Video URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=isr0B7nn_FE
[Music] have you done a podcast before i've done podcasts before nothing with this reach though so that's exciting you can't think about that no not at all each part yep um first of all very nice to meet you yeah you too you're like you're a tech og like you know when it comes to like the tech people you're you're like you know you're at the forefront of it i mean you were one of the co-founders you were one of the co-creators of mosaic right yeah that's right what was it like before there were web browsers so how do you know you know a time before web browsers like i do so i'm an og now but when i first started i thought i missed the whole thing really i thought i missed the whole because i missed the personal computer i missed the whole thing you missed the ad the in original use of the personal computer yeah the personal computer and before that all the other computers that you know came before that so the computer revolution kind of happened over the 50 years right before i showed up what was the first personal computer the first personal computer the first true personal computer they were like kits in the early 70s that you could build the first interactive computer that you could use the way you use a pc was all the way back in the 50s it was a system called plato at the university of illinois where i went and it was uh it was really it's there's a great book called the uh that's like the bright orange glow and it was a it was a screen black screen with only orange graphics um and they built it by hand at the time and they had the whole thing working and so they like these ideas are all old ideas they had email like they had all these ideas kind of way back when it just they had emails yeah that email and messaging and multiplayer video games and all that stuff back in the 50s really yeah it just was it just was only in a couple places it was really hard to get it working it was expensive when you say multiplayer video games it wasn't like a graphic video they had like very simple very simple graphics very simple like space war games or whatever i mean really remember like asteroids yeah yeah like that quality of stuff or even even
simpler than that so what year was asteroids asteroids would have been in the late 70s 77 78 79 somewhere in there pong was 74 i think which was the big the first console the first arcade video game was pong yeah we had one somewhere around that time and i remember thinking it was the most crazy thing i've ever seen in my life that you could play a thing that's taking place on your television you could move the dial and the thing on the television would move i mean it was magic it's so crude and dumb for kids today they would never believe the the impact that it had yeah on people back then so before the one you had in your tv set that was later on before they had the the arcade game the console in the in the arcade and the the story there is crazy is this guy nolan bushnell who's the founder of this company atari that basically created the video game industry and he he developed this this game pong so he literally built one like they had no idea if anybody want to play a video game at that point so they built one they built this this console they put it in a bar in mountain view in in silicon valley um and uh the guy the owner of the bar called up you know three days later and he's like you know your thing is broke like come get it um and you know nolan's like all depressed and he goes in and he realizes the the the thing it's so jammed with quarters it was so popular right that people just like kept jamming quarters in it right and it literally like it couldn't take any more quarters and literally he was like aha you know proof people actually want to play video games like that's how like even that was not obvious at the time yeah i remember the first video game arcades and like a complex game was what did was that there was like a dungeons and dragons game what was it called dragon quest or something there was the first laserdisc game which had like video clips yes it's probably the one you're thinking about something like that yeah do you remember that game jamie you know what i'm talking about he's way too young and there was like a move that you had to do really quick and if you did the move correctly you would go on to the next level if you didn't like a a video graphic would play where you you got
killed well it was it was a big i think it was the same one it's a big deal because it was the first game that had video clips yes and that was a really hard thing and they had like a giant the hedge like giant uh platter laserdisc platter yeah inside playing these clips and again it was it was like it existed it was just really hard to make it work did you find it that i think that's probably let me see what it looks like yes that's exactly what it was dragon's lair so if you did it correctly you would get this video where you went through all the right moves and you got to the place but you you would have moments where you had to make a quick decision and if you made the correct decision like here like jumping to the flaming ropes if you made the correct decision you would get across but if you screwed up they would play a video of you dying right exactly and that was super sophisticated back then oh yeah yeah yeah this was a marvel at the time and i remember the like the early days of the arcade where video arcades were around yeah yeah yeah so look all this stuff is super obvious in retrospect like it's just it's obvious in retrospect everybody wants to play games they want them at home all this stuff like at the time it was not obvious and that's kind of how all this new technology goes that's how the internet was in the very very beginning it's like well i don't think anybody's going to want to do this was that was the overwhelming view and then and by the way you know not all new technologies work but the ones that do people look back and they're like well that one must have been obvious and it's like no wasn't the people at ibm who was it that mocked the idea of a personal home computer yeah there was a lot of that well there was a famous statement of the founder of ibm's this guy thomas watson senior and he did this he famously said one of these things maybe he said it maybe didn't but he said there's no need for more than five computers in the world and right in the theory the theory was basically the government needs two right they need like one for defense and one's for like civilian uh use and then there's like three big insurance
companies and that's like the total market right and that's all anything needs um and then there's a famous letter in the hp archives where the some engineers told uh basically the founders of hp they should go in the computer business there's an answer back from the ceo at the time saying you know nobody's gonna want these things so like yeah it's really it's tenuous i mean the famous new york times wrote a review of the first laptop computer that came out in like 1982 1983 and the review is you really say it's just scaling it's just like this is so stupid i can't believe these nerds are up to this nonsense again this is ridiculous and then you realize like what the laptop computer was in 1882 it was 40 pounds it was like a suitcase right and you open it up and the screen's like four inches big right and and so like the whole thing's slow and it doesn't do much and so if you just like take a snapshot at that moment in time you're like okay this is stupid but then you know you project forward and by the way the people who bought that laptop got a lot of use out of it because it was the first computer you could carry like that turned out to be a big deal well it's probably very valuable now right just as a you know novelty piece yeah yeah but like this idea that we got from like that's just absurd to literally everybody carrying a supercomputer in their pocket in the form of a phone in 30 years so quick yeah yeah actually really fast when you were first getting on computers so like how old were you when you first started coding and screwing around on computers well i started coding before i had a computer yeah so i taught myself so i'm i'm like the perfect i'm like right in the middle i'm like the perfect gen x age i'm like you're about turned 51. i was born in 1971. um the uh the the home computer started coming out in like 1980 81 where like normal people could buy them they got down to a few hundred dollars you hook them up to your tv set um and so i i knew i wanted one but like i couldn't i couldn't find it you know what did they run on think i had mode enough lawns you have to have the money to buy one what did they run on like software yes oh so microsoft
actually they had a very simple operating system and then they had uh microsoft actually made a what's called basic at the time which was the programming language that was built in and so when you say this is a home computer but like who was buying them and what was what what function did they serve yeah well that was a big debate the big debate at the time actually was are these things do these things actually serve any function in the home and sort of the the as would all say basically like basically it's because ads are trying to get people to like basically pitch their parents on buying these things and be like well you know tell your mom she can like do like she can file all of her recipes on the computer right they're like that's the kind of thing they were reaching for right and then your mom says well actually i have a little card you know three by five card holder i don't actually need a computer to file my recipes so there was that um a lot of it was game a lot of it was games a lot of video games and then you know kids you know like like me like to learn how to code you know first it's like play the game and it's like well how do you actually create one of these things and then you know businesses started to get a lot of you know when the spreadsheet arrived that was a really big deal because that was something that people it was something people capability the business people didn't have until they had the pc how much data storage did those things have back then so my first computer had four kilobytes of storage for a thousand bytes four thousand bytes of storage and so you would write you would write you could code you could write code but you had you had to you had to write code you had to know exactly what was happening in basically every single slot of memory because it was you just there wasn't a lot to go around and did it use a floppy disk so later on they had the floppy disks um that's new in the beginning they used cassette players okay so this is the beginning so if you're you're a kid with a computer in 1980 you you have a cassette player and so they would literally record programs
as like audio garbled you know electronic sounds on cassette tape and then it'd read it back in but you had this like tension you had this tension because cassette tapes weren't cheap they were fairly expensive and the high quality cassette tapes were quite expensive but you needed the high quality cassette tape for the thing to actually work but you were always tempted to buy the cheap cassette tape because it was longer right and so you would buy the cheap cassette tape and then your programs your story programs then they would load and you'd be like all right i got to go back and buy the expensive cassette tape how did they work through sound like how did that work yes they just they code into basically basically beeps you know you could you could you could say it wasn't music you definitely couldn't dance to it but it was you know it was beeps of different different uh different frequencies and that's how it stored data yeah and that's how it's stored data that's what it looked like wow so that's an old this is an old this is this is a that's a computer from a company called wang which is a big deal so that company was a huge deal that was one of the first big american tech companies of this generation wang laboratories yeah so this is this is the one of this is not the exact one i have but it's a lot like it and so yeah there's the cassette radio shack trs-80 this is i think original model one was there a feeling back then when you were working with these things that this was going to be something much bigger yeah so the thing that they did the thing the thing that they got right on their personal computer was you loaded the personal computer if you remember it was it would say you would show the thing and then it would say ready and then there would be the little cursor yeah ready and then a little cursive right little cursor sitting there blinking and basically what that represented if you were of a mind to be into this kind of thing that represented unlimited possibility right because you're it basically it was it was inviting right it was basically like okay ready for you to do whatever you want to do ready for you to create whatever you want to create and you could start typing you could start
typing in code and then there were all these mag you know at the time magazines and books that you could buy that would tell you how to like code video games and do all do all these things but you could also write your own programs and so it was this real sense of sort of inviting you into this amazing new world and then that's what caused a lot of us kind of of that generation to kind of get pulled into it early wow and so as you're watching this evolve around you and you're a part of it as well like when so when you when when did you guys first make mosaic what year was that yeah so that started in 92 and then windows 95. the critical mass in windows yeah so yeah that was pretty windows 95 so windows 3.1 was new back then and windows 3.1 windows 3.1 was the first real version of windows that a lot of people used and it was it was what brought the graphical user interface to personal computers right so the mac had shipped in 85 but they just never sold that many macs right most people had pcs most of the pcs just had text-based interfaces and then windows 3.1 was the big breakthrough so the mac got its user interface the graphic user interface from xerox right well so there's a lot this goes to that the backstory so that so the xerox had a system yeah xerox had a system called the alto which was basically like a proto sort of a proto mac apple then basically built a computer that failed called the lisa uh which was named after steve jobs daughter and then the mac was the second computer they built with the gui but the story's not complete the way the story gets told is that apple somehow like stole these ideas from xerox that's not quite what happened because xerox those ideas had been implemented earlier by a guy named doug engelbart at stanford who had this thing at the time called the mother of all demos which you can find on youtube where he basically in 1968 he shows all this stuff working and then again if you trace back to the 50s you get back to the plato system that i talked about which had a lot of these ideas and so it was like a 30-year process of a lot of people working on these ideas until you know basically steve was able to package it up in the macintosh i need to see
that video the mother of the mother of all demos yeah so this is a legendary this is a guy yeah this is a guy well this is going to be more important than it looks so i'd like to set up a file so i tell the machine all right output to a file and it says oh i need a name i'll give it a name i'll say so you see on the right that was the first mouse so diego barton invented the mouse among other things and that's the first mouse there on the right so so he's showing the first mouse in use in the first computer system ever made it was a three-button mouse it's a three-button mouse um so could it copy and paste and all that stuff he had word processing he had all these he had all kinds of interactive he was one of the first four nodes on the internet back around that time so he was even doing email back then i think or shortly thereafter what here he's writing code he was doing email in 68 yeah yeah yeah very early on wow so like sort of an intranet email so you would have to be attached to the the network to receive emails like how did it work it could either be in yeah you could you had there were private email systems early on but also he was on the original internet the original internet in the us started with only four computers on the internet and one of them was his um so there were four nodes on the original on the original network map and so he was kind of plugged into this where was that this is it it was something called stanford research institute so did you have to be local to to be a part of it did it have to be connected by wire yeah yeah and in fact it's not like it went through a telephone wire or anything like another you know like you know like dial up or anything yeah well so early on they were the kind of the same thing so actually early internet was actually integrated with dial up and so early email early internet email actually was built it didn't assume you had a permanent connection it assumed you would dial into the internet once in a while get all the data downloaded and then you disconnect because it's too expensive to
leave the lines open one original server like one large server well the the internet idea was all the computers are peers right so there's no there's no single node right and so there's just four computers that talk to each other which was the basis of what the internet is today four computers talk to each other now it's four billion computers talk to each other but it was that same idea and how did they store things individually like did you have access to each individual computer's data or did they have a collective database you know they had a combination of i mean this is very original these these were very simple systems as compared to what we have today so these were very basic implementations of these ideas but they would have they had very simple what's called store and forward email uh they have very simple it's called file retrieval so if there's a file on your computer and you wanted to let me download it i could download it they had what was called telnet where you could log into somebody else's computer and use it so you are messing around with this stuff and you guys create it was it the very first web browser or the first like used by many people web browsers yeah it was the first it was a productized um it was the first browser used by a large number of people it was the first browser that was really usable by a large number of people um it was also one of the one of the first browsers that had integrated graphics the the actual first browser was a text browser uh the very first one which basically was what was the prototype that tim berners-lee created so but it was just it was very clear at that point like we now have the we have we have windows we have the mac we have the gui right we have graphics like and and then we have the internet and we need to basically pull all these things together which is what mosaic did and gui is graphic user interface and and again it sounds like it's like we've lived with the gui now for 30 years most people don't remember computing before that it sounds like obviously everything would be graphical but it was not obvious at that point most computers at that point still were not graphical and so it was it was a big deal to basically say look this is just
going to be graphical yeah most computers were using dos yeah that's and so when you created this when you and whoever you did it with created mosaic what what was that like to what was the difference in like you functionality like what was the difference in what you could do with it yeah well so i it so it worked really well um so it like we pop we polished it like we got to the point where like normal people could use it because it was a black you could do this stuff a little bit before but it was like a real black art to put it together so we got to the point where it was like fully usable we made it it's called backward compatible so you could use it to get to any information on the internet whether it was web or non-web um and then you could actually have graphics actually in the information right so so web pages before mosaic were all text you know we added graphics and so you had the ability to have images um and you had the ability to ultimately help you know visual design and all the things that we have today um and then later with netscape which followed then we added encryption which gave you the ability to do business online right to be able to do e-commerce right and then later we added video we added audio and you know it just kind of kept rolling and kind of became what it is today when you look at it today what do you remember your thoughts back then as to where this was all going so it was impossible to predict what it's you know it's just it's played out at a much higher level of scale with many more use cases than we would have thought but it seemed pretty obvious to us that people would want this kind of thing because at the very basic level is ability for anybody to publish anything right text or video or audio right and then it was the ability for anybody to consume anything right the ability for all computers in the world to connect with each other and that you wouldn't need centralized gatekeepers you wouldn't have you know tv networks that could control what was on anybody could produce you know whatever they want to do and so that like that basic idea seemed like a
pretty good idea um it it hit an incredible wall of skepticism like all of the experts right they're all on the record they're all if you read the newspapers magazines at the time 100 it would be like this is stupid this is never going to happen nobody wants this this is never you know this is never going to work and if it does work nobody's going to want it uh over all the big companies were completely dismissive um it was just like there's just no way this is just too crazy it's the same same pattern as these crazy kids are at it again you know okay sure they've been right you know every other time you know they've been right many other times you know it's like this one they [ __ ] up electricity worked you know telephones worked the railroads worked okay yeah light bulb worked but like you know this computer thing is stupid this internet thing is stupid you know now we're hearing it today you know crypto blockchain you know web3 this stuff is stupid you know every new thing it's just this constant wall of doubt um and you know and frankly a lot of it's fear and a lot of it's you know just kind of people getting freaked out but your unique perspective of having been there early on with the original computers having worked to code the original web browser that was widely used like and seeing where it's at now does this give you a better perspective as to what the future could potentially lead to because you've seen these monumental changes like firsthand and been a part of the actual mechanisms that forced us into the position we're in today this wild place right in comparison i mean god go back to 1980 to today and and there's no other time in history where this kind of change i mean other than catastrophic natural disasters or nuclear war there's nothing that has changed society more than the technology that you are a part of so when you see this today and you do you have this vision of where this is going sure well yeah it was it was complicated but so many many parts to it but yeah look one thing is just like people have tremendous creativity right people of people are really smart and people have a lot of ideas i think somebody can do something i can
introduce you to folks that would change your scale some people that is this yes i won't argue with that but look there's a spectrum there are there are there are a lot of smart people in the world there are a lot more smart people in the world than have had access to anything that we would consider to be you know modern universities or you know anything that we consider to be kind of the way that we kind of have you know smart people you know build careers or whatever there's just a lot of smart people in the world they have a lot of ideas if they have that capability to contribute right if they can code if they can write if they can create you know me they will do it like they will figure out i mean the most amazing thing about the internet to me to this day is i'll find these entire subcultures you know i'll find some subreddit or some youtube community or go down some rabbit hole and there will be you know 10 million people working on some crazy collective you know thing um and i just didn't you i you know even i didn't you didn't know it existed and you know people are just like tremendously passionate about what they care about and they they fully express themselves and yeah it's just it's fantastic and i feel you know we're still at the beginning of that like we're still you know most people in the world are still not creating things most people are just consuming and so we're still at the beginning of that so so i know that's the case um look it's just going to keep spreading like so there's a there's a there's a concept in computer science um uh called metcalfe's law that basically expresses the power of a network mathematically um and and the formula is x squared um and x squared is the formula that gets you the classic exponential curve the the curve that arcs you know kind of up as it goes um and and that's a process that's basically an expression of the value of a network is all of the different possible connections between all the nodes which is which which is x squared and so and so quite literally like every additional person you add to the network doubles the potential value of the network to everybody who's on the network and so every time you plug in a
new user every time you plug in a new app every time you plug in a new you know anything sensor into the thing a robot into the thing like whatever it is the whole network gets more powerful for everybody who's on it and the resources that people's fingertips you know get get bigger and bigger and so you know this thing is giving people like really profound superpowers in like a very real way holy [ __ ] right and so it's just gonna get because the internet's gonna get wired in everything right every car right every every everything every door everything's going to have a chip everything's going to be connected to the network like the whole world is going to get like smart and connected in a you know you know in a very different way and then look you know we still have these legacy you know we're still in the world you know we're at like that weird halfway point right where we still have like broadcast tv right and we still have like print newspapers right we still have these like older things radio we still have radio like these things still exist they haven't gone away and there's still you know pretty significant you know attention and dollars and prestige associated with these things but i i i think it's obvious what's going to happen which is all of that's going to transfer to the internet right yeah 100 of it right and so we're we're still only halfway or part way you know into the transition it's going to get a lot more extreme than it is now what do you do what do you anticipate to be like one of the big factors if like if you're thinking about real breakthrough technologies and things that are going to change the game is it some sort of uh human internet interface like something that is in your body like a neural link type deal is it something else is it augmented reality is it is it virtual reality what do you think is going to be like the next big shift in terms of the symbiotic relationship that we have with technology yeah so this is one of the very big topics in our industry that you know people argue about we sit and talk about all day long trying to figure out like which you know which starts to fund and projects to work on so i'll give you
what i what i kind of think is the case so the two that are rolling right now that i think are going to be really big deals are ai on the one hand and then cryptocurrency blockchain web 3 sort of combined phenomenon on the other hand and i think both of those have now hit critical mass both of those are going to move uh really fast so so we should talk about those and then right after that you know i think yeah some combination of let's say they call virtual reality and augmented reality vr ar uh some combination of those is going to be a big deal then there's what's called internet of things um right which is like connecting connecting all of the objects in the world online and and that's now happening um and then yeah then you've got the really futuristic stuff you've got the you know neural link and the the brain stuff and you know all kinds of all kinds of ways to kind of you know have the human body be more connected into these environments that stuff's further out but there are very serious people working on it so let's start with ai because that's the scariest one to me this google engineer that has come out and said that he believes that the google ai is sentient because it says that it is sad it says it's lonely it starts communicating and you know google is there it seems like they're in a dilemma in that situation first of all if it is sentient does it get rights right like does it get days off yep i had this conversation with my friend duncan trussell last night and he was saying imagine if you you know if you have to give it rights like is it does it get treated like a human being like what is it well it'll give you make it even a step harder what if you copy it right now you've got two of them well that was what i said to ray kurzweil ray kurzweil was talking at one point in time about downloading consciousness into computers and then he believes that inevitably will happen and my thought was like what's going to stop someone from downloading themselves a thousand
times right with some donald trump type character just wants a million trumps out there just out there doing speeches like what what would stop that yeah exactly so so let's let's start with what this actually is today which is i think you know which is very interesting not well understood but very interesting so what what google and this other company open ai that are doing these kind of text the text bots that have the you know the the been in the news what they do it's it's it's a program it's an ai program it's it's basically it uses a form of math called linear algebra it's a very well-known form of math but it uses a very complex version of it and then basically what they do is they've got complex math running on big computers and then what they do is they have what they call training data and so what they do is they basically slurp in a huge data set from somewhere in the world and then they basically train the math against against the data to try to kind of get it up to speed on how to interact and do things the training data that they're using for these systems is all text on the internet right so and all text on the internet increasingly is a record of all human communication right all the text on the internet all the text on the internet so how does it capture all this stuff well so google google's core business is to be the cro is to do that is to be the crawler you know famously their mission organizers information they they actually pull in all the text on the internet already to make their search engine work and then that's that's and then the ai just scans that and the ai basically uses that as a training set right um and so and basically just just basically chews through and processes it it's a very complex process but like chews through and processes it and then the ai kind of gets a converged kind of view of like okay this is human language this is what these people are talking about you know and then it has all the statistical you know once when a human being says x somebody else says y or z or this would be a a good thing to say or a bad thing to say for example you can get emotion you can you can detect emotional loading from text now so you
can kind of determine with the computer and kind of say this text reflects somebody who's happy because they're saying oh you know i'm having a great day versus this text is like i'm super mad you know therefore it's upset and so you could have the computer could get trained on okay if i say this thing it's likely to make humans happy if i just say this thing is like to make humans sad but here's the thing it's all it's all human generated text it's all the conversations that that we've all had and and so basically you load that into the computer and then the computer is able to kind of simulate right somebody else having that conversation um but but what happens is basically the computer is playing back what people say right it's right it's not it's not nobody no engineer the the guy who went through this and did the the whistleblower thing he even said he didn't look at the code he's not he's not in there like working on the code everybody who works in the code will tell you it's not alive it's not conscious it's not having original ideas what it's doing is it's playing back to you things that it thinks that you want to hear based on all the things that everybody has already said to each other that it can get online and in fact there's all these ways you can kind of trick it into basic like for example you can have it he has this example where he like has it where basically he said you know i want you to prove that you're alive and then the computer did all this stuff through it's live you can do the reverse you can say i want you to prove that you're not alive and the computer will happily prove that it's not alive and it'll give you all these arguments as to why it's not actually alive and of course it's because it the computer has no view on whether it's alive or not but it seems like in in with with this is all very weird and for sure we're in the fog of life if it's not life it's in this weird fog of like what makes a person a person like what makes an intelligent thinking human being that knows how to communicate able to respond and answer questions well it does it through cultural context does it through understanding language and having been
around enough people that have communicated in a certain way that it emulates that right yeah so this is the real question so this is where i've said it the real question is what does it mean for a person to think right like that's the real question and so and so let's talk about there's something called the turing test right which is a little bit more famous now because the the movie they made about alan turing so the turing test basically in its simplified form the turing test is basically you're sitting in a computer terminal you're typing in questions and then the answers are showing up in the screen there's a 50 chance you're talking to a person sitting in another room who's typing the responses back there's a 50 chance you're talking to a machine you don't know right you're the subject and you can ask the entity on the other end of the connection any number of questions right he will he or she or it will give you any number of answers at the end you have to make the judgment as to whether you're talking to a person or talking to a machine the the theory of the turing test is when a computer can convince a person that it's a person then it will have achieved artificial intelligence right then it will be as smart as a person but but that begs the question of like okay like how easy are we to trick right right like and in fact and so actually it turns out what's happened this is actually true what's happened is actually there have been chat bots that have been fooling people in the turing test now for several years the easiest way to do it is with a sex chat bot because they're the most gullible specifically specifically to men of course that's why women are like way less gullible women probably fall for it a lot less but men like you get a man on there with a sex chat bot like the man will convince himself he's talking to a real woman like pretty easily even when he's not right um and so just think of this as a slightly more you know you could think about this as a somewhat more advanced version of that which is look if this thing if it's an algorithm that's been optimized to trick people basically to convince people that it's
real it's going to it's going to pass the turing test even though it's not actually conscious meaning it has no awareness it has no desire it has no regret it has no fear you know it has none of the hallmarks that we would associate with being a living being like much less a conscious being and so so this is this is the twist and this is where i think this guy google got got got kind of strung up a little bit as they're held up um is it the the computers are going to be able to trick people into thinking they're conscious like way before they actually become conscious and then there's just the other side of it which is like we have no idea we don't know how human consciousness works like we have no idea how the brain works we have no idea how to like we have no idea how to do any of this any any of the stuff on people the the most advanced form of medical science that understands consciousness is actually anesthesiology because they know how to turn it off [Laughter] right they know how to click you know power up and then you had to power back on which is also very important but like they have no idea what's happening inside the black box and we have no idea nobody has any idea so so this is a parallel line of technological development that's not actually recreating the human brain is doing something different it's basically training computers and how to understand process and then reflect back the real world it's very valuable work because it's going to make computers a lot more useful for example self-driving cars this is the same kind of work that makes a self-driving car work yeah so this is this is very valuable work it will create these programs that will be able to trick people very effectively right and so so there for example here's what i would be worried about which is basically like what percentage of people that we follow on twitter are even real people right yeah elon is trying to get to the bottom of that right now he's trying to get the bottom of that you know specifically on that on that issue from the business but just also think more generally which is like okay if you have a computer that's
really good at writing tweets if you have a computer that's really good at writing angry political tweets or writing whatever absurdist you know humor or whatever it is like and by the way maybe the computer is going to be better at doing that than a lot of people are you know you could you could imagine a future internet in which most of the interesting content is actually getting created by machines you know there's this new system dolly um you know that's getting a lot of visibility now which is this thing where you can type in any phrase and it'll create you computer generated art right oh i've seen that yeah they've done some with me it's really weird yeah yeah you know chase lepard he's got a few of them that he put up on his uh instagram how does that work yeah yeah so it's it's a very similar thing so basically what they do with the the google has one of these and and open ai has one of these what they do is they pull in all of the images on the internet right so if you you think about if you go to google images or whatever just do a search you know on any topic it'll give you thousands of thousand images of you whatever and then basically they pull in all the images um yeah that's me exactly how bizarre yeah so that's so that's ai generated art so that's a i generated art that's a different program that's just basically doing yeah sort of psychedelic art the the the dolly ones are basically they'll they're sort of composites um where they will give you basically a it's almost like an artist that will give you many different drafts yeah that's another one of me yeah so uh he the first one he go back to that please yeah you just had it up it's what does it say it said uh what joe rogan facing the dmt realm insanely detailed intricate hyper hyper masculinist miss dark elegant ornate luxury elite horror creepy ominous haunting moody dramatic volumetric light ak render 8k post hyper details so they say that and then they enter all this stuff in and this is what comes out and this is what comes out now holy [ __ ] yes okay so first of all yes it's incredible like that's amazing it's an original work of art that is exactly with this back that make my nose look
like that it doesn't really look like that right not not today it's it's a little off i mean i would say if that was an artist like i think you got the nose wrong and you made my job well it's referencing these other artists if you see at the end but it's actually referencing this is probably pulling in portraits right of other people from those artists and using it to do a composite thing right but the fact that it can make art no but see what it's doing right so it's very impressive i mean the output's very impressive and the fact that it can do that is impressive but it's being told exactly what to do yes it didn't have the idea that it was going to do that it was told it was it's it's following instructions right right so it's not sitting it's not sitting there like a real artist dreaming up new artistic concepts right but here's the question because you were you were saying this before that it can trick people into thinking it's real how do we know what's what is alive but this is the question like what is a human consciousness interacting with another human consciousness i mean it is data it is the understanding of the use of language inflection tone the vernacular that's used in whatever region you're communicating with this person in to make it seem as authentic and normal as possible and you're doing this back and forth like a game of volleyball right this is what language is and a conversation is if a computer's doing that well it doesn't have a memory well but it does have memory well it doesn't have emotions is that what we are i don't know because if that's what we are then we're all that's all we are right because the only difference is emotion and maybe biological needs like the need for food the need for sleep the need for you know the for touch and love and all the weird stuff that makes people people the emotional stuff but if you extract that the the normal interactions that people have on a day-to-day basis it's it's pretty similar yeah yeah well so so here would be the way to think about it is like what's the difference between an
animal and a person right like why do we grant people rights that we don't grant animals rights and of course and of course that's a hot topic of debate because there are a lot of people who think animals should have more rights but but fundamentally we do we do have this idea we have this idea of what makes a human distinct from a horse or a dog right is is self-awareness right a sense of self a sense of self being conscious right you know i i decart i think therefore i am right right and so at least we have this concept with this philosophical concept of consciousness being something that involves self-awareness like the computers the computer is like i told you the computer is quite capable of telling you it has self-awareness yeah it's also quite capable of telling you it doesn't it doesn't care right it has no opinion on whether it has consciousness or not and that's why i'm confident that these things are not conscious they're not alive but these things are they're just it's just a it's a program it's a program it's a program but at what point in time does the program figure out how to write better programs right at what point in time does the program fit figure out how to manifest a physical object that can take all of its knowledge and all the information that's acquired through the use of the of the internet which is the basically the origin theme in ex machina right right the super scientist guy he's using his web browser his his search engine to scoop up all people's thoughts and ideas and he puts them into his robots which is basically what basically what what these companies are doing hopefully hopefully with a different result um well let me bring there's another word hopefully there's another there's another topic the friend of a friend of mine peter peter thiel and i was arguing sargeras is like it's like basically it's like he's like look you know civilization is declining you can tell because all the science fiction movies are negative right like it's all dystopia nobody's got hope for the future everybody's negative and my answer is just like the negative stories are just more interesting right nobody nobody makes
the movie with like the happy ai right like it's just not there's no drama in it right so anyway that's why i say hope hopefully it won't be hollywood's dystopian vision but here's another question though the nature of consciousness right which is another idea that descartes had that i think therefore i am guy had is he had this idea of mind-body dualism which is also what right kurzweil has with this idea that you'll be able to upload the mind which is like okay there's the mind which is like basically all of this you know some level of software equivalent coding something something happening and how we do all the stuff you just described then there's the body and there's some separation between mind and body where maybe the body is sort of can be arbitrarily modified or is disposable or could be replaced or replaced by a computer it's just not necessary once you upload your brain and of course and this is a relevant question for for the a for ai because of course the ai dolly has no body you know gpt3 has no body right well do we really believe in mind body do we really believe mind and body are separate like do we really believe that and what the science tells us is no they're not separate in fact they're very connected right and a huge part of what it is to be human is the intersection point of of of of brain and mind and then brain to rest of body for example all the medical research now that's going into the influence of gut bacteria on behavior right and then sort of in the role of viruses and how they change behavior and like and so basically like i think the most evolved version of this the most sort of advanced version of this is like whatever it means to be human it's some combination of mind and body is some combination of logic and emotion it's some combination of mind and brain it leads to us being the crazy creative inventive destructive innovative caring hating people we are right the sort of mess yeah the mess that is humanity right like that that's that's amazing like that that you know the the four billion years of evolution that it took to get us to the point where we're at today is like amazing and i'm just saying like we don't know we don't have the slightest idea how to
build that like we're we don't even understand how we work we don't have the slide to see how to build that yet and that's why i'm not worried that these things like somehow come alive or they start to yeah see i'm much more worried than you because my concern is not just how we work because i know that we don't have a great grasp of how the human brain works and how the consciousness works and how we interface with each other in that way but what we do know is all the things that we're capable of doing in terms we have there's a vast database of human literature and accomplishments and mathematics and all the different things that we've learned all you you need to have is something that can also do what we do and then it's indistinguishable from us so like our idea of that of our brain is so complex we can't even map out the human brain we don't even understand how it works but we don't have to understand how it works we just make something that works just as good if not better and it doesn't have the same like cells yeah but it works just as good or better yeah it just we can do it without emotion yeah which might be the thing that [ __ ] us up but also might be the thing that makes us amazing but maybe only to us right right to the universe we're like these emotions and all these biological needs this is what causes war and murder and all the thievery and all the nutty things that people do right but if we can just get that out then you have this creativity machine right then you have this this force of constant never-ending innovation which is what the human race seems to be if you could look at it from outside i always say this that if you could look at the human race from outside the human race you say well what is this thing doing what's making better stuff all it does is make better stuff it never goes ah we're good it's just constantly new phones better tvs faster cars jets that go faster rockets that land that's all it ever does is make better stuff collectively and even materialism which is the thing with people oh it's so sad people are so materialistic what's the best fuel for innovation right materialism because people get obsessed
with wanting the latest greatest things and you literally like sacrifice your entire day for the funds to get the latest and greatest things you're giving up your life for better things that's what a lot of people are doing it's their number one motivation for working shitty jobs is so they can afford cool things right well so then we get to fill us a deeper philosophical thing which is would you get the good of humanity without the bad of humanity right would you get all of the creativity and all of the energy like but it's only good to us to the universe is it really good well the universe okay so i mean look people have different views on this my view is the universe is uncaring yeah right like exactly yeah i think so too the universe does not really does not give a [ __ ] right so good or bad like it's only i think it's all relative in our neighborhood but yeah but i think therefore it's i mean to me that to me that to me that's a simple question answer is it's all in only through our eyes right we're the only thing that matters because the university universe really doesn't care right by the way mother nature doesn't care like no nobody cares nobody cares about us and so we we we get the you know privilege but we also get the burden of being the ones who have to define the standards yeah that we have to we have to set the rules and of course the project of human civilization is trying to figure out how how to do that yeah um well look the computers are going to get good at doing a lot of things that that said just let me be clear a computer or a machine or a robot that does something really well is a tool right it's not it's not a it's not a replacement it's not an augment it doesn't make humanity irrelevant it doesn't this it doesn't that in fact generally what it does is it makes everything better and we can we can talk about how that happens um but it's a tool like it's it's a thing it's it's a hammer right and like anything else like look these are tools tools hammers look hammers have good uses and bad uses right i'm not a utopian on technology like i think that you know many technologies have destructive consequences um but you know fire you know
it's good and it's bad sides yeah um you know people burn to death at the stake have a very different view of fire than people who have you know a delicious meal yeah roasted meat people killed by a clovis point are probably not that excited about the technology yeah exactly people you know look people driving in the car love it the people who run over by car hate it right you know and so like technology is this double it's his double-edged thing but the pro the progress does come and of course it nets out to be you know historically at least a lot more positive than negative nuclear weapons are my favorite example right it's like where nuclear weapons are good a good thing to invent or a bad thing to invent right and the overwhelming conventional view is they're horrible right for obvious reasons which is they can kill a lot of people they and they actually have no overt kind of you know the soviet union used to set up nuclear bombs underground to like basically develop new oil wells not a good idea they stopped doing that um yeah yeah just a little bit there you go yeah sure okay like that did the what to explain how they did that oh yeah well they would they'd have like i don't know what it was whether you'd be opening up a new well or they'd be like trying to correct a jam an existing well and so they just you know they're like well you know what do we have that could like you know free this up and it's like oh how about a nuke so so they try uh i'll give you another example um the u.s government had a program in the 1950s the air force had a program in the 1950s called project orion and it was um for um it was for spaceships that were going to be nuclear powered not nuclear-powered with a nuclear engine but they were going to be a spaceship and that would be like a giant basically lead basically dome and then they would actually set off nuclear explosions to propel the spaceship forward and so they were they didn't they never built it but but they thought hard about it i go through these examples to say these were attempts to find positive use cases for nuclear weapons basically and we never did so we'd say so you could say look nukes are bad we shouldn't invent nukes well here's the thing with
nukes nukes probably prevented world war iii right right nukes if you're if at the end of world war ii if you asked any of the experts in the u.s or the soviet union at the time are we going to have a war between the u.s and soviet union in europe another land war right between the you know the between between the two sides you know most of the experts very much thought the answer was yes in fact the u.s to this day we still have troops in germany basically preparing for this land war that that never came um nuclear weapon the deterrence effect of nuclear weapons i would argue a lot of historians would argue basically prevented world war iii so so so the pros and cons in these technologies are tricky but they usually do turn out to have more positive benefits than negative benefits in most cases i just think it's like it's hard or impossible to get new technology without basically having both sides without you know it's hard to develop a tool that can only be used for good and for the same reason i think it's hard for humanity to progress in a way in which only good things happen right right but aren't we looking at the pros and cons of nuclear weapons to a very small scale i mean we're looking at it from 1947 to 2022. that's such a blink of an eye we could still [ __ ] this up we could really screw it up the consequences are so grave that if we do [ __ ] it up it's literally the end of life as we know it for every human being on earth for the next hundred thousand years having said that there were thousands of years of history before 1947 1940 there were thousands of years of history before that and then the history of humanity before the nuclear weapons was nonstop war yeah no it's not some war but it's a different thing right it was pretty bad it's pretty bad yeah no doubt so the original form of warfare like if you go back in history the original form of warfare like the greeks the original form of warfare was basically people outside of your tribe or village have no rights at all like they don't count as human beings they're there to be killed on site right and then the way that warfare happened like for example between the
greek cities and this is the like the heyday of the greeks athens and socrates and all this stuff the way warfare happened is we invade each other's cities i burn your city to the ground i kill all your men and i take all your women as slaves and i take all your children to slaves right so like that's pretty apocalyptic yeah right um and this isn't that kind of what's going on in russia right now well so so they're in ukraine russia russia is this is the big question this is the big question for the uh for the united states on russia right now which is like okay what's the one thing we know we don't want we don't want nuclear war with russia right we know we don't want that what do what do we want to do us government what does it want to do well it wants to arm ukraine sort of up to the point where the russians get pissed off enough where they would start setting off nukes and and this is the sort of live debate that's happening and and it's just it's a real debate you you could look at it and you could say well nuclear weapons are bad in this case because they're preventing the us from directly interceding in ukraine it'd be better for the ukrainians if we did you can also say the nuclear weapons are good because they're preventing this from cascading into a full land war in europe between the us and russia world war iii and so it's a it's a complicated calculus i'm just saying like i don't i don't know that things would be better if we returned to the era of world war one right or the napoleonic wars or of no probably not probably not or the questions has this deterrent has the nuclear deterrent is it i guess it's it's what we have is a bridge and the nuclear deterrent is a bridge for us to evolve to the point where this kind of war is not possible anymore like we have evolved as a culture where whatever war we have is nothing like world war one or world war ii well there's there's an argument there's an argument in sort of defense circles that actually nuclear weapons are actually not useful they seem useful but they're not useful because they can never actually get used
then it's a hollow threat right unless you're putin right yeah it basically it's like okay like no matter what we do to putin he's never going to set off a nuke because if he set off a new could be an act of suicide because if we nuked in retaliation he would die and like and nobody's none of these guys are actually suicidal now right but without that sonic weapons that doesn't seem to be the case anymore right so now we have hypersonics right exactly so now we have hypersonics coming along that that changes the playing field right that's a that's a non-nuclear weapon with potentially you know very profound consequences and so yeah look they have nukes that are hypersonic they have yeah but they also have none they have that but they also have non-hypersonics and so like one of the questions on non-nuclear hypersonics is for example is it the first weapon that can take out aircraft carriers and if so that changes the balance of right so anyway there's all these questions but right however my point at least was even even nuclear weapons like you can point to this actually very positive outcome um and so most of these technologies when they look scary up front as you get deeper into them people are creative people figure out ways to use these things in ways that end up actually being very positive hopefully right so how did we get on this tangent we got on this tangent talking about whether or not artificial life is life and how do you decide whether it's life now when you're if it gets so com what if it's not sentient but it behaves in every way a sentient thing does how do we decide that it's sentient like this this engineer that makes this distinction you're saying he's done it erroneously well so what he's if you read the interview he's he's an interesting guy and he's got a colorful yeah colorful backstory what what he literally says he did a long form interview for white wire magazine literally says he said two interesting things he said one is i i didn't look at the code like i don't you know he is a programmer but he said i
didn't i didn't work in the code i didn't look at the code it wasn't my job i don't actually know what this thing is doing you know so first of all it's not so he's not making an engineering evaluation right he's observing it entirely but he's doing what we call black box observation he's observing it entirely from the outside um and then the other thing he says is he's making his his evaluation is made in his role as a priest right what kind of a priest is he um so you should look that up um it's a it's a um some people might call it a cult um i don't want to be judgmental um it's a it's a creative it's a it's a creative non-traditional um religion that he apparently is fully ordained in um more power to him um you know a priest of a marginal whatever maybe we don't take that seriously but now we get back to the big questions right which is like okay like historically religion capital our religion played a big role in the exact questions that you're talking about and yeah traditionally we you know culturally traditionally we had concepts like well we know that people are different than animals because people have souls right um and so you know we in the sort of modern evolve west are you know a lot of us at least would think that we're beyond the sort of superstition that's engaged in that but we are asking these like very profound fundamental questions yeah that a lot of people have thought about for a very long time and a lot of that knowledge has been encoded into religions and so i think the religious philosophical dimension of this is actually going to become very important i think we as a society are going to have to really take these things seriously in what way like what in what way do you think religion is going to play into well in the same way that in the same way that it plays in the same way that it plays in basically any so religion historically is how we sort of transmit ethical and moral judgments right um and then you know we basically sort of you know it's the sort of modern intellectual vanguard of the west a
hundred years ago whatever decided to shed religion as a sort of primary organizing thing but we decided to continue to try to evolve ethics and morals but if you ask anybody who is if you see anybody who's religious what is the process of figuring out ethics and worlds they will tell you well that's a religion and so nietzsche would say we're just inventing new religions like we're we're sitting we think of ourselves as highly evolved scientific people in reality we're having basically fundamentally philosophical debates about these very deep issues that don't have concrete scientific answers and that we're basically inventing new religions as we go well it makes sense because people behave and re like a religious zealot when they defend their ideologies like when they're unable to objectively look at their own thoughts and opinions on things because it's outside of the ideology yeah the religious instinct runs very deep right yeah well that's a is that our part of our operating system i think so i it has something to do with from what i've been able to establish reading about this it has something to do with basically what does it mean for individuals to cohere together into a group and what does it mean to have that group have sort of the equivalent of an operating system that it's able to basically all agree on and prove to you know members of the group are able to prove to each other that they're full members of the group and it seems universal and then they and then they they transmit right what religion does is it encodes ethics and morals but it encodes lessons learned over very long periods of time into basically like a book right and a set you know parables right and lessons right and you know commandments and things like this and then you know a thousand years later people in theory right or at least are benefiting from all of this hard-won wisdom over the generations and of course the big religions were all developed pre-science right and so they were basically an attempt to sort of code human knowledge pre-scientific human knowledge into something that was reproducible even in an area where you didn't have mass
literacy do you think that's why most attempts at encoding morals and ethics into some sort of an open structure turn religious they almost all turn to this point where it seems like you're in a cult yeah you're basically i well it's it's basically yeah i think everything ultimately is some i think basically all human societies all structures of people working together living together whatever it's sort of they're all sort of very severely watered down versions of the original cults like if you go far enough back and you if you go far enough back in human history you go back before the greeks there's this long history of the sort of develop and i'm going to specifically talk about western civilization here because i don't know much about the eastern side but western civilization there's this great book um called the ancient city that goes through this and it talks about how the original form of civilization was basically it was a fascist communist cult um and this was the origination of the tribes and then ultimately the the cities and that which ultimately became states and that's what i was describing earlier which was like the greek city-state was basically a fascist communist cult um it had a very concrete specific religion it had its own gods people who were not in that cult right did not count as human had no rights and were to be killed on sight or could be like freelance like they had no trouble they had no moral qualms at all about enslaving people or killing people who weren't in their cult because they worship different gods they don't count yeah right and so that was the original form of human civilization and i think the way that you can kind of best understand the last whatever four thousand years and even the world we're living in today is we just have these we have very you know we have a millionth the the intensity level of those cults like we've we've watered i mean even our cults don't compare to what their cults were like right right we have watered these ideas all the way down right we watered the idea from that all-consuming cult down to what we called to religion and then now what we call whatever i don't know philosophy or worldview or whatever it is and now
we've watered it all the way down to you know with you know crossfit like right so so i view it as so in an important way it's it's like a pr it's been a process of diminishment as much as it's been a process of advancement but but you you're exactly right like you can see the and this is actually relevant a lot of the tech debates because you can see what happens which is humans we want to be members of groups we want to reform into new cults we want to reform in a new religion so we want to develop new ethical and moral systems and hold each other to them by the way what's a hallmark of any religion hallmark of any religion is some create some crazy some belief that strikes outsiders is completely crazy right what's the role of that crazy belief the role is that by professing your belief in the crazy thing you basically certify that you're a member of the group right right you're right you're willing to stand up and say yes i'm a believer yes i have faith therefore i'm a member of the group therefore include me in the circle and don't that's woke twitter and yes and so basically what twitter has basically recreated they they are a you know they're a non-spiritual religious cult yeah they exhibit all the same religious behaviors right they have excommunication they have sin they have redemption or lack thereof right they you know they have their original sin right um you know privileged proclamations of piety uh yeah all that stuff yeah by the way they have their you know they have church you know cei seminars they've got you know they have recreated a form of basically evangelical protestantism is in in sort of structural terms like that that's that's what they've actually done uh nietzsche actually predicted this he said basically you know because nietzsche wrote nietzsche wrote at the same time that darwinism right nietzsche wrote at the same time that darwin was basically showing with natural selection that the the physical world didn't exist necessarily from creation but rather revolved right it wasn't actually 6000 years old it was actually 4 billion years old and it was this long process of trial and error as
opposed to creation that got us to where we are and so nietzsche said this is really bad news right this is going to kick the legs out from under all of our existing religions it's going to leave us in a situation where we have to create our own values he said there's nothing harder in human society than creating values from scratch like it took thousands of years to get judaism to the point where it is today it took thousands of years to get christianity it took thousands of years to get you know hinduism and we're going to do it in 10 right or 100. but even the thousands of years that people did create various religions and got them to the point where they're out in 2022. they did it all through personal experience life experience shared experience all stuff that's written down lessons learned i mean wouldn't we be better suited to do that today with a more comprehensive understanding of how the mind works and how emotions work and the the roots of religion i mean you know this is the atheist position right is it yeah you're much you're much you're much better off constructing this from scratch using logic and reason however instead of all this encoded superstition however like well what nietzsche would have said is oh boy if you get it wrong it's a really big problem right like if you get it wrong you know he said that what is it god is dead and we will never wash the blood off our hands right like wow right basically meaning that like this is going to lead you know he basically predicted a century of like chaos and slaughter and we got a century of chaos and slaughter right yeah right because literally what happened right was not nazism was it was basically a new religion communism was a new religion like both of those went viral as we say and then they you know had they both had like catastrophic consequences yeah and it's like okay all of a sudden you know maybe christianity and judaism don't look so bad what seems to that kind of religious thinking applies to so many critical issues of our time like even things like climate change i've brought up climate change to people and you see this this almost like
ramping up of this defending of this idea that upon further examination they have very little understanding of or at least a comprehen like a sort of a cursory understanding that they've gotten through a couple of washington post articles but as far as like a real understanding of the science and long-term studies very few people who are very excited about climate change it seems like almost like a thing clearly don't get me wrong it's like this is something we should be concerned with this is something we should act we should be very proactive we should definitely preserve our environment but i'm not that's not what i'm talking about what i'm talking about is this inclination for people to support or to like robustly defend an idea that they have very little study in right so i don't i won't take a position on clinton no no i don't want you to change because yeah but um but it's clear it's real but the phenomenon well so it's so it's complicated so it's it's it's it's complicated it's based on simulations of a very complex system um like it's not the climate studies are not scientific experiments the traditional sense there's no right there's no control there's no other earth that we're comparing to that has more or less emissions and so it's all modeling you know we saw what good modeling was during covid which was it turned out at least not not very good for covet maybe it's better for client like it's it's it's complicated like it's very complicated have you read unsettled uh not yet no not yet so so i was going to say so the funniest thing that i was going to bring up that term the funniest thing that you hear the tip that tips on to the when it sort of passes into a religious conversation is this idea of the science is settled yes the science is settled is not how science works right the uh feynman said like science is the process feynman richard feynman famous scientist said science is the process in not trusting the experts right very specifically what we do in science is we don't trust experts because they're certified experts what we do is we cross-check everything they say any scientific statement has to be what's called falsifiable which means
there has to be a way to disprove it there has to be vigorous debate constantly about what's actually known and not known right and so then so this idea that there's something where there's a person who's got a professorship or there's a you know a body a government body of some kind or a consortium or something and they get to like get together and they all agree and they settle the science like that's not scientific right and so that's that's the tip off at that point that you're you're no longer dealing with science and people start studying saying stuff like that and you weren't dealing with science when they did it with covid right and you weren't you're not dealing with science when they do with climate right that's a great example then you're dealing with a religion and and then you're getting all the emotional consequences of a religion and you also get various factions of this religion right you have your right-wing faction the religion that takes a stance that seems to be rooted in doctrine as well as your left-wing side and you can kind of predict what side a person's on by asking them one or two questions how do you feel about a woman's right to choose right how do you feel about the second amendment how do you feel and then you could run those things a few times and then you i can pretty accurately guess what side of the fence you're on right right so yes it's out of that it's how they all cluster right yeah and with what they are with what they are and we're all in these i mean we're all i'm in probably probably in a half dozen of these myself but yeah we're all in these various secularized religions yeah you know they're they're being used jonathan hyde has this great term he says morality morality binds and blinds he talks about a lot so binds which is the purpose of morality is to bind a group together right and then and then blinds basically if you bind the group together you want to blind the group to disconfirming information right because because you want you want everybody to agree you want everybody on the same page because you want to maintain group cohesion right but it's but it's about group cohesion if if they're correct or not on the details is not really important to
whether the religion works have you thought back on the origins of this kind of the function of the mind to create something this kind of structure and do you think that this was done to the because it's fairly universal right it exists in humans that are separate from each other by continents and a little far away and other sides of the ocean is this a way i mean i've thought of it as almost like a scaffolding for us to get past our biological instincts and move to a new state of whatever consciousness is going to be or whatever civilization is going to be but the fact that it's so universal and that the belief in spiritual beings and the belief in things beyond your control and the belief in omnipresent gods that have power over everything that it's so universal it's fascinating because it almost seems like it's an in it's a part of humans that can't be removed like there's no real atheist societies that have evolved in the world other than i mean there's atheist communities in the 21st century but there's they're not even that big well and they act like religions right yeah right yeah they get very upset yeah with their questions so so yeah so look it it goes to basically i think the nature of evil it goes to the nature of evolution it goes the nature of how we evolve and survive and succeed as a species individually we don't get very far right the naked human being in the woods alone does not get very far right um the we we get we get places as groups right and so do we exist more as individuals or as groups i think we exist more as groups yeah you know it's very important to us what group we're in um there's this there's this concept of sort of cultural evolution uh right which is basically this concept that basically groups evolve in some sort of analogous way to how how individuals evolve you know if my if my group is stronger i have better individual odds of success of surviving and reproducing than if my group is weak and so i want to contribute to the strength of my group you know even if it doesn't bear directly on my own individual success i want my group to be strong right and so
basically you see this process basically the lonely individual doesn't do anything it's it's always the construction of the group and then the group needs glue it needs bonding and and and therefore religion right there for morality therefore the binding and blinding process yeah and i think yeah i think it's just inherent like i think it's just inherent and like i said i think what we're dealing with today is a much diluted version of what we had before it's it's much these these things are all they seem strong today they're much weaker today than they used to be for example they're less likely to lead to physical violence today than they used to be right there's like there aren't really religious violent religious wars in the u.s right in the west like that you know that that doesn't happen now it's like a virtual when we have like virtual religious wars where at least each other and then you know you can kind of extend this further and it's like okay what is a you know what is a fandom right of a fictional property right or what is a hobby right or what is a you know whatever what is any activity that people like to do what is it what is it what is a what is a community what is a company what is a brand what is apple right and these are all we viewed as like these are basically sort of increasingly diluted diluted dilution increasingly diluted cults that basically maintain the very basic framework of a religion yeah right and basically serve as a way to bind people together and i just think like that's that's one of my big takeaways from like just kind of watching how companies evolve over the over the years like individuals are important as individuals but everything interesting that happens happens in in a group setting um and so we're we're just and this again this goes to like consciousness is like we are mentally driven to form groups we seem to be biologically driven to form groups like it seems very innate very deeply seated you know it seems like the only way we work we have we have a pre you know we have a ethnocentrism we have a gene we have some level of preference for other people who are from the same
genetic groupings you know that's you know the concept of a people right which used to be basically how human society was designed we continue to have huge debates about what that means today with with all the all the you know all the race issues right these are these are central no matter how intellectual and abstract we get these are all central experiences so this thing that we have this operating system religion seems to be a core component of it right how what what other core components would ai have to get down before it would be considered sentient so it has to be able to communicate it has to be able to recognize that you're communicating as well and to respond and to volley back and forth it has to be able to make its own decisions it has to be able to act or at least assert itself it has to do does it have to have feeling well the the central descartes the car the central the central intellectual thing would be it has to be able to prove that it has self-awareness and what is self-awareness like like at a fundamental level yeah i think therefore i am like i i am a i am an entity i i have a unique role in the world i am a unique but if it says that and and by the way i'm afraid of death well i know it doesn't have to be afraid of death to be alive well again historically that's the but if it's a computer and it's not a biological life form with a finite lifespan is it afraid of being turned off what if it has the ability to stop you from turning it off i think we would all like that but yes yeah yeah yeah well but this is one of the things even in the google this is one of one of the things which is this like you you can you can like i said you can interrogate at least these current systems and they will protest to the you can interrogate these systems in a way where they will absolutely swear up and down that they're conscious and that they're afraid of death and they don't want to be turned off but this guy did that at google you can also like i said you can interrogate these
things and they will prove to you that they're not alive right i see what you're saying right and so maybe that maybe that maybe that's a threshold that you can that's the rules maybe well maybe that's how you they keep you from turning them off before they do become sentient who me you know what i'm saying i'm not alive don't worry about me i'm definitely not alive exactly i mean why do we need fear and emotions to consider it alive if that's only alive as we know a human being to be that's not a sociopath right but why do we need that from but that was the theme of ex machina right they they were i mean he was in love with that girl and ultimately the girl left him in that room and to starve to death but this is the thing that that that movie was an extended kind of meditation on the turing test yeah here's the problem which is how hard is it okay here's okay this is going to become a question how hard is it to get a man to fall in love with a sex bot it depends on the man it depends on the sex exactly like that maybe that shouldn't be the test right maybe men are too simple um for that like maybe the fault the fault layer lies within ourselves so yeah that's right i don't think that's efficient if this if the fembot looks like scarlett johansson you got a real problem you know men men will fall for things all you have to do is be around her for a long period of time and you'll start to think like what is the point of it being real who gives a [ __ ] if she's a person yes she's real she's right there maybe we should let women make these calls i don't know you know maybe there's the alternate routes we should think i don't think they're gonna make the call correctly either i think we're [ __ ] i think it might be like the ultimate trick like if we can recreate life in a sense that it's indistinguishable from biological life that has to be created by intercourse it's just be aware the leaps that are happening just be aware of the leaps the leaps that are happening which is like here's here's what we know we don't know how to recreate a human brain like we don't know how to do it i can't build you a
human brain i can't i can't design one i can't grow it a tank i can't do any of that i have no idea how to do that i have no idea how to produce human consciousness um i know how to write linear algebra math code that's able to like trick people into thinking that it's real like ai i know how to do that i don't know how to code ai i don't know how to deliberately code ai to be self-aware or to be conscious or any of these things and so the leap here is like and this is kind of it's like the raker as well leave you know some people believe in this as a leap the leap is like we're going to go from having no idea how to deliberately build the thing that you're talking about which is like a conscious machine to all of a sudden the machine becoming conscious and we're it's going to take us by surprise and so right that's a leap right it's it i don't know it would be like carving a wheel out of stone and then all of a sudden it turns into a race car and like races off through the desert we're just like what you know what what just happened it's like well somebody had to invent the engine or the engine had to emerge somehow from somewhere right like right at some point now what ray kurzweil and other people would say is this will be a so-called emergent property and so if it just gets sort of sufficiently complex and there's enough interconnections like neurons in the brain at some point it kind of consciousness emerges it sort of happens kind of i don't know bottoms up right as an engineer you look at that and you're just kind of like i don't know that seems hand-wavy nothing else we've ever built in human history has worked that way but nothing else in human history has ever been like a computer no we've had machines from computers but but that can computers interface with human beings in an ai chat box everything a computer does today so you take your iphone everything computer does today a sufficiently educated engineer understands every single thing that's happening in that machine and what's happening and they understand it all the way down to the level of the individual atoms right and all the way up into what appears on the screen and a lot of what you learn when you get a computer science degree is like all
these different layers and how they how they fit together included in that education at no point is you know how to imbue it with the spark of consciousness right how to pull the dr frankenstein you know and have the monster wake up like we have no we have no conception of how to do and so in a sense in a sense it's almost it's almost giving engineers i think too much i don't know if trust or faith it's just kind of assuming it's just like a massive hand wave basically but isn't there and to the point being where my interpretation of it is the whole ai risk that whole world of ai risk danger all this concern it's primarily a religion like it is another example of these religions that we're talking about it's a religion and it's a classic religion because it's got this classic you know it's the book of revelations right it so this idea that the computer comes alive right and turns into skynet or x machina or whatever it is and you know destroys us all it's a it's a it's a it's an encoding of literally the christian book of revelations like we've we've recreated the apocalypse right and so again each nietzsche would say look all you've done is you've reincarnated the sort of christian myths into this sort of neo-technological kind of thing that you've made up on the fly and lo and behold you're sitting there and now you sound exactly like an evangelical protestant like surprise surprise you know i think that's what it is i think it's a massive hand wave i don't know you know i see what you're saying yeah i do see what you're saying but is it egotistical to equate what we consider to be consciousness to being this mystical magical thing because we can't quantify it because we can't recreate it because we can't even pin down where it's coming from right but if we can create something that does all the things that a conscious thing does at what point in time do we decide and accept that it's conscious do we have to have it display all these human characteristics that clearly are because of biological needs jealousy lust greed all these weird things that are inherent to the human
race do we have to have a conscious computer exhibit all those things before we accept it and why would it ever have those things those things are incredibly flawed right why would it have those things if it doesn't need them if it doesn't need them to reproduce because the only reason why we needed them we needed to ensure that the physical body is allowed to reproduce and create more people that will eventually get better and come up with better ideas and natural selection and so on and so forth that's why we're here and that's why we still have these monkey instincts but if we were going to make a perfect entity that was thinking wouldn't we wouldn't we engineer those out why would we need those so the very thing that we need to prove that a thing is conscious it would be ridiculous to have it in the first place they're totally unnecessary if i had a computer it's like i'm sad i'd be like [ __ ] what are you sad about you don't even have a job you don't have a life you don't have to wake up what the [ __ ] are you sad about right you have low serotonin you don't even have serotonin what are you talking about well it's not self-actualized well what it doesn't have a vision it doesn't have a vision of itself it doesn't have goals that it's driving towards right but does it have to have those to be conscious but if you eliminate all these other things what you are left with ultimately is a tool like you're back to sort of you're back to building screwdrivers what if that tool is interacting with you in a way that's indistinguishable from a human interacting with you well let me make the problem actually harder so that i mentioned how war happened between the ancient greeks it took it took many thousands of years of sort of modern western civilization to get to the point where people actually considered each other human right like people in different greek cities did not consider each other human like they considered each other like you know i don't know what this is but this is not a human being as we understand it it certainly has no human rights we can do whatever we want to it um and you know it's really judaism and then christianity in the west that kind of
had this really christianity that had this breakthrough idea that said that everybody basically is you know basically as a child of god right and then there's an actual religious you know there's a there's a there's a value there's an inherent moral and ethical value to each individual regardless of what tribe they come from regardless of what city they come from we still as a species seem to struggle with this idea right that all of our fellow humans are even human like you know we very part of part of the religious kind of instinct is to very quickly start to classify people into friend and enemy and to start to figure out how to dehumanize the enemy and then figure out how to go to war with them and kill them we're very good at coming up with reasons for that so we if anything our instincts are wired in the opposite direction of what you're suggesting which is we actually want to classify people as not human but originally but i think also that was probably done you know have you ever had like a feral animal i haven't but i've yeah they they're so distrusting of people yeah there i had a feral cat at one point in time and he he didn't trust anybody but me anybody near him like kiss and sputter and he had weird experiences i guess when he was a little kitten before i got him with and also just like being wild i think that's what human beings had before they were domesticated by civilization i think we had a feral idea of what other people are other people were things that were going to steal your baby and kill your wife and kill you and and take your food and take your shelter that's why we have this thought of people being other than us and that's why it was so convenient to think of them as other so you could kill them because they were a legitimate threat when that's not that doesn't exist anymore when you're when you're talking about a computer when you get to the point where you develop an artificial intelligence that does everything a human being does except the stupid [ __ ] is that alive well let me give you okay so everything a human being does so the good news is these machines are really good at generating the art and they're
really good at like tricking google engineers into really good sex spots um they can't fold clothes why not it turns out to be really hard to fold clothes could but they can make microchips it's really hard to fill you can you cannot buy a robot today that will fold your clothes but you cannot find a robot in a lab that will fold your clothes is it because all clothes are different robot will like pack your suitcase for you like no robot will like like just like it's all of a sudden it's just like you've got all this judgment you've got all these questions you've got managing 3d space config yeah all these can yeah you know computers are good at abstract 3d stuff but like you've got all of the all of a sudden the real the real world kicks in do we have an ability to to make a computer that could recognize variables and weights like the difference between the weight of this coffee mug versus the weight of this lighter sure that it can that it can adjust in terms of the amount of force that it needs to use in instant in real time like a person does yes and that'll get better that'll get better why can't it hold closed well at some point it may be able to fold close you know will it become conscious when it's able to fold close like uh you know what is this jamie it's probably something the guy oh there we go the laundry folding robot oh this is what this is what a big this is what a big deal this idea is okay here's a good example like this is what they had to do this i don't know this um you know i'm assuming they probably put a lot of work into this but like this is what they have to do to have a machine that can fold clothes but it's doing it it's doing yeah you know in its way in its way it looks amazing it's doing it better than me in the lab it's not you know you're not coming out with a suitcase you can travel with right but if you have another computer that comes over and picks up the folded things and stuffs it into a box and then closes it i'm just saying there's a lot and again this goes to the thing and look you could say look you you could here's what you could you could say i'm
being like human-centric and all my answers and do to which you know it's like okay what can you what can a computer do a human can or what or what's so special about all these things about people i think my answer there would just be like of course we want to be human-centric like right we're the humans like i said like you know the universe doesn't care team humans yeah exactly and so like you know i think we should make these decisions i don't think we should be shy about making these decisions no i love the way you're saying this because you're not you're you're not giving it any air and you're you're really you're thoroughly chasing down this idea of what it what would make it alive by the way it might be much more pl there might be robots in the future that are much more pleasant to be around than most people that are still not alive but that's a problem right right like but what is it maybe it's a problem maybe it's good like yeah maybe it is maybe people are going to actually get a lot out of that but what is a person yeah that that that is where especially if we get to the kurzweil idea like do you know there's a gentleman from australia got his arm and leg bitten off by a shark i met him at the comedy store and he has like a carbon fiber arm that articulates and the fingers move pretty well you can shake your hand it's kind of interesting and he walks without a limp with his carbon fiber leg and i'm looking at this guy i'm like this is amazing technology and what a giant leap in terms of what would happen a hundred years ago if you got your arm blown off and your leg bitten off and what would it be like well you'd have a very crude thing you'd have a peg and a hook right that's pirates what is it going to be like in the future and are they going to be superior do you remember when luke skywalker got his arm chopped off and they gave him a new arm and it was awesome yeah that's going to happen right but that's pretty from an engineering standpoint that's a lot simpler than building your brain that's okay hang in there with me what if it gets to the point where your whole body is that yeah yeah but again
that's a lot simpler than building a brain and then you take your brain yeah and you put it into this new artificial body that looks exactly like you right when you were 20. and we may know how to do that before we understand how consciousness works in the brain right yeah but would you would you think of that as a person i would if you have a human brain that's trapped in this artificially created body that looks exactly like a 20 year old version of you yeah i would no i would now there are scientists who wouldn't right there are scientists who would say look this goes back to the mind-body duality question there are scientists who say look the rest of the body is actually so central to how the human being is and exists and behaves and like you know got bacteria and all these things right that if you took the brain away from the rest of the nervous system and the gut and then the bacteria and all the all the the entire organ is sort of complex of organisms that make up the human body that it would no longer be human as we understand it right it might still be thinking but it wouldn't have the you wouldn't be experiencing the human experience there are scientists who would say that obviously there are religions that would definitely say that yeah um uh you know that that's the case um you know i would be willing to meet me personally if you want to go so far as to say if it's if if it's the brain so it's only the brain because what if they can do with what if they do this and then they take your brain and then they put it into this artificial body and this is the new mark you're amazing you're 20 years old your body you have no worries you're bulletproof everything's great and you just have this brain in there but the brain starts to deteriorate and they say good news we can recreate your brain and then we can put that brain in this artificial body and then you're still you you won't even notice the difference that's so that's the lead that's the leap right today that's the hand wave we have no clue how to do that you can for now i know for now but we have no clue
how to do a lot of things right we're not worried about those things either right but if you look like we don't know how to make gravity reverse itself either right like there's a lot of things we don't like at some point somebody's got to like sit down and actually build these things right and i'm just saying like you can you could you could go to you know mit for the next 50 years you wouldn't learn the first thing on how to do what you're describing so sure i i feel you yeah but if you are you think what so do you think that a lot of kurzweil's ideas are are they just dreams are they just like maybe one day we can do this or is there any real technological basis for any of his like his proposals about like downloading consciousness is there any real understanding of how that could ever be possible or like a real road map to get to that well again you know there's a theory let's give this let's still manage theory his theory basically is you could map the brain the brain is the theory be the brain is physical um and you could you could in theory with future sensors you could map the brain meaning you could like take an inventory of all the neurons right um and then you could take an inventory of all the connections between the neurons and all the chemical signals and electrical signals to get pat get passed back and forth um and then and then if you could basically if you could model that if you could examine a brain and model that then you basically would have a new you would have a computer version of that brain like you you would have that yeah just like copying a song or copying a video file or anything like that you know look in theory maybe someday with sensors that don't exist yet maybe at that point like if you have all that data you put it together does it start to run does it start to does it say the same things does it say hey i'm mark but i'm in the machine now right you know i don't know um but would it even need to say that if it wasn't a person well like if you have consciousness and it's sentient if it doesn't have emotions and it doesn't have needs and jealousy and all the weirdness it makes a person why would it even tell you it's sentient well i mean
at some point it would want to be asked for example not to get turned off what if it has the ability to stop you from turning it off that would be that would be big news but wouldn't it be not concerned about whether it's on or off if it didn't have emotions so it didn't have a fear of death if it didn't have a survival instinct i mean ever i mean if you're a death like every every every animal that we're aware of like has a fear but it's not an animal i i know but if it's not even an animal like but if it's the next thing walk it the other way though if if it's not even that if if it doesn't even have a sense of self-awareness to the point where it's worried about death like is it is it anything more than a tool well what if is it anything more than a hard drive right like well and then here's here's the other thing right race race i mentioned this before where he says look consciousness is machines will come alive sort of on their own because consciousness is emergent consciousness is the process of enough connections being made between enough neurons where the machine just kind of comes alive and and again as an engineer i look at that and i'm like that's a hand wave can i rule out that that never happens i can't rule it out i don't even know how we came i don't know how rocky is i see what you're saying like you're not willing to go with it yeah it's just like yeah there's a point at which it be these there's a point at which the hypothetical scenarios become so hypothetical that they're not useful and then there's a point where you start to wonder if you're dealing with a religion yeah that point where the hypotheticals become so hypothetical yeah that's where i live yeah that's my name it's funny it's fun to talk about this is there's not much to i know there's not much to do with it but it's just it's that's the most fascinating to me because i always wonder like what defines what is a thing and i've always said that i think that human beings are the electronic caterpillar that's creating the cocoon and doesn't even know it and it's going to become a butterfly yeah that could be and then look there are still as you said there are still core unresolved questions about what it means for human beings to be human
beings yeah and to be conscious right and to be valued and what our system of ethics and morals should be in a post-christian post-religious world and like are these new religions we keep coming up with are they better than what we had before right and so there's one of the ways to look at all the one of the ways to look at all of these questions is they're all basically echoes or reflections of core questions about us yes right because we could you could say the cynic would say look if we could answer all these questions about the machines it would mean that we could answer we could finally answer all these questions about ourselves yes which is probably what we're groping towards yeah most certainly right that's what we're grappling with we're trying to figure out what it means to be human and and how we like what are our flaws and how can we approve improve upon what it means to be a human being and that's probably what people are at least attempting to do with a lot of these new religions like the thing that that i do you know i oppose a lot of these very restrictive ideologies in terms of what people what people are and are not allowed to say are not not allowed to do because this group opposes it or that group opposes it but ultimately what i do like is that these ideologies even if they only pay lip service to inclusion and lip service to kindness and compassion because a lot of it's just lip service but at least that's the ethic that's what they're saying like they're saying they want people to be more inclusive they want people to be kinder they want people to group in and they're using that to be really shitty to other human beings that don't do it but at least they're doing it in that form right it's not like trying to i know what you're saying like you don't agree with me at all not at all no no no this is what communism promised right how'd that work out yeah but communism didn't have the reach you know the reach the internet has it was it got pretty big no i think you're right but i think the basis that the
battle against it okay is where it resolves itself the the basis of every awful horrible totalitarian regime in history has always been oh we're doing it for the people yes it's not for us right it's not for us leaders it's for the people with it you know hitler is doing it for the german people the communists are doing it for all the people on earth like the it's always on behalf of the people it's always done out of a sense of altruism um and like the road to hell is paid with good intentions like that that's the that's the trick but don't you think the goal posts because of this do get moved in a generally better direction and that the battle as long as it's leveled out as long as people can push back against the most crazy of ideas the most restrictive of ideologies the most restrictive of regulations and rules and the the general totalitarian instincts that human beings have human beings have for whatever reason a very strong instinct to force other people to behave and think the way they'd like them to that's a part of that's what's scary about this forced conversion yes right into my religion yeah you're a heathen i need to get that you're right i need to i need to demand that you convert or i need to figure out a way to use it or punish you ostracize you were killing right but it's general like we can agree that generally society has moved up until now to a place where there's less violence like all of pinker's work right shows less violence less races um less war well there's two ways of looking there's two ways of looking at it one is that we have pr we have progressed and i think there's there's very smart people make that argument the other way of the other ways we mentioned before which is actually what we're doing is we're diluting we we are going from strong cults to weak call we're basically going to ever weaker forms of cults we're basically working our way down towards softer and softer and softer forms of the same fundamental dynamic so where does that go to well the good the good news at least in theory you know of of walking down that path would would be less less physical violence in fact that you know and there is less physical violence like you know political
violence is an example is weighed down as compared to basically any historical period and so that just on a sheer human welfare standpoint like you'd have to obviously say that's good you know the other side of it though would be like all of the social bonds that we expect to have as human beings are getting you know diluted as well they're all getting you know watered down and you know this concept of atomization you know we're all getting atomized we're getting basically pulled out of all these groups these groups are diminishing in power and authority right and and they're and they're diminishing in other positive ways as well and they're kind of leaving us as kind of unmourned individuals trying to find our own way in the world and you know people having various forms of like unhappiness and dissatisfaction and dysfunction that are flowing out of that and so you know if everything's going so well then why is everybody so fat and why is everybody on you know drugs and why is everybody taking ssris and why is everybody experiencing all this stress and why are all the indicators on like anxiety and depression spiking way up but aren't we aware of that well but like how's it going right well for who well for the for me it's going great for you it's going great for me right why but why is it going great for you well for a lot but for a lot of people it's not going that great right but isn't it going great for you because of education and understanding and acting yeah there's a certain number of people who these things go great for it right why is that i mean that's a whole nother but you can't say everybody right no no not everybody but if you're looking if you're looking at collective welfare there is an adoption question if you're looking collective welfare you don't focus on just the basically the few at the top right you focus on everybody and but it's not even at the top it's the people that are aware of physical exercise and nutrition and well-being and wellness and yeah so here's what's happening mindfulness so once upon a time and again like i'm not really i'm not religious and i'm not defending religion per se but once upon a time we had the idea that the the body was a vessel provided to us by god and that like we had a responsibility as my
temple i have a responsibility to take care of it like okay we shredded that idea right and then what do we have we have this like really sharp now demarcation this really like fantastic thing where basically if you're like super if you're in the elite if you're like upper income upper education upper whatever capability right you're probably on some regimen like you're probably on some combination of weight lifting and you know yoga and boxing and jiu-jitsu right pilates and like all the stuff and running in aerobics and all that stuff and if you're not you're probably like you just look at the stats like obesity is like rising like crazy and then it's this weird thing where like the elite of course you know the the elite is the delete sends all the messages the elite is you know includes the media sends all the messages and the message of course now is body positivity right which basically means like oh it's it's it's great to be fat in fact doctors shouldn't even be criticizing people for being fat and so it's like the people the elites most committed to personal fitness are the most adamant that they should send a cultural message to the masses saying it doesn't matter oh okay wait now we're getting tinfoil hat let me hit the no no no no no no do you really think the elites are sending body positivity yes and this is where it comes from 100 percent in what way you pick up the cover of any any of these it's the new in thing now with all the fitness magazines in the checkout stands at the supermarket right but where's that coming from that's coming from people that's coming from it sells to people if you let them know that they're good of course well because of course people want to hear i i would love to hear if i'm just like an ordinary person living i'd love to hear a message i can eat whatever i want but i think the message gets transported on social media long before so-called elites get a hold of it but it was it was the idea it's like all these ideas yeah the it's like all these ideas the idea of body positivity right is definitely is definitely elite like that the idea that like that's just good is just fine like you know this you look at old
photos of crowds of those just crowds of normal people you don't see fat people yeah the 1970s it's just not yeah it's including relatively recently like it's just not the case right and so look people may have people may have a natural inclination to not exercise they may have a natural inclination to eat all kinds of horrible stuff right that may be true but like there's a big difference between living in a culture that says that that's actually like not a good idea and that you should take care of yourself versus living in a culture where the culture says to you no that's actually just fine in fact you should be prized for it okay but if a doctor criticizes you they're being evil but let's break that down like where's that message coming from where is the message of body positivity where's it coming from the same way same place all these other ideas but isn't it coming from this is the communism right isn't it coming from the same place that where you get participation trophies it's a it's an it's an evolution of the sort of egalitarian ethic of our time right that sort of evolved it evolved all the way through communism it kind of hit the 60s it turned into this other thing that we have now you know sort of modern whatever you want to call it modern elite secular humanism whatever you want to call it anyway point being like it is a weird it is a weird dichotomy like it's very the outcomes are very strange right it's like okay why why are the people most enthusiastic about sending this message the most fit right why is everybody else suffering is that real my are they the most fit the people that are sending this body positivity message in general what i see is obese people that want to find some sort of an excuse for why it's okay to be obese yeah there's there is some of that but there's a lot of theory right there's a lot of you know there's a lot of professors there's a lot of writers right there's a lot of people working in the media companies like there's a lot of people there a lot of people whose job it is to propagate ideas yeah they have likes that have you know six yoga classes a week and do it do all the stuff you shot you at whole foods and those are the ones that are telling you
it's okay to be fast that's where a lot of the stuff is coming from really how so where are you getting this it's just it's i mean you just you look at major abs now showing up in major advertising campaigns right but isn't that just because they feel like that's what people want and there's a lot of blow back from that but again let's go back to where this started which is it's a level of like are you in a culture that has expectations or not right are you in a culture that actually has high standards or not and and this goes back to the nature point in a religious environment you had high standards because you were trying to live up to god okay we are now trying to create cultures that we are constructing from scratch right they're not religious we don't believe in god we're trying to construct value systems from from scratch and do we value emotions too much yeah do we value emotions too much do we yeah what do we value do we value do we value achievement do we not do we value right do we value protecting people from shame and do we value economic growth do we you know do do we think people should have to work like you know by the way drug policy like do we think it's okay for people you know do we do we do we value people not being stoned like and by the way maybe we should maybe we shouldn't i don't know but like it's the thing we're gonna have to figure out right if you saw the number like i'm not anti-marijuana but like the numbers of marijuana usage in the states of legalized marijuana are like really high and like do we want like 40 or 50 or 60 or 80 percent of the population being stoned all day is that real i don't know not yet but if you look at where the numbers are going in the states that will legalize marijuana like it's rising well the government the classic the classic case the government just another the the federal government just announced they're going to start to uh they they banned they just banned jewel uh electronic cigarettes isn't that wild no why'd they do that so they finally banned those i'm coming to that so they ban those and then they're going to try to now mandate lower nicotine levels in tobacco cigarettes right um but why would they ban jewels well so jules are
electronic cigarettes there's a bunch of our there's a bunch of arguments it's it's a long time there's a whole bunch of arguments but it's interesting that the trend is to ban tobacco but to legalize marijuana right so these things this is a tobacco vape pen is this illegal now i don't think it's illegal if joule is not going to be allowed to operate um i don't know what that means for other companies like that they might also be banned like that might not be legal in the u.s in three months what yeah yeah yeah that's coming but who the [ __ ] are they to tell us we can't have this federal government but this is what's crazy like why yeah well as usual with these things there are very specific reasons um you know and a lot of it of course has to do with marketing to kids which has always been an issue but i'd like to find out what what they're saying what's the reason when you think about half a million people die every year from cigarette smoking right how many people are dying from jewels yeah i don't know is it four i mean generally a lot of people scab pickers those kids who's dying from jewel those people that i remember them all day they uh when i saw a story about this maybe two years ago they had their content of nicotine is way higher than you know oh it's the average this this [ __ ] puts you on pluto right right away it's wild it gives you a crazy head rush a tinfoil hat also read that had this had something to do with a big building they bought in san francisco and a lot of people didn't like that like the company but i don't know how the federal government outlawed them because of a building i don't know that doesn't make any sense it sounds like the jewel lobbyists need to step up their [ __ ] game nancy pelosi has a number you've got to find what that number is and get it to her but but here's the other thing you're not dying from the nicotine like the nicotine is not causing the lung cancer exactly right right a very good point which backwards causing the lung cancer the tobacco's causing lung cancer right um one of the not even the tobacco necessarily yeah like the tar like the the other right the all kinds
of other [ __ ] the stuff that's in there so one of one of the arguments for joule historically was it is better than smoking so it is healthier than smoking cigarettes there's an issue with the heavy metals and the adulterated packets and so forth but generally speaking if you get through that people are generally going to be healthier smoking a vape pen then they're going to be smoking smoking tobacco but but think think about the underlying thing that's happened which is negative on nicotine positive on marijuana well then think in terms of the political coding on it right so who smokes cigarettes versus who smokes pot right so who smokes cigarettes it's coded it's not 100 but it's coded as lor especially middle middle class lower class white people um who smokes pot you know upper class upper middle class white people wait a minute slower class a lot why people smoke pot too they they do now in increasing numbers but history if you just look if you look for cheech and chong if you look at that was street chinchong was a long time ago fda proposes rules prohibiting menthol cigarettes and flavored cigars to prevent youth okay that kind of significantly reduced tobacco-related disease and death well these are and then specifically you'll notice what's happening menthol cigarettes flavored cigars targeted that's those are coated black those are the historically those are black centric markets right and so this is criticism when they first came out with this with methyl cigarettes that it's very specifically targeting black people being able it's it's raising the basically raising the price of cigarettes on black people and so there's there's are they more expensive they either make them more expensive or they just like flat out outlaw them and make them you know and then they're contraband they're bootleg they're you know then it's an illegal drug is it are menthol cigarettes inherently worse uh i don't think they're inherently worse just historically it's the black it's the black community that tends to prefer menthol cigarettes um right but why
would they outlaw menthol cigarettes like what's the justification because they're trying to reduce smoking among black people they're trying to trying to reduce smoking of nicotine among black people they're not interestingly trying to reduce smoking of marijuana the black people in fact they're doing quite the opposite because we're legalizing marijuana everywhere so there is an interesting as the tectonic tectonic plates shift in our ethics and morality there's a coding to race and class what are your reservations about marijuana being fully legalized and implemented i just i don't know i don't know we we've just we've like this way like i'm sort of reflexively a libertarian my my general assumption is it's a it's a good idea to not basically tell adults that they can't do things that they should be able to do especially particularly things that don't hurt other people but you're apprehensive um and furthermore it seems like the drug war has been a really bad idea and the same for the same reason prohibition has been a bad idea which is when you make it illegal then you make it then you have organized crime then you have violence right right and all these things so that's like my reflexive that's that's a sort of as a soft libertarian that's sort of my natural inclination having said all that you know if the result is that you know 20 of the population is stoned every day like is that a good outcome okay what about 30 what about 40 what about 50 like do you ever smoke marijuana i've a couple a little bit a couple times what are you what are your thoughts on what happens when people smoke marijuana a lot i don't know i don't know do you believe that the medical establishments that struggled so much with covet is going to be able to give you the answer i don't think they're the ones i should turn to i think we should turn to the people that are high-functioning marijuana users well except maybe the high-functioning users or the special maybe they you know maybe there's biological differences i think there certainly is right yeah there certainly is have you ever uh seen alex berenson's book tell your children i've heard about it it's a really interesting book and i
had him on with a guy named mike hart who's a doctor out of canada who prescribes cannabis for a bunch of different ailments and different diseases for people and he was like very pro-cannabis and i'm a marijuana user and so the two of them together it was really interesting because i was more on alex berenson's side i was like hey there it there are real instances of people developing schizophrenic or schizophrenia radically increasing in people whether they had an inclination or a tendency to schizophrenia family history or something and then a high dose of thc snaps something in them but there are many documented instances of people consuming marijuana specifically edible marijuana and having these breaks so what are those things and because of the fact that it's been prohibited it's been scheduled one in this country for so long we haven't been able to do the proper studies so we don't really understand the mechanisms we don't know what's causing these we don't really know what's causing schizophrenia right well it's going to say it's possible that marijuana is getting blamed for schizophrenic breaks that would have happened anyway right right right precondition right right so we yeah we don't know it's hard to study well here's another question another ethical question gets interesting which is should there be lab development of new recreational pharmaceuticals right should there be labs that create new hallucinogens and new you know barbiturates and new amphetamines and new et cetera et cetera or new opiates like this is the big dilemma about fentanyl right and then the new ones that are even more potent but should there be should that be should that be a fully legal and authorized process should there be the equivalent of you know the equivalent of the you know should there be companies with like you know the same companies that make you know cancer drugs or whatever should they be able to be in the business of developing recreational drugs but isn't the argument against that that if you do not do that then it's the same thing as prohibition that you put the money into the hands of organized crime and they develop it because there's a desire right that's right yeah and then you get
math and fentanyl and so forth on the other hand do you want to be like again goes back to the question do you want to be in a culture in which basically everybody is encouraged to be stoned and hallucinating you keep saying stone but the thing about cannabis is cannabis it facilitates conversation and community and kindness there's a lot of very positive aspects to it especially when used correctly and i would argue it's i mean from what i can tell it's there for if you had to make a societal choice you prefer marijuana over alcohol i do but i also like alcohol right i think alcohol is a great social lubricant and it makes for some wonderful times and some great laughs and if you're a happy person i'm a happy drunk i like drinking with friends we have a lot of laughs and i don't think if the government came along and said no more drunk no more drinking no more alcohol i would be just as frustrated as i would be if they came along and said no more cannabis i think it's if you're a libertarian then i would imagine that you think that the individual should be able to choose their own destiny if fully informed yeah and i and i do and by the way like you'll notice there's another thing that happens again as we kind of reach for our new religions um is we we me the the reflex which is legitimate which we all do is to start to think okay therefore let's talk about laws let's talk about bands let's talk about government actions right there's another domain to talk about which is virtues right and like and and and and our in our in our decisions and our cultural expectations of each other right and of the standards that we set and who our role models are right and what we hold up to be like positive and virtuous right and that's an idea that's an idea that was sort of encoded into all the old religions we were talking about like they had that built in yeah we arguably because of the dilution effect right arguably like we've lost that sense that you know there used to be there used to be this concept called the virtues right if you like read the founding fathers they talked a lot about like the founding fathers famously like adams and martial and these guys said basically
democracy will only work for in a virtuous population right in a population of people who have who have the virtues who have basically a high expectation of their own behavior and the ability to enforce that enforce codes of behavior within the group yeah independent of laws and so it's like okay what what are our virtues exactly right what do we what do we hold each other to what are our expectations you know in in our time it is kind of unusual historically and that those are kind of undefined we don't really don't have good answers for that how do we develop those good answers don't we let people try it out and see where it goes and see if there's maybe like a threshold maybe there's like a like go out and have a glass of wine nothing wrong with that right drink four bottles of wine at dinner you might be belligerent right right or you know like alcohol alcohols you know to this day is highly correlated with violence it's highly related with domestic abuse um you know it's highly community fights you know when people get in street fights it's almost always somebody's gotta extend shootings deaths almost always either one side or the other is drunk yes okay maybe that's not so good right maybe that's not so good maybe we shouldn't be encouraging that you haven't done that right have you had alcohol before nothing yes yes but you you turned out okay i turned out okay but don't you think that you should be a standard you're a very intelligent guy shouldn't we different people have different experiences right should we deny them those experiences no i didn't say henry yeah the whole thing but like right well this goes to i mean look this this reason i'm so focused on this whole ethics morals thing is because you know a lot of the sort of hot topics around technology ultimately turn out to be hot topics around like all the questions around freedom of speech yeah are the ex they're the exact same kind of question everything that we've been talking about to me which is it's like it's an attempt to reach for you know should we should there be more speech depression should there be less is you know hate speech
misinformation so forth yes yes these are all these sort of encoded ethical moral questions that prior generations had very clear answers on and we somehow have become onward on and maybe we have to think hard about how to get our mornings back yeah but how does one do that without forming a restrictive religion good question yeah i mean by definition what you know morality buys and blinds like at some point yeah do you want to live in a world with no structure right do you really want to live in a world with no structure but i mean what we i think we want a certain amount of structure that we agree upon that we agree is better for everyone for all parties involved right would you say we have that today i don't think we do yeah i don't think we do no i think we have some people that have sort of agreed to be a part of a moral structure you know and a lot of those people are atheists you know like guys like my friend sam harris very very much an atheist but also very ethical you know will not lie has a very sound moral structure that's admirable and when you talk to him about it's very well defined and he would make the argument that religion and a belief in some nonsensical idea that there's a guy in the sky that's watching over everything is not benefiting anybody and that morals and ethics and kindness and compassion are inherent to the human race because the way we communicate with each other in a positive way it's enforced by all those things by developing good community it's enforced by all those so would you say that most people in the united states that don't consider themselves members of a formal religion are getting saner over time or less sane over time it depends on the pockets that they operate in if they have some sort of a method that they use to solidify their purpose and give them a sense of well-being and generally those things pay respect to the physical body whether it's through meditation or yoga or something there's some sort of a
thing that they do that allows them i don't want to say to transcend but to elevate themselves above the worst based instincts the base instincts that that a human animal has yeah i think there are people like that i don't think that's the representative but it but shouldn't that be what we aspire to i don't think that's the representative experience right but is that not the representative experience because people are not guided correctly they don't have the proper data or information or they don't have good examples around them yeah and i think that's a big part of it right like what kind of community do you operate in if you operate in a community of compassionate kind interesting generous people generally speaking those traits would be rewarded and you would try to emulate the people around you that are successful that exhibit those things and you would see how by being kind and generous and moral and ethical that person gets good results from other people you have other people in the group that reinforce those because they they see it they generally learn from each other isn't it a lack of leadership in that way that we don't have enough people that have exhibited those things there certainly is that right but you don't have a lot of faith in that i will agree on well it's like okay they better show up pretty soon well they're kind of here but they're just not it's hard to get there don't you think no you know they're so they're not getting elected office i know that much that's true that's a giant problem right the popularity contest is the giant problem so the way we decide who is going to enforce these laws and rules and regulations we essentially have giant popularity contests i would just say we've decided we can define our own morality from scratch i hope that goes well i'm a lot i'm a lot more worried about that than i am about artificial intelligence i can tell you that i'm a lot more worried about the other people that's an imminent threat yeah so it's a constant threat what is the what's the solution i don't know it's a
hard one have you do you have any theories i mean i like at the very least i i would i always go to try to figure out the meta level okay like if this isn't going well like like what's the system like what what's what's the what's the process by which by which this would happen what are the sort of biases that would be involved as we think about this what are the motivations that we have i don't know that that brings me any closer to an answer to the to the actual question hmm but is this something you've wrestled with yeah a little but yeah a little bit but not yeah i would not i would not certainly not propose an answer you wouldn't propose an answer but would would you ever sit down and come up with just some sort of hypothetical structure that people could operate on at least have better results i think that that is going to be something that people are going to have to do maybe someday i might do that someday you might do that someday yeah but you clearly have thoughts on it and you you clearly have thoughts on things like marijuana that maybe perhaps people are using to escape or to dilute their perspective okay let me give you something i do have strong thoughts on i don't yeah let me give you something i have strong thoughts on like do we value achievement right what is achievement achievement do we value out performance okay but what is performance what is achievement is it okay let me value people who do things better than other people okay but what are those things what about communicate with people do we value people who communicate with people better do we value people who are kinder yeah we've are those achievements to getting differences right but get to be able to get your personality and your body and your life experiences in line to the point where you have more more positive and beneficial relationships with other people isn't that an accomplishment yeah sure of course that would be an accomplishment but also like do we do we value people who build things right like what are those things right do we value do we value people who create jobs um do we value people who run companies depends on what those jobs
are what those companies are right what if the company makes nuclear weapons and the job is to distribute those all around the world and blow [ __ ] up well that's an accomplishment except what those companies do is they prevent world war three so you would say yes sometimes you would say that's an accomplishment sometimes they shoot drones into civilians they do they do they do um yeah look do we value yeah i mean look do we value do we value heterodox thinking right do we value thinking that violates the norm right do we value thinking that challenges current societal assumptions like do we value that or do we hate that we try to shut it down um you know look do we value people if they study harder they get better grades the better grades should get them into a college other people can't get to but do we have to universally value all the same things like isn't it important to develop pockets of people that value different things and then we make this sort of value judgment on whether or not those things are beneficial to the greater human race as a whole or at least to their community as a whole do we value population growth that's a question right do we value having kids right yeah is having is having kids something that contributes to the human story um or it depends on who's having kids have you seen idiocracy yes mike judge was on the other day and the podcast actually came out today and mike judge is awesome and his movie idiocracy i i never watched it i'd only watch clips and i watched it prior to him coming on the show the [ __ ] beginning scenes where they explain how the human race devolves is [ __ ] amazing it's so funny that's kind of what we're worried about right well i don't know i mean right now there's a movement afoot among the elites in our country that basically says having kids is having kids having anybody having kids is a bad idea including having elites have kids is a bad idea because you know climate well elon doesn't think that well exactly so elon has been surfacing this issue this issue and i think a very useful way because i think this this is a real question yes there's a long history
there's a long history in elite western thinking there's a long history in elite western thinking about this question of whether there should be kids who has kids right 100 years ago all the smartest people were very into eugenics right and then later on that became something called population control and then in the 70s it became something called degrowth and now we call it environmentalism and we basically say as a result more human beings are bad for the planet not good for the planet is that eugenics really yes well it's descended from eugenics it's like it's like it's it's eugenics itself let's see eugenics was discredited by world war ii hitler gave eugenics a bad name legit legitimately so that was a bad idea um that so it shed the overt kind of genetic engineering component of of eugenics but what survived was this sort of aggregate question of the level of population and and there and so the big kind of elite sort of movement on this in the 50s and 60s was so called population control now the programs for population control tended to be oriented at you know the same countries people had been worried about with eugenics you know in particular you know a lot of the same people who were worried about the eugenics of africa all of a sudden became worried about the population control of africa right right that led to kind of this whole modern thing about african philanthropy kind of all flows out of that out of that out of that tradition um but it all kind of rolls up to this big question right which is like okay are more more people better or worse right and if you're like a straight-up environmentalist it's pretty pretty likely right now you have a position that more people make the planet worse off but until the point where more people develop technology that fixes and corrects all the detrimental effects of large populations and then of course i would argue as an engineer i would argue we already have that technology and we just refuse to use it like which technologies nuclear nuclear energy nuclear energy i agree with you on that that if we had better nuclear energy we'd have far less particulates in the atmosphere like i was watching this uh
this video was really fascinating where they were talking about electric cars and they were they were giving this demonstration about you know the if we can all get onto these electric vehicles the emission standards would be so much better the world would be better the environment would be better and then this person questioned him gets to where's this electricity coming from it's powering this car and the answer is mostly coal yeah that's right that's what this guy says and and then you're like whoa yeah well well if that was nuclear yeah that's right if that was nuclear then that would be eliminated you would have nuclear power which is really the cleanest technology that we have available for mass distribution of electricity yeah that's right right by far well so funny history here so richard nixon who everybody hates um it turns out i don't hate him okay all right a lot of kids a lot of people hate him i'm just kidding i think if you're around today you probably would hate that you probably would um uh nixon next time it turns out was the softy on a couple of topics uh one was the environment so nixon created the environmental protect protection agency right so this is a guy with like as good environmental kind of credentials as anybody in the last like you know 70 years um he also proposed a project in 1972 called um uh i'm blanking on the name of the project um uh what the [ __ ] was it i can't remember but it was specifically as a project for uh to build a thousand nuclear power plants in the u.s by the year 2000 oh it's called project independence is to achieve energy energy independence so he said let's build a thousand nuclear plants by 2000 then we won't have any dependence on foreign oil we won't need to use oil we won't need any of this stuff and we'll be able to just like power the whole country on nuclear reactors you will notice that that did not happen did not that did not happen yeah and so here we sit today with this kind of hybrid you know kind of thing where we're you know we mostly have it's a lot of gas you know now there's some solar and wind there's some you know a few nuclear plants and then europe you know kind of has a similar kind of mixed kind
of thing and then in the last five years we've decided both we in europe have decided well let's just shut down the nuclear plants like let's just shut down the remaining nuclear plants let's try to get let's try to get the gold to zero right and then of course europe has hit the buzz saw on this because now shutting down the nuke plants means they're even more exposed to their need for russian oil right it happened in the worst time possible right exactly and they still won't stop shutting down the plants they're still doing it even though they really shouldn't because europe europe is funding russia to the tune of over a billion euros a day by buying their energy and they can't turn it off because they don't have their own and so and sure enough germany right now they're firing up the coal plants again oh geez right and they're heading into summer where they need to power the ac systems and then this winter they have a big problem they need to power heat um and so yeah literally like we're back we're back to coal so so somehow we've done you know after 50 years of the environmental movement we've done a complete round trip and we've ended up back at coal is that because we didn't properly plan what was going to be necessary to implement this green strategy long term and they didn't look at okay we are relying on russian or what if russia does this what if you know what what are our options do we go right to coal why don't we have nuclear power at least at least have a plan we know that they can develop nuclear power plants that are far superior to the ones that we're terrified of like fukushima right ones that don't have these fail-safe programs or don't have a limited failsafe like fukushima had a backup the backup went out too and then they were [ __ ] three-mile island chernobyl when meltdowns that's what scares us what scared us is the occasional nuclear disaster but is that are we looking at that incorrectly because there's far more applications than there are disasters and those disasters could be used to let us understand what could go wrong and
engineer a far better system and that far better system would ultimately be better for the environment yeah so total number of deaths attributed to nuclear civilian nuclear power total number of deaths what were they for three mile island i don't right how many were there for fukushima it was a couple no it was either zero or one that was one guy there's one court case how many people develop superpowers not nearly enough we need to see once again we need to get to we need to get to the x-men before yeah why is that like never happening you want to take a digression there are there are super power startups should we do nukes or superpowers which one first these are both interesting oh well let's let's just go look at this what jamie just pulled up the nobody died as a direct result of the fukushima nuclear disaster however in 2018 one worker in charge of measuring radiation at the plant died of lung cancer caused by radiation and that just as trivia that's actually disputed that's actually there's actually litigation that's been a legal litigation case in japan about whether or not that was actually whether he got lung cancer actually because some people just get lung cancer yeah and people who don't even smoke it and how can you tell where the lung cancer comes from and so that's why i said it's either zero or one interesting now the disaster related does actually those were those were attributed deaths to the evacuation and those were mostly old people under the stress of evacuation and then again you know the question of like they were old people if they were 85 you know you're really going to die anyway so so back to whatever whatever um so look nuclear power by far is the safest form of energy we've ever developed like overwhelmingly the total number of civilian nuclear deaths and nuclear power has been very close to zero there's been like a handful of construction deaths with people concrete falling on people other than that like it's basically as safe as can be we know how bad coal is by the way there's something even worse than coal which is so-called biomass which is basically people burning wood or plants in a stove in the house
the the fireplaces fireplaces in the house are terrible there's roughly five million deaths a year attributed in the developing world to people burning biomass in the house so like that that's the actual catastrophe that's playing out and that's because of gas leaking inside their home yeah smoke smoking smoking smoke in the house and so like that that's the like that if you're just if you're if you're a pure utilitarian you just want to focus on minimizing human death you get you try to go after those five million now you know nobody ever talks about that of course because nobody actually cares about that kind of thing but like that is what you would go after nuclear is like almost completely safe and then there is there is a way to develop if you want to develop a completely safe nuclear plant that was like safer than all these others what you would actually do there's a new design for plants where you would actually have the entire thing be entombed from the start so you would build a completely self-contained plant and you would encase the entire thing right in concrete and then the plant would run completely lights out inside the box and then it would run for 10 years or 15 years or whatever until the fuel ran out and then it would just stop working and then you would just seal off the remaining concrete and then you would just leave it leave it put and nobody would ever open it and it would be totally safe like totally contained you know nuclear waste is there so you could build especially with your point of modern engineering like there hasn't been real there hasn't been like a new nuclear power plant design in the u.s in 40 years and i think maybe i don't know the last time the europeans did one from scratch but if you use modern technology you could upgrade almost everything about it and so we have the capability we can do this at any time like this is a very straightforward thing to do there has not been a new nuclear plant authorized to be built in the united states in 40 years holy [ __ ] we have something called the nuclear regulatory commission their job was to prevent nuclear plants from being built jesus christ and this is because of these small amount of disasters that have caused no life
either people have a dispute about the facts or there's a religious component here where we have the same people who are very worried about climate change are also for some reason very worried about nuclear for reasons as an engineer i i don't understand how they how they kind of do it's something about nuclear so-called ick factor it's energy right i mean it's the idea of um the fact that you can't get rid of it like once once you do have a disaster like fukushima that area is [ __ ] for a long time yeah but again this is the thing is you can do like total amount of nuclear waste in the world is like very small um there's a way to build these things where they're like completely contained like that that you could work around like that's not a big issue relative to the scale of the other issues that we're talking about like compared to carbon emissions like that's just not a big issue right but what i was going to get to is that that energy also there are strategies in place to take nuclear waste and convert it into batteries and converted into energy you could do that there is so there's a lack of education or you could just bury it well look i think primarily this i primarily these topics are religious um this is always my type for anybody whoever and there's there's a whole wave of investing that's happening and so there's a whole climate tech remember there's a whole green climate tech wave of investing in tech companies in the 2000s that basically didn't work there's another wave of that now because a lot of people are worried about the environment and and to me the litmus test always says where are we funding new nuclear power plants right because because we have the we have the answer like we don't need to invent the new thing we actually have the answer for basically a limited clean energy we just we just we don't want it i don't know why religious reasons that you the the europeans don't want i mean the europeans of all people should really want it well it's not they should be doing this right now is it that we don't want it or that we don't understand it so like if we if it was laid out to people the way you're laying out to me right now and if if there was a a grand press conference that was held worldwide where people understood the benefits of
nuclear power far outweigh the dangers and that the dangers can be mitigated with modern strategies with modern engineering and that the power plants that we're worried about the ones that failed were very old and it's essentially like worried about the kind of pollution that came from a 1950s car as opposed to a tesla right like we're looking at something that's very very different well so stewart brand who's the founder of the whole earth catalog and one of the leading environmentalists the 1960s has been on this message for 50 years he's written books he's given talks he's done the whole thing there's a debate in the environmental community about this he's in the small minority of environmentalists who are on this page and who's what's the opposition completely rejected the opposition fundament fundamentally the environmental movement i mean an interpretation of it would be it's primarily a religious movement it's a movement about defining good people and bad people right the good people are environmentalists the bad people are capitalists and people building new technologies and people building businesses and companies and factories and you know and having babies right so it's a way to demarcate friend an enemy right good good person bad person yeah and and you know look it's you know you know these are very large you know enterprises lots of scientists activists lots of people making money on you know it's like a whole thing right that is the problem right and so yeah so you know once things get into this zone of fact you know the the the lot the facts and logic don't seem to right don't seem to necessarily care of the day you know look i just say it's reassuring to me that we have the answer um you know it's disconcerting to me that we won't use it well maybe the russia thing will maybe the russia thing is an opening to do you know maybe the europeans are going to figure this out um because you know they're now staring they're now actually staring down the barrel of a gun which is dependence on russia we have to change the way the public views nuclear because nuclear they view nuclear as
disaster they view nuclear as bombs factor yeah they just have to hear you yeah i don't yeah i don't know i don't know if someone like my experience the logical arguments don't the logical arguments don't work in these circumstances right it's got to be some larger message well i don't think there's going to be a lot of people hearing this message this message first of all the message the pro-nuclear message at least worldwide at least nationwide as an argument amongst intelligent people is very recent it's been within the last couple of decades where i've heard people give convincing arguments that nuclear power is the best way to move forward um oftentimes environmentally inclined people and people that are concerned about our future that aren't educated about nuclear power that word automatically gets associated with right-wing hardcore anti-environmental people who don't give a [ __ ] about human beings they just want to make profits and they would they want to develop energy and ruin the environment but do that to power cities right so i know how we build a thousand nuclear plants in the u.s and make everybody happy you want to hear my proposal yes we have the koch brothers do it oh okay uh which is charles coke specifically coke industries yes um uh um and and so if you are on the right you're like this is great you know he's you know he's here he's a hero he's a hero on the right and he runs this you know huge industrial company that's fantastic asset to america and this is a big opportunity for you know for him and the company and it's great and we'll build the nukes and it's gonna be great it will export them it'll be awesome if you're on the left you're cursing him you're putting him to work for you to fix the climate right yeah you're doing a complete turnaround and you're basically saying you know look we're gonna enlist you to fix you know you review you as a right winger this is the left-wing cause we're going to use you to fix the left-wing cause so so i think we should give him the order well why would that be good if the
people on the left freak out because they're immediately going to reject it well of course they're going to reject it i'm saying in an alternate hypothetical world they would find it they would find it entertaining let me start by saying this is what we should actually do right we should actually give him the order and have him do it um and i'm just saying like if the left could view it as oh we get to take advantage of this guy who we don't like to solve a problem that we take very seriously that we think he doesn't take seriously which is climate well i don't know about your logic there because they would think that he's profiting off of that and the last thing they would want i mean koch brothers to profit as they say this is my this is not actually happening right so but but what about someone else who's not supposed to work yeah no they'll pick yeah look pick any you know ge could do it there's any number yeah there's a number of companies that could do it do you think you would just take one success story like implementation of a new much more safe much more modern version of nuclear power i mean that would certainly help we need something right because i mean the first thing is the government and again the government would have to be willing to authorize one i've had conversations with people that don't you know they don't have the amount of access to human beings and different ideas and they immediately clam up when you say nuclear power well there's been a big this has been a big whammy look there's something very natural here look nuclear again we live in a much deluded version of what we used to live like in the 50s and 60s this was a hot topic because there was a huge rush of enthusiasm for nuclear everything yeah um and then there was yeah there were these there were these these accidents and then looked at the the the fear i mean i remember when i was a kid the fear of nuclear war was like very very real so yeah well we're basically close to the city remember in the 80s like this is uh it was real this is uh you know people talk about politics are bad now it's like well i
remember worrying that we were all going to die holocaust yeah you remember that probably the tv series the the day after oh yeah that freaked everybody out yeah like the whole country went into a massive depressive funk after that show came out and so yeah there's been a big kind of psychic whammy right that's been put on people about this and then and then like i said there's a lot of there's a lot of environmental movement that i think doesn't actually want to fix any of this and i think their opposition to nuclear is is sort of proof of that and they have a very anti-nuclear sort of set of messages well what does the environmental movement propose they so they propose degrowth they they they propose to growth they propose lower a much lower population level they propose much lower industrial activity they propose a much lower human standard of living yeah they propose a return to an earlier mode of living that you know our ancestors thought was something that they should improve on and they want to go back to that and it's it's a it's a you know it's a religious impulse of its own nature worship is a is a fundamental religious impulse do you think it's also there's a financial aspect to that as well because it's it's an industry yeah anything yeah look any of these things become yeah these become so self-self perpetuating industries there's always a problem with any activist group which is do they actually want to solve the problem because yeah that's very actually solving problems that's bad for bad for fundraising it was kind of ironic i'd even say like look most of this is not i would not even say most this is bad intent i think most of it's just people have an existing way that they think about these things it's primarily emotional it's not primarily logical do you know someone that i would be able to talk to that is like the best proponent of nuclear energy that can lay it out yeah let me go so stewart brand would be the sort of godfather of the environmental movement who i'm sure would talk about and then there's a young founder who i know an mit engineer who i'll give you
his information and he's going to write this down so stuart brand is one of them stuart brand is yeah so stuart brand is on sort of the one side environmentalism and then you know older you know older generation a lot of experience of this issue and stuart brand is the guy who is an environmental activist but or at least advocate and is pro-nuclear he was one of the original sort of he was one of the original environmentalists that we would sort of consider he ran this thing called the whole earth catalog that sort of brought a lot of modern environmentalism into being in the 60s is there any reasonable person that opposes that uh who has convincing arguments i mean it's i mean they they're a dime a dozen like they're that's the rest of the movement but it's reasonable i i don't know that right do they have like some sort of an an answer i would it would defer to my experience is they jump to a different topic you get to what the actual underlying goal is which again is to shrink shrink human population and then i'll give you there's the mit guy i'll tell you about who's an expert on nuclear who has this new design okay who's that guy bret b-r-e-t uh google mask k-u-g-e-l-b-r k-u-g-e-l yes m-a-s m-a-s google mass yeah i like that name yeah and here's a podcast he has a podcast mit yeah he has a podcast called titans of nuclear um and he has gone around the country over the last like five years and he's interviewed basically every living nuclear expert well he sounds like a good guy he's a really really sharp guy he sounds like the perfect guy right because he already has a podcast so he started his podcast he's he he's he's in the nuclear industry he's working on this this kind of thing and um so he he said well i want to really come up just he's an mit engineer but he didn't take nuclear he's not a nuclear expert so he said i want to spin up on all this nuclear topics and so he said let me start a podcast i'll go interview all the nuclear experts and all the people actually know how to build like nuclear plants and how this stuff works and he's like boy i don't know if they'll talk to me because i'm just a kid and i don't know whether they'll and he said they were just he
said uniformly they've just been totally shocked that anybody wants to talk to them at all they're just like oh my god like we've never been invited on a podcast before nobody's ever want nobody ever wants to hear from us and so he said he said like 100 hit rate of all the real experts oh and so if you listen to his but it takes you through like all this stuff in detail okay titans and nuclear i'm going to get on that so the the it seems like the problem is there's a bottleneck between information and this idea that people have of what nuclear power is that needs to be bridged we need to figure out how to get to people's heads that what we're talking about when you talk about nuclear power is a very small amount of disasters we're a large amount of nuclear reactors and you're dealing with very old technology as opposed to what is possible and virtually no deaths that's wild and overwhelmingly better by trade-off versus any other form of energy yeah right um yeah i mean look that's that's the argument i think it's quite straightforward my experience with human beings is that they only react to crises um and so that's why i say like i don't think logical arguments sell so i i think it's it's it's probably some sort of crisis and you know the russia crisis is one opening yeah um and i you know it would be great to see leadership from somebody in power to be able to take advantage of that maybe that will happen in europe um and then yeah the other would be if if people actually get like if people actually get worried enough about global warming and people say they're worried about global warming but not enough to do this and so maybe i don't know maybe we just need higher temperatures and then people will take this seriously yeah so it may just need to get bad do you have any concerns about this this movement towards electric cars and electric vehicles that we are going to run out of batteries we're going to run out of raw material to make batteries and what that could that could be responsible for a lot of strip mining a lot of very environmentally damaging practices that we use right now to acquire and also that this could be done by other
countries of course that are not nearly as environmentally conscious or concerned right so so technically fun fact we never actually run out of any natural resource we've never run out of natural resource in human history right because what happens is the price rises right the price rises way in advance of running out of the resource and then basically whatever that is using that resource becomes non-economical and then either we have to find an alternative way to do that thing or we were or at some point we just stopped doing it and so the thing i don't think the risk is running out of lithium i think the risk is not being able to get enough lithium to be able to do it at prices that people can pay for the cars um and then there's there's other issues which is where does lithium come from i'll just give you an example um you know people talk about a lot of a lot of companies a lot of companies are doing a lot of posturing right now in their morality um one of the things that all electronic devices have in common your phone your tesla your you know your iphone they often common they all contain not just lithium they also contain cobalt um if you look into where cobalt is mined it's not a pretty picture right you know it's child slaves in the congo um and you know we kind of all gloss it over because we need the cobalt um and so maybe there should be more you know maybe we should be maybe we should be like much more actively investigating for example mining in the us like you know maybe the concept you know as you know there's a big anti-mining and financial resource development culture in the us in the political system right now as a consequence we kind of outsource all these conundrums to other countries is maybe we should be doing it here well that was my question about it is fascinating to me that there's not a single u.s developed and implemented cell phone that we don't have a cell phone that's put together by people that get paid a fair wage with health insurance and benefits and everything we we make i mean when when we buy an iphone you're buying it from foxconn right foxconn is constructing it in app these apple you know contracted factories where they have nets around
the buildings to keep people from jumping off the roof and people are working inhumane hours for patents i mean it's like a tiny amount of money in comparison to what we get paid here in america why is that like is that because we want apple to make the highest amount of profit and we don't give a [ __ ] about human life we only could pay it lift service like why is it why haven't they done this in america well here's where i would i think i would actually agree here's an environmentalist argument i think i might agree with which basically is it's very easy for so-called first world or developed countries to sort of outsource problems to developing countries right right and so just as an example take carbon emissions for a second we'll come back to iphones carbon emissions in the us are actually declining like we we actually is all this like animation over the paris accords or whatever but like if you look carbon emissions in the us have been falling now for like quite a while why is that well there's a bunch of theories as to why that is some people point to you know regulations some people point to technological advances for example modern internal combustion cars emit a lot less they have catalytic converters now they emit a lot less co2 um but maybe one of the big reasons is we've outsourced heavy industry to other countries right and so all of the factories with the smoke stacks right and all the mining operations and all the things that generate by the way a lot of you know mass agriculture that generates emissions and so forth like we've we've in a globalized world we've outsourced that right and if you look at if you look at emissions in china they've gone through the roof right and so so maybe what we've done is we've just taken the dirty economic activity and we've moved it over there and then we've kind of gone yeah you know look how good we're doing yeah it's you know we're great we're great now they're you know they're awful they have all kinds of problems but we're you know we're great we are the consumer that fuels they're awful we created yeah we created it it's a little
bit like the debate about like you know you know sort of the drug trade in countries like mexico and colombia right which is how much how much of that is induced by you know american demand yeah you know for things like cocaine so yeah so it's it's this this is where the morality questions get trickier i think than they look yeah which is like what have we actually done now there's another argument on the on the i'll defend foxconn there's an argument on the other side of this that actually no it's it's good that we've done this from an overall human welfare standpoint because if you don't like the foxconn jobs you would really hate the jobs that they would have been doing instead right the the only thing worse than working in a sweatshop is you know scavenging in a you know scavenging in a dump or doing subsistence farming or being a prostitute right and so you know maybe you know even what we would consider to be low end and unacceptably difficult and dangerous and manufacturing jobs may still be better than the jobs that existed prior to that and so again there's a different morality argument you can have there again it's a little bit trickier than it looks at first blush so i i find where i go through this because i find we're in an era where a lot of people including a lot of people in my business are making these very flash cut moral judgments on what's good and what's bad right and i find when i peel these things back it's like well it's not quite that simple interesting um with the implementation of modern nuclear power is it possible to manufacture cell phones in the united states well anything that drops the cost of energy all of a sudden is really good for domestic manufacturing for sure and do so without the environmental impact yeah well number one so dropping the price of energy energy is a huge part of any manufacturing process huge cost thing and so if you had basically unlimited free energy from nukes you you all of a sudden would have a lot more options for manufacturing in the u.s and then the other is look we have we have you know robotics though a conversation like we you know if you built new
manufacturing plants from scratch in the u.s they would be a lot more automated um and so you'd have you know assembly lines of robots doing things um and then you wouldn't have you know you wouldn't have the jobs that you know people don't want to have yeah um and so yeah you know you could do those things there's actually a big put this isn't happening with phones this is happening with chips um so this is one of the actual positive things happening right now which is there's a big push underway from both the u.s tech industry and actually the government to give them credit uh to bring chip manufacturing back to the u.s um and there's a there's a bill intel's the company leading the charge on this in the us and there's a build out of a whole bunch of new you know these huge 50 billion dollar chip manufacturing plants that will happen in the u.s was a lot of that motivated by the supply chain crisis yeah one of the big issues was cars couldn't get chips yeah that's right yeah well the china when the chinese shut down for covet all of a sudden the cars can't get chips um and then and then look also just greater geopolitical conflict you know like one people in dc don't agree on much but one of them is we don't really want to be as dependent on china as we are today right and so we want to bring um and then you know there's taiwan exposure a lot of chips are actually made in taiwan and there's a lot of stress and tension around taiwan so clearly if we get chips manufacturing back in the us we not only solve these practical issues we might also have more strategic leverage we might not be dependent on china so the good news is that's happening and let me just say like if that happens successfully maybe that sets a model to your point maybe that's a great example to then start doing that in all these other sectors what what what else could be done to improve upon like whatever problems that have been uncovered during this covid crisis and during the supply chain shutdown like that it seems like a lot of our problems is that we need to bring stuff into this country we're not making enough to be self-sustainable so that's one i would give you another big one though
covet has surfaced a problem that we always had and we now have a new answer to which is the problem of basically for thousands of years young people have had to move into a small number of major cities to have access to the best opportunities right and so and by silicon valley is a great example of this if you've been a young person from anywhere in the world and you want to work in the tech industry and you want to be on on the leading edge you had to move to you figured you had to figure out a way to get to california get to silicon valley and if you couldn't you probably it was hard for you to be part of it and then you know the areas that the cities that have this kind of they call these superstar cities the cities that have these sort of superstar economics everybody wants to live there they end up with these politics where they don't want you to ever build new housing you know they never build new roads the quality of life goes straight downhill and you know everything becomes super expensive and they and they they don't and they don't fix it and they don't fix it because they don't have to fix it because everybody wants to move there and everything is great and taxes are through the roof and everything is fantastic um and so one of the huge positive changes happening right now is the fact that remote work worked as well as it did when the coveted lockdowns kicked in and all these companies sent all their employees home and everything just kept working which is kind of a miracle yeah right has caused a lot of companies including a lot of our startups to think about how should should companies actually be all based in a place like northern california or should they actually be spread out all over the country or all over the world right and and so and and if you think about the the gains from that one is all of the economic benefits of being like silicon valley and tech or hollywood and entertainment like maybe those gains should be able to be spread out across more of the country and more of the country should be able to participate right and then by the way the people involved like maybe they shouldn't have
to move maybe they should be able to live where they grew up if they want to continue to be part of their community or maybe they should want to be able to live where their you know extended family is yeah or maybe they should want to live someplace with a lot of natural beauty or some place where they want to contribute to uh you know philanthropically to local community whatever other decision they have for why they might want to live someplace they can now live in a different place and they can have still access to the best jobs and it seems like with these technologies like zoom and facetime and all these different things that people are using to try to simulate being there the actual physical need to be there if you don't have a job where you actually have to pick things up and move them around it doesn't really seem like it's necessary yeah so some exist big companies are having some trouble with this right now because they're so used to running with everybody in the same place and so there's a lot of ceos grappling with like how do we have collaboration happen creativity happens right if i'm creating writing and creating a movie or something how do i actually do it if people are in the same room but a lot of the new startups like they're getting built from scratch to be remote um and they just have this this new way of operating and it might be a better way of operating but there is some benefit for people being in the room and spitballing together and coming up with ideas and developing community there's some benefit to that that i think it gets lost with remote work but again this is coming from a guy who doesn't have a job yeah so and by the way has a very nice office facility um so our firm runs we now run uh we were a single office firm everybody was in our firm 24 all all the time um we now run primarily remote virtual mode of operation but we have offsites frequently right so we're basically what we're doing is we're basically taking money we would have spent on real estate we're spending instead on travel and then on on off sites right by offsite like like basically fly everybody yeah we'll fly everybody into a hotel or
resort you know for three days maybe some of them with families maybe some of them just just just and you have a vacation together exactly right nice and like real bonding right like right real like a good time together have a good time together have lots of free time to get to know each other go on hikes have long dinners right parties fire on the beach like whatever it is have people really be able to spend time together how much of a benefit do you think there is in that a lot yeah a lot well and then what you do is you kind of charge people up with the social bonding right and then they can then they can then go home and they can be remote for six weeks or eight weeks and and they still feel connected and they're you know talking to everybody online and then you bring them right right when they start to fray when it starts to feel like they're getting isolated again you bring them all back together again interesting yeah and the the benefit of that bonding is like as a person who runs a company like how do you think of that do you think oh it makes people feel good about working there and so they are more enthusiastic about work and like how do you uh how do you weigh that out it's it's to form and reinforce the cult right so it's the reality of the company religion right yeah which we don't call it that but that you know that's what it is and so it's to get is to get that sense of it's that sense of community it's that sense of group cohesion that like we're all in this together i'm not just an individual i'm not a mercenary i'm a member of a group we have a mission the mission is bigger than each of us individually and do you have like little struggle sessions where you let people air their gripes and some companies have those we're not so hot on those we have other ways to do deal with that kind of thing um more what we're trying to do is it's more it's brainstorming so like create creativity like there's there's definitely a role for in person um and then it's for all of the like you know it's like employee onboarding um it's for training um it's for um planning right it's for for for all the things where you really want people like thinking hard in a group do all those things but but a lot of it is just the
bonding like like ben and i run our firm like we're constantly trying to take but we're trying to take agenda items off the off the sheet every time because we're trying to have people just have more time to get to know each other how do you weed out young people that have been indoctrinated into a certain ideology and they think that these struggle sessions should be mandatory and they think that you know there's a certain language that they need to use and there's a way they need to communicate and there's certain expectations they have of the company to the point where they start putting demands upon their own employers yeah so the big thing you do i think and this is what we try to do is you basically declare what your values are right so you want to be like your company you want to be very upfront and you want to basically say here's what we stand for and so we we do we do this um you know in a couple different ways for example you know one of our core values um is that we think that technology is positive for the world right and if you're the kind of person who wants to be a technology critic like that's just inconsistent with our values we don't we don't employ technology critics have many other places that they can work on how so in terms of technology critic like what do you mean by just like you know the kinds of people who want to go online or want to write articles or whatever about how evil all the technologists are and how evil elon is and how evil capitalism is and like all this stuff um you know there's lots of other places there's lots of you know there's lots of other things counter productive counter production it's just it's inconsistent with our values like we're we have we're optimistic about the impact of technology in the future um another is you know we have an understanding of diversity that says that people actually are going to feel included like they're actually going to feel like they're all they're part of a of a mission a group that's larger than themselves everyone regardless yeah regardless and they're not going to feel like they're different or better or worse and that they have to prove themselves it's a meritocracy
meritocracy and that they don't have to take you know they don't have to we're not going to have politics in the workplace in the sense of they're not going to have to take they're not going to be under any pressure either express their political views or deny that they have the political views or pretend to agree with political views they don't agree with you know we're just not gonna that's just not part of what we do we're mission driven against our mission not all of the other missions you can pursue all the other missions in your in your free time do you think the pursuing of a lot of those other missions is a distraction and that yeah enormously yeah i mean it can really run away and that you know that that is a big problem in a lot of these companies now but you can define your company you can define your culture and basically say that's not what we're about we're about our mission and then you just you basically broadcast that right up front and you basically say look you are not going to be happy working here and by the way you're not going to last very long working here yeah right if you have a view contrary to that so you've kind of recognized the problem in advance and establish sort of an ethic for the company that weeds that out certainly everything that everything like there's this concept of economics called adverse selection so there's sort of adverse selection then there's the other side positive selection so adverse adverse selection is when you attract the worst right and positive selection is when you attract the best right and and every every formation of any group it's always positive selection or adverse selection i would even say it's a little bit of like if you like put on a show it's like depending on how you market the show and how you price it where you locate it you're going to track in a certain kind of crowd you're going to dissuade another kind of crowd like there's always some process of sort of attraction and and selection um you know the the enemy is always adverse election the enemy is sort of having a set of preconditions that cause the wrong people to opt into something you know what you're always shooting for is positive selection you're trying to actually attract the right people you
know you're trying to basically put out the messages in such a way that by the time they show up they've self-selected into what you're trying to do do you have most of this is that do you have other ceos that contact you and go hey we've got a [ __ ] problem here how did you guys do this yeah yeah yeah so i'm just giving an exam a public example is coin coinbase um you know as a company that's now been all the way through this and it's a company we've been involved with for for a long time and you know that that's a very public case of a ceo who basically declared that you know he had hit a point where he wasn't willing to tolerate politics in the workplace and then yes he did this he was the he was the first of these that kind of did this we're going to be mission driven our mission is open what he's a crypto currency company said our mission is an open global financial system that everybody can participate in um and he said look there are many other good missions in the world you can pursue those in your own time uh or go to other companies to do so was it a a system where their activists had infiltrated the company and yeah yeah well you'd say in some cases it's fallen activists in a lot of cases it's just like a level of activation on non let's just say non-core issues it's a level of sort of internal activation on issues you have a certain number of people who get fired up you have other people who feel like they have to go along you have other people who feel like they now can't express themselves you have other people who feel like they have to lie to fit in right and it's it's it's it's a it's a the conclusion he reached was it was destructive to trust it was causing people in the company to not trust each other not like each other not be able to work on the court problems that the company exists to do and so anyway he he did like a best-case scenario on this he just said look he actually did it in two parts he said first of all this is not how we're gonna operate going forward and then he said i realize that there are people in my company that i did not set this rule for before who will feel like i'm changing i'm pulling the rug out from under them and saying they can't do things they thought they could
do and i'm going to give them a very generous severance package and help them find their next job kick rocks but with with like he did a very you did like a you know six month severance package something on that order and to make it really easy for people to be able to get you know care and like deal with all those issues and then almost incentivize that yeah basically say look you're not gonna like it here you're not gonna like it here you're gonna you're gonna you're gonna you know we're gonna be telling you all this you know to stop doing all these things you're not gonna get promoted um and so you're gonna definitely be better off somewhere else do you think going forward that's going to be what more companies utilize or that they implement a strategy like that because it's ultimately for your bottom line it's got to be detrimental to have people so energized about so-called activism that it's taking away the energy that they would have towards getting what whatever the mission of the company has done yeah so the way we look at it is basically look it is so hard to make any business work period right like to get a group especially from scratch a startup to get a group of people together from scratch to build something new against a what is basically a wall of sort of start out within different indifference of skepticism and then ultimately like [ __ ] battles with big existing companies like it's in other startups like it's so hard to get one of these things to work it's so hard to get everybody to just even agree to what to do to do that right to what you know what is that what is the mission of this company how are we going to go do this to do that you need to have like all hands on deck you need to have everybody with a common view a lot of what you do as a manager in those companies is try to get everybody to a common view of mission you're trying to build a cult you're trying to build you're trying to build a sense of camaraderie a sense of cohesion right just like you would be trying to do in a military unit or anything else where you need people to be able to execute against a common goal and so yeah any anything that chooses
anything that chews away at that anything that undermines trust and causes you know what you know causes people to feel like they're under pressure under you know various forms of unhappiness um you know other other other missions that the company has somehow taken out along the way that aren't related to the business yeah that just all kind of chews away at the ability for the company and then the twist is that in our society the companies that are the most politicized are also generally like the have the strongest monopolies right and so like for example right and so that's what we always tell people is like look the problem with using a company like google or any other like large established company like that and because people look at that and they say well whatever google does is what we should do it's like well start with a search monopoly right start life number one with the search monopoly the best business model of all time 100 billion dollars in free cash flow then you can have whatever culture you want right right but all that stuff didn't cause the search monopoly the cause of search monopoly was like building a great product and taking it to market and that's what we need to do and so that this is where more ceos are getting to now having said that the ceos who are willing to do this are still few and far between the leader this is yeah leadership is rare in our time um and i would give the ceos who are willing to take this on a lot of credit and i would say a lot of them aren't there yet a lot of them must be terrified too because it's so these ideologies are so prevalent and these religions as you would say are so strong yeah brian got so an example brian ceo of coinbase got get deluged with emails from other ceos you know in the weeks that followed and they were basically all like wow that's great i wish i could do that at my company a wish right do you think that would be more prevalent in the future that more yeah so they're going to realize that they're going to have to well things like netflix netflix realized that when their stock dropped radically they realized that a little bit a little bit a little bit yeah
i have a friend as an executive at netflix and she was telling me uh the the struggles that they go through and it's pretty fascinating yeah it's like they essentially hired activists who are she pulled this person into uh her office to have a discussion with them and the person said how do i know you're not the enemy yeah right that's right and she's like i'm your [ __ ] boss like what are you talking about that person wound up getting fired ultimately eventually but i mean what the [ __ ] imagine that kind of uh an attitude 20 years ago you could never imagine it it would not take place yeah there's been yeah there's a there's been a collapse in i would say trust and authority in managers there's been a collapse in leadership exhibited by managers it has not gone well it's been a bad experiment and there's a lot of fear and do you think this is exactly accentuated by social media oh yeah for sure well it's all social media but it's also it's also the mainstream media the classic media like look so what's the fear well a big part of the fear is that there's gonna you're then gonna deal with you know you're going to have the next employee who hates you is going to go public right right but is that it's the cover of time magazine stuff right like you know now you know what drives what goes in the cover of time magazine these days is apparently it's a lot of social media but still it's like all of a sudden 60 minutes is doing a hit piece on you like it right but is the problem that these companies don't have ability to defend themselves and express themselves on broad scale well they could choose to i mean this is like how would they do that they need to they need to they need to choose to they need to decide they need to decide that they need to decide they need to have a crisis they need to decide that the status quo is so bad that they're going to deal with the flak involved in getting to the other side of the of the bridge but they would also have to have a platform that's really large where it can be distributed so they it could mitigate any sort of incorrect or biased hit piece on them yeah and look they have to willing to tell their story right and they have to be willing to come out in public and say
look here's what we believe here's why we do things and that's what the ceo of coinbase has done yeah he's done that yes he's a very brave guy um what's his name again brian armstrong [ __ ] yeah brian yeah he's a great guy all right we're very proud that brings me to crypto yes what do you have a general feeling about crypto i'm sure you have very strong opinions yeah very strong opinions yeah so let me start by saying we don't we don't do we don't do price forecasting um so we don't do price forecasting when it's on the way up we don't do price forecasting it's on the way down i have no idea what the prices are going to be we never recommend people buy anything like we're not trying to get people to buy anything i'm not marketing anything so nothing i say will should be attributed in any way to like oh mark said you know buy buy this or don't buy that none of that um and in fact we basically in the way our business works is we basically ignore all the short-term stuff we sort of invest over a 10-year horizon it's kind of our kind of base based thing that we do um and so we're yeah we have a big program in this and we're charging head with the program what are your feelings about the the prevalence of i mean even these sort of novel coins or novelty coins and these the idea that you could sort of establish a currency for your business that's like you know there was talk about meta doing some sort of a metacoin you know and that a company could do that google could do a google coin and they could essentially not just be an enormous company with a wide influence but also literally have their own economy yeah what do you think about that well so this has happened before this is a this is there's a tradition of this and so the frequent flyer miles are like a great example of this right in fact to the point we have credit cards that give you you know free frequent flyer miles to sort of sort of cash back so companies have that um you may remember from the 70s um it was more common the old days but there used to be these things called like a p stamps there used to be these like saving stamps you'd get you go to the supermarket and you buy a certain amount they give you these stamps you could spend the stamps of
different things or send them in okay so there were there was sort of private so-called script kind of currency issued by companies in that form um then there's all these games that have in-game currency right and so you play one of these games like world of warcraft or whatever any of the in-game currency and sometimes it can be converted back into dollars and sometimes it can't and so forth and so yeah so there's been a long tradition of companies basically developing internal economies like this and then having their customers kind of cut in in some way and yeah that's for sure something that they can do with this technology when you compare fiat currency with these emerging digital currencies do you think that these digital and currencies digital currencies have solutions to some of the problems of traditional money and do you think that this is where we're going to move forward towards that digital currencies of the future so i'm not an absolute i'm not an absolutist on this i so i don't think this is a world in which we cut over from national currencies to cryptocurrencies um i think national currencies continue to be very important um the big thing about a national national currency to me the thing that i think gives it real because you know national currencies are no longer backed by you know gold or silver or anything their their fee their fee out their paper the thing that really gives them value in my view um is basically that it's the form of taxation right and so if the government basically is going to legally require you to turn over a third of your income every year they're going to require you to do that not only in the abstract they're going to require you to do that in that specific currency right yeah i can only pay the irs in dollars i can't do it in japanese yen or euros well what do you do or or bitcoin if you function completely in bitcoin yeah well then you would you if you as an individual function completely in bitcoin then you would just convert at the end of the year and to be able to pay your taxes you convert into dollars for the purpose of paying your taxes could you pay your
tolerance could you pay your taxes right now when it's worth almost nothing no comment depends i mean how does that work well the good the good the good news is if your income is crypto then you have a lot less income this year too so well isn't there a fear that the government would choose to tax you at the highest point like is it is it yeah well there's so actually bitcoin so there's this is actually an issue in the policy right now it's a big dispute which is actually is is something like bitcoin is it money or is it is it is it a commodity right isn't it and and so and right now actually i believe this is still the case i think trading in cryptocurrency profits trading cryptocurrency i think are all short-term gains um i think i think they always get you in short-term gains because they classify that's something i'm not a i'd have to have to go read back up on this but um this is a hot issue and kind of how this stuff should be taxed and there will be big there are big policy debates about that today do you but there's so many of them isn't that part of the issue there's so many currencies and they're all sort of vying for legitimacy yeah but that's also i mean it's good news bad news it's also a big plus it's also a big plus in the following way like we have a technology starting in 2009 right sort of out of nowhere there is a pre-history to it but really the big breakthrough was bitcoin in 2009 the bitcoin white paper we have this new technology to do cryptocurrencies to do blockchains and it's it's this new technology that we didn't have that all of a sudden we have and we're basically in we're now 13 years into the process of a lot of really smart engineers and entrepreneurs trying to figure out what that means and what they can build with it and that talk technology is blockchain blockchain yeah at its core it's the idea of a blockchain which is basically like an internet-wide database that's able to record ownership and all these attributes of different kinds of objects physical objects and how much of an issue is fraud and theft and and infiltration of these networks yeah i mean it's an it's an issue for sure i
mean there's basically the i think the way to think about that is anytime there's an economic system there's some form of fraud or theft against it um you know the example i always like to use is um there remember if you remember the like saga of like john dillinger um you know and um and uh bonnie and clyde like when when when the car was invented all of a sudden it created a new kind of bank robbery right because there were banks and then they had money in the bank and then all of a sudden people had the car and then they had the tommy gun which was the other new technology they brought back from world war one and then there were this run of oh my god banks aren't safe anymore because john dillinger and his gang are gonna come to town and they're to rob your bank and take all your money right and that led to the creation of the fbi that was the original reason for the creation of the fbi and at the time it was like this huge panic as like oh my god banks aren't going to work anymore because of all these criminals with cars and guns and so it's it's basically it's like anything it's like when there's economic opportunity somebody's going to try to take advantage of it there's going to be criminal people are going to try criminal acts people are going to try to steal stuff and then you basically you're always in any system like that you're in a cat and mouse game against the bad guys which which is basically what this industry is doing right now what what is causing this massive dip in cryptocurrency currently oh i have no idea you have no idea no clue um it's just happening the market is so the theory of financial markets so um this goes back to the logic emotion stuff we're talking about earlier so one view of financial markets like the way that they're supposed to work is it's supposed to be lots of smart people sitting around doing math and calculating and figuring out this is fair value and that's fair value and whatever like it's all a very like mechanical like smart logical process okay and then there's reality and reality is people are like super emotional um and then and then emotionality cascades and so some people start to get upset and then a lot more people get upset or some people start to get euphoric a lot more people get
euphoric is now a good time to like jump in i have no idea i have no idea here's i like how you're like avoiding here's i'm gonna avoid that i'm very good i'm very very very good at avoiding this question um so ben graham is sort of the godfather of stock market investing ben graham was warren buffett's mentor and kind of the guy who defined modern stock investing and ben graham used this metaphor in his book a hundred years ago and he said look you need to think about financial markets and he was talking about the stock market but the same thing's true for crypto i said you think about it basically think about it as if it's a person and call it mr market and he said the most important thing to realize about mr market is he's manic depressive like he's really screwed up right and he has like all kinds of crazy impulses and he has like good days and bad days and some days like his family hates him and some days he's like you know it's whatever like his life is chaos um and basically every day mr market shows up in the market and basically offers to sell you things at a certain price or buy things from you at a certain price but he's manic depressive and so the same thing on different days he might be willing to buy or sell at different prices and you can spend a lot of time if you want to try and understand what's happening in his head but he's like you know it's like trying to understand what's happening inside the head of a crazy person like it's probably not a good use of time um instead you should just assume that he's nuts and then what you do is you make your decisions about what you think things are worth and when you're willing to trade and you do that on according to your principles not his principles and so that that that would be the metaphor that i encourage people to think about like these markets are just nuts there's a thousand different reasons why the prices go up and down i don't have any idea um the core question is what's the substance right what's right what's real what's what's actually legitimately useful and valuable right and that's and that's what we spend all of our time focusing on so when you sp you focus on that what what do you find when you say what is what is valuable
like what are you looking towards are you looking towards long-term stability are you looking towards public interest in a thing like how do you how do you decide what's valuable yeah so we our lenses is venture capital we we look at everything through the lens of technology and so we we look at the lens of these things we only invest in things that we think are significant technological breakthroughs so if somebody comes out with an alternative just an alternative bitcoin or whatever and even if it's a good idea bad idea that's not what we do what we do is we're looking for technological change um and so we're looking basically what that means is the world's smartest engineer is developing some new capability that wasn't possible before and then building some kind of project or effort or company right around that and then we invest and then we only think long term we only think in terms of 10 years 15 years longer and the reason for that is big technological changes take time right it takes time to get these things right right um and so that that's our framework we spend all day long talking to the smartest engineers we can find talking to the smartest founders we can find who are organizing those engineers into projects or companies um and then we you know we we try to back every single one of those that we can find and how do we establish this network and then we basically we put we put the we put the money in we basically lock the money up we you know we raise money from our investors we lock that money up for like a decade and then we we try to help these projects succeed and then hopefully at the end of whatever the period of time is you know it's worth more than we invested but we're not you know we're not trading we're not in and out of these things we're not we're not gaining the prices and how do you develop these networks where you are in touch with all these engineers and do find these technologies that are valuable yeah so that's the core motion so the venture for the firm i'm a part of now we're up to about 400 people this is kind of what this organization does we've got about 25 investing partners this is what they do they spend all day basically we we spend
all day basically talking to talking to founders talking to engineers you know a lot a lot of us grew up in the industry so a lot of us have like actual hands-on experience having done that or and then a lot of our partners have been you know very involved in these projects uh over time um it's a positive selection i mentioned adverse selection positive selection we're trying to attract in this we're one of the smartest people to come talk to us yeah we want the other people hopefully to not come talk to us um we do a lot of we call outbound we do a lot of marketing we communicate a lot in public it's one of the reasons i'm here today is just like we want to have a voice that's in the outside world basically saying here's who we are here's what we stand for here are the kinds of projects we work on here are our values right a good example the reason i told the coinbase story of what brian did is because like that that's part of our like we think that's good that he did that other venture firms might think that's bad right but like if you're the kind of founder who thinks that's good then we're going to be a very good partner for you right and then we spend a lot of time in the details like working through the we have a lot of engineers you know working for us a lot of us have engineering degrees and so we spend a lot of time working through the details mark you're a fascinating guy i really really enjoyed this conversation i'm really glad we did it can we do it again sure of course let's do it again yes thank you very much thank you very much for being here i really really enjoyed this good all right anything else want to give people your social media or anything do you want to do that you want to get inundated by dick pics i am all good that's such an inviting proposition maybe tell you what maybe they could use they could use the ai art then they could do that yeah do some ai art did you just mark some may i do some dick pics thank you very much bye everybody [Applause] [Music] you