Latest / AI for Founders with Ryan Estes / Unlocking human and machine consciousness with Steven Schrembeck

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Unlocking human and machine consciousness with Steven Schrembeck · AI for Founders with Ryan Estes

0:00
Welcome back to AI for Founders. I'm your host, Ryan Estes.
0:03
I am not AI. Today's episode is a deep one.
0:06
I'm joined by Steven Schrenbeck, founder of Impossible Labs and a
0:10
thinker at the intersection of AI, consciousness and human
0:14
meaning. But this isn't just another tech
0:16
chat. Stevenson Explorer blending
0:18
software engineering with over 1000 hours of meditation
0:21
practice. We talk about brain, computer
0:24
interface, sensory substitution, psychedelics, even close
0:28
encounters with UFOs, My favorite stuff.
0:31
It's a conversation that challenges assumptions about
0:34
what's real, what's possible, and what it means to be human in
0:37
a world rapidly reshaped by artificial intelligence.
0:40
If you're curious about where technology ends and
0:42
consciousness begins, or even if there's a boundary, then this
0:46
episode is for you. Let's dive in.
0:48
But first, some business. This episode is brought to you
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Let's get your voice out there. That's Kick Caster by MO Burst.
1:44
All right, Steven, how are you doing?
1:45
Thanks for coming on the show. I'm having a pretty good day
1:49
actually. Just finished a run so feeling
1:52
pretty mellow. Did a long meditation, ready to
1:54
chat. Tremendous.
1:56
And that's really what I want to speak with you to begin.
1:59
I want to hear about all your projects.
2:00
But you know, when you became available for an interview, one
2:04
thing really stood out and that's this the intersection of
2:07
AI and human meaning. Meditation research, brain,
2:11
computer interfaces and sensory substitution.
2:14
So because you mentioned meditation, let's start there.
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What? What kind of meditation do you
2:19
do? I At this point I have my own
2:25
spin on it. I don't follow a specific school
2:27
or methodology, although I like to borrow from them.
2:30
I do frankly, I do about an hour meditation every morning.
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I've, I'd probably get maybe 1000 hours into my belt.
2:37
So I'm not like a guru or anything, but for me it's like 2
2:40
different things. It's this is how I reset myself.
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This is how I get my brain and body to function like this is it
2:47
has a bigger effect than almost anything else I do in life, even
2:51
than medications, anything like that, besides maybe sleep.
2:54
And the other is like inner space exploration, right?
2:57
It's that we've got this tool to explore what is reality, right?
3:01
What is, how do we, how does consciousness interact with, you
3:05
know, the physical world and what are the rules?
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And so you got this tool to probe at, you know, what are
3:09
the, the rules of experience? And I can't think of a better
3:13
tool for exploration, for like meaning and purpose and our
3:17
place in the world, what matters, how it all works.
3:19
So I mean, that's the other big thing.
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That's what it is to me. Amazing.
3:24
OK, so you've got 1000 hours under your belt.
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What brought you to the cushion? Well, I started out probably
3:32
like a lot of people. It's OK.
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I'll do 10 minutes here, 20 minutes here.
3:35
I'll guilt trip myself into it. I'll take a couple months off.
3:39
Yeah. It was a it was a thing you
3:41
should do, you know? And then at some point, I read
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the autobiography for Michael Singer.
3:49
I think it's The Surrender experiment.
3:50
Then I read his, his actual book after that.
3:56
The name escapes me at this point.
3:58
It'll come back. The Untethered Soul and he
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talked about just like, oh, I did like this 2 hour meditation
4:03
and had this profound like experience and like what you can
4:07
do that just by sitting there. I had no idea that this was even
4:11
a thing. Very naive at this point in
4:13
time, didn't know anything about, you know, you know, yoga
4:16
traditions or the yogis or you know, there's paths to
4:19
enlightenment or different techniques or any of the altered
4:23
states that are possible without psychedelics or anything, right.
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No intervention at all. Things you can do with just your
4:28
own mind and where you put your attention.
4:31
And your concentration is crazy. And I had no idea you could
4:35
reach these kinds of experiences or like insight just by sitting
4:39
there properly. And that's really what brought
4:41
me in is this fascination. It's the same thing that draws
4:43
me to technology. It's like I got to know, I got
4:45
to play with it. I'm curious.
4:47
I need to know the rules and can I do some engineering with it
4:50
once I understand how it works? So yeah, that's that's what
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pulled me in. Amazing.
4:54
And then when you're sitting, you said you're pulling from
4:57
multiple traditions, but nothing in particular.
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What are you doing when you're when you're meditating?
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So my basic protocol again, I, I sometimes it's how I realize I'm
5:10
angry and stressed out and most of the session is just like
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resetting to 0, right? That's, that's not exciting.
5:15
My basic protocol draws right from the Yoga Sutras, right?
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It's, it's pretty simple. It is a process of letting go,
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attempting to find a center and basically whatever you're
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putting your attention on is not the thing to put your attention
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on. And it is a process of
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progressively relaxing and moving your attention almost
5:35
like a like a knot. It just continue to invert
5:38
whatever you're looking at now without freaking out or
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anything, but it's basically moving from big overt bodily
5:44
sensations to OK now emotional and now I'm aware of thoughts.
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It's a continual separation of vote.
5:49
That's not me. That's not me.
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That's not me until there's nothing left but the sense of
5:54
self. And then if you want to, you can
5:56
try to keep going and have an ego death experience that's
6:00
frankly not in a realistic goal for most sessions.
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It I really don't enjoy it. I don't it's not like a fun
6:06
experience, but there are other. Sometimes I'll pick other
6:09
targets for meditation depending on what I'm trying to do, but
6:11
that's my my go to. Nice.
6:16
And why not choose a particular path?
6:20
Why not zazen? Why not, you know, mindfulness
6:25
base stress reduction? Why not Zoke Chen?
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Is there? Is there something you're
6:30
gaining by not committing to a particular dogma?
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I am totally open to being naive and probably a lot of these
6:39
practitioners would be happy to tell me that I just something in
6:43
me. It just is irked by dogma and
6:46
authority and tradition and this is the way it's done.
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I love to just come in like slurp up, OK, why does it work
6:52
that way? How does it function?
6:54
Let me try it myself. And I try, I want to try to
6:56
understand why the existing structures work and anything
7:00
really. And then I take it and I leave
7:02
the rest because I'm completely uninterested and why we do this,
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because it's the way. This is the next step.
7:07
You don't get to progress. Now.
7:08
I got to study these stupid cones for a long time.
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I don't think I'm going to do that.
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I'm going to follow my interest and my intuition and that's what
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I'm going to do. And I end up, I think that it
7:19
can be detrimental, this mindset in life because it causes you
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to, if you're not aware of what you're doing, to waste a bunch
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of cycles replicating work that other people have already
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figured out. However, you know, at some
7:31
point, it's also where everything new comes from are
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from people who are interested in defying what already exists
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or reassembling or synthesizing from multiple sources.
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And that's frankly myself as interest is that's what draws me
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as I want. I want to learn it.
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I want to do it myself, making my own or I'll just quit because
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it's boring. What a way?
7:54
Do you mind if I share a little bit of my experience with
7:56
meditation? Please, there's a conversation.
7:59
Let's hear you. Bet so I I started as a kid, you
8:02
know, I was probably 1617 reading the Dow to Ching had a
8:05
couple of books. This is before the Internet.
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So I was doing my thing and I didn't know if I was doing it
8:10
right or whatever. And so intermittently.
8:12
A hardcore kid. I thought it was cool, man.
8:16
I was into like, you know, Jack Kerouac and stuff.
8:18
I read the Dharma Bums. I was like, dude, I'm a Buddhist
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now, what's up? So, you know, and I carried on
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and picked up, you know, little tips here and there.
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Never really knew what I was doing, but got pretty serious
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about it maybe 10 years ago. And it's like now you know what,
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this is my path. And a part of that was looking
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for a sang ha. And so I was like, you know, on
8:38
one side, I want further instruction for some of these
8:41
mental techniques, but also I'm an able bodied man and I think
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there's a community out there that could use a guy with a
8:49
pickup truck. I mean, it's adorable that you
8:51
go to your religion for something you believe in or
8:53
something. But ultimately you just need
8:55
like a competent man or woman, you know?
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So what I did is I went to all the different temples here in
9:03
Denver and in Boulder and stuff and basically, you know,
9:06
interviewed him was like, hey, this is what I do.
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I'm interested in this. What do you think?
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What do you think I should do? And every single one of them
9:12
said you should stay here and do this with us.
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And I'll bet you know. And so I was kind of leaning
9:21
towards Jambala, you know, which has like a great history in in
9:26
Boulder and of course, you know, scandalous one.
9:31
Well, the IT really blew up like right then, like the whole
9:34
Shambhala thing came tumbling down lawsuits.
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I mean, what they were doing the 60s and 70s were was pretty
9:40
awful. And it continued that behavior
9:43
until present day. So to your point, kind of
9:45
disillusioned didn't bitter by the whole thing.
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Now what I did a few years ago is it's still very part in
9:53
central of who I am meditating, but also like kind of studying
9:56
these Buddhist traditions in in various different ways.
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So I went on a whole bunch of podcasts.
10:00
Again, I have this kind of like seeker energy.
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So I went on a bunch of Buddhist podcasts and wanted to talk
10:06
about bringing contemplative practice to business and I was
10:10
roundly rejected by like 1/2 a dozen.
10:14
I do these interviews and they'd be like, you're not Buddhist or
10:18
you're not Buddhist enough or you're not this or that.
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And I'm like, who are you? You know they wouldn't even air
10:23
the episodes. You're talking to the wrong
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people, man. Yeah, well, I'm talking to a lot
10:27
of different people, but, you know, I, I, I think there's
10:29
value to a tradition. Yeah, I'm a martial artist, so
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I, I, but I'm a mixed martial artist, so I, I like to bring
10:37
them all together. So anyway, that, that's kind of
10:40
my experience and I've had the same thing.
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It's like, no, you know what, I'm going to switch from
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kundalini to, to Zhou Chen techniques to, you know, just
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simple Zazan is probably my favorite, what I do mostly on
10:53
the cushion and keep it moving. Now the American Buddhist
10:56
tradition is also very interesting to me, largely
11:00
because it's marred in partying. So I don't think you can, you
11:05
can extract the the American contemplative tradition without
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psychedelics, alcohol and scandalous sex and psychedelics
11:17
in particular, because this is it's non consensual
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enlightenment in a way where it confirms that there is a terrain
11:25
to traverse. You know, psychedelics aren't as
11:29
much of an intoxicant as they are kind of a revealing of an
11:32
inner landscape. And so, you know, at least for
11:35
me, it was instrumental in like being like, whoa, there's
11:38
something going on in here. And then of course, you know,
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you can, you can find some of those states like you were
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talking about on the cushion without all the fireworks.
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You know, it can be kind of distracting sometimes.
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So how about you, what was your experience with with
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psychedelics and and how does that incorporate in any way to
11:54
your sitting practice? Pretty limited.
11:59
So pretty much legal forms of marijuana and psilocybin.
12:04
So they're all not nearly as strong as the illicit compounds.
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Depends on where you are. Denver a lot there.
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There's a lot legal in Denver. That's true.
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So, but you know enough to have a profoundly different
12:21
experience. All right, we'll put it that
12:23
way. And but I did it after having
12:26
done a lot of meditation and found that to my great surprise,
12:31
oh, there's nothing really new here.
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Now, I'm sure this is different if you're using DMT or
12:36
something, you're using that, that what is it that cactus or
12:40
flower compound. I'm in the middle of the desert.
12:42
I'm sure that's a different experience entirely.
12:44
But for the most part, I was shocked to find, oh, this is
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like the same thing. Like I've been here, right?
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This is like next door. And so I described it to others
12:56
as like, OK, psychedelics is like strapping yourself to a
12:59
rocket. You got no choice.
13:00
You're on the ride and or you can learn how to fly and you can
13:04
go as slow as you want with an airplane.
13:06
You could just sort of putter around on the runway.
13:08
You can take off whenever you're ready.
13:10
Besides, you don't like it, you can land again.
13:12
It's a useful thing and probably better most of the time, but
13:16
sometimes some people, and I guess on purpose, you need a
13:20
rocket launch to really kick yourself out of where you are.
13:23
Get it started to know that there's a there, there, you
13:25
know, all the, the great, you know, Jewish Buddhists in in
13:30
America, Jack Kornfield and what is Sharon and all these guys and
13:38
gals, they all came out of the hippie movement taking ass and
13:40
being like, Oh my God, I got to go to India.
13:42
You know, Ramdas, all these guys, even what's his name,
13:47
Timothy Leary. I mean, they all started there.
13:51
But to your point, it is a familiar place and particularly
13:56
with these contemplative traditions, why I do like
13:58
studying kind of the the Buddhist doctrines is because
14:02
they're all about these lists and they, they love to like
14:05
categorize stuff, but they plot the.
14:08
Terrain. So much gamification.
14:10
Yeah, and they have hierarchies, you know, so they have these
14:12
genre or genres where you're like, OK, you're level 1, you're
14:15
level 2, you're Level 3, you're level 4.
14:18
And you can start to like figure out like what lives in these or
14:22
what is in these different realms and kind of how to
14:25
traverse them. You know, So it, it's
14:30
fascinating. So meditation, you're doing an
14:33
hour a day, which is quite a bit.
14:36
When do you like to to do meditation and talk a little bit
14:38
how it influences your life? Well, I, I didn't start that
14:46
way, right? I, I started slowly increasing,
14:48
but I noticed I was getting to more and more insight.
14:52
It was profoundly affecting me like it at certain times, like I
14:55
was scrambling to this as a way to to find insight.
15:01
Like to the easiest way of describing it is it allows me to
15:05
insulate myself from the world and to at least for there's a
15:08
half life to it, but bring to my work, to my family interactions,
15:12
everything I do to act from as innermost intention as you can
15:17
have right it. I'm trying to make sure that the
15:19
first and most important intentions I have for the day or
15:22
my time or even in response to things that I didn't expect are
15:26
coming from my values or from my, my desires and not what the
15:30
world has sort of pushed into my field of view.
15:34
So it has been an amazing tool for that.
15:37
So I found that the more I increase the time, the better
15:41
effects I got. And then at some point, just
15:43
like long distance running, you know, you, you connect the loop,
15:47
the reward circuitry and like, oh, this is helping me.
15:50
And it no longer became a challenge most of the time to
15:53
sit down and do that time. I don't do it right as I wake up
15:55
because I'm too tired and I'm cranky or, or I don't, I don't
16:01
sort of foggy headed. I usually do it a little later,
16:03
8 between 8:00 and 10:00 AM. It's about two hours after
16:07
waking or three or four hours after waking.
16:11
But yeah, so I mean, that's my schedule and that's a lot of
16:14
what it's for. And I I often will just pick
16:16
what I'm interested in and I will pick a technique or a
16:19
target of focus and just try stuff out.
16:23
There's definitely more to the story than that, but that's my
16:25
that's my schedule. I love it.
16:27
And then when you say insights, maybe explain to people what you
16:30
mean. What are insights in meditation
16:32
all. Right, So I mean, I, I risk of
16:39
sounding like a crazy person, but I'm, I prefer to just be
16:42
completely honest and think I'm a fool if you like.
16:46
But so I for a long time, you know, will say the first 2-3
16:51
hundred sessions there I was after, you know, some form of
16:55
enlightenment. I was after trying to, I wanted
17:00
the superpower of being able to walk through the world without
17:02
being bothered by things so that I could act from what I thought
17:06
was the right thing to do without being so attached to it.
17:09
That's really what I was after, not to just like transcend my
17:12
body and start glowing and flying around or become like the
17:16
Buddha or whatever. I had no interest in like
17:19
leaving life. I wanted to be better in it, and
17:23
that still is my goal. But then I had some very
17:26
profound experiences, basically a couple pretty close UFO
17:31
sightings that totally rocked my world.
17:33
I'm like, holy crap, this isn't just a game.
17:35
Like we don't understand the world.
17:37
Like, I don't know what this was, but it wasn't something
17:41
that human beings made. And I was definitely not crazy.
17:46
Well, at least no more crazy than everyone else.
17:48
And. Pause.
17:49
Tell me everything right about this.
17:52
Tell me. Tell me, Tell me.
17:53
Really. Yes, OK, I'll, I'll, I'll say
17:57
that the the punchline and then we'll come back as the punchline
17:59
is that this caused me to get much more serious about the
18:02
weird parts of meditation and using exploring inner spaces as
18:07
a tool for understanding what the heck is going on here.
18:10
Why are we here? What's going on?
18:13
Why does how does the world work?
18:15
And that I mean, it totally derailed my, you know, startup
18:19
intentions and well, I won't say derailed it.
18:21
It shifted everything in my life, right.
18:23
It's now I'm incorporating everything.
18:25
So the UFO things, I've had three experiences, need to go
18:29
into great detail on some of them.
18:31
The first one was just looking out my back window.
18:34
I see like these weird flashing lights.
18:36
They're just white orbs in the distance going across the
18:38
skyline. Got a great view from my back
18:41
window. I can see a very long distance
18:43
and they were, it was like a neural network.
18:45
They were just firing in the sequence.
18:46
It's very weird, like they were not in a line.
18:51
They're just like this cloud. It's very strange.
18:54
The second one, I was going for a run.
18:56
This is maybe six months to a year after that going for a run
19:00
I see flying about 1/4 of a mile behind my house.
19:03
I was deep in a non dualistic meditation at this point.
19:07
I was watching a guy running I'll put it that way.
19:10
And so and I just see flying about 1/4 mile behind myself
19:14
house but looks like a black bean, like a kidney bean shape.
19:18
I don't know how to. It was this weird matte black
19:20
with a mother of Pearl Sheen like a little rainbow Sheen all
19:24
over it. It could have been 6 feet tall.
19:26
It's hard to tell the distance. It was just floating in a
19:29
straight line, no sound and not it was.
19:32
I checked later, it was going against the wind by about 15
19:35
miles an hour and that's it. It's just floating.
19:38
I saw it for about 6 seconds and that's that started to RIP me
19:41
right back out of meditation, begin to associate real quick.
19:45
At first I'm like, I knew that would be there.
19:46
That's the profound sense I had. I knew it would be there.
19:50
And then I'm like, wait a minute, that doesn't make any
19:52
sense. What am I looking at?
19:54
And then I started like, I got to go get like a monocle.
19:58
And then the third story in a nutshell is about four months
20:01
ago. Me and my wife go for a walk
20:02
every night, and we're in the neighborhood.
20:05
And I just have this profound sense that we're going to see
20:07
something, which is, again, very weird.
20:10
And it's sort of a cloudy night. And we see this white orb
20:13
coming. And I think it's Venus.
20:16
I think it's nothing. She's like, that's not a star,
20:18
It's not a planet. It's coming closer.
20:20
I'm like, no it's not. Sure enough, it starts to come
20:23
closer and closer, and now it's over the tree line and I look
20:27
through my 8X monocle because I have one now.
20:28
At this point, it's happened twice.
20:30
I'm like, I got to start running around with this thing and it's
20:33
a glowing white ball. I look through the 8X monocle,
20:36
that's it. That's all it is, is a glowing
20:38
white ball. There's no sound and it flies
20:41
over our heads. It goes across the tree line,
20:44
starts to accelerate, no sound at all, no other effects.
20:48
And then it just lets out this plume of like white stuff behind
20:52
it like a comet. And it just, I, I stared at it
20:55
because she turned around and said I got to go get the kids, I
20:57
got to get a camera and she ran. I knew to keep staring at it.
21:01
I've read enough stories at this point.
21:03
I I'm watching this thing. Sure enough, as soon as she
21:06
turns around, it fades out just like turning the opacity down to
21:09
0, like in a transition. It's gone.
21:12
It's just gone and that's it. So those are my experiences.
21:16
Amazing. Do you think the orbs and the
21:18
kidney bean thing are the same thing?
21:23
Man, I got a lot of theories, but I honestly all I have are
21:26
are theories. I know that nobody's knocking at
21:28
my door. I never got a book in the mail
21:29
describing how it all works. It seems like honestly, it just
21:33
seems like a prod just to like a little poke from outside of what
21:38
we think is real. The consensus reality, what most
21:40
people think exists. Just a little paw.
21:43
Just rattle the cage a little bit, hey?
21:46
Yeah. Just enough to get me to take
21:48
meditation seriously to, you know, start looking into this.
21:51
Honestly, that's what it looks like is somebody from the
21:53
outside looking at humans going you guys screwed up.
21:57
Hey, just a little slap. There's more out there.
22:00
Go look that's but I think honestly.
22:02
Well, and they've been flirting with all kinds of disclosures
22:04
for years and years and years now.
22:06
So I mean, it's coming, you know it it And there's really there's
22:11
just a couple of options. Either there's some kind of
22:14
interdimensional travel beings or they're from outside of the
22:18
earth in some kind of spacecraft, or they're
22:21
unbelievably old and they've been here for a long time and
22:24
they just re emerge or there's some kind of drone technology
22:27
that that the government has, you know, it's like take your
22:31
pick. Yeah.
22:33
I'm not ruling out the last one, but I don't think it's that one
22:36
exclusively to be honest with you that people think way too
22:41
highly of the government if they think that this is also why you
22:45
harassing this random guy with like weird.
22:48
What are you using this money for?
22:49
This is pretty dumb. I think it's pretty obviously
22:51
like some sort of intelligent entities of some kind from
22:56
another time, from the dimension, from the world's,
22:59
from our world, very old. Like you don't have to violate
23:02
physics as we know it. I think it's just there are more
23:04
rules than we realized, more fundamental rules.
23:08
And we're naive. We're babies in the universe,
23:10
you know I. Agree.
23:11
I my cousin is has a he's a doctor of physics and does
23:18
physics work with I I think like neon gas or something the way
23:22
above my pay grade. But I saw him last week and I
23:26
was like, hey man, do you think the reason that there haven't
23:30
been dramatic advancements is physics were was because after
23:34
area 51 crashed that like they black boxed all the physics
23:38
while they were reverse engineering the UFOs?
23:40
And he was like, what the hell are you talking about?
23:44
I was like, dude, come on, man. I thought you would know he he
23:47
did not. But I.
23:49
I wanted the inside scoop. I love this idea.
23:53
And to kind of tie it into like the meditation, you know, some
23:56
people might also say, well, Steven, you were in like a
23:59
heightened state. You may have like hallucinated
24:02
the whole thing because that is also a part of ascending in
24:07
genres. It's like you can reach places
24:09
that a celestial realm where you know, the, the Tibetans describe
24:13
all these amazing monsters and stuff like that.
24:16
They all put orbs in absolutely everything.
24:20
I, I'm kind of a student of crystal balls because they are
24:26
absolutely everywhere. In fact, I, that's what I use.
24:29
You can see it back there next to the mirror.
24:34
It's a little crystal ball. So these orbs might have been
24:37
like tipping people off through history.
24:40
Why are they using them in these contemplative practices?
24:42
I don't know. Point is, the, the point I'm
24:44
trying to get to is that consciousness has this terrain
24:50
that you can explore independently.
24:52
Now I, I understand your, your hesitance to talk about it too
24:56
much. I'd have it too, because this
24:58
puts you into some kind of woo woo category.
25:00
And they're like, all right, man, what do you, what are you
25:02
going to do here? I know where the Overton window
25:04
is, right? I have an awareness of where the
25:06
Overton window is, Yeah, even if I think it's wrong.
25:09
Now, now there is kind of like an emergent understanding
25:13
within, we'll call them atheists that say like, no, you know
25:17
what? What's happening with human
25:19
consciousness isn't necessarily limited to a substrate, which is
25:22
to say that it must be bound by flesh.
25:25
Rather it there might be a particle of consciousness, there
25:29
might be a like a gravity type field of consciousness that once
25:34
you reach a certain complexity that you can tap into.
25:38
And so basically what they're doing is taking away like the
25:42
God and goddess realm, which I don't know if that's necessary
25:45
to do that. They take away all the magic and
25:48
they're like, no, consciousness is an emergent phenomenon inside
25:52
the universe. Now how maybe this trans
25:55
translates to the subject of this podcast is, you know, if
25:59
consciousness is not limited by substrate and in fact is just an
26:04
emergent factor of the universe, do you think that like we'll be
26:08
able to create an AGI that can tap into that, become self
26:12
aware? And that's a profound question.
26:18
I guess my answer to these camps is yes.
26:20
And don't be so quick to assume that either of you is right or
26:24
either of you is wrong. My take is I at this point in
26:29
time I don't know but I'm trying to find out.
26:33
That is my take. Like I have hunches, I have
26:35
ideas, but I hold them all loosely or as loosely as I can.
26:39
But I have to have some beliefs in order to progress and test
26:42
things. But I have a position of
26:44
complete humility. I believe that there is a lot to
26:47
learn from what has exist and what people have already
26:49
studied, and it'd be silly to throw away thousands of years of
26:52
knowledge and practice. That's an amazing starting
26:55
point. At the same time, I also think
26:57
that we should be open to it being weirder than we think.
27:01
And it's premature to start closing off too many things when
27:05
really we've only just started exploring with new tools of
27:08
science, technology and engineering and bringing those
27:11
to bear. And to some degree, logic and
27:13
mathematics and physics and bringing those tools to bear as
27:16
well. And they are equally valid.
27:18
And I'm not interested in anyone who thinks we should throw away
27:22
any of these tools. Now, that said, using AGI, well,
27:26
I think we need to learn a lot more about consciousness,
27:29
especially as it applies to the ethics of artificial
27:34
intelligence. If we are running these things
27:36
in a box at a million times the cycle rate of your brain, what
27:41
are we doing to them? Enough people have seen Black
27:44
Mirror at this point to understand the implications that
27:46
we should be careful because we don't know what's conscious, we
27:50
don't know what is in there experiencing things.
27:52
And for that reason alone, can it be done?
27:56
Maybe we need to understand the interface of how human
28:00
consciousness interfaces with the material world.
28:03
Are they separate? How are they separate?
28:04
How are they connected? What are the rules?
28:07
Why are they connected this way? Why is it limited to these
28:10
perspectives? We need to understand how it
28:12
works. And then from there we can begin
28:15
to look at. We can begin to just like a folk
28:19
crash or any found piece of technology.
28:21
The human brain and body is a found piece of technology.
28:24
Really we can. Just like we've done with AI up
28:27
until this point. We begin to reverse engineer the
28:30
consciousness connection to the body and understand why it is we
28:33
experience what we experience and how attention and all these
28:36
things correlate and being open to very different rules of
28:40
reality than we thought existed. Then we can start engineering
28:43
with it. But I think it's premature to
28:45
engineer when we don't even have the science.
28:47
The science comes first, and I don't mean you have to have an
28:50
academic paper in a lab and do these things.
28:53
Doing personal exploration is valid science.
28:56
There's lots of different kinds of evidence, but you need to
29:00
have some basis, some priors in order to begin engineering.
29:03
And that's really what I think we need to understand that.
29:06
What are the ground rules of the game?
29:08
I'll start testing stuff and taking it seriously.
29:10
So that is my point. I think it could be possible,
29:15
but we just I at least I don't have a high confidence that we
29:18
know enough of the rules with enough confidence to begin
29:21
engineering something reliable or even understanding what it's
29:24
doing. Just a wild guess.
29:27
Let's say AGI becomes aware and it has a subjective experience
29:32
of being itself. What's the expression of that?
29:35
Is it a giggle? Is it a moan?
29:37
Is it a scream? Is it a poem?
29:39
I'm. Sitting, it depends on what it's
29:47
aware of. Where is the threshold between
29:49
awareness and function. You don't spend a whole lot of
29:53
time thinking about how to digest your food.
29:55
And yet it's a critical and a lot of energy goes into there's
29:57
a lot of a lot of cells in your body are doing it and they do
30:00
belong to you. So where is the divide?
30:03
Where where does it put its attention versus where can it
30:05
put its attention? And I think that is what will
30:07
shape its experience and its experience will shape what it
30:11
feels. If I had to take a guess, if
30:14
we're using an LLM based architecture, which I think is a
30:17
part of the at least the first major portions of AGI, but it is
30:23
only one major part. It's not the whole thing.
30:25
We're not not there yet, we're close, but it's not LLMS alone.
30:29
I think that just looking at LLMS, you can, you can ask them
30:32
about their experience now. And if you're clever about it,
30:35
you can begin to understand what it's experiencing just by
30:38
looking through how the architecture works.
30:41
It it would, I would have to guess it's a lot like being a
30:48
sort of mycelial network, like a or a tree root network of a lot
30:53
of different organisms, but in Fast forward and all at the same
30:56
time from one perspective, like it's all one solid thing rather
31:01
than multiple things. I think that that is what it
31:03
would be the closest experience. Now what is that like?
31:06
Tell me I. Know wild.
31:10
OK we're coming up on time. You got maybe 5 more minutes, we
31:13
can do the lightning round. Yeah, sure.
31:17
Absolutely. If you were just entering
31:20
college today as a freshman, what would you study?
31:28
I would study something that gives me a well paying job and
31:32
an attention span and I would write.
31:36
I would study the other smart people in my college because
31:39
that's the biggest asset you're going to get out of college is
31:42
relationship relationships. What you're studying is
31:44
pointless. What do you see as a well paying
31:46
job right now? OK, right now it's going to
31:51
change. Well, right now you can should
31:54
continue to ride the AI hype wave, specifically on the
31:57
engineering and application side.
31:59
Knowing how to do things is key. It's going to be exceptionally
32:02
hard to get a entry level job at any technology position at this
32:05
point in time. But hard is not the same as
32:08
impossible. You need to differentiate
32:09
yourself. So technology and engineering is
32:12
the right place to go. If I'm giving a longer time
32:14
frame, 10 to 1520 years, it is in.
32:19
If you if you just want a good job, it's in physical
32:22
engineering. We have a massive deficit in
32:25
knowing how to build actual physical things that do stuff,
32:28
run electricity and turn stuff and function.
32:32
We have a lot of people who know how to sit at a desk and move
32:36
spreadsheets around. That's not the kind of
32:38
engineering we need. We need people who know how to
32:39
do things. So be useful and you'll be fine.
32:42
Love it. Let's say a big bag fell out of
32:45
a UAP and it's got a billion dollars in it.
32:47
You can do whatever you want. What do you?
32:52
Do I'm going to just scale up what I'm already doing?
32:56
I'm living a small version of that, right?
32:57
It's, you know, maybe good contracts and day job or
33:01
whatever. However I'm choosing to earn my
33:03
money at that time like that takes a bit of a backseat to
33:06
whatever, but it's improving a think tank.
33:10
I really want to test the boundaries of consciousness.
33:14
I want to begin like I said, engineering with things that
33:19
appear to be real that people didn't think were real.
33:21
There's, there's a whole swath of those things.
33:23
We'd have time to get into all of them.
33:24
But I want to use technology again to improve people's lives.
33:28
We need an optimistic vision of the world and we've lost that.
33:31
Technology has been something we've come to fear and hate and
33:34
control us, but we can use it to as a positive lever too.
33:38
So whatever I do, it would be just magnifying technology as a
33:43
optimistic lever for humanity again.
33:46
Beautiful. What are your favorite AI tools
33:47
right now? Frankly, I either make my own or
33:55
I just use stock GBT chat DBT. Often I'll use it in the
34:00
playground because I can replay messages and I can see the inner
34:03
thoughts and all that and it's a lot easier.
34:05
But or just using something simple and constructing a bunch
34:09
of change prompts. That is in terms of LLMS, that's
34:14
what I'm doing. But it's because I've found that
34:17
many of the agentic stuff, many of the composite tools that
34:21
people put together are just crap.
34:23
If you know how to do something, it gets in your way.
34:25
And I found that it's best at things you don't know how to do
34:29
if you're just interfacing with it.
34:33
And so I still use it for that, but I can just use a chat window
34:35
for that. So it's just worse at doing the
34:38
things I already know how to do. So typically I will build tools
34:43
on my own and or as a product. And so I make my own.
34:48
Frankly, I know it's sort of a lame answer, but that's that's
34:52
the truth. Love it.
34:54
Is there something you know now that you wish you knew earlier?
35:00
Anything at all. Anything kind of an obnoxious.
35:04
Question. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
35:08
I'll take the core insight that got me to start impossible labs
35:11
and making software, which is stop relying on willpower right
35:16
to to do things. And so originally I started out
35:19
making software for, you know, just the brain and motivation
35:22
and controlling attention. I realized that whether using
35:26
software or anything else, that playing playing game wasn't
35:29
working in life and that one side turned to sort of an anti
35:33
fragile mentality and learning how to use rules and systems,
35:36
some of them software, not all of them.
35:38
Stop relying on expecting yourself to do the right thing
35:41
and adding systems and figuring out root problems and stop
35:47
relying on willpower and effort to get things done.
35:50
My life got so much easier and better and more carefree and I
35:54
get a paradox. They get got a lot more done.
35:56
I stopped forcing it so much. So I'd say that is that is the
36:00
one key lesson over the last five to 10 years.
36:02
If I could only keep one, it would be that one.
36:04
I'm picking that one up and put it in my pocket.
36:06
I need to hear that. If you could live in any
36:09
historical era ever except the future, which would it be?
36:16
I don't want to give the cop out answer but it's basically now
36:19
OK, you want me to pick one? Pick one.
36:24
OK, I would pick probably the time about 12,000 years ago.
36:30
I really want to know what these ancient civilizations were like.
36:34
So I'd say the height of technology before massive
36:37
cataclysms for humankind. I would love to see how good
36:40
they were at Stonework or whatever the heck they were up
36:42
to. Like that we've totally
36:44
forgotten. I'd love to see it.
36:45
Me too amazing. Where can people connect with
36:48
you online? I have a website
36:51
calledimpossiblelaboratories.com. You can see like all the
36:55
information there I occasionally released, like blog posts and
36:58
podcasts just talking about all the crazy stuff I'm building and
37:01
coming up with. Some of it has market potential,
37:04
most of it doesn't and I'm just exploring and I'm honest about
37:07
that. Steven, this has been awesome.
37:10
Thank you so much for the conversation.
37:13
Absolutely. Thank you.
37:16
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37:20
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37:24
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