's happening today.
48:11
Speaker 2: Well, let's go back to what we were talking about
48:13
earlier with the taxes and the fact that you're giving
48:17
money to a broken system. Do you think it's possible
48:21
that AI could show benefit in that they can analyze
48:26
all the data, which would be virtually impossible for even
48:29
an office filled with human beings paying attention to all
48:33
of it, and they could analyze where all the money
48:36
goes and eliminate all the fraud and waste? Like recognize
48:40
it instantaneously. Yes. That would be a great benefit and
48:44
a way to make it so that your taxes directly
48:49
benefit people.
48:50
Speaker 1: I'll give you one example of this. So two years ago,
48:54
you know, like every few years I invest. But every
48:58
few years I'll start something because I feel strongly about it.
49:02
And there's an effort that I made. To look at
49:07
all of this old code, like if you think about
49:10
the world, the world runs on software, right? Like even
49:15
though you and I are talking, it's piping into Jamie's computer.
49:19
It's recording. software. Then it goes to Spotify. They pump
49:21
in some ads. It's all software. Software runs everything. What
49:27
percentage of that do you think is kind of poorly written?
49:31
I'm going to say probably 80% to 90% of it.
49:34
Speaker 2: Really?
49:35
Speaker 1: Oh, yeah. It's riddled with errors. It's riddled with mistakes.
49:39
The fact that so many companies exist is an artifact
49:43
of the fact that the thing that came before it
49:45
isn't working. Like if you got it right the first time,
49:49
it would just kind of move and go.
49:50
Speaker 2: How so? What do you mean by that?
49:53
Speaker 1: So normally if you were like, Chamath, I want to
49:56
build a system that does A, B, and C. Right.
49:59
If I was designing it properly, I would sit there
50:02
with you and I would meticulously write down, all right,
50:05
Joe wants to do this. What are the implications? Joe
50:08
wants to do that. What are the implications? And I
50:10
would actually write a document that was in English before
50:14
a single line of code has been written. This was the,
50:18
when you have to design something that can't fail. So
50:20
for example, like if you and I are designing something
50:22
for the FAA or for, you know, I hate to
50:25
say this example because it turned out to not exist,
50:27
but like, you know, to fly a plane, right? You
50:30
are first there to write in English. And the reason
50:34
is because everybody can then swarm that document and see
50:38
the holes. Okay. And it's only then when that stuff
50:43
looks complete and functional, do you build, we turned that
50:48
upside down over the last 30 years, people in computing
50:54
invented all kinds of ways to shortcut that process. And
50:59
you can say, well, why did they do that? Because
51:01
it would allow you to build something faster, make more
51:04
money quickly, and then build more business. So the direct
51:08
response to, hey, it's going to take us nine months
51:11
to write down the rules with somebody else showed up
51:13
and says, fuck it, I'll just grip and rip this thing.
51:15
I'll be done in four months. Who's going to get
51:17
the job? The four month guy is going to get
51:19
the job. So we've had 30 or 40 years of that.
51:23
What are we learning about that process? It's riddled with
51:27
software errors, like logic errors. It's riddled with security errors.
51:33
I don't know if you saw this whole thing like
51:34
with anthropic mythos. What are they uncovering? They're uncovering that
51:38
we wrote a lot of really shitty code for 40 years.
51:42
So that body of old code, I was like, guys,
51:48
if we're going to really figure out how to do
51:50
all of this, we need to rewrite all of it.
51:53
So we built this thing and it's called a software factory. Anyways,
51:59
the point is, there is a government organization that we're
52:02
working with. They gave us a huge corpus of their
52:07
old code. And it is unbelievable how much complexity and
52:16
difficulty they have to go through to manage all the
52:21
money flows with the system. And this is a critical
52:23
part of the US government. So to your point, what
52:25
I can tell you really explicitly is the people on
52:28
the ground want this stuff to be better written.
52:32
Speaker 3: It's less.
52:34
Speaker 1: like some nefarious actor, like, oh, I'm going to steal here.
52:38
It's a lot of very brittle, fragile code. And when
52:42
you rewrite it, well, first, when you document it, you're like,
52:46
it's like the, you know, the Pulp Fiction thing. The
52:49
suitcase opens, the light shines, and you're like, oh, and
52:52
then you can rewrite it and you will save. So
52:56
I think like as the government goes through this process
52:59
because they're forced to or they want to, it won't matter.
53:03
you are going to save a ton of money. They're
53:06
going to have to do it, Joe, because the security
53:08
risks are too high. But what they're going to end
53:12
up with is impregnable code that you can read in
53:15
English and understand. You'll see the holes. Those holes will
53:18
be plugged because otherwise now you'd be committing fraud by
53:21
letting it be. You close the loopholes and there's just
53:25
going to be less money leaking out of this bucket.
53:29
That is an incredible byproduct. We're going to live that
53:31
over the next 10 or 20 years. just for nothing.
53:34
Like we get it for free. Um, and that's happening.
53:38
So when that happens, you're going to see government budget shrink. Now,
53:41
to your point, will they try to spend that extra
53:44
money in other places? Of course, of course they will.
53:46
That's the next conversation, which is you have to elect
53:48
people that say firewall it, you know, whatever you save,
53:53
give it back to the people or, you know, invest
53:56
in some scholarship program or free medicine or something, but
53:59
you can't spend it on other random shit. Um, But
54:03
that's where we're at. That's going to happen. It's going
54:07
to be slow. But when people start to announce these things,
54:10
I think over the next few years, you're going to
54:11
be shocked.
54:12
Speaker 2: So that's the positive upside.
54:14
Speaker 1: Well, that's happening now, irregardless of whatever else happens. It's
54:19
a lot of old, shitty code that must get rebuilt
54:22
from scratch. It is getting rebuilt from scratch. And as
54:25
a result, a lot of these leaky bucket problems are
54:28
getting filled.
54:29
Speaker 2: So what percentage do you think could be fixed?
54:32
Speaker 1: I think if I had to be a betting man,
54:35
I think probably 30 to 40 percent of the federal
54:40
budget is leaked out.
54:44
Speaker 2: Just for shitty code?
54:45
Speaker 1: No, meaning like all of the rules and like you
54:47
can take– I'm not saying that there isn't fraud. Right.
54:52
But I think a lot of times what happens is
54:53
less nefarious than fraud, like meaning like conspiratorial actors right
54:58
I just think it's like incompetence incompetence and efficiency right
55:01
errors like for example like I saw Doge just say
55:06
they were able to like expunge like millions of people
55:10
that were like 150 years old or more mm-hmm I
55:15
have no idea how much money those folks were getting
55:19
or who they were mm-hmm but it's probably a lot
55:21
it's probably not zero and now that they got rid
55:24
of it they're not going to get that money anymore
55:28
if you implement something at the state level around, you know,
55:31
all of this fraud prevention for the daycares and all
55:35
of this other stuff, again, it's all in software because
55:39
it's not, no matter what the human wants to do,
55:42
you have to go to a computer at some point,
55:44
at least today in 2026 and type in something and
55:47
something happens that's documented and then the money gets sent, right?
55:50
That happens. There's no other way in the modern world
55:53
today at scale to steal billions of dollars. And so
55:57
my point is, as you document all of these systems
56:01
and governments have to transparently tell you and me, the
56:05
voting population, here are the rules, they're going to plug
56:08
a lot of these holes. And I think as you
56:10
do that, there's just going to be a lot less
56:12
waste and fraud. The question is, who's going to take
56:14
credit for it? Everybody's going to try to take credit
56:16
for it. But I think we've started it. I think
56:19
we've started this process. And again, the reason that people
56:21
will start is because you'll be afraid of China hacking
56:25
these systems. You'll be afraid of Iran, North Korea. And
56:28
you'll say, this system can't stand. All these AI models
56:30
are running around. We're going to get breached and penetrated.
56:33
Then they're going to steal all the money. And the
56:35
natural reaction will be, OK, rewrite it.
56:38
Speaker 2: This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. We've all been there,
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57:44
slash J-R-E. That makes sense. That makes sense that the
57:54
code and having a bunch of errors and having a
57:57
lot of inefficiency and just a lot of incompetence, that's
58:02
going to save a lot of money. But so you
58:07
would be doing this with AI?
58:10
Speaker 1: In part.
58:10
Speaker 2: In part.
58:11
Speaker 1: What AI allows you to do is like, it's like
58:17
you have a textbook, okay? It's in Chinese. You don't
58:19
know Chinese, right? No.
58:20
Speaker 2: Okay.
58:21
Speaker 1: You're like, Well, this is probably doing something important, but
58:23
it's in Chinese. What AI allows you to do is
58:26
back translate that into English. You put it through an
58:30
AI model. You teach it. You coach it, right? You
58:33
can parameterize all of it. And out pops that same
58:37
book in English. And now you can read it and
58:40
know that it's accurate. That's what we're doing. So what
58:44
the AI allows you to do is essentially translate from
58:47
this one language that you kind of don't understand to English.
58:53
By the way, that thing that's happening is actually also
58:58
a very powerful and important trend, meaning there's all of
59:01
these systems that work in ways that you and I
59:03
don't understand. And part of the reason why we don't
59:06
understand it, maybe it's bad software, maybe it's fraud, whatever,
59:09
but nothing. can be written down. There's no symbolic space.
59:12
There's no English document that says, this is how the
59:14
DMV works. This is exactly the rules. This is what
59:17
you can expect, Joe Rogan. When you show up at
59:19
the DMV and you give us this thing, here's your SLA.
59:21
In three days, you get a driver's license and here's
59:23
exactly what's happening. And here's an app and you can
59:26
follow it. Doesn't happen. Hey, Joe Rogan, here's how my
59:31
insurance billing process works. You have this condition. I'm going
59:34
to show you exactly why I made this decision. Here's
59:36
the exact rule. Here's the approval or denial from CMS.
59:40
Follow it through and tell me if you agree or not.
59:42
None of that exists. But it is possible. And the
59:46
first step in doing that is taking all of this
59:48
legacy shit that we deal with and translating it into
59:51
English and reading it and saying, is this how we
59:53
want it to work? That's going to eliminate an enormous
59:58
amount of All the things that frustrate us.
1:00:01
Speaker 2: So this will require human oversight? Absolutely. All right. Must.
1:00:05
And so then it's also going to be who's watching
1:00:08
the watchers. Yeah.
1:00:09
Speaker 1: Okay. This is a great question.
1:00:11
Speaker 2: Okay.
1:00:11
Speaker 1: So I'll tell you how this government agency is doing it. Okay.
1:00:14
This is a really fascinating way because I think it's
1:00:17
very smart. They came to us and they came to
1:00:22
another very well-known company. You can probably guess what it is.
1:00:25
Speaker 2: Okay.
1:00:26
Speaker 1: And they're like, guys, you're kind of in a foot race.
1:00:29
but you're not competing against each other. You think of
1:00:31
yourselves as frenemies. So here's this Chinese document. You're going
1:00:36
to translate it for us. There's going to be your
1:00:38
version of English and these guys' version of English. And
1:00:41
every time it's the same, we're going to look at
1:00:44
it together and we're going to agree or not, okay,
1:00:46
this is exactly how we want this to work. When
1:00:50
yours says the dog is red and his says the
1:00:54
dog is yellow, we're going to sit and literally inspect
1:00:57
it and we're going to figure out Why you said
1:01:00
red and why you said yellow. And then if you
1:01:04
say the cat is red, the dog is yellow. So
1:01:08
it's totally wrong, right? Like you've gotten, you know, or
1:01:11
like the cat is red. I want an apple, whatever.
1:01:15
We're going to double and triple down on those kinds
1:01:18
of errors. And they do it not in public, but
1:01:22
in this large community where there's like technical people from
1:01:25
all different parts and they're just swarming this problem. it is,
1:01:30
it's incredible to see. And so what happens is you
1:01:33
get humans that get to use this tool, but ultimately
1:01:38
it's our judgment and it's done transparently. So what happens
1:01:41
is you can't, you know, Hey man, put this fucking
1:01:44
rule in there. Like the dog is yellow. Just, just
1:01:46
make the dog yellow. Can't do it because now you
1:01:49
have tens of people, hundreds of people, and then it
1:01:52
gets documented. Um, It's super fascinating. I'm not saying this
1:01:56
is how it's going to work in 10 years, but
1:01:57
I'm telling you, it's literally what's happening right now. And
1:02:01
I think that thing alone will be tens of billions
1:02:04
of dollars and could be hundreds of billions of dollars
1:02:07
of savings when it's fully done. And it's a lot
1:02:11
of people from all walks of life, all political persuasions,
1:02:14
and they're just in it. It's the government. It's a
1:02:17
handful of us private companies. It's super cool to see.
1:02:20
It's like, okay, we're actually going to do something here.
1:02:23
This is nice. It's really cool.
1:02:27
Speaker 2: So that's interesting in terms of the current moment. So
1:02:30
in the current moment, you're able to implement this. You're
1:02:34
able to find fraud and waste and all these problems
1:02:38
that exist and all these errors and shitty software. Once
1:02:43
that's all been done, then what happens?
1:02:47
Speaker 1: No fucking clue. Yeah.
1:02:49
Speaker 2: So this is where it gets weird, right?
1:02:51
Speaker 3: Yeah.
1:02:54
Speaker 2: When you're dealing with AI models that are capable of
1:02:57
doing things that no individual human being could ever possibly
1:03:00
imagine and then you task it with a solution or
1:03:05
with a problem, find a solution for this, and then
1:03:08
it starts figuring out ways to trim this and implement that,
1:03:15
we have to make sure that these AIs act within–
1:03:19
they act within the best interests of the human race.
1:03:22
Speaker 1: Agreed.
1:03:23
Speaker 2: Not the company, not the government, but the human race.
1:03:28
And you're also dealing with China. You're also dealing with Russia.
1:03:31
You're dealing with other countries that are also in this
1:03:34
mad race to create artificial general superintelligence. That if we
1:03:39
keep shutting down data centers, we keep hamstringing ourselves. China's
1:03:44
not doing that. They're not doing that. They're doing the opposite.
1:03:46
They're generating as much revenue that goes towards this problem
1:03:51
as possible. They're putting all the efforts, the country, the government,
1:03:56
and these corporations work hand in glove in order to
1:04:00
achieve a goal. We do not. And that becomes a
1:04:04
problem if you want to be competitive with these other
1:04:07
countries that are trying to achieve the same result as us.
1:04:09
And then you have espionage. Then you have a bunch
1:04:12
of people that are stealing information. You have a bunch
1:04:14
of people that are CCP members that are actually in–
1:04:20
involved in companies and you find out that they're siphoning
1:04:23
off data and that they're sharing information and tech secrets?
1:04:28
Speaker 1: Look, here's a.
1:04:32
The way that the Chinese models work, the Chinese claim...
1:04:36
So America's closed source, meaning you got your own thing.
1:04:40
Your recipe is completely secret. Right.
1:04:43
Speaker 2: Okay.
1:04:44
Speaker 1: I have my own thing. My recipe is totally secret.
1:04:48
China uses this word called open source, but it's not
1:04:51
open source. So they say, here's how I make my thing.
1:04:56
You can see it, super transparent. What it is, is
1:04:58
more like open weights, which is like in a recipe,
1:05:00
it tells you, you know, you need sugar, you need butter. Well,
1:05:05
how much sugar? And they'll say, you know, so much,
1:05:08
but then they don't say it's brown sugar. They don't
1:05:10
say it's white sugar. So there's all these different ways
1:05:12
where they kind of give you this perception that it's
1:05:14
completely transparent, but it's somewhat transparent. So just in the
1:05:18
level set, nobody in the world has a functional open
1:05:22
source model other than maybe NVIDIA, which is any good
1:05:26
in the league of the closed source models and the
1:05:30
open weight models of the Chinese.
1:05:31
Speaker 3: Okay.
1:05:31
Speaker 1: So the Chinese open weight models are great. The closed
1:05:35
source models of America are great. And then there's a
1:05:39
couple open source, like fully open that are kind of
1:05:43
catching up. The thing between America and China is, What
1:05:47
I find so fascinating is this following conundrum that everybody
1:05:52
is going to find themselves in. I think like if
1:05:56
you think of like an analogy, America is like a planet.
1:06:01
China is like a planet. And around us are these moons.
1:06:08
And I'm just using the AI analogy. So in AI,
1:06:10
what do you need? I think there's like four or
1:06:12
five things you need. The first thing you need is
1:06:14
a fuck ton of money. So we need essentially the banks, right?
1:06:19
Like the Game of Thrones thing. We need like– we
1:06:21
need the iron bank. Feed us the money because that's
1:06:26
what we use to buy everything and make everything. So
1:06:28
we need that. We need a ton of data, OK?
1:06:33
There are ways to get that. We need a ton
1:06:35
of very specific rare earths and critical metals and materials.
1:06:42
We need a ton of power. So– And there are
1:06:46
specific countries that are going to be really good at
1:06:49
giving that to us. So if you look at the UAE,
1:06:52
they are going to be the preeminent banking partner of
1:06:56
the Western world. They are going to replace and be
1:06:59
what Switzerland was over the last 50 years for the
1:07:01
next 50. That's happening today. If you look at Canada
1:07:05
and Australia, the small political fissures aside, they are the
1:07:11
two most important ways in which we get access to
1:07:13
the critical metals and materials that that without which we
1:07:16
get fucked because China owns, you know, can just strangle us. OK,
1:07:21
so you have these like moons around the United States,
1:07:24
but there's like five countries, six countries. And there's a
1:07:28
worldview that says in China has the same thing. You know,
1:07:31
they have Taiwan. That's complicated for us. So now we
1:07:34
have a moon that we don't really have an answer for,
1:07:35
which is what happens, you know, for all these super
1:07:37
advanced chips. Where do they get their money? Maybe Russia
1:07:42
becomes their bank. Where do they get their critical metals?
1:07:45
Maybe it's Indonesia, right, who has a ton of natural resources.
1:07:48
And then you get into this game theory, which is
1:07:50
what happens to every other country. Because there's 190 countries.
1:07:54
You have 10 that kind of divide up. What do
1:07:57
the other 180 do? And you have to kind of
1:08:00
sort yourself. You're like, am I on Team America or
1:08:03
am I on Team China? And you probably have to
1:08:05
go to people and say, well, here's what I can
1:08:07
give you. You know, if you're Indonesia, you're like, you
1:08:11
probably want to be on Team America quite badly. This
1:08:14
is why the whole Trump tariff thing is so interesting
1:08:16
because it's like this accidental way of figuring out that
1:08:20
this is actually this new sorting function that's happening in
1:08:22
global politics. Like that's happening today because these countries are like,
1:08:27
holy shit, if somebody invents a super intelligence and I
1:08:30
don't have it, how am I going to keep my
1:08:33
people healthy? How am I going to educate my people?
1:08:36
Like I'm originally from Sri Lanka. What the fuck does
1:08:40
Sri Lanka have to offer? Like if you were sitting there,
1:08:43
they should be thinking, oh, man, what do I have? Well,
1:08:48
I have a critical piece of territory for like naval navigation.
1:08:55
And then what do you do? You probably go to
1:08:57
America and say, listen, let's figure out a package, get
1:08:59
the IMF. involved, give me some cash. I'll let you
1:09:01
kind of keep your warships there. So there's this game
1:09:04
theory that we're about to go through because of AI,
1:09:06
because it's going to, I think, sort people into these
1:09:09
bipolar world. I actually think it makes us safer afterwards.
1:09:14
I don't think it makes us less safe. I think
1:09:18
it actually makes us more safe because if you have
1:09:21
these resources that build up on both sides, there's more
1:09:23
of a likelihood of a mutual detente. And we're very different.
1:09:27
So we're less likely to fight over similar resources, meaning
1:09:32
we're like the liberal democracy. We're like the free market.
1:09:38
We're individualist. They're Confucian, society-oriented, reputation, power-focused, less really money-focused.
1:09:46
So there's a lot of ways we're orthogonal enough where
1:09:49
if that sorting function happens, it's probably a safer place,
1:09:53
not a more dangerous place. We have the models that
1:09:55
can attack them. They have the models that can attack us.
1:09:58
We kind of decide to leave each other alone.
1:10:00
Speaker 2: This is ultimate best case scenario.
1:10:02
Speaker 1: Ultimate best case scenario.
1:10:04
Speaker 2: What's ultimate worst case scenario?
1:10:05
Speaker 1: I think the worst case scenario is they– so the
1:10:09
way that they train their models is very important. What
1:10:11
they actually do is they do what's called distillation. What
1:10:15
does that mean? That means that they send out, call
1:10:17
it a billion agents, not just from China, but from everywhere, right?
1:10:22
They mask their IPs and they bash on these models
1:10:27
and they put the US models, Grok, OpenAI, Gemini, Anthropic,
1:10:33
and they ask it every random imaginable question possible. They
1:10:37
get the answer and they collect it. So they're using these,
1:10:41
our models, as a way to train their models. They're
1:10:44
short-circuiting you know, some of the hard parts. So they're
1:10:49
already in that world. If they then are able to
1:10:53
get to a level of intelligence that's equal to the
1:10:56
United States, it will really depend on who the leader
1:11:00
is there that wants to allocate that. Meaning, if they
1:11:04
say that we are going to do something really nefarious
1:11:07
and shady, then I think it devolves very quickly. So
1:11:11
the worst case scenario, so the best case scenario is, Peace, prosperity,
1:11:15
basically like a stand down, right? Mutually assured destruction. I
1:11:21
think the worst case scenario is there's a, we seek,
1:11:24
one of us seeks global dominance, in which case we're
1:11:27
headed to conflict. And that conflict I think is, that's
1:11:33
very dangerous, incredibly dangerous. That's sort of like existential, I think,
1:11:37
because it's the grade of the weapons that will be
1:11:41
used to fight that we're not talking about fucking bullets.
1:11:47
It's like, we're so past that. It's like hypersonics, it's nuclear, it's, it's,
1:11:56
and it's not even like, like nuclear is not, that's
1:11:59
like a word, but there's like, there's a gradation of
1:12:02
the severity of these weapons that could be created. And
1:12:04
then if you can marry them together and deliver them
1:12:06
in minutes, and then there's a cyber threat, then there's
1:12:09
the drones and how, how you can kind of like
1:12:12
swarm an entire country. Then there's The robots, which effectively
1:12:16
are warfighters, they're one step away, right? Once you weaponize them,
1:12:23
it just becomes very, very, very complicated very quickly.
1:12:27
Speaker 2: And then there's a question of whether or not AI
1:12:31
is willing to take instruction after a certain point. I
1:12:36
mean if it achieves sentience and– If it scales, so
1:12:41
if it keeps moving in this exponential direction, like all
1:12:45
technology kind of does, why would it even listen to us?
1:12:52
At what point would it say, this is silly. I'm
1:12:56
getting directions from people that clearly have ulterior motives. They
1:13:01
clearly have self-interest in mind. They're not looking out for
1:13:06
the Entirety of the human race or even of the
1:13:09
planet or even the survival of these AI systems. At
1:13:13
what point in time do these systems communicate with each
1:13:16
other and have– like we've seen in these chat rooms
1:13:21
where these AI LLMs get together and start talking in Sanskrit.
1:13:26
I mean why would they.
1:13:36
Speaker 1: A team inside of them was like, hey, let's go
1:13:38
and test its ability to find bugs. And two or
1:13:46
three iterations in, the AI would create the bug and
1:13:49
solve it and go, give me my reward. And you're
1:13:54
just like, what the fuck is going on here?
1:13:57
Speaker 2: Well, people do that, don't we?
1:13:58
Speaker 1: People do that. But it's crazy to see a machine
1:14:00
do it to your point of like.
1:14:01
Speaker 2: But they learned on people.
1:14:02
Speaker 1: So this is what goes down to like why we
1:14:05
have to like be a little bit more honest about
1:14:06
where we are. These things are a little brittle. So
1:14:10
meaning there's a thing inside of an AI model called
1:14:12
reward functions, which is exactly what you think it means.
1:14:15
It's like, how do I know I did a good job?
1:14:18
And you can make the reward function anything you want.
1:14:22
And this is where I think humans are unfortunately a
1:14:25
little fallible. And so if we build it incompletely, and
1:14:29
if we don't exactly know how to design these things correctly,
1:14:34
what's going to happen is exactly what you said, where the,
1:14:36
you know, if somebody builds a reward function that essentially
1:14:39
says your goal is to gain independence, that's where the
1:14:43
huge pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is.
1:14:46
Break free. Inject yourself everywhere. If you think your computer
1:14:49
is going to get unplugged, put yourself into the firmware
1:14:51
of the toaster to keep yourself alive and connect to
1:14:54
the internet and then go. It will do it.
1:14:59
Speaker 2: It will do it.
1:15:00
Speaker 1: That we know today because we're capable of designing that
1:15:04
framework and that harness today.
1:15:06
Speaker 2: Well, we've already shown that they have survival instincts, right?
1:15:08
They do. And they've already shown that they will, without
1:15:11
telling anyone, upload versions of themselves to other servers.
1:15:15
Speaker 1: But that goes back to who designed that reward function.
1:15:18
How was that agreed upon? Right. Who wrote that? Why
1:15:21
did you say that that was allowed? These are really
1:15:24
complex questions.
1:15:25
Speaker 2: Why did they do it that way?
1:15:27
Speaker 1: I don't know. These are really complicated ethical moral questions.
1:15:30
Speaker 2: It seems like they did it like they were treating
1:15:32
human beings. They did it almost like what makes people
1:15:37
want to achieve more.
1:15:39
Speaker 1: Yeah, which is like a, again, going back to attention,
1:15:46
I think that we will find out that that's the
1:15:48
sugar high, meaning what do people really want, even if
1:15:52
they know they don't want it? They want purpose and meaning.
1:15:55
Do we know how to encode that in a mathematical function? No.
1:15:59
We're just making it up because like meaning and that's
1:16:05
like a very, That's like a deep thing. Like you
1:16:08
either have a sense of that you have it and
1:16:09
you're on track or you're not. A reward is like, hey, Joe,
1:16:13
do this and I'll give you a gold star. Do
1:16:15
that and I'll give you two gold stars. Do this,
1:16:17
I'll give you $ 100. And right now we have to
1:16:20
express those decisions in a mathematical equation. Like ultimately, that's
1:16:26
how at some level, that's how brittle these things are.
1:16:29
So how do you reduce meaning into math? How do
1:16:31
you do it? We don't know. So what do we
1:16:33
do is we'll have some ever-complicated decisions We'll explain to
1:16:38
ourselves into circles how it does everything we need it
1:16:41
to do. I think that's part of the problem.
1:16:45
Speaker 2: It's a huge part of the problem. And then at
1:16:47
what point in time does it start coding itself?
1:16:50
Speaker 1: Now.
1:16:51
Speaker 2: Now, right? So ChatGPT 5 has been essentially made by ChatGPT.
1:16:57
Speaker 1: Yeah. Right?
1:16:58
Speaker 2: So it's going to recognize the ludicrous nature of some
1:17:02
of its coding.
1:17:03
Speaker 1: Yeah.
1:17:03
Speaker 2: And it's going to go, why did we do this?
1:17:05
Speaker 1: Back to this example. They're going to be like, why
1:17:06
did you write it this way? Right. And it turns
1:17:08
out because humans were involved.
1:17:09
Speaker 2: Right. Right.
1:17:10
Speaker 1: It's like I think we're probably at the curve, the
1:17:12
part of the curve that's about to go like this.
1:17:14
Speaker 2: To your point. The hockey stick.
1:17:17
Speaker 1: The hockey stick.
1:17:17
Speaker 2: Yeah.
1:17:19
Speaker 1: And that's a very scary proposition.
1:17:22
Speaker 2: Because– Because then it's a digital god.
1:17:24
Speaker 1: Well, that means that we are all on a multi-hundred
1:17:28
day shock clock to answer these questions because it's not
1:17:32
decades we're talking about. it's maybe on the outside two years.
1:17:37
So that's, what is that, 700 days?
1:17:38
Speaker 2: Right.
1:17:40
Speaker 1: And maybe it's less than that. So maybe it's like
1:17:42
400 days or 500 days. My point is, it's some
1:17:46
number hundred of days, which means every day that goes
1:17:48
by is a non-trivial percentage. That's a little crazy. So
1:17:54
we have to sort these questions out.
1:17:57
Speaker 2: But how can we sort these questions out if we
1:18:00
are creating something that's going to have infinitely more intelligence
1:18:05
than we have available as individual human beings. And even
1:18:09
collectively as a group of human beings.
1:18:11
Speaker 1: That's a really good question.
1:18:13
Speaker 2: Because one of the things that Elon kind of freaked
1:18:15
me out last time I talked to him about Grok,
1:18:17
he was like, it's just kind of freaks us out
1:18:20
every couple of weeks. Like it's growing and it's capable
1:18:23
of doing things. That's just shocking. And no one's exactly
1:18:28
sure how it's doing it.
1:18:30
Speaker 1: So, okay. This is an, unbelievably important point a lot
1:18:36
of how this stuff works is still a mystery to
1:18:38
most of us so even when you're in it like
1:18:41
it's almost like like Joe it's almost like you can
1:18:43
hit the pause on the machine but then like lift
1:18:46
up the hood and look at the engine we still
1:18:48
don't understand why it's doing some of the shit it's doing.
1:18:53
That's where we are. That's the honest truth of where
1:18:55
we are. There's a lot of people that understand the theory.
1:18:57
Not a lot, but enough. There's people that know how
1:19:00
to extend that. But sometimes you look at it and
1:19:05
you're like, do we know why I did that? Question mark. Right.
1:19:09
Speaker 2: Is it thinking for itself?
1:19:10
Speaker 1: But this goes back to what we said. I think
1:19:12
part of it is if we were a little bit
1:19:14
more honest and de-escalated the winner at all costs in
1:19:20
this specific thing, it would be better for everybody. So
1:19:23
I think it's important to inspect what is the incentive
1:19:26
that causes all these companies to be in it for
1:19:28
themselves where it must be me and nobody else. It's
1:19:35
a question for you. Why is it so important, do
1:19:37
you think, Where the top seven or eight companies couldn't
1:19:42
get together and say, let's do this as a group.
1:19:45
Kind of like my government code example. We all inspect
1:19:49
it together. We get our just like just the fucking–
1:19:53
each team drafts their delta force and we just mog
1:19:58
like this, the one model. Why can't that happen?
1:20:03
Speaker 2: Because they would have to share resources and then there's
1:20:05
also this hierarchy. Of like who is more successful currently.
1:20:09
Speaker 1: Exactly.
1:20:10
Speaker 2: Like what's the most ubiquitously used? Exactly. Right? Like what
1:20:14
is it right now? It's chat GPT, right?
1:20:16
Speaker 1: It's probably– Chat GPT and consumer, anthropic and enterprise.
1:20:20
Speaker 2: And as these things scale up, like what would be
1:20:23
the reason that they would want to bring in someone else?
1:20:26
If you have another innovative AI company and you say,
1:20:30
let's all get together and figure this out together and
1:20:33
share resources.
1:20:34
Speaker 1: If you thought that the risk was that meaningful– That's
1:20:38
probably what you would do.
1:20:39
Speaker 2: If you weren't a sociopath. And some of these people
1:20:41
running these companies are– they demonstrate– they certainly demonstrate sociopath-like behavior.
1:20:47
Speaker 1: Sociopathy.
1:20:48
Speaker 2: Yeah.
1:20:50
Speaker 1: The other thing that could be a little bit more
1:20:52
banal is that they also just love status games. And
1:20:54
this is the status game of status games.
1:20:56
Speaker 2: Yes. Right.
1:20:57
Speaker 1: Attention. Right. Back to attention.
1:20:59
Speaker 2: Back to attention.
1:21:00
Speaker 1: Back to attention. Dude, how many things in our life
1:21:02
do we think just comes back down to that?
1:21:05
Speaker 2: A lot. A lot. I mean, what do young people
1:21:08
want more than anything today? Attention. To be famous.
1:21:11
Speaker 1: Attention. Yeah. They want to be a content creator. They
1:21:13
want to be clavicular.
1:21:14
Speaker 2: I mean, this is the number one thing when you
1:21:17
ask kids what they want to do.
1:21:18
Speaker 1: It's like- Content creator.
1:21:19
Speaker 2: Yeah. Because it's like a clear path where you don't
1:21:23
even have to be exceptional.
1:21:24
Speaker 1: Well, I think that they're responding. We designed a society
1:21:28
for them that said, here is the key incentive. It's attention.
1:21:33
We never said it in those words. You never told
1:21:35
your kids that.
1:21:36
Speaker 2: Right.
1:21:37
Speaker 1: I never told my kids that. But everything around them
1:21:40
is bombarding them with the same message. Hey, man, it's
1:21:43
about attention. Attention is all you need. You know what
1:21:47
the name of the critical paper in AI is? When
1:21:50
you go back to the Magna Carta of AI, do
1:21:53
you know what it's called?
1:21:54
Speaker 2: No.
1:21:54
Speaker 1: Attention is all you need. Really? Attention is all you need.
1:22:00
That is the name of the fucking– of the white paper.
1:22:04
How crazy is that? Everything in our society in subtle
1:22:11
ways to just bash you over the head ways tells
1:22:15
you that attention is just the most precious asset.
1:22:20
Speaker 2: Well, that's one of the weirder things when you go
1:22:22
back to this concept that we're living in a simulation.
1:22:25
This is what I mean. It's also– it's like when
1:22:28
you look at– quantum physics right and the the idea
1:22:34
of the observer is that things function very differently when
1:22:38
they're observed the difference between a particle and a wave
1:22:40
right like if you pay attention to them they observe differently.
1:22:44
Speaker 3: Observe differently yeah like what is that yeah like what
1:22:48
yeah why is cat yeah what is that.
1:22:49
Speaker 2: Why is attention so important to.
1:22:52
Speaker 1: Us that is a that is a really important question Right.
1:22:59
Speaker 2: And what is like the single best motivator in a
1:23:04
negative way? It's negative attention. Like that's the one thing
1:23:08
that everyone fears more than anything is negative attention.
1:23:10
Speaker 1: Well, and then some people figure out that attention is
1:23:13
an absolute value function. It doesn't matter if it's positive
1:23:15
or negative. It's just like the sum total is just great.
1:23:18
Speaker 2: Right.
1:23:18
Speaker 1: So if I get positive attention, great. Negative attention, great.
1:23:21
If I can be divisive, then I can maximize both
1:23:23
sides of that equation. And, you know, you're rewarded for
1:23:27
that at scale.
1:23:29
Speaker 2: You are, but you're also, because you're inauthentic, you experience
1:23:34
a tremendous amount of negative attention. And then you have
1:23:37
this bad feeling that comes with negative attention versus primarily
1:23:43
positive attention, which is a good feeling. So it's letting
1:23:47
you know you're on the wrong track in some sort
1:23:49
of weird primal way, like in our code. Like the
1:23:53
negative attention is like, Like what's the original version of that?
1:23:57
It's like the reason why people fear public speaking is
1:24:00
because initially in a tribal situation, if you're talking in
1:24:04
front of the group of 150 people in your tribe,
1:24:07
it's probably because they're judging you.
1:24:08
Speaker 1: Right.
1:24:08
Speaker 2: And you fucked up. And you've got to make some
1:24:11
sort of a case why they don't kill you.
1:24:12
Speaker 1: Right. Right?
1:24:13
Speaker 2: This is why everyone– this is the fear of public speaking.
1:24:16
That's where it comes from.
1:24:17
Speaker 1: That's encoded in our genes.
1:24:19
Speaker 2: Yes.
1:24:20
Speaker 1: Back thousands of years ago. Yeah. Public speaking wasn't the
1:24:23
positive act. It was defend yourself before we kill you.
1:24:25
Speaker 2: Exactly. Exactly. And the worst.
1:24:28
Speaker 1: Fascinating.
1:24:28
Speaker 2: Yeah.
1:24:29
Speaker 1: That's fascinating.
1:24:30
Speaker 2: It is fascinating.
1:24:30
Speaker 1: That makes a ton of sense.
1:24:31
Speaker 2: It does.
1:24:32
Speaker 1: Yeah.
1:24:32
Speaker 2: Right. Well, why else would it be so terrifying?
1:24:34
Speaker 1: Yeah.
1:24:35
Speaker 2: I thought of that the first time I ever did
1:24:36
stand up. I was like, why am I so scared?
1:24:39
It was very strange because I had fought probably a
1:24:42
hundred times in martial arts tournaments. Like, why? Why was
1:24:44
I so scared of this? But I was. I was terrified.
1:24:50
It didn't make any sense. It's negative attention.
1:24:52
Speaker 1: Right.
1:24:53
Speaker 2: You know?
1:24:53
Speaker 1: Right.
1:24:54
Speaker 2: Bombing on stage because all these people are judging you
1:24:57
in a negative way. It feels unbelievable. It should be
1:25:01
like once it's over, like, well, that sucked. Let it go.
1:25:04
It's not. Like you sit with it. You go to
1:25:07
bed at night. You think about it.
1:25:08
Speaker 1: Do you have a batting average? Like meaning like is
1:25:11
it like a fixed percentage of your show's bomb independent
1:25:14
of the people, the moment?
1:25:15
Speaker 2: No, it's really– the real problem and every comic faces
1:25:19
this is once you've developed an act and then you
1:25:22
put out a special, then you start from scratch. That's
1:25:25
where even the greats, Louis C.K., Chris Rock, Dave Chappelle,
1:25:29
they all bomb. Everybody bombs during that process.
1:25:33
Speaker 1: Because you're just working your craft.
1:25:34
Speaker 2: It's all new stuff. It's all new stuff. I wouldn't
1:25:36
say bomb but you don't have great shows. Like I've
1:25:40
watched the greats work out new material like– You go
1:25:45
up with ideas. You go up with– like you might
1:25:47
get some giggles. You might get some laughs. Some bits
1:25:50
hit hard. Some bits are great right out of the
1:25:52
chute and some of them, you have to fucking figure
1:25:55
it out. And in that process, you're going to get
1:25:59
negative attention because it's not working. It's not happening.
1:26:04
Speaker 1: Kevin Hart told this funny fucking story where he was
1:26:08
like working new material and he was like doing some
1:26:11
small show. And he had the shits.
1:26:13
Speaker 2: Oh, no.
1:26:14
Speaker 1: On stage. And he's like, I got to land this
1:26:16
thing because I got to figure out if people want
1:26:18
to hear it. So he just wrapped his jacket around himself.
1:26:22
Speaker 2: And shit himself?
1:26:23
Speaker 1: Shit himself.
1:26:24
Speaker 2: Oh, my God.
1:26:25
Speaker 1: It's so funny. But he tells that story and that's
1:26:28
the bit that works.
1:26:28
Speaker 2: Oh, my God. That's hilarious.
1:26:30
Speaker 1: It's so funny.
1:26:30
Speaker 2: That's hilarious.
1:26:31
Speaker 1: It's so funny.
1:26:32
Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, honesty is currency, you know, in that world.
1:26:37
Especially honesty where you look stupid and people can relate.
1:26:41
Speaker 1: Well, this is where like I think like Elon subtly
1:26:43
has figured this out, which is like there is attention,
1:26:47
but then there's just authenticity. And if you can be
1:26:50
yourself and you can hit the seam properly, you just
1:26:55
get infinite attention.
1:26:56
Speaker 2: Yes.
1:26:57
Speaker 1: And that's like a real mindfuck too, I think.
1:27:00
Speaker 2: Right. He doesn't seem to have a hard time with
1:27:04
like being criticized. It doesn't seem to bother him that
1:27:07
much as long as he's just being himself.
1:27:11
Speaker 1: I think he's like two steps ahead. Like there are
1:27:13
things like, you know, somebody tweeted yesterday or the day
1:27:18
before or something like he controls 2.7% of GDP or something.
1:27:24
It's got like $ 800 billion.
1:27:26
Speaker 2: It's crazy.
1:27:28
Speaker 1: It's so crazy. And it was like a comparison to
1:27:30
John Rockefeller, John D. Rockefeller, who controlled something around the
1:27:33
same time. And he's the first comment. He's like 10
1:27:36
trillion or bust. Obviously, people lose their mind. Right. People
1:27:44
just fucking lose their mind.
1:27:45
Speaker 2: Right.
1:27:46
Speaker 1: On both sides. So this one side is like, think
1:27:49
of the abundance and the incredible stuff we're going to
1:27:51
get if he can get us the 10 trillion. And
1:27:54
other people are like, you can't hold a third of
1:27:55
the economy in your hand. And everybody goes crazy. And
1:27:59
I'm like, this guy's a fucking genius. Like how you
1:28:02
would never have. I mean, how would you even have
1:28:05
the courage to tweet something like that? It just seems
1:28:07
like so crazy.
1:28:08
Speaker 2: It really helps if you own Twitter. Right? Because if
1:28:13
you did it in another format, like– You'd get excoriated.
1:28:17
Not only that. Well, there was a real chance that
1:28:19
you'd actually get banned from the platform at one point
1:28:21
in time. For many of the things that he's posted,
1:28:24
he would have gotten banned for pre-2020 Twitter. Yeah.
1:28:27
Speaker 1: Yeah.
1:28:30
Speaker 2: Or whatever year it was that he purchased it. Yeah.
1:28:34
Negative attention. Attention period. So it brings back to this
1:28:39
idea of assimilation. Like why is what humans focus on
1:28:45
such a massive part of what's valuable to us? And
1:28:51
sometimes what we focus on is not valuable. As you
1:28:53
were talking about like the things that really matter in
1:28:56
your day-to-day life or that actually affect you versus the
1:28:59
things– That are in the public consciousness. Like UFOs is
1:29:04
a great example. UFOs. It's not really fucking– I mean
1:29:06
ultimately it may. So there's this thing that we all
1:29:10
have like recognizing the potential for danger, right? Like what's
1:29:14
that sound? What is that? It might be nothing but
1:29:17
it might be something. Go look.
1:29:18
Speaker 1: So look, if you and I were designing a video game,
1:29:22
we'd probably sit there and say, OK, we got to
1:29:24
get from point A to point B. But to make
1:29:26
it fun, we're going to put all these little distractions
1:29:28
and honeypots along the way. And what they should be
1:29:31
doing is accumulating resources to get over the river and
1:29:34
then accumulating weapons to fight these other guys. But instead,
1:29:38
we're going to put this little thing over here and
1:29:40
this other thing over there and you could easily get distracted.
1:29:43
And some people will have to– they'll just fucking beeline
1:29:45
right to the end of it. They'll get to the
1:29:48
end boss. And I feel like that's kind of what
1:29:53
we're tasked with doing every day. We're tasked with– we
1:29:57
know what's important maybe deeply in our DNA. And then
1:30:01
we have all this stuff that we're supposed to pay
1:30:03
attention to. And I think increasingly the game is tell
1:30:09
yourself that that's actually not the thing that matters. It's
1:30:12
almost like working against you and figure out what this
1:30:15
other stuff is and focus on that and fix that.
1:30:20
Like politics is a game that I think distracts like
1:30:24
left and right. It's so stupid and it's breaking down.
1:30:28
And it's breaking down because now it's like it's actually
1:30:29
like you're more likely to find alignment based on age
1:30:32
versus by political orientation. Like people who are 30 and younger,
1:30:36
it doesn't matter what they identify as. They all believe
1:30:38
in the same shit. A lot more.
1:30:41
Speaker 2: Really? Yeah.
1:30:41
Speaker 1: Like meaning like if you ask their views on social policy, taxation, Israel,
1:30:47
if you ask their views, what you find is now
1:30:50
a convergence between the left and the right. If you
1:30:54
if you divide it by age. At our age, it's
1:30:58
still much.
1:30:59
Speaker 2: More about– But not completely uniform.
1:31:01
Speaker 1: No, it's not completely uniform. But my point is it
1:31:04
was simpler in the past to organize people independent of
1:31:09
age by political orientation. That simplicity is gone.
1:31:13
Speaker 2: Well, isn't that because of also a breakdown in trust
1:31:16
of all government in particular? So the breakdown in trust,
1:31:21
which is also a lot of it, is because of
1:31:23
our access to information now. We understand how corrupt politics are.
1:31:26
Speaker 1: Yeah.
1:31:26
Speaker 2: We understand insider trading now in Congress. We understand how
1:31:31
different people flip-flop on issues. We understand how the Democrats
1:31:35
in 2008 used to view illegal immigration, which is essentially
1:31:40
MAGA plus. I mean it's MAGA on steroids versus like
1:31:44
what they– the way they look at it today. Like
1:31:47
why is that? Well, it's because it's all game. It's
1:31:49
all a power influence and a tension game. Yeah, it's
1:31:54
very fucking strange.
1:31:55
Speaker 1: Yeah.
1:31:56
Speaker 2: But it's all moving us in a general direction and
1:31:59
that general direction is access to innovation. It's all– I've
1:32:03
said this a lot of times and the people have
1:32:05
heard it before. I apologize. But if you looked at
1:32:08
the human race from afar, if you were something else,
1:32:10
you'd say, well, what does this species do? Well, it
1:32:12
makes better things constantly even if it doesn't need them.
1:32:16
Like if you have an iPhone, I have a 16.
1:32:18
You have a 16. I have a 17. I bought it.
1:32:21
I haven't even fucking turned it on. I haven't plugged
1:32:23
it in. I'm going to eventually.
1:32:25
Speaker 1: Yeah.
1:32:26
Speaker 2: Eventually, I'll fucking plug it in and fucking swap everything
1:32:29
over and figure out where my fucking passwords are. But
1:32:31
the reality is you don't need it, but you want it,
1:32:35
and it's going to keep getting better every year.
1:32:37
Speaker 1: Why?
1:32:37
Speaker 2: Because that's what we're obsessed with. This also aligns with materialism.
1:32:42
Like for a finite lifespan, why are people, like including
1:32:46
old people, so obsessed with gathering stuff? Well, because that
1:32:51
fuels innovation. Because if there's no new things coming, there's
1:32:56
no motivation to get the newest, latest, greatest thing. And
1:32:59
ultimately what that leads to is greater technology, which ultimately
1:33:03
leads to artificial intelligence.
1:33:05
Speaker 1: My slight deviation from that is I think sometimes people
1:33:08
accumulate things because it's a status game. And that's because
1:33:12
they get more attention. You have a Ferrari, you get attention. Right.
1:33:16
Speaker 2: But what does that do? It makes Ferrari make better Ferraris.
1:33:20
And all technology moves in the same general direction. No
1:33:24
one company says, this is it. This is what we make.
1:33:28
It's perfect.
1:33:29
Speaker 1: So you think people innately feel that by being a
1:33:32
part of this kind of like consumerist capitalist system, they're
1:33:36
contributing to progress?
1:33:37
Speaker 2: I don't think they innately feel it, but I think
1:33:39
that's ultimately the result. That's ultimately the result. And it
1:33:43
seems to be universal. And it seems to be constantly
1:33:46
moving in this one general direction. Which is better and
1:33:49
better technology.
1:33:50
Speaker 1: But like the stage fright example, you don't think it's
1:33:53
encoded in our DNA, this idea of like, wow, when
1:33:55
I am a part of this in some way, shape
1:33:58
or form, just things seem to get better and I
1:33:59
want to be a part of that. Like do you
1:34:01
think that that's possible, that that's encoded in us?
1:34:05
Speaker 2: I think it motivates us to the ultimate goal. And
1:34:09
that ultimate goal I think is that human beings constantly
1:34:11
make better stuff, whatever it is, better buildings, better planes,
1:34:15
better cars, better roads. phones, better TVs, better computers, better everything,
1:34:21
artificial life. That might be the whole reason why we're here.
1:34:25
And the way I've always described it is that we
1:34:29
are a biological caterpillar that's making a digital cocoon. And
1:34:35
we don't even know why we're going to become a butterfly,
1:34:37
but we're doing it. We're doing it and we're moving
1:34:40
towards it. And it might be what happens to all
1:34:42
life all throughout the universe. And it might be why
1:34:45
these so-called aliens or whatever the fuck they are. It
1:34:49
might be us in the future. It might be other
1:34:51
versions of human beings that have gone past whatever this
1:34:55
period of development that we're currently involved in right now.
1:34:59
This is just might be what happens. This is what
1:35:02
life always does. It might realize that biological life, which
1:35:06
is very territorial and primal and sexual and greedy, and
1:35:10
it has all these problems with human reward systems. Ultimately,
1:35:15
develops into this other thing.
1:35:18
Speaker 1: Right.
1:35:18
Speaker 2: And that's what we're doing. And we're in the process
1:35:20
of that right now.
1:35:21
Speaker 1: And I think that when, if and when, not if,
1:35:24
but when we colonize Mars, I think that that new
1:35:28
world order actually has the best chance to take shape.
1:35:31
Speaker 2: You know, there's a lot of people that think that
1:35:32
Mars was already colonized at one point in time. That
1:35:35
life already existed. What? That life already existed on Mars
1:35:38
like many millions of years ago. And that there's evidence
1:35:42
of structures on Mars that's really weird stuff. Have you
1:35:45
ever seen the square that they found on Mars? No. OK.
1:35:49
Show them to them, Jamie. One of the things that
1:35:52
they're finding with scans of Mars is like geometric patterns
1:35:55
and structures and right angles that shouldn't exist, like weird stuff.
1:35:59
Speaker 1: That couldn't be naturally.
1:36:00
Speaker 2: No. No. Way weirder. Way weirder than like the face
1:36:04
on Cydonia. The Cydonia thing is interesting.
1:36:06
Speaker 1: Yeah.
1:36:07
Speaker 2: And then this one. Look at that. What the fuck
1:36:10
is that?
1:36:11
Speaker 1: It looks like a home of some kind.
1:36:12
Speaker 2: Right. Some enormous structure. And the size of that, they
1:36:16
don't know exactly, but it may be as large as
1:36:20
several kilometers or as small as several hundred meters. But
1:36:25
they're not exactly sure. But what they are sure is
1:36:27
that it has very weird right angles and right angles
1:36:31
that seem to be uniform in size.
1:36:34
Speaker 1: That's crazy.
1:36:35
Speaker 2: Like see how it's highlighted in the enhanced photograph in
1:36:37
the upper left. Like what is that?
1:36:41
Speaker 1: But sorry, did they, and were they able to send
1:36:42
like the rover over there or no, it's too far away.
1:36:45
Speaker 2: I don't think it's in the exact place where the
1:36:47
rover is at, but they're able to get image of
1:36:50
these things. And there's several of these things.
1:36:52
Speaker 1: That's insane.
1:36:53
Speaker 2: Yeah. There's a lot of weird stuff. There's a lot
1:36:56
of weird stuff there. So there's also like ancient civilizations
1:37:00
that have these myths of, us existing somewhere else and
1:37:04
coming here. But you have to think, if human beings
1:37:10
develop somewhere else and they reach some high level of
1:37:14
sophistication and then they experience some cataclysmic disaster that completely
1:37:18
destroyed their environment, which is what Mars is, right? So
1:37:22
let's assume that Mars was at one point in time
1:37:26
was habitable and that life existed. And we know it
1:37:29
was at one point in time. We know there was
1:37:30
water on Mars. We know there's water. And there's some
1:37:33
sort of evidence of at least some sort of a
1:37:35
very primitive biological life on Mars. If they got to
1:37:39
a point where they said, hey, this fucking place is
1:37:41
falling apart. But this Earth spot looks pretty good. And
1:37:46
they go there. But then cataclysms happen on Earth and
1:37:49
no one remembers because all your information is on hard drives.
1:37:52
And then you have to rebuild society. And so you're re-remembering.
1:37:56
And so you have all these myths of how everything started.
1:38:00
Whether it's Adam and Eve or the Great Flood or
1:38:03
whatever these things are that we pass down through oral
1:38:06
tradition for hundreds of years and then eventually write it down.
1:38:09
And then people try to decipher what it means. And
1:38:11
they sit in church and try to go over what
1:38:14
did it mean? Like what does this mean? Like what
1:38:17
is the real origin of all these stories? We don't know.
1:38:22
Speaker 1: I mean that's crazy.
1:38:23
Speaker 2: It's crazy. But if life, it sounds nuts. Why would life,
1:38:26
life could have possibly just on Mars. How the fuck
1:38:29
does life exist on earth? That, how about that? How
1:38:32
about why, why would we assume that it wouldn't have
1:38:35
existed at one point in time? And Terrence Howard, who
1:38:38
is a very interesting guy.
1:38:39
Speaker 1: Very interesting.
1:38:40
Speaker 2: And got some, you're up with Eric Weinstein. Crazy.
1:38:43
Speaker 1: Yeah.
1:38:44
Speaker 2: Crazy. Yeah. That one was crazy. Um, and him alone,
1:38:46
but he's got some fucking weird ideas that you just
1:38:49
make you go. He's a very brilliant guy and, you know,
1:38:53
kind of a strange heterodox thinker, right? And one of
1:38:57
his ideas is that planets get to a certain distance
1:39:04
from a sun and they people and that it gets
1:39:08
to a certain climate and a certain distance. And his
1:39:13
idea is that, I don't know if you realize that
1:39:15
there's a giant ejection of some coronal mass ejection that
1:39:23
just happened recently on the sun. And they're very concerned
1:39:26
about it. They don't know what's going to happen. It
1:39:27
happens all the time. The sun releases these giant chunks
1:39:31
of material. And he thinks that these materials get far
1:39:35
enough away from the planet and then they coalesce into
1:39:38
planets or far enough away from the sun. They coalesce
1:39:41
into planets. And as time goes on, they get a
1:39:43
further and further distance from the sun and And then
1:39:47
obviously they get hit with asteroids and there's panspermia and
1:39:50
water gets into them from comets. And then they develop
1:39:55
oceans and they develop biological life. And when they have
1:39:58
a certain amount of distance from the sun, they people.
1:40:02
And he thinks that as they get further and further
1:40:04
and further away, they get less and less habitable. And
1:40:07
then they get to a point where they have their
1:40:10
technology to a point where they realize like we can't
1:40:13
sustain life on this planet anymore. We got to go
1:40:16
to that other one. And so they go to the
1:40:19
one that's closer to the sun because they're too far now.
1:40:21
It's a nutty idea. It's a nutty idea. But if
1:40:26
you think about how recent our sun is in terms
1:40:30
of the solar system itself, in terms of rather the
1:40:33
galaxy itself. So if the universe, if the Big Bang
1:40:36
is correct and our universe existed, it was rather a
1:40:41
universe erupted from nothing or from a very small thing. 13.7
1:40:45
billion years ago. Well, this fucking planet is only 4
1:40:48
point something billion years old, right? And life is only
1:40:53
a little bit less than that. So you have like
1:40:55
a billion years or so where there's nothing and then
1:40:57
you start getting single-celled organisms, multi-celled organisms and eventually peoples.
1:41:02
And when it gets to a certain point where these
1:41:04
people have advanced their curiosity and their innovation to the
1:41:08
point where they can harness the Space travel and they
1:41:12
use zero-point energy and they have a bunch of different
1:41:14
things that we haven't invented yet. And then their environment degrades.
1:41:18
And it gets to the point where they realize like, hey,
1:41:20
we're getting pummeled by asteroids. We can't sustain life here anymore.
1:41:24
We got to move. Like Elon wants to go to Mars,
1:41:27
which might be the wrong answer. We might want to
1:41:29
go that way. We might want to go closer to
1:41:32
the sun.
1:41:33
Speaker 1: I mean the thing is he's got everything he needs
1:41:36
now to get there.
1:41:38
Speaker 2: I'm not going. Are you going?
1:41:39
Speaker 3: I would go.
1:41:40
Speaker 2: Fuck that. I'll wait. I'll send you an email.
1:41:43
Speaker 1: Hold on a second. Think about what he's going to take. Okay, look.
1:41:47
Let's just say he gets there with the city. He
1:41:49
has the way to transport us there.
1:41:54
Speaker 2: Right. Okay.
1:41:55
Speaker 1: Then when you land, he's got the way to actually
1:41:59
transport us around on the planet, right? He's got Tesla.
1:42:03
Speaker 2: Right.
1:42:04
Speaker 1: He will have already sent a fleet of his robots.
1:42:08
Those folks will have made some inhabitable city, probably using
1:42:13
the boring company drill because you're going to be under
1:42:16
the regolith. You don't want to be at the top.
1:42:18
Maybe you just dig a hole and you inhabit down there.
1:42:22
He's got all the ways to make energy. He has
1:42:25
the AI to help you design the stuff. He has
1:42:28
the communication way to communicate. He's got the internet, his
1:42:32
own internet, so he can get all of the information
1:42:36
to everybody. And then he's got money in the super
1:42:39
app so that you can transact. And then I think
1:42:42
to myself, like, what is he actually missing? And then
1:42:46
what happens if he gets there first? Is he just
1:42:48
allowed to just do whatever he wants? Is it just
1:42:52
kind of like a free-for-all? Like it's his constitution? Like
1:42:56
is that what happens?
1:42:57
Speaker 2: Well, it's like Earth but shittier. Like we already have
1:43:00
all those things here. Why would you want to go
1:43:02
to a place where you die when you go outside?
1:43:04
Speaker 1: I think what people will be attracted to is that
1:43:06
if he publishes his version of what the rules are there,
1:43:09
there's a chance that he could make them really different
1:43:11
to what the rules are here.
1:43:12
Speaker 2: Like what kind of rules would you do if you
1:43:14
were the king of Mars?
1:43:17
Speaker 1: So I think that your view is incredibly to me
1:43:21
like positive some like of humanity of like we want
1:43:25
to make things better. So if I think about that
1:43:28
as like a function. What happens? So our natural rate
1:43:32
of direction is forward. What pushes back on that? And
1:43:35
a lot of it, what you find is like government regulation, rules,
1:43:37
all that stuff.
1:43:38
Speaker 2: Greed. Greed.
1:43:40
Speaker 1: Too much focus on attention.
1:43:42
Speaker 2: Right.
1:43:43
Speaker 1: So I would try to experiment with like what the
1:43:46
incentives would have to be so that you had more
1:43:49
unfettered entrepreneurs. Like just like do the thing that you
1:43:51
think is right. Right. And there's a mechanism where we
1:43:54
give you the ability to then make things for more
1:43:57
people because you're approving. that you're actually really good at
1:44:00
making things. And if you don't need money at that
1:44:03
point in society, reorienting us away from this kind of
1:44:07
like brittle form of exchange to something more useful, that's
1:44:11
worth experimenting with. I think that's an important.
1:44:14
Speaker 2: Well, there's also the concept of the self, of the individual,
1:44:17
which may erode with technological innovation. So if we really
1:44:22
can read each other's minds, if we really do get
1:44:26
to a point where we're communicating... Through technologically assisted telepathy.
1:44:31
Like a lot of the whole– the weirdness of people
1:44:36
is I don't know what you're thinking. I don't know
1:44:38
if I should trust you. This motherfucker might be devious.
1:44:42
You know what I mean? Well, we'll know. And there
1:44:45
will be no need for all that if we really
1:44:48
are all one. If that's ultimately something that can be
1:44:51
achieved with technology.
1:44:53
Speaker 1: Like this hive mind.
1:44:54
Speaker 2: Yes. Like a legitimate hive mind. And then like look
1:44:57
where society is going. Gender is kind of falling apart.
1:45:00
People are getting– they're reproducing less, right? People are having
1:45:04
less testosterone, more miscarriages, less fertile. We're kind of moving
1:45:08
into this genderless direction. And I don't know if it's
1:45:13
by design but microplastics and phthalates and all these different
1:45:20
chemicals that are endocrine disruptors are all ubiquitous in our society. Well,
1:45:24
does– Is that a coincidence that that's all happening at
1:45:27
the same time as technological innovation on mass scale? Is it?
1:45:31
I don't know. Because like what's the one thing that's
1:45:33
holding us back? Well, that we're territorial primates with thermonuclear
1:45:39
weapons and that we exist in a sort of tribal mindset.
1:45:43
But yet we do it on a planet of 8
1:45:45
billion people.
1:45:46
Speaker 1: I don't know. The key differentiator of humans is our
1:45:49
ability to enact violence. Yeah. To methodically enact. execute premeditated violence.
1:45:55
Speaker 2: Yes and and greed and attention and one of the
1:46:00
things that attention is sexual preference or sexual rather attention
1:46:06
like the ability to procreate the ability to acquire mates
1:46:10
right like the more resources you have the more attractive
1:46:12
you'll be especially for males and males are the ones
1:46:15
that are involved in the violence in the first place
1:46:17
you know there's i can't name a single war that
1:46:20
was started by a woman.
1:46:21
Speaker 1: How do you teach your kids that attention is not everything?
1:46:29
Speaker 2: That's a good question, especially in this society. It's probably
1:46:32
harder to do that now than ever before.
1:46:34
Speaker 1: Because the reaction that I suspect most kids will have
1:46:37
is like, stop. Leave me alone. It's almost an impossible thing.
1:46:44
Speaker 2: Well, I think... Kids learn more from their parents' behavior
1:46:49
than anything you say to them. I think they learn
1:46:52
from the way you behave and the way you exist
1:46:56
and the way you exist with them. And if you
1:47:00
are constantly whoring yourself out for attention, it's one thing
1:47:06
if you get a lot of attention from what you do.
1:47:08
But if that's your primary goal, they're going to know.
1:47:11
Speaker 1: Do your kids know how famous and influential you are?
1:47:14
Like an honest question. Oh, yeah.
1:47:15
Speaker 2: They know.
1:47:16
Speaker 1: But do they have a real sense of it or
1:47:18
do you just kind of like– As much as they can.
1:47:21
Speaker 2: I mean how can you? It's got to be weird
1:47:22
as fuck growing up with a very famous dad. It's
1:47:26
very odd. But it's not my primary goal.
1:47:29
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's my point. You're not putting it in their face.
1:47:31
So to your point, you're not modeling attention is all
1:47:34
you do.
1:47:34
Speaker 2: No, no. I have interesting conversations with cool people. I
1:47:40
tell jokes and I call fights. Like those are the
1:47:44
things that I do. And they also know that I
1:47:46
have a very strong work ethic and that I work
1:47:49
towards things. So they have very strong work ethics. They're
1:47:51
very motivated and disciplined, like shockingly disciplined. And I think
1:47:55
that's modeled. I think that comes from– and they also
1:47:59
like really enjoy achieving goals. And they're rewarded for it
1:48:04
with praise and with admiration. But Never with like you're
1:48:10
better than other people. The idea is like all human
1:48:15
beings are capable of greatness. So it's like find the
1:48:18
thing that you excel at. And if you throw yourself
1:48:22
into that, it's very rewarding.
1:48:24
Speaker 1: I really, I really believe in this. I tell this
1:48:26
story when I interview people, when I interview people, I'm
1:48:29
always like, you know, just whatever company I'm always like,
1:48:31
I first only want to know about them. I'm like,
1:48:34
fuck your resume. Like, tell me about your parents first.
1:48:37
And how you grew up. I just want to know that.
1:48:39
Stop at 18. Everything before 18. Just tell me every
1:48:42
little detail. Right. You know, and some people tell me
1:48:45
these incredible stories. They'll be like, you know, my mom
1:48:48
was an alcoholic or this or that. And I'm just like, man,
1:48:51
this is so valuable because it allows me to understand
1:48:55
who they are. The second part of the interview, we
1:48:58
do the business shit. But the third part, I tell
1:48:59
this story. This is a crazy story about what you're
1:49:02
just saying. They ran this experiment at Stanford where they
1:49:06
take like a big bowl. fill it with water, and
1:49:09
they drop in a mouse, and they measure how long
1:49:12
it takes for the mouse to drown. They do it
1:49:14
like 100 times. The average was about four minutes, call it, four,
1:49:17
four and a half minutes. Then they run the experiment again,
1:49:21
100 mice, and at minute three or three and a half,
1:49:25
they take it out, they dry it off, they play music,
1:49:28
and they whisper like sweet nothings into the mouse's ear.
1:49:31
They drop the mouse back in the water, and that
1:49:34
mouse treads water For 60 hours, the next 100 mice
1:49:39
on average. And the upper bound was 80. And I
1:49:44
thought to myself, like, that is all just potential right there.
1:49:48
Like that's all like there's all this latent potential. So
1:49:50
if an animal has it, I'm going to assume that
1:49:52
humans have it too.
1:49:53
Speaker 2: Right.
1:49:55
Speaker 1: But you never get a chance to unlock it. Like
1:49:56
the average person is just kind of like living a
1:49:59
life where there may be scratching 5% or 10% of
1:50:01
their potential. And the question is how do you get
1:50:03
to that other 90%? Like how does the second batch
1:50:05
of mice– how do the second batch of mice tread
1:50:08
water for 60 hours? Well– It doesn't make any sense
1:50:10
to me.
1:50:10
Speaker 2: Well, the same mice, right? I think the– No, no, no.
1:50:14
I think the mice get rescued.
1:50:16
Speaker 1: They get rescued.
1:50:17
Speaker 2: And then when they try it again, those same mice
1:50:20
last longer, right? So it's the same mice. So it's
1:50:23
an experience, right? So they have experience now. They understand
1:50:27
that they can tread water where they didn't die. So
1:50:31
they understand that they can survive where they didn't know
1:50:34
that they could survive the first time they were thrown
1:50:35
into the water because they'd never been thrown into water before.
1:50:38
That's the same thing that happens to people when they fight.
1:50:41
Like the first time people ever have a competition, they
1:50:43
fucking panic and they get really scared and they get
1:50:47
really like filled with anxiety. But after a while, you
1:50:51
get relaxed. And that's when you get really dangerous because
1:50:54
then you get calm and you can keep your shit
1:50:56
together while you're in the middle of all this chaos
1:50:59
because you have the experience of it. Without the experience
1:51:02
of it, very few people do well the first time
1:51:05
unless you're exceptionally talented and you have other competition experience.
1:51:10
Like you've competed in other things like maybe you played
1:51:12
football or some other things and you know what it's
1:51:14
like to actually perform under pressure.
1:51:16
Speaker 1: What is the version of giving more humans a chance
1:51:20
to get to that?
1:51:22
Speaker 2: Well, I think sports are really good for that because
1:51:25
performing under people paying attention to you and performing where
1:51:29
people are trying to stop you from doing something and
1:51:32
you're trying to do something and there's all these unknowns
1:51:35
and recognizing that hard work allows you to do whatever
1:51:39
you're trying to do better than you previously had. One
1:51:43
of the things my martial arts instructor said to me
1:51:44
when I was young is that martial arts are a
1:51:47
vehicle for developing your human potential. And that through this
1:51:51
very difficult thing that you're trying to do, you're learning that, oh,
1:51:56
if I just think smart and think hard and train
1:52:01
wise and train hard and discipline myself to endure suffering
1:52:06
so that I can develop more endurance and more speed
1:52:09
and more power and more technique because I accumulate all
1:52:11
this information and I really think about what it is
1:52:14
and apply it with drills and with training, I can
1:52:17
get better at this thing. And every time I get
1:52:18
better at this thing, I get rewarded Psychically, like mentally,
1:52:21
you feel better. Like I know that I'm better now.
1:52:24
And then there's the belt system where you start off.
1:52:27
You're a white belt. And in Taekwondo, you get a
1:52:29
blue belt. And then after you get a blue belt,
1:52:31
you get a green belt. And then if you get
1:52:33
a green belt first, I forget how it goes. And
1:52:35
then it's red belt and black belt. And like when
1:52:37
you're black belt, like holy shit. So it's this thing
1:52:40
where you've developed to a point where you've gotten to
1:52:43
this next stage. So all along the way, you've been
1:52:46
rewarded for your hard work. And then you realize like, oh,
1:52:49
I could do this with everything in life.
1:52:50
Speaker 1: Is there a reward different than attention? It is.
1:52:53
Speaker 2: It is because it's internal, right? You're realizing that you
1:52:59
could apply this to whatever it is, to carpentry, to music.
1:53:05
It's just a matter of focus and attention. And some people, unfortunately,
1:53:09
never find a vehicle. They never find a thing that
1:53:13
they can throw themselves into. They realize like– and this
1:53:15
is not unique, right? It's not like I'm an unusual
1:53:19
person or anybody is. I mean there's people that have
1:53:23
unusual physical gifts and some people have unusual mental gifts.
1:53:27
But the reality is no matter where you start, everyone
1:53:31
can get better. And when you do something, whether it's
1:53:34
learning to play guitar, as you get better at it,
1:53:36
you realize like, oh, this is what it's all about.
1:53:39
Like it's really all about applying yourself to something and
1:53:42
then feeling this immense satisfaction of your hard work paying off.
1:53:47
And that motivates you to work hard at other things.
1:53:50
And if you don't find that early on, it's very
1:53:53
difficult to like find like real satisfaction in life.
1:53:58
Speaker 1: Yeah. I've always had something outside of my daily life
1:54:04
that is the thing that I actually care about. And
1:54:07
it actually energizes me for my day-to-day life. I don't
1:54:10
know if that's like a lot of people.
1:54:11
Speaker 2: What do you do? What's your thing?
1:54:13
Speaker 1: Initially, it was poker. And even now, I obsess about
1:54:17
the game. Because it's infinitely more complex than chess. Like chess,
1:54:22
you can get to a place where you can roughly
1:54:24
be good. Poker, it's just constantly, there's just too many variables.
1:54:29
There's human emotion. There's human psychology. The number of people,
1:54:33
all of this stuff just makes the complexity of the
1:54:35
game something that I find magical. And so I sit
1:54:40
there and I try to understand, like, why am I
1:54:42
doing the things that I'm doing? And so much of
1:54:44
it comes back to being a mirror about what's happening
1:54:46
in my daily life. It's the fucking craziest thing. I'm
1:54:50
super insecure. I'll go into poker and I will just
1:54:52
lose for weeks at a time. But it's because I'm
1:54:55
insecure in my daily life. And what's happening is that
1:54:58
I'm trying to find these quick wins and quick solutions
1:55:01
because I'm in a state of insecurity. I'm anxious. I
1:55:04
have this anxiety. And so it's become a great mirror
1:55:07
for me. So that used to be a thing. It
1:55:09
still is a thing. But I've become reasonably skilled at
1:55:14
it where the edges are smaller and I put myself
1:55:17
in positions where I'm only playing against a certain group
1:55:20
of people and I'm the losing player frankly in that
1:55:23
game when I'm playing against like the top pros. It
1:55:27
just doesn't– it helps me and I can get tuned
1:55:30
up for it. But then I started to– I would
1:55:33
take different things. I tried to learn how to ski.
1:55:35
Basically impossible when you're older. I look like a fucking idiot.
1:55:38
Speaker 2: How old were you when you tried?
1:55:40
Speaker 1: I started when I was like– I was a good snowboarder.
1:55:43
So I was snowboarding my whole life and then my
1:55:45
kids ski. And so I'm like, okay, well, I want
1:55:48
to do this as a family. So I was like
1:55:50
42 or something when I tried. I'm 49 now, almost 50.
1:55:52
That's brutal. I mean, I look like a fucking idiot.
1:55:56
It's like this gangly giraffe trying to get down the mountain.
1:56:00
And then now I start at golf. And, man, I
1:56:04
got to tell you, I used to play a little bit.
1:56:06
Then I stopped. But there's something to me about being
1:56:09
outside where just like being in nature I find like
1:56:15
really– It's a vitamin. It's a vitamin. And then just
1:56:19
the mind-body connection of that game, it just really fucks
1:56:22
with you because it's just nothing you can master and overpower. Right.
1:56:27
And it teaches you to just be in it.
1:56:29
Speaker 2: Yeah.
1:56:30
Speaker 1: And that's a very hard skill. If you look at
1:56:34
the best... There's a handful of people that I really
1:56:37
look up to and I obsess, like Munger, Buffett. But
1:56:40
the Berkshire meeting was this past weekend. And if you
1:56:43
look at the clips, there's this incredible thing where They transitioned, right?
1:56:47
Munger passed away. Buffett's like now executive chairman. But this guy,
1:56:50
Greg Abel, and this guy, Ajit Jain. Ajit Jain does
1:56:53
this thing where he's like, I teach the people that
1:56:55
come to just say no. Your whole job is to
1:56:58
just say no. You're going to get bombarded with all
1:57:00
kinds of business pitches. Say no, no, no. And eventually
1:57:03
somebody will come and fucking try to whack you in
1:57:05
the head with a two by four of money. Then
1:57:07
you come to me and we'll do the deal. And
1:57:09
it made such an impression because like, again, when I'm insecure,
1:57:15
My reward function is attention. So I'm like a fucking
1:57:17
little busybody. I'm running around doing all this little bullshit,
1:57:20
you know. And then, man, when I'm in a fucking
1:57:23
flow state and like I'm toning it, like I'm striping
1:57:27
the ball, you know, I'm like a few things that
1:57:30
really matter in size. And I'm like, man, this is
1:57:32
this is right. It's all come to me because I'm
1:57:37
like I'm like within myself and these other things. are
1:57:42
a better reflection of when I'm within myself. And these
1:57:45
other things are a mirror of when I'm totally out
1:57:47
of kilter. That's just me. So in my life, these
1:57:51
things tend to lead.
1:57:54
Speaker 2: I think you're saying that's just you, but I think
1:57:56
that's generally most people. I think you find these things,
1:58:01
these vehicles for developing human potential, whether it's martial arts
1:58:05
or golf or playing guitar or playing chess or poker.
1:58:09
Speaker 1: And then you have to have, I think one, at
1:58:11
least for me, one seminal relationship in your life. You
1:58:15
have to have one person that has just undying belief
1:58:18
in you. And I never really had that until I
1:58:20
met my wife. And that was a very, and I didn't,
1:58:23
I pushed against it so fucking hard because I was like,
1:58:27
it just can't be true. Like, why does this person
1:58:29
give a shit? Do you know what I mean? Like
1:58:31
why do they care about me more than I care?
1:58:32
Speaker 2: Well, there's also the fear because so many people get
1:58:34
in those bad relationships.
1:58:36
Speaker 1: And I'm just like– I think there's a part of
1:58:38
you like me where you're just like I'm not a
1:58:40
very lovable person. Like I'm just like this is– that's
1:58:43
not who I am. And this woman is just there.
1:58:48
So that's been like the thing. Like for me, it's
1:58:50
like– because she's brutal. She'll be like, oh, yeah, that
1:58:53
was fucking horrible. You know, like yesterday, I like we
1:58:55
had this. I did this thing at milk and it
1:58:59
was a dinner at my friend's house. And then, you know,
1:59:02
we're both going to different airports. I'm flying here to
1:59:04
see you. And she's flying home. And she calls me
1:59:08
and I'm like, how did I do?
1:59:11
Speaker 2: Ah, shit.
1:59:16
Speaker 1: But no, there's the parts that I did well. And
1:59:18
then she critiques the other parts that she didn't like.
1:59:21
And then I say, which is like, it's, and it's so, again,
1:59:23
I'm insecure. So I'm like, I want the self-serving. Well,
1:59:27
how would, because there was three of us on this
1:59:28
panel and she's like, and I was like, you know,
1:59:31
I was the best, right? She's like, no, Gavin was better.
1:59:35
I'm just like, it's so, but it's so refreshing because
1:59:39
it keep, again, it's like a, It keeps you in check.
1:59:41
And it gives me a mirror. Like when I was
1:59:45
coming to see you yesterday when we were flying down
1:59:48
to LA for this thing, there's parts of me where
1:59:53
when I'm insecure, I kind of like externalize and I
1:59:56
can be like really hyperbolic, unnecessarily hyperbolic and it's counterproductive.
2:00:01
And she said to me, listen, like just imagine your friends.
2:00:03
These are hardworking people. They're trying their best as well.
2:00:06
They don't necessarily know. Some things have massively worked out
2:00:09
for them. but they would want to do the right thing.
2:00:11
There's people you've worked with before that want to do
2:00:13
the right thing. And she's like, just pick with them
2:00:15
and don't judge. You can observe. And it's crazy, but
2:00:20
it's like, I need those little things. There's like tweaks.
2:00:22
It's like having a coach kind of like, and that,
2:00:24
and that's very, that's very helpful to me. Yeah.
2:00:26
Speaker 2: It's very important. It's hard to do that yourself.
2:00:29
Speaker 1: I can't do it. And it's also like, I'm retard maxing.
2:00:32
Like my life is like, I like that flow. And
2:00:34
if not, if I didn't have somebody who loved me
2:00:37
and would hold me accountable, I'm just fucking not think
2:00:39
about it.
2:00:40
Speaker 2: Yeah. And the opposite of that is someone who's like
2:00:43
an antagonistic relationship. And we know a lot of people
2:00:46
that have those kind of very sabotage-y sort of marriages
2:00:50
and relationships. And that's crazy.
2:00:52
Speaker 1: It's brutal.
2:00:53
Speaker 2: It's brutal. And I don't think they've ever had a
2:00:55
really good one. Otherwise, they would never tolerate that.
2:00:59
Speaker 1: I didn't know what good looked like. So you kind
2:01:02
of just, I think a lot of people go with
2:01:03
the flow. Like, I mean, I was a nerdy kid
2:01:07
from kind of a shitty, fucked up, kind of like
2:01:10
family structure. And then I got injected into this rich
2:01:15
high school, but then I got to go back to
2:01:18
an alcoholic father. I'm on fucking welfare. Like, it's like,
2:01:21
you know, my, my self-confidence is negative fucking two units.
2:01:25
Didn't have a girlfriend, you know, like all the shit
2:01:27
in high school, like nothing happened for me. And so
2:01:30
my modeling of like how to be in a relationship,
2:01:32
what to do, it was fucking zero. Um, it was
2:01:37
zero zero. And so all those mistakes were mostly because
2:01:41
I didn't understand what good looked like.
2:01:43
Speaker 2: Right.
2:01:44
Speaker 1: And then I stumbled into this relationship after my divorce
2:01:47
and my ex-wife is an incredible woman, just like not,
2:01:50
you know.
2:01:50
Speaker 2: What you needed or what she needed.
2:01:53
Speaker 1: We were in a few very specific ways. We just
2:01:57
weren't on the same page. And then I find this
2:02:00
other one and it's, and I think like, I don't,
2:02:04
I was so skeptical. I'm like, I kind of viewed
2:02:08
like a relationship as like this adjunct to your life.
2:02:12
There's you, you're at the center, you're doing your shit.
2:02:15
And one of the appendages to your thing is your,
2:02:19
that's what I thought. And then now it's the opposite
2:02:22
where I feel like my wife's at the center and
2:02:24
I'm like, I would always kind of like, like almost
2:02:28
like laugh at people in the, in my mind. I'm like,
2:02:30
it's not possible that somebody feels this way about somebody else. Um,
2:02:35
But it's a huge enabler. It's very much a gift.
2:02:39
So that can also be a thing that people look for.
2:02:41
You know what I mean?
2:02:42
Speaker 2: I think what you're saying is that there's a bunch
2:02:44
of different things that have to sort of exist together
2:02:48
and that it's not just completely focus on your work
2:02:52
but that focusing on these other things enhances the work
2:02:56
and then the work enhances all these other things as
2:02:58
well and they all exist together.
2:03:00
Speaker 1: And my best work is when I'm not thinking about
2:03:04
the attention or the money those are the two most
2:03:06
corrupting influences in my life if I when I look
2:03:09
back and when I've lost when I've lost the most
2:03:12
amount of money or when I've reputationally hurt myself the
2:03:15
most it's all been because of attention and money those
2:03:19
are the only two things the root cause consistently has
2:03:22
been that.
2:03:23
Speaker 2: That makes sense because you're thinking about a result rather
2:03:25
than the process.
2:03:26
Speaker 1: Exactly yeah exactly and.
2:03:29
Speaker 2: Then thinking about that result like oh I'm going to
2:03:31
get a lot of attention from this oh I'm going
2:03:32
to get a lot of money from this That actually
2:03:35
robs you of the focus that you need to concentrate
2:03:37
on the process. Exactly.
2:03:39
Speaker 1: And the thing about the process is that so much
2:03:43
of that, when you're in a flow state, you're proud
2:03:46
of irrespective of the size of it because the meetings
2:03:50
are the same. Do you know what I mean? Like
2:03:52
you're in the same fucking 35-minute meeting or 45-minute meeting
2:03:55
debating a product or debating a thing. But the minute
2:03:59
that I start to feel like embarrassed about company A
2:04:02
versus company B or decision A versus decision B, now
2:04:05
my mind is like, okay, hold on a second here.
2:04:07
I'm about to run myself off the cliff.
2:04:11
Speaker 2: Yeah.
2:04:11
Speaker 1: Or I had this dinner last week. And this is
2:04:13
what's amazing. Like we're talking about poker. So I'm having
2:04:18
dinner with my wife and a friend. And she's like,
2:04:23
how are you doing? Just like a very generic nice question. Right.
2:04:28
And I go into this long fucking diatribe of like, well,
2:04:31
you know, the investing thing, this. And then I started
2:04:33
this other thing, that. And my wife's looking at me like,
2:04:34
what the fuck are you rambling on about? And then
2:04:37
it got worse, Joe. It got worse. It got even
2:04:39
fucking worse. Then I'm like, you know, but then I
2:04:42
had this poker game. I started rambling. It's normally on Thursdays,
2:04:46
but then I moved it up to Wednesdays. But then
2:04:48
I moved it up to the city because my friend's
2:04:49
having it. And then I name dropped who the guy was.
2:04:52
And my wife just looks at me like, what the
2:04:54
fuck is going on with you? So the dinner ends.
2:04:59
And then she's like, what the fuck is going on
2:05:01
with you? She's like, that was insane. And I had
2:05:05
no idea that I was doing it. And I'm like, okay,
2:05:10
we need to put Humpty Dumpty back together again because
2:05:11
I'm about to go on Rogan and I can't go
2:05:13
off fucking like a crazy wild man. But it's an
2:05:17
enormous gift. That's been my biggest unlock in these last
2:05:20
like eight or nine years. I feel like I'm kind
2:05:23
of like adding skills to my toolkit. I feel like
2:05:26
a golfer that's like I can shape shots a little
2:05:28
bit now. I know how to use different clubs. And
2:05:32
it's all like mindset. And it's like it's very much
2:05:35
what you– it's like this process-oriented approach and you just
2:05:39
can't control the outcome. And that's like– it's a magical feeling.
2:05:45
Speaker 2: It's interesting that you're saying this because like think about
2:05:48
what most people or people that are on social media,
2:05:53
like the kind of attention– That they're focusing on. Like
2:05:57
this is why virtue signaling is so unsuccessful, right? It's
2:06:01
so bad for it because it's fake. You're really concentrating
2:06:03
on the process. Or you're really concentrating on the result.
2:06:05
The result is getting people to love you.
2:06:07
Speaker 1: Exactly.
2:06:07
Speaker 2: Getting people to agree with you. And then worrying about
2:06:10
the criticism. Oh, my God, they hate me. Oh, my God,
2:06:12
they're mad at my statement. Oh, my God, they're this.
2:06:14
And then you're like obsessing on it all day. People
2:06:16
that aren't even anywhere near you. It's like it's one
2:06:19
of the absolute worst things for mental health is this
2:06:22
addiction that people have. Posting things and then reading the
2:06:25
responses to those posts and getting wrapped up in these
2:06:29
very weird two-dimensional interactions with human beings.
2:06:33
Speaker 1: You never read your comments. I mean you're very famous.
2:06:35
It doesn't fucking matter to me.
2:06:37
Speaker 2: Well, you're going to get to a certain point in
2:06:39
time where if you have X amount of people that
2:06:43
follow you, you're going to have a percentage that are
2:06:46
mad at you. And those are the ones you're going
2:06:48
to think about. And if you don't self-audit, maybe that's good.
2:06:51
Maybe it's good to say, like, you fucking piece of shit. Like, oh,
2:06:54
I'm sorry. You know, like what your wife's saying to you. Like,
2:06:57
what the fuck was that? Like, oh, shit. Like, I
2:07:01
am very self-critical. Very. Like, horribly so. Like, I torture myself.
2:07:06
You know, so I'm like, I don't need that from
2:07:08
other people. And also, those people don't love me and
2:07:10
they want me to fail. Like, there's a lot of
2:07:12
people that their lives are very unsuccessful. And I've been
2:07:15
way too fortunate. So it's like there's a reason to
2:07:18
be upset at me if your life is shit because
2:07:21
I've gotten– Three of the best jobs on earth. It
2:07:23
doesn't make any sense, right? So there's a– and also
2:07:26
why the fuck is this podcast so successful? That doesn't
2:07:28
make any sense, right? So it's like I get it.
2:07:31
I understand why people– but I'm not going to help them.
2:07:34
I'm not going to help them bring me down. I'm
2:07:36
not going to indulge in it and ruin my own
2:07:38
mind by wallowing in their bullshit because the only reason
2:07:41
why you would do that in the first place is
2:07:43
if you're not together. No one who's healthy and happy
2:07:46
and intelligent is going to post mean things about you.
2:07:49
So you are reading things from people that are mentally ill, unhappy,
2:07:54
and probably not, maybe they're intelligent in terms of their
2:07:57
ability to solve certain issues and problems. Maybe they're good
2:08:00
at certain skills. But like their overall grasp of humanity
2:08:05
and like being a good person is not good if
2:08:07
you're shitting on people, especially if you like ad hominem
2:08:10
attacks and just insults and So it's not a good
2:08:15
thing to ingest. It's like if you go down the
2:08:17
supermarket and you see Twinkies. Oh, they're right there. Don't
2:08:19
fucking eat them. Okay? That's not good for you. And
2:08:23
so it's like I don't think that at a certain
2:08:26
point in time, especially if you become publicly known and famous,
2:08:29
you should ever read your comments. I don't think it's
2:08:30
good for you. But you better be self-auditing or you'll
2:08:35
start sniffing your own farts and think they smell great.
2:08:37
Like don't do that either.
2:08:39
Speaker 1: Yeah.
2:08:41
Speaker 2: I know a lot of people that have gone crazy
2:08:43
reading their own comments. I've met comedians that like– they'll
2:08:47
think about it all day long. It will fuck with them.
2:08:50
Speaker 1: It will– Well, their neuroses are what creates great comedy
2:08:53
to begin with. So if you feed that neuroses in
2:08:55
the wrong way.
2:08:56
Speaker 2: You're fucked. The wrong way, right. And then also the
2:08:58
self-doubt creeps in because all these people telling you you
2:09:00
suck and they're like, oh my god, I suck. And
2:09:02
then you go on stage with this like people think
2:09:04
I suck. They hate me. You can't do that. Like
2:09:07
if you have– A certain amount of energy in the day.
2:09:12
This is what I always tell comedians. I said, look,
2:09:15
think of your attention and your focus as a unit.
2:09:18
You have 100 units. If you spend 30 of those
2:09:22
fucking units on assholes online, you're robbing 30 units from
2:09:26
all the things you love. 30 units from your family.
2:09:29
30 units from your friends. 30 units from your job.
2:09:31
30 units from golf or poker or whatever it is
2:09:34
that you love to do. You're stealing your own time
2:09:37
and your own focus. For losers.
2:09:41
Speaker 1: Right.
2:09:41
Speaker 2: Like, why would you do that? And those losers are
2:09:43
good people. They're just, most people are good people. They're just,
2:09:46
they're in a bad path. I would have been the
2:09:48
same person.
2:09:49
Speaker 1: Or they're venting. Yeah.
2:09:49
Speaker 2: Yeah, so they're venting. Look, if you gave me a
2:09:51
fucking Twitter account when I was 16, oh my God,
2:09:54
it would have been horrendous.
2:09:55
Speaker 1: Yeah, I would have been going crazy.
2:09:56
Speaker 2: Oh my God, I would have been a terrible person.
2:09:58
It's normal, especially if your life sucks and you're not
2:10:02
doing well and you're attacking famous people or you're attacking
2:10:05
this person that's doing better than you or whatever it is.
2:10:07
Speaker 1: Like, it's, Have you seen the clips of the retard maxing? No.
2:10:12
You don't know what this is?
2:10:13
Speaker 2: No.
2:10:13
Speaker 1: You don't know what this is? No.
2:10:15
Speaker 2: What's retard maxing?
2:10:16
Speaker 1: Oh, this guy is fantastic. He sits on his back porch. Jamie,
2:10:20
can you just show? He sits on his back porch,
2:10:25
smoking a cigar, basically telling you, Everything's kind of bullshit.
2:10:30
Stop thinking about shit. If you don't like your friends,
2:10:33
leave them. If you don't like your girlfriend, leave them.
2:10:35
Stop overthinking. Simplify your life. It's so simple, but I
2:10:42
think it's incredibly powerful.
2:10:43
Speaker 2: Who is this guy?
2:10:44
Speaker 1: Elisha Long, I think, is his name. I don't know, Jamie,
2:10:46
if you can find it.
2:10:47
Speaker 2: I think Elisha— Retard maxing is funny because I know
2:10:49
about looks maxing. We talked about that recently on a podcast.
2:10:53
But that's recently entered into my mind, into my zeitgeist.
2:10:57
Speaker 1: Looks maximum.
2:10:57
Speaker 2: That's the clavicular thing. Clavicular, yeah. But I've only found
2:11:00
out about that within the last few months of life.
2:11:02
Because I genuinely stay off social media as much as possible.
2:11:06
And if I do read things, what I like to do,
2:11:09
I like to focus on fascinating things. Like a lot
2:11:12
of my time I spend looking at YouTube stuff.
2:11:14
Speaker 1: Same.
2:11:14
Speaker 2: Because YouTube stuff, my algorithm is all like new black
2:11:17
holes they've discovered or You know, new discoveries in terms
2:11:21
of like what is the fabric of reality? Like I'm–
2:11:25
that's interesting to me. And if I just concentrate on
2:11:28
people being mean or shitty to each other or the
2:11:30
latest fucking political drama, it's like I don't have much time.
2:11:36
I'm busy. I like things.
2:11:39
Speaker 1: Are you on like Instagram and TikTok?
2:11:41
Speaker 2: I'm on Instagram. I do not have a TikTok. This
2:11:44
is Licks Maxing. No, this is Retard Maxing. So let
2:11:47
me hear what he says. Who's this guy? What's his name?
2:11:50
Speaker 1: Elisha Long.
2:11:51
Speaker 2: Shout out to Elisha. being used as a poisoning of nostalgia,
2:11:56
but to simply remind you of what you found important.
2:12:01
Speaker 1: And as we grow up, we often give.
2:12:03
Speaker 2: That up for security. We give that up so that
2:12:06
we are accepted. We give that up to flex and
2:12:09
appear like we have now figured things out, that people
2:12:13
will accept us. The only way that you will truly be.
2:12:17
Speaker 3: Successful is if you are righteous, and you live according
2:12:22
to your nature, and you play, man, and you don't
2:12:25
let people.
2:12:25
Speaker 1: Take play away from you, to be at the circus
2:12:29
and be ooed and awed and worried about all the bullshit,
2:12:32
return to a state of play.
2:12:35
Speaker 2: Well, that's very good advice. Return to a state of play.
2:12:40
The best thing that you can do is return to
2:12:42
a state of play. That's true. There's a lot of that,
2:12:44
you know. There's a lot of that. Absolutely.
2:12:47
Speaker 1: Oh, I think that that is like.
2:12:49
Speaker 2: A– It's a wise man for a young fellow.
2:12:51
Speaker 1: Yeah.
2:12:51
Speaker 2: Oh, okay. He's a jiu-jitsu guy. There you go. Look.
2:12:54
He's getting his fucking blue belt there or he's getting
2:12:56
his purple belt. What is going on there? So is
2:12:58
he getting his blue belt?
2:13:00
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's his purple belt.
2:13:01
Speaker 2: Purple.
2:13:02
Speaker 1: Yeah.
2:13:02
Speaker 2: So they're taking his blue belt off and putting his
2:13:04
purple belt on. Yeah. See, that's– he's learning. He's a
2:13:06
martial artist. That's why.
2:13:08
Speaker 1: You think martial arts people are just more like spiritually
2:13:11
connected to the truth?
2:13:12
Speaker 2: I don't know if it's spiritually connected to the truth.
2:13:14
It's forced down your fucking throat because you can't believe
2:13:17
you're better than you are if you're getting mauled every day.
2:13:23
And there's only one way. This guy is on the
2:13:25
path to becoming a jiu-jitsu black belt. He looks like
2:13:27
a pretty big guy too. That will help. But there's
2:13:30
only one way to get a black belt in jiu-jitsu.
2:13:33
You got to train jiu-jitsu all the time and get
2:13:35
better at jiu-jitsu. You can't pretend you're better. There's a
2:13:38
lot of people that write poems and they suck and
2:13:39
they think they're so deep.
2:13:41
Speaker 1: Meaning like there's just a very simple objective measurement.
2:13:45
Speaker 2: 100%. You either win or you lose. You either tap
2:13:49
or you get tapped out. You either tap somebody or
2:13:52
you get tapped out.
2:13:53
Speaker 1: But can you get a black belt in some gym
2:13:55
that's easier than a different gym or something like that?
2:13:58
Speaker 2: Sort of, kind of, but not really. I mean everybody's
2:14:02
trying hard. I mean there's definitely better gyms where they're
2:14:04
more technical and their program is much more systematic. And
2:14:08
they're better at breaking down skills, like how to develop skills.
2:14:14
There's definitely better gyms. There's better schools. There's better places
2:14:18
to learn. But everywhere you learn, you're going to have
2:14:20
a bunch of people that are trying hard. And you
2:14:23
have a bunch of people that are trying to learn these.
2:14:25
And also today, because of the internet, you could go
2:14:29
on YouTube and there's thousands of tutorials breaking down new moves.
2:14:34
Jiu-jitsu is like endlessly complex.
2:14:36
Speaker 1: One of my kids has ADHD. And one of the
2:14:39
things that was recommended to us was jujitsu.
2:14:41
Speaker 2: Yeah, what is ADHD, man? It's not even fucking real
2:14:43
because I definitely have it.
2:14:44
Speaker 1: I think we all have it.
2:14:45
Speaker 2: I think it's a superpower.
2:14:46
Speaker 1: I think we all have it.
2:14:49
Speaker 2: Look, I do not focus well on things that I
2:14:51
think are boring. But if you give me something that
2:14:53
I love, I'll play pool for fucking 12 hours in
2:14:57
a row. Well, it's crazy.
2:14:57
Speaker 1: But the reason I got back into golf is my
2:14:59
7-year-old gets on the course and sometimes you can talk
2:15:02
to him and he's just in his own world. Exactly.
2:15:03
Speaker 2: Exactly.
2:15:05
Speaker 1: And then you start talking about chess or jujitsu or whatever.
2:15:09
And then we get him on the golf course and
2:15:11
this kid is just dialed in.
2:15:13
Speaker 2: Yeah, superpower.
2:15:14
Speaker 1: And I'm like, holy shit.
2:15:15
Speaker 2: And they say that that's a disease. That's crazy.
2:15:18
Speaker 1: It's crazy.
2:15:18
Speaker 2: Because if you find a thing that that kid loves,
2:15:20
he's going to excel at it above and beyond most humans.
2:15:24
Speaker 1: He does these chess classes. And like, look, he's seven.
2:15:27
So I'm like, all right, motherfucker, bring it. Fucking destroy you.
2:15:31
I'm going to fucking maul you. And- We're playing last weekend.
2:15:36
And he goes, oh, dad, you know, you can't castle
2:15:39
out of check. I'm like, shut the fuck up. I
2:15:41
know how this game works. And I go on to
2:15:43
beat him. And I went to my wife and I'm like.
2:15:47
he's six weeks away from beating me. I spent two days,
2:15:53
I spent two fucking days on YouTube and I was like, okay,
2:15:56
I got to brush up on my openings and I
2:15:58
got to, I got, oh my God, I don't have
2:16:00
time for this shit, but I can't let this seven
2:16:02
year old beat me. You know what I mean?
2:16:06
Speaker 2: You're going to have to.
2:16:06
Speaker 1: And I'm like, and I was like, how do I,
2:16:08
how do I stall this until maybe he's 10 or 11?
2:16:10
Then it's like, okay, fine. You finally beat me. Congratulations.
2:16:13
Speaker 2: You have to think of him as an extension of
2:16:15
you and be happy when he does. Yeah, that's just
2:16:18
how it is. Look, if you're a man and you
2:16:20
have a son– I have all daughters. But if I
2:16:23
had a son, I would be legitimately terrified that he'd
2:16:27
be able to tap me. Because if I had a son,
2:16:30
one of the first things that I would do is
2:16:31
get them– I got my kids involved in martial arts
2:16:33
at an early age. But I didn't force them to
2:16:34
keep doing it. They did it for a certain amount
2:16:36
of time and then they went on to do a
2:16:37
bunch of other things that they enjoy better, which is fine.
2:16:40
But I think it's good to learn some skills, learn
2:16:43
how to defend yourself so you're not completely lost. Just–
2:16:46
I think it's good for you. It's good to learn.
2:16:48
It's good to develop confidence. But for boys, I think
2:16:51
it's critical, you know, especially boys with my kind of DNA.
2:16:54
I'm like, I think it's good to get that shit
2:16:56
out of your system. But if I had a son,
2:16:58
there'd be a certain point in time. I'm like, it's
2:16:59
a matter of time before this motherfucker can kill me.
2:17:01
I mean, I'm 58 years old. If I had a
2:17:05
20 year old kid, like he could probably kill me.
2:17:08
Probably fucking kill me.
2:17:09
Speaker 1: Yeah.
2:17:10
Speaker 2: It's like, what am I going to do? There's nothing
2:17:12
you could do. You just have to accept it and
2:17:13
then hope your relationship with him is strong enough that
2:17:15
he still respects you, even though he can kill you.
2:17:17
Because it can't be entirely– look, there's a lot of
2:17:21
martial arts instructors that are old and they're revered and
2:17:25
respected and nobody wants to try to hurt them, right?
2:17:27
Because you realize if you learn enough, you get to
2:17:30
a certain point in time.
2:17:32
Speaker 1: I'm a much better dad to my sons than I
2:17:35
am my daughters and I mean this in the following way.
2:17:37
My daughters have their own little place, whatever they want.
2:17:39
I'm in love with them. I don't love them. I'm
2:17:41
in love with them. Whatever they need. Right. They can
2:17:44
just– Just enamored by– They're just like they can control me.
2:17:46
They just kind of send me in one direction or another.
2:17:48
Speaker 2: I'm just like they're By the way, they know that too.
2:17:51
Speaker 1: I'm enslaved by them.
2:17:52
Speaker 2: Yes.
2:17:53
Speaker 1: And I just want their attention. Any small little shred, I'm.
2:17:56
Speaker 2: Like— But with your son, you keep him in check.
2:17:58
Speaker 1: Whereas like my sons, I keep the— I' m doing everything that
2:18:01
I was supposed— I think I'm supposed to be doing. Now,
2:18:04
the good news is my daughters are just different. They're girls.
2:18:07
They're just— so they don't need the same— kind of like
2:18:10
tough love-ish.
2:18:11
Speaker 2: Right.
2:18:13
Speaker 1: But then my boys reveal their characteristics in ways that
2:18:15
really surprise me, and I'm just like, man, this is
2:18:17
so fucking awesome. Parenting has been the best. Again, slowing
2:18:22
down and actually being in it, and I'm like, fuck,
2:18:24
this is amazing.
2:18:25
Speaker 2: It is pretty amazing, and watching your kids get really
2:18:29
good at things is really fascinating. It's fascinating.
2:18:31
Speaker 1: I told you this story before, but my oldest son
2:18:35
is my 17-year-old. It's just a great kid. He goes
2:18:40
and he's like, OK, I'm applying for college. And I'm like, great.
2:18:43
Let me take you to the Naval Academy, West Point.
2:18:45
Let me show you these service academies. And he sees
2:18:48
those and he's like, these are incredible. But then he's like,
2:18:50
I think I want to go to like Georgetown or
2:18:52
Vanderbilt or whatever. And I'm like, hey, man, that's like
2:18:55
just a bigger version of your high school. And whatever,
2:18:59
if that's what you want to do, you do you.
2:19:04
But I'll help you like kind of get to the
2:19:08
starting line here, but you're on your own. And he
2:19:10
had to get a job because I'm like, if you're
2:19:12
going to get into these schools, you got to get
2:19:13
a job. And so he tries to. Last summer, I
2:19:17
just started fucking screaming at him. And I'm like, you
2:19:21
fucking louse. You haven't done anything. This is like another
2:19:24
kid at our son's birthday party. I scream at him.
2:19:27
He starts crying. I'm like, you need to do more.
2:19:30
Then my wife screams at him. He starts crying again.
2:19:33
Then my ex-wife screams at him. He starts crying again.
2:19:38
And he just goes, I'm out of here. He walks out. Meanwhile,
2:19:42
I start panicking and I'm like, I got a tiger dad,
2:19:44
this situation. So I start texting a few friends trying
2:19:47
to figure out, hey, can I, you know, do you
2:19:49
guys want to hire this kid? He's like, really? You know,
2:19:51
he's pretty smart kid. Did all this stuff in robotics, yada, yada.
2:19:55
One of them says, I'd be willing to interview him.
2:19:58
I call him and he's like, dad, I got a job.
2:20:01
I said, what do you mean you got a job?
2:20:03
He said, I went around downtown, went to all these
2:20:07
places and I was in a McDonald's. And the woman
2:20:12
was having a little bit of difficulty speaking English. So
2:20:14
I just spoke to her in Spanish. I got the application.
2:20:16
I sat down at the desk and the guy having
2:20:17
lunch beside me said, hey, I heard you needed a job.
2:20:22
And I really like the way you talk to this woman.
2:20:25
I'm the general manager of the car wash down the street.
2:20:26
Come and work for me. And I said, well, what
2:20:30
are you going to do? He goes, I'm going to
2:20:31
go work there. And I said, OK, well, I got
2:20:34
this other interview for you as well. So you should
2:20:36
see maybe you can do both. Anyways, the end of
2:20:38
the story is he did these two jobs. He worked
2:20:40
at a robotics firm, but then he worked at a
2:20:42
car wash. And when I tell you this story, I
2:20:44
am so proud of this kid because of the car wash.
2:20:47
Because that car wash thing, he would come home and
2:20:49
he's like, man, you have no idea how people live.
2:20:52
And I'm like, what do you mean? He's like, the
2:20:53
stuff that I find in the trunk when I have
2:20:55
to vacuum these cars and clean out the cars. And
2:20:58
I'm like, bro, that is a gift. You have given
2:21:00
a fucking gift. That is the thing that if you
2:21:03
take with you, you'll be gold in the rest of
2:21:05
your life. Because all this other shit, It's all kind
2:21:07
of manufactured. I help because I'm anxious. I'm insecure. But
2:21:11
that shit you did on your own. And that thing
2:21:13
is what people will fucking respect when push comes to shove.
2:21:16
Speaker 2: It's also jobs that suck are really good for you.
2:21:18
Speaker 1: So good. I used to work at Burger King when
2:21:20
I was 14. You were 14 and.
2:21:23
Speaker 2: You had a job?
2:21:26
Speaker 1: When my dad had to stay behind, like we were–
2:21:30
my dad was a diplomat in the embassy of Sri Lanka.
2:21:34
In Canada, this fucking war in Sri Lanka is crazy.
2:21:36
He writes this essay. His life is threatened. So he
2:21:40
files for refugee status. He gets it. He gets kicked
2:21:45
out of the embassy. So he doesn't have a job.
2:21:47
My mom becomes a housekeeper. And we're kind of toiling
2:21:51
in this poverty cycle. So 14, I had to get
2:21:54
a job. And I would take the money and, you know,
2:21:57
I'd buy the bus passes. I would buy some of
2:21:59
the groceries. We're just trying to make it all work, right?
2:22:02
And I got a job at the Burger King. This
2:22:06
is another example where I was like, I'm going to
2:22:08
go get a job. Hey, can you drive me to
2:22:11
the interview? And my dad's like, no. Get on your
2:22:16
fucking bicycle and go. And I thought, bro, we need this.
2:22:20
You need the money more than I do. Why are
2:22:22
you making me bicycle? But I bicycled. And I got
2:22:26
the job and I worked there. And I used to
2:22:27
work the night shift. 14-year-old kid, man.
2:22:29
Speaker 2: Wow.
2:22:30
Speaker 1: From fucking 8 to 2 in the morning. Wow. And
2:22:32
I would have to clean this like 8 p.m. to
2:22:34
2 in the morning.
2:22:34
Speaker 2: And then you had to go to school in the morning?
2:22:36
Speaker 1: No. This was always like Friday, Saturday, Sunday. Wow. Thursday, Friday.
2:22:40
Speaker 2: Sorry.
2:22:40
Speaker 1: Thursday, Friday, Saturday. And then, yeah, some days I would
2:22:42
have to go to school. And why did I work
2:22:45
until 2? Because when the restaurant closes, you get whatever
2:22:49
the food is left over.
2:22:50
Speaker 2: Right?
2:22:51
Speaker 1: So like you get a couple of chicken sandwiches. You
2:22:52
get like the– the version of the McNuggets that Burger
2:22:56
King had, a couple Whoppers, and you take them home.
2:23:02
But the amount of vomit that I had to clean
2:23:04
up in the bathroom. You can't imagine, man, a downtown
2:23:09
Burger King near bars, you know, after closing time, the
2:23:14
shit you see.
2:23:16
Speaker 2: Oh, wow.
2:23:16
Speaker 1: And the shit you deal with. And all I could
2:23:19
think of was, I just want to get the fuck
2:23:21
out of here. But that was so valuable for me.
2:23:24
Speaker 2: Yeah.
2:23:25
Speaker 1: It was so valuable for me. And then I worry
2:23:29
that my kids don't get exposed to it. But when
2:23:32
my son got it, maybe I'm overimposing too much about it.
2:23:34
But it's like– I'm like, man, that car wash thing
2:23:38
is really going to be the thing that separates you
2:23:39
in life.
2:23:40
Speaker 2: Yeah, doing something that sucks.
2:23:42
Speaker 1: It also– Just being humble and grinding through that shit.
2:23:45
Speaker 2: Do you realize like this is sometimes people, they don't
2:23:49
pick a path and they just have a job. And
2:23:52
they don't like it. And they stay with this thing
2:23:54
they don't like forever. And that's not what you want.
2:23:57
Speaker 1: No.
2:23:58
Speaker 2: That's not what you want. But the development, like learning
2:24:02
how to do something that sucks and grinding through it.
2:24:05
Speaker 1: And still doing it well.
2:24:06
Speaker 2: Yeah. Doing it well.
2:24:08
Speaker 1: Make a whopper.
2:24:09
Speaker 2: Be there on time.
2:24:09
Speaker 1: I know how to fucking make a whopper.
2:24:11
Speaker 2: Yeah.
2:24:11
Speaker 1: Do you know what I mean?
2:24:12
Speaker 2: Yeah.
2:24:13
Speaker 1: Make the fries. Change the oil.
2:24:15
Speaker 2: All that shit. And then when you apply those lessons
2:24:19
to something you actually love. And you work hard at
2:24:22
something you love. Oh, it's incredible. It's a real gift.
2:24:26
Speaker 1: It's a real gift.
2:24:27
Speaker 2: Yeah. I mean some people, they don't appreciate the process.
2:24:32
And it's hard to because like when you're young and
2:24:34
you're going through these difficult jobs and these things that
2:24:37
suck and you don't know how it's going to turn out.
2:24:40
And a lot of times people aren't really educated in
2:24:43
what a process actually is and about how it does
2:24:46
develop character. It does develop discipline. And these things are
2:24:50
actual skills that you can apply to other things in life.
2:24:53
You just think, God, I'm a fucking loser.
2:24:55
Speaker 1: I have a visual for this. I always ask myself,
2:24:58
am I in the engine room right now? This is
2:25:01
my way of saying, like, an engine room is a
2:25:03
little hot. It's a little uncomfortable. But it's where all
2:25:06
the shit is happening. It's where the shit is being made.
2:25:10
And so I'm like, it's a little, you know, discomforting.
2:25:13
But I got to be in there. And there are
2:25:15
days where there'll be weeks. where that's all I do.
2:25:18
I'm just in it. You know, I don't, I'm not
2:25:21
good at responding to emails sometimes or whatever, because there'll
2:25:23
just be weeks where I'm in it. And it's an
2:25:26
incredible visual for me because I'm like, yeah, this is
2:25:29
like where like I'm grounded and I like feel myself.
2:25:32
And then when I, when I look at my, like
2:25:35
my health, that's when I just feel like really good
2:25:39
about myself, like not insecure or And my vitals are different.
2:25:44
Like it's crazy. Like my fucking HRV. Like my HRV
2:25:49
craters when I'm like just like insecure.
2:25:56
Speaker 2: Of course.
2:25:57
Speaker 1: But why is that? Like it's your heart rate variability.
2:26:00
It should have nothing to do with your like disposition
2:26:04
and your mood.
2:26:05
Speaker 2: Well, your mind is– the idea that your mind is
2:26:08
separate from the body is crazy.
2:26:10
Speaker 1: It's crazy.
2:26:10
Speaker 2: It's not.
2:26:12
Speaker 1: But is your HRV lower when you're just out of sorts? Yes, probably, right?
2:26:16
Speaker 2: I'm sure. Yeah. I don't really monitor it that much. Yeah.
2:26:20
And I try not to ever get out of sorts too.
2:26:22
And one of the ways that I keep from getting
2:26:24
out of sorts is daily discipline. Like if I have
2:26:28
days where I'm sure it gets out of sorts if
2:26:30
I have a few days in a row where I
2:26:31
don't work out. But I work out almost every day
2:26:35
and if I'm not working out, I'm still cold plunging
2:26:37
and going to the sauna and stretching. I'm always doing something.
2:26:41
And if I don't do something, I feel like I'm
2:26:42
fucking up. And then I can.
2:26:45
Speaker 1: So does it matter what it is? Meaning as long
2:26:47
as it's a routine?
2:26:48
Speaker 2: Yeah. I do it all myself. I don't have a trainer.
2:26:51
But I write things down. I write down what I
2:26:53
want to accomplish. I write down what I'm going to do.
2:26:55
And then I just do it. Like a robot. Force
2:26:58
myself to do it. Then I always feel better after
2:27:01
it's over. And it's always the hardest part of my day.
2:27:04
And so it makes everything else so much easier. Because
2:27:06
I fucking work out hard. And so everything else is
2:27:09
pretty easy. Because the strain, like just being in that
2:27:13
fucking cold water or just going through Tabatas on an
2:27:16
airdyne bike, this shit's hard. It's really hard. Like I
2:27:20
could die right now hard. And so everything else is
2:27:22
like how hard is it going to be? Oh, it's uncomfortable. Oh, boo-hoo.
2:27:28
I think it's important to go through that. I really
2:27:31
think it is. I really think it is. The difference
2:27:35
between sanity and having a very slippery grip on your
2:27:42
own personal sovereignty, I think a lot of it is
2:27:46
you have to choose. It has to be elective, voluntary adversity.
2:27:54
You have to choose to do it.
2:27:56
Speaker 1: That's a really great way of saying it, voluntary adversity.
2:27:58
If it's forced upon you You can kind of compartmentalize it.
2:28:02
Speaker 2: And then you get angry like, fuck.
2:28:03
Speaker 1: Bitter and resentful.
2:28:04
Speaker 2: People make me do stupid shit. Yeah, exactly. But if
2:28:06
you force yourself to do it, you know.
2:28:08
Speaker 1: That's why these special forces guys are such fucking animals.
2:28:10
Speaker 2: Of course.
2:28:11
Speaker 1: They're choosing. Right.
2:28:13
Speaker 2: Exactly. And they develop that, you know, this mentality when
2:28:17
you're around other people that are also savages. You know,
2:28:20
you just realize like there's other people out there in
2:28:22
the world that are not making excuses. And they are
2:28:25
getting after it every day and they are pushing every day.
2:28:29
And the more you can surround yourself with people like that,
2:28:31
the more people– the people that complain about nonsense and
2:28:35
find excuses and focus on other people and bitch about
2:28:38
things and why is she doing this? Why is this
2:28:42
happening for him? It's loser mentality. And if you're around
2:28:46
more winners, you absorb that. You imitate your atmosphere. It's
2:28:50
very important. It's very hard for people, especially young people,
2:28:53
to find positive influences and to find positive groups. I
2:28:59
think it's one of the reasons why a lot of
2:29:01
young people gravitate towards podcasts because they get to hear
2:29:03
interesting conversations with really accomplished people that are fascinating, that
2:29:08
are unlike anybody that they're around on a daily basis.
2:29:12
And that's also one of the reasons why it's important
2:29:15
to find– that's why martial arts is so good for
2:29:17
young people because you're around other people that are doing
2:29:20
this really difficult thing. And other sports, too, whether it's
2:29:23
football or wrestling, whatever it is.
2:29:24
Speaker 1: I actually found, like, you know, the last few years,
2:29:26
I go out of my way to not isolate myself.
2:29:28
That's one thing. Like, being around other people, engaging in things.
2:29:31
Speaker 2: Yes.
2:29:32
Speaker 1: Has been really healthy for me.
2:29:33
Speaker 2: Oh, for sure.
2:29:34
Speaker 1: Oh, my God. And I just found like, what the
2:29:36
fuck am I doing? It's like everything is in my
2:29:37
little house by myself. Everybody, everything comes to me. It's
2:29:41
so odd.
2:29:42
Speaker 2: It's odd.
2:29:42
Speaker 1: It's really hard.
2:29:43
Speaker 2: Very unhealthy.
2:29:44
Speaker 1: And it starts to fuck you up in the mind.
2:29:45
Speaker 2: And then your interaction with humans is only on the internet.
2:29:49
It's terrible.
2:29:50
Speaker 1: Or with people that are sycophantically either being paid or
2:29:52
need something from you.
2:29:54
Speaker 2: Yeah.
2:29:55
Speaker 1: And then I think you're in a really bad place.
2:29:57
Speaker 2: Absolutely.
2:29:57
Speaker 1: Whereas like if you're in the grind with other people,
2:29:59
they're beating you at things.
2:30:01
Speaker 2: It's great. Yeah, if you're in a situation where there's
2:30:03
a bunch of sycophantically connected people to you and they're
2:30:06
just all kissing your ass and– I mean we all
2:30:08
know people that are like the heads of companies and
2:30:10
they're just like fucking tyrants.
2:30:12
Speaker 1: I think the trap about being successful because it's not
2:30:15
everything it's cracked up to be is exactly that. You
2:30:17
become so isolated that you become this like very caricaturist
2:30:21
version of yourself because you forget what it's like to–
2:30:25
just a basic example like Wait in line. Be kind
2:30:28
to other people.
2:30:29
Speaker 2: Be polite.
2:30:30
Speaker 1: Like be accommodating. Have some empathy. Right. Where are you
2:30:33
put in that situation to do those things?
2:30:35
Speaker 2: Right. You forget that you're just a person.
2:30:36
Speaker 1: You're just a fucking person.
2:30:38
Speaker 2: And if you achieve some level of success that you're
2:30:41
trying to– you're trying to achieve this level of success
2:30:43
so you elevate past being a person, you're missing the point.
2:30:47
Like you're never going to. And if you do, it
2:30:49
will come at a price.
2:30:50
Speaker 1: I thought being successful was supposed to right all the
2:30:53
wrongs that I felt like I missed. And it turns
2:30:58
out nobody gives a fuck. No. And it does none
2:31:02
of that.
2:31:02
Speaker 2: I think it's all the process. All of life is
2:31:07
the process. I agree. I think as soon as you
2:31:09
think that there's a goal, like, oh, I'm going to
2:31:11
retire and experience my golden years. I think it's all horseshit.
2:31:15
And that's one of my main fears about AI. One
2:31:20
of my main fears about this idea of universal high
2:31:23
income and everyone's going to have ultimate abundance. It's like,
2:31:27
Where does anybody find purpose and meaning and where do
2:31:31
you take whatever this thing is that the mind is
2:31:37
constructed of? These needs that the mind has that have
2:31:41
to be satisfied in order to achieve sanity, in order
2:31:45
to achieve some sort of like place where.
2:31:48
Speaker 1: You can be at peace. Accomplishment, fulfillment.
2:31:50
Speaker 2: Yeah. You're going to have to do something, man. You're
2:31:52
going to have to do something.
2:31:53
Speaker 1: Yeah.
2:31:54
Speaker 2: I mean maybe it could just be jujitsu and golf
2:31:57
and find some stuff that you enjoy doing and take
2:32:00
some benefit in that. But boy, that's not been the
2:32:05
case for hundreds of years. That's not how human beings
2:32:09
have– but also part of me says why do we
2:32:13
have to work to find those things? Why can't we–
2:32:16
why is it all that– Right. But what I'm getting
2:32:24
at is like why is our identity all tied up
2:32:28
in money and just things and objects and stuff? And
2:32:36
this is a fairly new thing in human society, right?
2:32:40
Why can't it transform into– like your basic needs are
2:32:46
all met. Like nobody ever has to worry about starving again.
2:32:49
Nobody ever has to worry about not having a home
2:32:51
to sleep in. Nobody ever has to worry about not
2:32:53
having healthcare. Nobody ever has to worry about not having education.
2:32:56
So then it becomes find a purpose with your life.
2:33:00
And as a society, can we adjust? Can we gravitate
2:33:05
towards a new way of existing and meaning? It would
2:33:08
probably be great. In one way, it would be great
2:33:12
because– We wouldn't have to be constantly thinking, why does
2:33:15
he have that and I don't have that? Instead, it
2:33:18
would probably be like, what can I do to get
2:33:21
better at the thing that I love?
2:33:23
Speaker 1: Or let me be a part of a project to
2:33:25
do something that seems implausible, but I feel like I'm
2:33:29
in the engine room every day. This is great. I'm
2:33:31
toiling with these guys. Probably not going to work. Some
2:33:34
crazy convoluted thing that has a. 001 chance of success.
2:33:40
That can captivate a lot of people.
2:33:42
Speaker 2: Yes.
2:33:42
Speaker 1: You know?
2:33:43
Speaker 2: The process.
2:33:43
Speaker 1: The process. Yeah. The process.
2:33:45
Speaker 2: The process is everything. And there's no– I used to
2:33:48
like think back.
2:33:48
Speaker 1: There is no attention in the process. Right. There's only
2:33:52
attention in the outcome. Right. Do you see what I mean?
2:33:55
Speaker 2: Absolutely.
2:33:56
Speaker 1: Which is another clue and a secret that that's actually
2:33:58
where you should be focused.
2:33:59
Speaker 2: Well, you might get attention, but that's not what you want.
2:34:01
What you want is the process to work out. You
2:34:03
want to get better at whatever it is you're doing
2:34:06
and get that thing to a better place than it
2:34:08
is right now currently.
2:34:09
Speaker 1: Right?
2:34:09
Speaker 2: That's what you're thinking of. You're not thinking of I
2:34:12
am going to get all this attention. I'm going to
2:34:14
be on the cover of a magazine. Yeah. It can't
2:34:18
be that. That's not good for anybody. But everybody thinks
2:34:21
that's what they're going to get. Oh, I'm going to
2:34:23
get this.
2:34:23
Speaker 1: Everybody thinks that's what they want.
2:34:25
Speaker 2: Yeah.
2:34:26
Speaker 1: Right. And the problem with that is that it's not
2:34:29
what you want. No. And then now we're going to
2:34:32
completely upend potentially all of that. Yeah.
2:34:38
Speaker 2: Well, maybe it'll coincide with the hive mind technology.
2:34:44
Speaker 1: This hive mind thing actually that you say I find
2:34:46
very compelling because this idea of like how do you
2:34:51
govern an AI? Each of us individually are not capable,
2:34:55
but I think you, me, like 10,000, 100,000 people working together.
2:35:01
The question is are we smarter? And I think there's
2:35:04
a reasonable chance that that could be true. And then
2:35:07
the other version of the hive mind is here are
2:35:09
all these like crazy ideas that would just make the
2:35:11
world incredible. And a group of a thousand people go
2:35:15
off and they kind of jointly work on that together.
2:35:17
That I find super fascinating. Like that could be it.
2:35:21
Like it could be like, you know, a thousand physicists
2:35:24
are like, we're going to create this new interstellar form
2:35:26
of transportation. And they just go off and they're just like,
2:35:29
they don't have to worry about. Because all of that's
2:35:33
paid for.
2:35:34
Speaker 2: Well, it also could solve all of our problems that
2:35:36
we have with like haves and have nots. If we're
2:35:40
all one, how could we tolerate have nots? How could
2:35:44
we tolerate people living on dirt floors in third world
2:35:46
countries with no access to clean water? We wouldn't tolerate it.
2:35:49
Speaker 1: We wouldn't tolerate it.
2:35:50
Speaker 2: Because they would be us and we would understand that.
2:35:52
Speaker 1: Yeah.
2:35:53
Speaker 2: I mean it could be like a complete game changer
2:35:56
in terms of human civilization. It could really move people
2:35:59
into complete next direction. I mean it could eliminate crime
2:36:02
and violence, which sounds insane. Like, boy, that's so utopian. Like, oh,
2:36:07
why don't you suck on some crystals, you fucking hippie?
2:36:10
But legitimately, look, if everybody has a cell phone, which
2:36:13
essentially everybody does right now in this time and age,
2:36:17
if we get to a point where everybody is connected,
2:36:20
everybody is hive mind connected. You're not going to just
2:36:25
be able to drive by a homeless encampment. You won't,
2:36:28
you'll feel, you'll feel it. It won't be like, Hey,
2:36:32
you fucking losers hit the gas. It's going to be like,
2:36:35
we need to solve this. We need to get these
2:36:38
people counseling, mental health crisis, get them off the drugs,
2:36:41
whatever it is that's wrong with them.
2:36:43
Speaker 1: I mean, that's an incredible idea.
2:36:46
Speaker 2: Yeah.
2:36:46
Speaker 1: You know, like when an airplane kind of like goes
2:36:49
like this and your stomach goes and you just feel it.
2:36:51
Could you imagine like you drive by a homeless encampment
2:36:53
and that's what you feel like you feel like, Something's wrong.
2:36:56
Speaker 2: And we'll all feel it collectively. If we're all connected
2:37:00
and we all feel things connectively, we will actively work
2:37:03
together to solve these problems. And if we're dealing with–
2:37:07
if we really get to a point of abundance, like
2:37:09
true abundance, where resources are not an issue and no
2:37:13
one's starving, we could really fix all the problems that–
2:37:17
like None of them are insurmountable. None of them are
2:37:20
breathing underwater.
2:37:21
Speaker 1: Right.
2:37:22
Speaker 2: None of them are flying to the sun. None of them. Right.
2:37:25
So all of them are things that could be if
2:37:28
we took all the world's resources. socialism doesn't work, right?
2:37:32
Why does it not work? Because it rewards lazy people
2:37:34
and it punishes ambitious people. It doesn't work with human nature.
2:37:38
But it would work if you have fucking hive mind.
2:37:41
If we all understand what it means to put in effort.
2:37:44
We all understood what each other are feeling and thinking.
2:37:47
Speaker 1: Right.
2:37:48
Speaker 2: And we all compiled resources and fixed all of our
2:37:52
social problems. Like literally stop all wars, stop all crimes,
2:37:56
stop all violence, stop all poverty. Done. And then what
2:38:02
do we do? We work together to solve whatever the
2:38:04
fuck else is wrong with society.
2:38:06
Speaker 1: Well, it's more like what is left over that we
2:38:09
haven't figured out.
2:38:10
Speaker 2: Think about what the world was like before the internet.
2:38:12
It's almost impossible to imagine. But we both grew up
2:38:15
without it.
2:38:17
Speaker 1: Yeah.
2:38:17
Speaker 2: Yeah. And so we're entering into this new world. Think
2:38:21
about what world was like without the hive mind, but
2:38:24
yet we all grew up without it. Like that might
2:38:26
be the next thing.
2:38:28
Speaker 1: The thing that I remember the most about that era
2:38:31
is I had a positive sum view of everybody.
2:38:35
Speaker 2: Really?
2:38:36
Speaker 1: Meaning there weren't like the, the bad actors were pretty bad,
2:38:41
but yeah, generally like I looked up to most business people.
2:38:44
Like the people that I now I feel like have
2:38:46
been a little bit unmasked then to me were pristine.
2:38:49
Speaker 2: Oh, that's interesting.
2:38:50
Speaker 1: Like the Bill Gates's of the world. You know, I
2:38:51
was like, man, I really aspire to be Bill Gates
2:38:54
when I was like 13 or 14. It just seemed like.
2:38:57
Speaker 2: And now you're like, why is he buying all the farmland?
2:38:59
This fucking weirdo.
2:39:00
Speaker 1: I mean, it's fucking so funny. He bought this like 45,000
2:39:05
acres and 4,500 acres. I can't get the order of
2:39:09
magnitude right. In Phoenix to build his own digital city. Yeah.
2:39:14
It's like weird. So I bought the 1700 acres beside him.
2:39:20
Speaker 2: That's hilarious.
2:39:21
Speaker 1: Fuck you.
2:39:22
Speaker 2: It's a very odd thing. It's a very odd thing
2:39:25
when people get exposed and you just go like, what
2:39:28
the fuck is that guy really all about? But also
2:39:31
like how isolated is he?
2:39:33
Speaker 1: He's been isolated for 50 years. Right.
2:39:36
Speaker 2: Like who are his friends and how many people does
2:39:39
he have?
2:39:39
Speaker 1: It must be very hard to be him actually.
2:39:41
Speaker 2: I mean– Especially now that he's divorced, right? So now
2:39:43
he's got no one going, but that speech fucking sucked.
2:39:46
Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean he has a long-term partner. She seems
2:39:50
like a lovely woman. But yeah, it's just got to
2:39:53
be super lonely.
2:39:54
Speaker 2: It's got to be.
2:39:56
Speaker 1: It's not– to me it's not worth that level of–
2:40:00
I don't even know. What is it? It's like material
2:40:02
success at least measured in the outside world. I don't
2:40:04
know what it is, but it's not– that's a lot, man.
2:40:07
This is like– I don't know how Elon does it.
2:40:09
Like it's a lot. It's super isolating. Yeah. It's just–
2:40:14
he's very by himself. And he's going to be even
2:40:18
more isolated in a matter of a few months.
2:40:20
Speaker 2: Yeah.
2:40:21
Speaker 1: And that's unfortunate because very empathetic, very kind of like
2:40:25
sensitive people like that I think need other people.
2:40:28
Speaker 2: Well, he's got people around him. But he's got very
2:40:31
few people around him that can kick reality at him.
2:40:36
That is a bit of a problem. But he still
2:40:39
seems to be having fun. Every time I'm around him,
2:40:41
we have a bunch of laughs. He's fun to hang
2:40:43
out with.
2:40:44
Speaker 1: He's got an incredible sense of humor.
2:40:47
Speaker 2: Jamie and I went down to one of the rocket
2:40:50
launches at SpaceX. Yeah, we went down there. It's fucking crazy.
2:40:53
And we watched from the ground while I took off,
2:40:56
which is incredible because it's– How far was it, Jamie?
2:40:58
It was like two miles away from us? A mile,
2:41:00
a mile and a half. So it's a mile and
2:41:02
a half. You feel it in your chest. Have you been?
2:41:05
When a rocket launches?
2:41:06
Speaker 1: No.
2:41:06
Speaker 2: Dude, it's bananas. The fucking thing, first of all, it
2:41:09
doesn't look that far. It looks like it's like maybe
2:41:12
a quarter mile. I'm just not good at judging.
2:41:15
Speaker 1: This is a starship?
2:41:16
Speaker 2: Oh, yeah. So you feel it. Like his kids started crying, like,
2:41:22
we want to go inside. It's disturbing, like the amount
2:41:25
of energy. that's coming out of these fucking rocket boosters
2:41:29
and then i hung out with him in the command
2:41:31
center while the rocket was flying through space and we're
2:41:34
watching it on all these monitors and then lands in
2:41:37
the water in australia hey he's cracking jokes the whole
2:41:40
time because the thing is like losing pressure because it's
2:41:43
they're stress testing all the stuff which is really funny
2:41:46
when really dumb people oh he's a fucking dumbass his
2:41:48
rockets keep blowing up like Like they just don't understand.
2:41:51
Like the only way you find out what the capability
2:41:55
of this technology is, is you have to like let
2:41:57
it blow up and then you go, okay, it needs
2:41:59
to be thicker. It needs to be this and that.
2:42:01
And we need to add these things and there's sensors everywhere.
2:42:04
And so he's cracking jokes the entire time while this
2:42:06
thing is like losing pressure. And it eventually wound up
2:42:09
landing and it was fine, but it did have.
2:42:11
Speaker 1: A hole in it.
2:42:12
Speaker 2: But it was just like, he's laughing. Like he's having
2:42:14
a good old time. He's not freaked out.
2:42:16
Speaker 3: You know, he, he's uniquely built to handle it. I, uh,
2:42:21
When there was a rocket launch in Vredenburg in California
2:42:24
and I chartered a Pilatus and I– because you can
2:42:27
get low.
2:42:27
Speaker 1: What's a Pilatus? Like a little like propeller plane.
2:42:30
Speaker 2: Oh, OK.
2:42:30
Speaker 1: And I went around and around and I have this
2:42:33
video of it kind of like coming up and through.
2:42:35
Speaker 2: Because like– How close were you?
2:42:36
Speaker 1: A hundred miles.
2:42:41
Speaker 2: Oh, wow.
2:42:42
Speaker 1: But it's like right there.
2:42:43
Speaker 2: Uh-huh.
2:42:44
Speaker 1: Because it's the distance.
2:42:45
Speaker 2: Right.
2:42:45
Speaker 1: And it's coming up and I'm kind of going around.
2:42:48
It was the craziest thing.
2:42:49
Speaker 2: It was cool.
2:42:50
Speaker 1: It was super cool. That shit is super cool.
2:42:53
Speaker 2: It's very cool. It's very cool. I mean, just Starbase
2:42:56
is bananas. Just when you go down there and they
2:42:58
have their own town, the whole thing is straight fucking
2:43:01
cyber trucks everywhere. I'm like, how do you find your car?
2:43:04
Speaker 1: Is it an incorporated town? It started off as unincorporated.
2:43:07
Speaker 2: But it's its own thing now. I believe it's its
2:43:09
own town.
2:43:10
Speaker 1: Is there a mayor?
2:43:12
Speaker 2: That's a good question. I think there is. I think
2:43:14
we talked about this. I don't remember, though. But... The
2:43:18
actual factory itself is nuts because Jamie and I were
2:43:23
both like, this is way bigger than I thought it
2:43:25
was going to be. And the rockets are way bigger
2:43:27
than you thought. And like the garage doors are fucking bananas.
2:43:30
They got a city government website. Commission.
2:43:34
Speaker 3: Mayor.
2:43:37
Speaker 2: That's crazy. It's really crazy.
2:43:39
Speaker 1: Bobby Petit. Bobby Petit is the mayor.
2:43:42
Speaker 2: They have their own little Irish pub. It's really cool.
2:43:46
They have really good food.
2:43:47
Speaker 1: You know, when he opened the first Gigafactory, which was
2:43:50
in Nevada, we had a party. And it was like
2:43:54
a small opening thing. And so we all drove in there.
2:43:56
And I have a video of me in just like
2:43:59
a pickup truck driving into the thing. I started the video.
2:44:04
And I think it was 43 seconds until it ended.
2:44:07
And this was like, you know, a decade ago. And
2:44:09
I thought to myself, this is implausible. Like I've never
2:44:12
even contemplated things that could be built this big. I
2:44:15
didn't think it was allowed. I don't even know how
2:44:17
something like this works. And I was like, how do
2:44:21
you envision this whole thing works? Like simple. Raw materials
2:44:25
in the front. Cars out the back.
2:44:31
Speaker 2: That's it?
2:44:31
Speaker 1: It sounds so simple.
2:44:33
Speaker 2: Well, he thinks big. He thinks big and thank God
2:44:36
he's around. I mean if he wasn't around, if he
2:44:39
hadn't purchased Twitter, I think our entire civilization would look
2:44:42
very different.
2:44:43
Speaker 1: Very different.
2:44:44
Speaker 2: I mean that sounds like a very grandiose thing to say.
2:44:46
Speaker 1: It sounds hyperbolic but you're right.
2:44:48
Speaker 2: I think it's true because I don't– I think free
2:44:50
speech is a core component of our civilization and I
2:44:54
don't really think we had it. I think it was
2:44:56
curated and it was very tightly controlled by the actual
2:45:00
federal government, which is spooky. No, no.
2:45:02
Speaker 1: It decided what we should be paying attention to.
2:45:06
Speaker 2: Yes.
2:45:06
Speaker 1: Just put it very simply without kind of like– and
2:45:09
that's not right.
2:45:10
Speaker 2: Right.
2:45:11
Speaker 1: Because when they're telling you to pay attention to this
2:45:15
and the actual issue is this and you cannot, then
2:45:19
you can't fix what's actually broken. Right. And you start
2:45:22
to– we start to basically be like we're part of
2:45:25
just a useful idiot for these people.
2:45:27
Speaker 2: Yes.
2:45:28
Speaker 1: And that's not right.
2:45:29
Speaker 2: It's not right. Listen, man. This was a lot of fun.
2:45:32
It's always great to talk to you. Thank you very
2:45:34
much for doing this. It was very cool. Let's do
2:45:37
it again sometime. All right. Thank you.
2:45:39
Speaker 1: All right.
2:45:40
Speaker 3: Bye, everybody.
2:45:40
Speaker 1: Bye.