Huberman Lab - Marc Andreessen: How Risk Taking, Innovation & Artificial Intelligence Transform Human Experience

Starting point is 00:00:00 Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and Ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today my guest is Mark Andreessen. Mark Andreessen is a software engineer and an investor in technology companies. He co-founded and developed Mosaic, which was one of the first widely used web browsers. He also co-founded and developed Netscape, which was one of the earliest widespread used web browsers. And he co-founded and is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, one of the most successful Silicon Valley venture capital firms. All of that is to say that Mark Andreessen

Starting point is 00:00:43 is one of the most successful innovators and investors ever. I was extremely excited to record this episode with Mark for several reasons. First of all, he himself is an incredible innovator. Second of all, he has an uncanny ability to spot the innovators of the future. And third, Mark has shown over and over again the ability to understand how technologies not yet even developed are going to impact the way that humans interact at large. Our conversation starts off by discussing what makes for an exceptional innovator, as well as what sorts of environmental conditions make for exceptional innovation and creativity

Starting point is 00:01:17 more generally. In that context, we talk about risk-taking, not just in terms of risk-taking in one's profession, but about how some people, not all, but how some people who are risk-taking, not just in terms of risk-taking in one's profession, but about how some people, not all, but how some people who are risk-takers and innovators in the context of their work, also seem to take a lot of risks in their personal life and some of the consequences that can bring. Then we discuss some of the most transformative technologies that are now emerging, such as novel approaches to developing clean energy, as well as AI or artificial intelligence. With respect to AI, Mark shares his views as to why AI is likely to greatly improve human experience.

Starting point is 00:01:53 And we discuss the multiple roles that AI is very likely to have in all of our lives in the near future. Mark explains how not too long from now, all of us are very likely to have AI assistance. For instance, assistance that give us highly informed health advice, highly informed psychological advice. Indeed, it is very likely that all of us will soon have AI assistance that govern most, if not all, of our daily decisions. And Mark explains how, if done correctly, this can be a tremendously positive addition to our life. In doing so, Mark provides a stark counter argument for those that argue that AI is going to diminish human experience.

Starting point is 00:02:30 So if you're hearing about and we're concerned about the ways that AI is likely to destroy us, today you are going to hear about the many different ways that AI technologies now in development are likely to enhance our human experience at every level. What you'll soon find is that while today's discussion does center around technology and technology development, it is really a discussion about human beings and human psychology. So whether you have an interest in technology development and or AI, I'm certain that you'll find today's discussion to be an important and highly lucid view into what will soon be the future that we all live in.

Starting point is 00:03:05 Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is however part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is Element. Element is an electrolyte drink that has everything you need and nothing you don't.

Starting point is 00:03:26 That means plenty of the electrolytes, sodium, magnesium, and potassium in the correct ratios, but no sugar. The electrolytes and hydration are absolutely key for mental health, physical health, and performance. Even a slight degree of dehydration can impair our ability to think, our energy levels, and our physical performance. Element makes it very easy to achieve proper hydration, and it does so by including the three

Starting point is 00:03:49 electrolytes in the exact ratios they need to be present. I drink element first thing in the morning when I wake up, I usually mix it with about 16 to 32 ounces of water. If I'm exercising, I'll drink one while I'm exercising, and I tend to drink one after exercising as well. Many people are scared off by the idea of ingesting sodium because obviously we don't want to consume sodium in excess. However, for people that have normal blood pressure and especially for people that are consuming very clean diets, that is consuming not so many processed foods or highly processed foods, oftentimes we are not getting enough sodium magnesium and potassium, and

Starting point is 00:04:25 we can suffer as a consequence. And with element, simply by mixing in water, it tastes delicious, it's very easy to get that proper hydration. If you'd like to try element, you can go to drink element that's elementy.com slash huberman to claim a free element sample pack with your purchase. Again, that's drink element LMNT.com slash huberman. Today's episode is also brought to us by Eight Sleep. Eight Sleep makes smart mattress covers with cooling, heating, and sleep tracking capacity. I've spoken many times before in this podcast about the fact that sleep, that is getting a great night's sleep, is the foundation of all mental health, physical health, and performance.

Starting point is 00:04:58 When we're sleeping well, everything goes far better when we are not sleeping well, we're enough, everything gets far worse at the level of mental health, physical health, and performance. And one of the key things to getting a great night's sleep and waking up feeling refreshed is that you have to control the temperature of your sleeping environment. And that's because in order to fall and stay deeply asleep, you need your core body temperature to drop by about one to three degrees. And in order to wake up feeling refreshed and energized,

Starting point is 00:05:22 you want your core body temperature to increase by about one to three degrees. With eight sleep, it's very easy to induce that drop in core body temperature by cooling your mattress early and throughout the night and warming your mattress toward morning. I started sleeping on an eight sleep mattress cover a few years ago and it has completely transformed the quality of the sleep that I get.

Starting point is 00:05:41 So much so that I actually load traveling because I don't have my eight sleep mattress cover when I travel. If you'd like to try eight sleep, you can go to eightsleep.com slash Huberman and you'll save up to $150 off their pod three cover. Eight sleep currently ships in the USA, Canada, UK, select countries in the EU and Australia. Again, that's eightsleep.com slash Huberman. And now for my discussion with Mark Andreessen. Mark, welcome. Hey, thank you. Delighted to have you here and have so many questions

Starting point is 00:06:10 for you about innovation, AI, your view of the landscape of tech and humanity in general. I want to start off by talking about innovation from three different perspectives. There's the inner game, so to speak, where the psychology of the innovator or innovators, things like their propensity for engaging in conflict or not, their propensity for having a dream or a vision.

Starting point is 00:06:37 And in particular, their innovation, as it relates to some psychological trait or expression. So we'll get to that in a moment. The second component that I'm curious about is the outer landscape around innovators, who they place themselves with, the sorts of choices that they make, and also the sorts of personal relationships that they might have or not have. And then the last component is this notion of the larger landscape that they happen to find themselves in. What time in history? What's the geography, Bay Area, New York, Dubai, etc.

Starting point is 00:07:12 So to start off, is there a common trait of innovators that you think is absolutely essential as a seed to creating things that are really impactful. Yeah, so I'm not a psychologist, but I've picked up some of the concepts on some of the some of the terms. And so I've, I've, it's a great moment of delight in my life, and I learned about the big five personality traits, because I was like, aha, there's a way to actually describe the answer to this question, and at least reasonably scientific terms. And so I think what you're looking for when you're talking about real innovators, like people who actually do really create a breakthrough work, I think you're

Starting point is 00:07:47 talking about a couple things. So one is very high in what's called trait openness, which is one of the big five, which is basically just like flat out open and new ideas. And of course, the nature of trait openness is trait openness means you're not just open to new ideas in one category. You're open to many different kinds of new ideas.

Starting point is 00:08:03 And so we might talk about the fact that a lot of innovators also are very creative people in other aspects of their lives, even outside of their specific creative domain. So that's important, but of course, just being open is not sufficient. Because if you're just open, you could just be curious and explore and spend your entire life reading and talking to people and never actually create something.

Starting point is 00:08:21 So you also need a couple of other things. You need a high level of conscientiousness, which is another one of the big five. You need somebody who's really willing to apply themselves in our world, typically over a period of many years, to be able to accomplish something right. They typically work very hard. That often gets obscured because the stories

Starting point is 00:08:38 they're getting told about these people are, it's just like there's this kid and he just had this idea. And it was like a stroke of genius and it was like a moment in time and it was just like, oh, he was so lucky. And it's like, no, for most of these people, it's years and years and years of applied effort. And so you need somebody with like an extreme, basically willingness to defer gratification

Starting point is 00:08:55 and really apply themselves to a specific thing for a long time. And of course, this is why there aren't very many of these people as there aren't many people who are high in openness and high in conscientiousness because to a certain extent, they're opposed, right? Traits. And so you need somebody that's both of those.

Starting point is 00:09:10 Third is, you need somebody high in disagreeableness, which is the third of the big five. So you need somebody who's just like basically ornery, right? Because if they're not ornery, then they'll be talked out of their ideas by people who will be like, oh, well, you know, because the reaction most people have new ideas is, oh, that's dumb. And so somebody who's too agreeable will be easily dissuaded to not pursue, not pulling the thread anymore. So you need somebody highly disagreeable. Again, the nature of disagreeableness

Starting point is 00:09:35 is they tend to be disagreeable about everything. So they tend to be these very kind of plastic, kind of renegade characters. And then there's just a table stakes component, which is they just also need to be high IQ. They just need to be really smart, because it's just it's hard to innovate in any category if you can't set the size large amounts

Starting point is 00:09:51 of information quickly. And so those are four, like basically, like high spikes, you know, very rare traits that basically have to come together. You could probably also say they probably, at some point need to be relatively low in neuroticism, which is another big five, because if they're too neurotic, they probably can't handle the stress.

Starting point is 00:10:09 So it's kind of this style in there. And then of course, if you're into, if you're into the sort of science of the big five, basically, these are all people who are on the far outlying kind of point on the normal distribution across all these trades. And then that just gets you to, I think, the hardest topic of all around this whole concept, which is just there are very few all these traits. And then that just gets you to, I think, the sort of hardest topic of all around this whole concept,

Starting point is 00:10:26 which is just there are very few of these people. Do you think they're born with these traits? Yeah, well, so they're born with the traits. And then, of course, the traits are not, you know, genetics are not destiny. And so the traits are not deterministic in the sense of that, you know, just because they have those personality traits doesn't mean they're, they're gonna, you know, deliver great creativity great creativity. But they need to have those properties, because otherwise they're just not either gonna be able to do the work or they're not gonna enjoy it, right? I mean, look, a lot of these people

Starting point is 00:10:51 are highly capable, competent people. It's very easy for them to get like high-paying jobs in traditional institutions and get lots of traditional awards and end up with big paychecks. And there's a lot of people at big institutions that we, you and I know well, and I deal with many of these, where people get's a lot of people at big institutions that we, you know, you and I know well, and I deal with many of these where people get paid a lot of money and they get a lot of respect

Starting point is 00:11:09 and they go for 20 years and it's great and they never create anything new. Right. And so there's a lot of administrators. A lot of them, yeah, a lot of them have an administrative jobs. And that's fine, that's good. The world needs, you know, the world needs that also, right?

Starting point is 00:11:22 The innovators can't run everything because everything, you know, the rate of change would be too high society. I think probably wouldn't be able to handle it. So you need some people who are on the other side who are going to kind of keep the lights on and keep things running. But there is this decision that people have to make, which is okay. If I have the sort of latent capability to do this, is this actually what I want to spend my life doing? And do I want to go through the stress and the pain and the trauma, right, and the anxiety, right, and the risk of failure, right?

Starting point is 00:11:47 And so do I really want to? Once in a while, you're running into somebody who just like can't do it any other way, like they just have to. Who's in the example of that? I mean, he lots of the paramount example of our time. And I bring him up in part, because he's such an obvious example,

Starting point is 00:12:00 but in part, because he's talked about this in interviews where he basically says like, he's like, I can't turn it off. Like, the idea is, I have to pursue them, right? That's why he's like running five companies at the same time and like working on a sixth, right? It's just like he can't turn it off. You know, look, there's a lot of other people who are probably have the capability to do it, who ended up talking themselves into or, you know, whatever events conspired to put them in a position where they did something else. Obviously, there are people who try to be creative who just don't have the capability. There's some bend diagram there of determinism through traits, but also

Starting point is 00:12:34 choices in life. And then also, of course, the situation in which they're born, the context within which they grow up, culture, what their parents expect of them, and so forth. And so you have to, get all the way through this. You have to thread all these all these natals kind of at the same time. Do you think there are folks out there that meet these criteria who are disagreeable but that can feign agreeableness, you know, they can for those just listening marches raised his right hand. In other words, that can sort of phrase that comes to mind, maybe because I can relate to a little bit, they sneak up through the system. Meaning they behave ethically as it relates to the requirements of the system. They're not breaking laws or breaking rules.

Starting point is 00:13:16 In fact, quite the opposite. They're paying attention to the rules and following the rules until they get to a place where being disagreeable feels less threatening to their overall sense of security. Yeah, we look to really highly competent people don't have to break laws, right? There was this myth that started happening around the movie The Godfather, and then there was this character, Myrlansky, who was like ran basically to Mafia 50, 60, 70 years ago, and there was this great line of like, well, my last year had only applied himself to running general motors.

Starting point is 00:13:46 He would have been the best CEO of all time. It's like, no, not really. Like the people who are like greater running the big companies, they don't have to be mob bosses. They don't have to break laws. They can work. They're smart and sophisticated enough to be able to work inside the system.

Starting point is 00:14:00 They don't need to take the easy out. So I don't think there's any implication that they have to break laws. That said, they have to break norms. Right, and specifically, the thing, this is probably the thing that gets missed the most. Because the process of innovating, the process of creating something new,

Starting point is 00:14:15 like once it works, like the stories get retconned, as they say, in comic books. So the stories get adapted to where it's like, it was inevitable all along. Everybody always knew that this was a good idea. The person has won all these awards, society embraced them. And invariably, if you were with them when they were actually doing the work,

Starting point is 00:14:33 or if you actually get a couple drinks into them and talking about it, they'd be like, no, that's not how it happened at all. They faced a wall of skepticism, just like a wall of basically social, essentially denial. No, this is not going to work. No, I'm not going to join your lab. No, I'm not going to come work for your company. No, this is not going to work. No, I'm not going to join your lab. No, I'm not going to come work for your company.

Starting point is 00:14:47 No, I'm not going to buy your product, right? No, I'm not going to meet with you. And so they get just like tremendous social resistance. So they're not getting positive feedback from their social network the way that more agreeable people need to have, right? And this is why agreeableness is a problem for innovation. If you're agreeable, you're going to listen to people around you.

Starting point is 00:15:05 They're going to tell you that new ideas are stupid. Right, end of story. You're not going to proceed. And so I would put it more on like they need to be able to deal with, they need to be able to deal with social discomfort to the level of ostracism, or at some point they're going to get shaken out and they're just going to quit. Do you think that people that meet these criteria do best by banding with others that meet these criteria early? Or is it important that they form this deep sense of self, like the ability to cry oneself

Starting point is 00:15:33 to sleep at night or, you know, line the fetal position, worrying that things aren't going to work out and then still get up the next morning and get right back out there? Right. So Sean Parker has the best line, by the way, on this, he says, being an entrepreneur, being a creator is like getting pushed to the face like over and over again. He said, eventually you start to like the taste of your own blood.

Starting point is 00:15:53 And I love that line because it makes everybody massively uncomfortable, right? But it gives you a sense of how basically painful the process is. If you talk to any entrepreneur who's been through it about that, they're like, oh yeah, that's exactly what it's like. So there is a big individual component to it, but look, it can be very lonely, right?

Starting point is 00:16:10 And especially very hard, I think, to do this, if nobody around you is trying to do anything, even remotely similar, right? And if you're getting just universally negative responses, like very few people, I think, very few people have an ego strength to be able to survive that for years. So I do think there's a huge advantage, And this is why you do C Cluster.

Starting point is 00:16:26 So there's a huge advantage to clustering. Right. And so you have, and you know, throughout history, you've had this clustering effect, you had clustering of the great artists and sculptors and Renaissance Florence. You know, you have the clustering of the philosophers agrees. You have the clustering of tech people in Silicon Valley. You have the clustering of creative arts, movie TV people in Los Angeles. Right. And so forth and so on. You know, for, you know, there's always a scene, right?

Starting point is 00:16:47 There's always, there's always like a nexus in a place where people come together, you know, for these kinds of things. So generally speaking, like if somebody wants to work in tech and in tech, they're going to be much better off being around a lot of people who are trying to do that kind of thing than they are in a place where nobody else is doing it. Having said that, the clustering has, it can have downsides, it can have side effects.

Starting point is 00:17:06 And you put any group of people together and you do start to get group think, even among people who are individually very disagreeable. And so the same clusters where you get these very idiosyncratic people, they do have fads and trends just like every place else, right? And so they get wrapped up in their own social dynamics. And the good news is the social dynamic in those places is usually very forward looking. And so it's usually like, it's like a herd

Starting point is 00:17:31 of iconoclasts looking for the next big thing. So iconoclasts looking for the next big thing, that's good. The herd part, that's what you've got to be careful of. So even when you're in one of these environments, you have to be careful that you're not getting sucked into the group thing too much. When you say group thing, do you mean excessive friction,

Starting point is 00:17:45 do you do pressure testing each other's ideas to the point where things just don't move forward or are you talking about group think where people start to form a consensus or the self belief that gosh, we are so strong because we are so different. What do you, can we better define group think? It's actually less either one of those things both happen. Those are good. Those are good. The part of the group think I'm talking about is just like we all we all basically zero in. We just end up zeroing in on the same ideas, right? In Hollywood there's this classic thing. It's like, you know, there are years where there's like a lot of volcano movies.

Starting point is 00:18:18 It's like, where are there all these volcano movies? And it's just like, I don't know, there was just something in the just all, right? There was just something in the air. You know, look, tech Silicon Valley has this, you know, there was just something in the just all, right? There was just something in the air. You know, look, tech, Silicon Valley has this, you know, there are moments in time where you'll have these, but it's like the old thing. I like, what's the difference in a fat and a trend, right? You know, fat, fat is the trend that doesn't last, right? And so, you know, Silicon Valley is subject to fads and both fads and trends just like anyplace else. In other words, you take smart, disagreeable people who cluster them together, they will act like a herd, right? They will end up thinking

Starting point is 00:18:44 the same things unless they try very hard not to. You've talked about these personality traits of great innovators before, and we're talking about them now. You invest in innovators, you try and identify them and you are one, so you can recognize these traits,

Starting point is 00:19:01 here I'm making the presumption that you have these traits, indeed, you do. We'll just get that out of the way. Have you observed people trying to feign these traits? And are there any specific questions or behaviors that are a giveaway that they're pretending to be the young, steep jobs or that they're pretending to be the young, steep jobs, or that they're pretending to be the young Henry Ford, pick your list of other names that qualify as authentic legitimate innovators. We won't name names of people who have tried to disguise themselves as true innovators, but what are some of the

Starting point is 00:19:38 the litmus tests? And I realize here that we don't want you to give these away to the point where they lose their potency, but if you could share a few of those. Yeah, no, that's good. We're actually a pretty open book on this. So, so yeah, so, so first of all, yes, so there are people who definitely try to like him in and basically present as being something that they're not. And they, you know, like they've read all the books, they will have listened to this interview, right? They will, they, you know, they study everything, and they they construct a facade, and they come in and present to something they're not. I would say the amount of that varies exactly correlated

Starting point is 00:20:06 to the NASDAQ. Right. And so when stock prices are super low, like you actually get the opposite, when stock prices are super low, people get too demoralized and people who should be doing it basically give up because they just think that whatever, whatever with the industry is over,

Starting point is 00:20:19 the trend is over, whatever, it's all hopeless. And so you get this flushing thing. So nobody ever shows up at a stock market low, right? And so it's like I'm the new, I'm the new And so you get this flushing thing. So nobody ever shows up at a stock market low. Right? And it says, I'm the new next big thing. And it doesn't really want to do it. Because there are higher status, the kinds of people who do the thing that you're talking about.

Starting point is 00:20:34 They're fundamentally oriented for social status. They're trying to get the social status without actually without actually the substance. And there are always other places to go get social status. So after 2000, the joke was, so, you know, when I got to Silicon Valley at 93, 94, the valley was dead. We talked about that. By 98, it was worrying and you had a lot of these people showing up who were, you know, basically had a lot of people showing up with, with some kind of stories. 2000 Market Crash. By 2001, the joke was that there were these terms B2C and B2B. And in

Starting point is 00:21:06 1998, they met B2C meant business to consumer and B2B meant business to business, which is two different kinds of business models for internet companies. By 2001, B2B meant back to banking and B2C meant back to consulting, right, which is the highest status people who, the people oriented to status who showed up to be in tech, were like, yeah, screw it, like this is over, stick a fork in it, I'm gonna go back to, you know, in Goldman Sachs, or go back to McKinsey, you know, where I can be high status.

Starting point is 00:21:31 And so you get this flushing kind of effect that happens in a downturn. That's said, in a big upswing, yeah, you get a lot of people showing up with a lot of, you know, with a lot of, you know, kind of, let's say public persona without the substance to back it up. So the way we stress that, I can actually say exactly how we test for this,

Starting point is 00:21:50 which because the test exactly addresses the issue in a way that is impossible to fake. And it's actually the same way homicide detectives trying to find out if you've actually, like if you're in a center, whether you've killed somebody, it's the same tactic, which is you ask increasingly detailed questions. And so the way a homicide cop does this is what were you doing last night?

Starting point is 00:22:12 Oh, I was at a movie. Well, which movie? We don't know. Oh, which theater. Okay, which seat did you sit in? Okay, what was the end of the movie? Right, like, right. And you ask increasingly detailed questions

Starting point is 00:22:24 and people have trouble, at some questions and people have trouble making up. And things just fuzzing, and just kind of obvious bullshit. And basically, fake founders basically have the same problem. They're able to really a conceptual theory of what they're doing that they've kind of engineered. But as they get into the details, it just fuzzes out. Whereas the true people that you want to back,

Starting point is 00:22:43 they can do it. Basically, what you find is they've spent five or 10 or 20 years obsessing on the details of whatever it is they're about to do. And they're so deep in the details that they know so much more about it than you ever will. And in fact, the best possible reaction is when they get mad, right? Which is also what the homicide cops say, right? Which actually you want is you actually want the emotional response of like,

Starting point is 00:23:01 I can't believe that you're asking me questions this detailed and specific and picky, and they kind of figure out what you're doing, and then they get upset. Like, that's perfect. That's perfect, right? But then they have to prove in themselves in the sense of like they have to be able to answer the questions in great detail.

Starting point is 00:23:18 Do you think that people that are able to answer those questions in great detail have actually taken the time to systematically think through the if ands of all the possible implications of what they're going to do and they have a specific vision in mind of how things need to turn out or will turn out. Or do you think that they have a vision and it's a no matter what, it will work out because the world will sort of bend around it. I mean, in other words, do you think that they place their vision in context, or they simply have a vision, and they have that tunnel vision of that thing, and that's going to be it. Let's use Ufurding example, with Netscape. I mean, that's how I

Starting point is 00:23:55 first came to know your name. When you were conceiving Netscape, do you think, okay, there's this search engine and this browser, and it's going to be this thing of other search engines. And it would fit into that landscape of other search engines. Are you just projecting your vision of this thing as this unique and special brainchild? Let me give the general answer and then we can talk about the specific experience. I think that's a very important thing. I think that's a very important thing.

Starting point is 00:24:24 I think that's a very important thing. or just projecting your vision of this thing as this unique and special brainchild. We give the general answer and then we can talk about the specific example. So the general answer is what entrepreneurship, creativity, innovation is what economists call decision-making under uncertainty. And so in both parts, that's the important decision-making. Like you're going to make a ton of decisions because you have to decide what to do and what not to do. And then uncertainty, which is like

Starting point is 00:24:43 the world's a complicated place. And in is like, the world's a complicated place, right? And in mathematical terms, the world's a complex adaptive system with feedback loops and it's really, I mean, it's, it's, you know, Isaac Asimov, in his novels, he wrote about this field called psycho history, which is the idea that there's like a supercomputer that can predict the future of like human affairs, right?

Starting point is 00:25:01 And it's like, we don't have that. Not yet, not yet, not yet. Well, we're gonna have that's like, we don't have that. Not yet. Not yet. Well, we're getting to that later. We certainly don't have that yet. And so you're just dealing, you know, military commander's call, this is the fog of war. Right, you're just dealing with the situation where the number of variables are just off the charts.

Starting point is 00:25:17 It's all these other people, right, who are inherently unpredictable, making all these decisions in different directions. And then the whole system is combinatorial, which is these people are colliding with each other influencing the decisions. And so I mean, look, the most straightforward kind of way to think about this is, it's amazing.

Starting point is 00:25:32 Like anybody who believes in economic central planning that always blows my mind, because it's just like try to open your restaurant. Like try just opening a restaurant on the corner down here. And like 50, 50 odds, the restaurant's going to work. And like all you have to do to run a restaurant is like have a thing and serve food and like that. And it's like most restaurants fail, right? And so in restaurant people run restaurants are like pretty smart.

Starting point is 00:25:50 Like they're, you know, they're, they're usually think about these things very hard. They all want to succeed. And it is hard to do that. And so to start a tech company or to start an artistic movement or to, or to fight a war, like you're just going into this, like basically about conceptual battleground or military terms, real battleground where there's just like incredible levels of complexity branching future paths. And so there's nothing, you know, there's nothing predictable. And so what we look for is basically the sort of drop, the really good innovators, they've got a drive to basically be able to cope with that deal with that. And they basically do that in two steps. So one is they try to pre-plan as much as they possibly can and we call that the process

Starting point is 00:26:27 of navigating the idea maze. And so the idea maze basically is I've got this general idea and it might be the internet that's going to work or search or whatever. And then it's like okay in their head, they have thought through of like okay if I do it this way, that way, this third way, here's what will happen, then I have to do that, then I have to do this, then I have to bring in somebody to do that, here's the technical challenge I'm going to hit. And they've have to bring in somebody to do that. Here's the technical challenge I'm gonna hit. And they've got in their heads as best anybody could.

Starting point is 00:26:48 They've got as complete a sort of a map of possible futures as they could possibly have. And this is where I say, when you ask them increasing detail questions, that's what you're trying to kind of get them to kind of chart out is, okay, how far ahead have you thought and how much are you anticipating

Starting point is 00:27:01 all of the different twists and turns that this is gonna take? Okay, so then they start on day one. And then of course, what happens is now they're in it. They're in the fog of war, right? They're in true uncertainty. And now that idea may be, maybe not helpful practically, but now they're going to be basically constructing it on the fly day by day

Starting point is 00:27:16 as they learn and discover new things. And as the world changes around them. And of course, it's a feedback loop. Because if their thing starts to work, it's going to change the world. And then the fact the world is changing is going to cause their plan to change as well. And so, yeah, the great ones, basically,

Starting point is 00:27:30 they course correct every single day. They take stock of what they've learned. They modified the plan. The great ones tend to think in terms of hypotheses, like a scientific sort of mentality, which is they tend to think, OK, I'm going to try this. I'm going to go into the world, I'm going to announce that I'm doing this for sure. Right?

Starting point is 00:27:49 Like, I'm going to say, like, this is my plan. And I'm going to tell all my employees that, I'm going to tell all my investors that, I'm going to put a stake in there on this, my plan. I'm going to try it. Right? And even though I sound like I have complete certainty, I know that I need to test to find out whether it's going to work. And if it's not, then I have to go back to all those same people, and I have to say, well,

Starting point is 00:28:03 actually, we're not going left. We're going right. And they have to run that loop thousands of times, right? And to get through the other side. And this led to the creation of this great term pivot, which has been very helpful in our industry, because the word when I was when I was going to the word we used was fuck up. And pivot sounds like so much better. It sounds like so much more professional.

Starting point is 00:28:22 But yeah, you let make mistakes. It's just too complicated to understand. You of course correct, you adjust, you evolve. Often these things, at least in business, the businesses that end up working really well tend to be different than the original plan. But that's part of the process of a really smart founder basically working their way through reality

Starting point is 00:28:40 as they're executing their plan. The way you're describing this has parallels to a lot of models in biology and the practice of science of random walks, but that aren't truly random, pseudo random walks in biology, et cetera. But one thing that is becoming clear from the way you're describing this is that I could imagine a great risk to early success.

Starting point is 00:29:01 So for instance, somebody develops a product, people are excited by it, they start to implement that product, but then the landscape changes, and they don't learn how to pivot to use the less profane version of it, right? They don't learn how to do that. In other words, the, and I think of everything these days, or most everything in terms of reward schedules and dopamine reward schedules, because that is the universal currency of reward. And so when you talk about the Sean Parker quote of learning to enjoy the taste of one's own blood, that is very different than learning to enjoy the taste of success. It's about internalizing success as a process of being self-determined and less agreeable, cetera. In other words, building up of those five traits becomes the source of dopamine, perhaps,

Starting point is 00:29:48 in a way that's highly adaptive. So on the outside, we just see the product, the end product, the iPhone, the MacBook, the Netscape, et cetera. But I have to presume, and I'm not a psychologist, but I have done neurophysiology, and I've studied the dopamine system enough to know that what's being rewarded in the context of what you're describing sounds to be a reinforcement of those five traits rather than oh it's going to be this particular product or the company's going to look this way or the logo is going to be this or that.

Starting point is 00:30:17 That all seems like the peripheral to what's really going on. That great innovators are really in the process of establishing neural circuitry that is all about reinforcing the me and the process of being me. Yeah. Yeah, so this goes to, yeah, so this is like extrinsic versus intrinsic motivation. So the Steve Jobs kind of zen version of this, right?

Starting point is 00:30:39 Or the sort of hippie version of this was, the journey is the reward. And yeah, he always told his employees that. It's like, look like, everybody thinks in terms of these big public markers, like the stock price or the IPO or the product launch or whatever, he's like, no, it's actually the process itself is the point. And to your point, if you have that mentality, then that's an intrinsic motivation, not an extrinsic motivation.

Starting point is 00:30:59 And so that's the kind of intrinsic motivation that can keep you going for a long time. Another way to think about it is competing against yourself. It's like, can I get better at doing this? And can I prove to myself that I can get better? There's also a big social component to this, and this is one of the reasons why Silicon Valley punches so far above its weight as a place. There's a psychological component, which also goes to the comparison set. So a phenomenon that we've observed over time is the leading tech company in any city

Starting point is 00:31:25 well aspire to be as large as the previous leading tech company in that city. But often not larger, right? Because they sort of have a model of success and as long as they beat that level of success, they've kind of you know checked the box like they've made it. You know and then they but then in contrast you're in Silicon Valley and you look around. And it's just like Facebook and Cisco and Oracle and you look Packard and Gladiators. Yeah, and you're just like looking at these giants.

Starting point is 00:31:51 And many of them are still, Mark Zuckerberg's still going to work every day and trying to do, and so these people are like, the role models are like alive, right? They're like right there. And it's so clear how much better they are and how much bigger their accomplishments are.

Starting point is 00:32:05 And so what we find is young founders in that environment have much greater aspirations, right? Because again, maybe at that point, maybe it's the social status. Maybe there's an extrinsic component to that. But maybe it helps calibrate that internal system to basically say, actually, no, the opportunity here is not to build a local, which

Starting point is 00:32:23 may call local maximum form of success, but let, which they call local maximum form of success, but let's build to a global maximum form of success, which is something as big as who possibly can. Ultimately, the great ones are probably driven more internally than externally when it comes down to it. And that is where you get this phenomenon where you get people who are, you know, extremely successful and extremely wealthy,

Starting point is 00:32:39 who very easily can punch out and move to Fiji and just call it. And they're still working 16 hour days, right? And so So obviously something explains that that has nothing to do with external rewards. And I think it's an internal thing. As many of you know, I've been taking AG1 daily since 2012. So I'm delighted that they're sponsoring the podcast. AG1 is a vitamin mineral probiotic drink that's designed to meet all of your foundational nutrition needs. Now of course, I try to get enough servings of vitamins and minerals through whole food sources that include vegetables and fruits every day, but oftentimes I simply can't get enough servings.

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Starting point is 00:33:46 that's drinkag1.com slash Huberman. I've heard you talk a lot about the inner landscape, the inner psychology of these folks, and I appreciate that we're going even deeper into that today. And we will talk about the landscape realm, whether or not Silicon Valley or New York, whether or not there are specific cities that are ideal for certain types of pursuits. I think there was an article written by Paul Graham some years ago about the conversations that you over here in a city will tell you everything you need to know about whether or not you belong there in terms of your professional pursuits. Some of that's changed over time and now we should probably add Austin to the mix because it was

Starting point is 00:34:22 written some time ago. In any event, I wanna return to that, but I want to focus on an aspect of this intrinsic versus extrinsic motivators in terms of something that's a bit more cryptic, which is one's personal relationships. You know, if I think about the catalog of innovators in Silicon Valley, some of them like Steve Jobs had complicated personal lives,

Starting point is 00:34:45 romantic personal lives early on. And it sounds like he worked it out. I don't know. I wasn't there, a couple's therapists. But when he died, he was in a marriage that for all the world seemed like a happy marriage. You also have examples of innovators who have had many partners, many children

Starting point is 00:35:03 with other partners, Elon comes to mind. You know, I don't think I'm disclosing anything that isn't already obvious. Those could have been happy relationships and just had many of them. But the reason I'm asking this is you can imagine that for the innovator, the person with these traits who's trying to build up this thing, whatever it is, that having someone or several people, in some cases, who just truly believe in you when the rest of the world may not believe in you yet or at all, could be immensely powerful. And we have examples from cults that embody this. We have examples from politics. We have examples from tech innovation and science.

Starting point is 00:35:46 And I've always been fascinated by this because I feel like it's the more cryptic and yet very potent form of allowing someone to build themselves up. It's a combination of inner psychology and extrinsic motivation because obviously if that person were to die or leave them or cheat on them or you know, pair up with some other innovator, which we've seen several times recently in the past. It can be devastating to that person. But what are your thoughts on the role of personal and in particular romantic relationship as it relates to people having an idea and their feeling that they can really bring that idea to fruition in the world?

Starting point is 00:36:22 So it's a real mixed bag. You have lots of examples in all directions. And I think it's something like something like that, something I follow. So first is we talked about the personality traits of these people, they tend to be highly disagreeable. Doesn't foster a good romantic relationship. Oh, highly disagreeable. It's a good, difficult, beautiful relationship.

Starting point is 00:36:38 I may have heard of that once or twice, people, a friend that may have given me that example. Yeah, right. And you know, maybe you just need to find the right person who like help him as that, and it's willing to, there's a lot of relationships where like, it's always this question about relationships, right? Which is do you want to have the same personality,

Starting point is 00:36:50 grow for a file, the same behavioral traits, basically, as your partner, or do you actually want to have, is it an opposite thing? And I'm sure you've seen this, there are relationships where you'll have somebody who's highly disagreeable, who's paired with somebody who's highly agreeable. And actually, we're not great,

Starting point is 00:37:03 because one person just gets to be on their soapbox, so the time the other person's just like, OK, it's fine, it's fine. It's good. You put two disagreeable people together. Maybe sparks fly, and they have great conversations all the time. And maybe they come to hate each other. So anyway, so these people, if you're

Starting point is 00:37:19 going to be with one of these people, you're fishing out of the disagreeable end of the pond. And again, when I say disagreeable, I don't mean these are normal distributions. I don't mean like 60% disagree fishing out of the disagreeable end of the pond. And again, when I say disagreeable, I don't mean, you know, these are normal distributions. I don't mean like 60% disagreeable, 80% disagreeable. The people we're talking about are 99.99% disagreeable, right? So these are ordinary people. So part of it's that.

Starting point is 00:37:35 And then of course they have the other personality traits, right? Super conscientious, they're super driven. As a consequence, they tend to work really hard. They tend to not have a lot of time for, you know, if hemipications or other things, you know, they're not, they don't enjoy them if they're forced to go on them. And so again, that kind of thing can fray in a relationship. So, so there's a, so there's a fair amount in there that's loaded. Like somebody's going to partner with

Starting point is 00:37:55 one of these people needs to be signed up for the ride. And that's, that's a hard thing, you know, it's a hard thing to do. Or you need a true partnership with two of these, which is also hard to do. So I think that's part of it. And then look, I think a big part of it is, you know, people achieve a certain level of success, and you know, either in their own minds or, you know, publicly, and then they start to be able to get away with things, right? And they start to be able to say, well, okay, you know, now we're rich and successful and famous, and now I deserve, you know, and this is where you get into, I've, I've used this

Starting point is 00:38:23 now in the realm of personal choice, right? You get in this thing where people start to think that they deserve things. And so they start to behave in, you know, very bad ways. And then they blow up their personal worlds as a consequence. And maybe they've regretted later and maybe they don't, right? So it's always a, always a question. So, yeah, so I think there's that. And then I don't know, like, yeah, some people just need, maybe the other part of it is,

Starting point is 00:38:45 some people just need more emotional support than others, and I don't know that that's a big, I don't know that that tilts either way. Like I know some of these people who have like great loving relationships and seem to draw very much on having this kind of firm foundation to rely upon. And then I know other people who are just like their personalizers, just a continuous train wreck, and it doesn't seem to matter. Like professionally they just keep doing what they're doing. And maybe we could talk here about like,

Starting point is 00:39:07 whatever is the personality trait for risk-taking, right? Some people are so incredibly risk-prone that they need to take risk and all aspects of their lives at all times. And if part of their life gets stable, they find a way to blow it up. And that's some of these people you could describe in those terms also.

Starting point is 00:39:24 Yeah, let's talk about that. Because I think risk taking and sensation seeking is something that fascinates me for my own reasons and my observations of others. Does it dovetail with these five traits in a way that can really serve innovation in ways that can benefit everybody? The reason I say to benefit everybody is because there is a view of how we're painting this picture of the innovator as this really cruel person,

Starting point is 00:39:52 but oftentimes what we're talking about are innovations that make the world far better for billions of people. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. And by the way, everything we're talking about also is not just in tech or science or in business. It's also,

Starting point is 00:40:04 everything we're also talking about is true for the arts. And you have a history of artistic expression as you know, you have people with all these same kinds of traits. Well, I was thinking about Picasso and his regular turnover of lovers and partners. And he was very open about the fact that it was one of the sources of his productivity, slash creativity. He wasn't shy about that. I suppose if he were alive today, it might be a little bit different. He might be judged a little differently. Right. Or that was his story for behaving in a pattern that was very awful for the people around

Starting point is 00:40:31 him and he didn't care. Right. Maybe they left him. Yeah. Who knows? So puts in text all this. But no, okay. So I have a theory.

Starting point is 00:40:39 So here's a theory. This is one of these. I keep a list of things that will get me kicked out of it in a party. And the topic's going to be given point in time. Do you read it before you go in? Yeah, this is one of these. I keep a list of things that will get me kicked out of a dinner party. And the topic's going to be given point. Do you read it before you go in? Yeah, I just, yeah. I am an auto recall so that I can get out of these things. But so here's the thing that can get me kicked out

Starting point is 00:40:55 of dinner party, especially these days. So think of the kind of person where I should like very clear that they're like super high, two point, that somebody is super high off, whatever to mean they're in, they've done things that have fundamentally changed the world. They've brought new, whether it's businesses or technologies or works of art, entire schools of creative expression, in some cases, to the world. And then, at a certain point, they blow themselves to smithereens, right?

Starting point is 00:41:20 And they do that either through a massive, like financial scandal, they do that through a massive personal breakdown, they do that through some like a massive like financial scandal. They do that through a massive personal, you know, breakdown. They do that through some sort of public expression. The causes them a huge amount of problems. You know, they say they say the wrong thing. Maybe not once, but several hundred times and blow themselves to smithereens. And and and there's this, you know, there's this kind of arc. There's this moral arc that people kind of want to apply, which is like the Icarus, you know, the flying too close to the sun. And you know, he had it coming and he needed to keep his ego under control and you get kind of this judgment that applies. So I have a different theory

Starting point is 00:41:52 on this. So the term I use to describe these people and a lot of other people who don't actually blow themselves up but get close to it, which is a whole other set of people. I call them martyrs to civilizational progress. So we martyrs to civilizational progress. So we're back with civilizational progress. So look, the only way civilizational gets moved forward is when people like this do something new, right? Because civilizational as a whole does not do new things. Groups of people do not do new things.

Starting point is 00:42:18 These things don't happen automatically. By default, nothing changes. The only way civilizational change on any of these axes ever happens is because one of these people stands up and says, no, I'm going to do something different than what everybody else has ever done before. So this is progress, like this is actually how it happens. Sometimes they get lionish to reward it, sometimes they get crucified, sometimes the crucification is literal, sometimes it's just symbolic, but like,

Starting point is 00:42:44 you know, they are those kinds of people. And then murders. When they go down in flames, and again, this is where it really scares the people's moral judgments, because everybody wants to have this super clear story of, okay, he did a bad thing and he was punished. And I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, no.

Starting point is 00:43:00 He was the kind of person who was going to do great things and also was going to take on a level of risk and take on a level of sort of extreme behavior such that he was going to expose himself to flying to close to the sun, wings melt and crash to ground, but it's a package deal, right? The reason you have the Picasso and the Beethoven and all these people is because they're willing to take these extreme level of risks, they are that creative and original, not just in their art or their business, but in everything else that they do, that they will set themselves up to be able to fail.

Starting point is 00:43:29 Psychologic, you know, a psychologist would probably, a psychiatrist would probably say, you know, maybe, you know, to what extent do they actually, like have a death wish, do they actually, you know, at some point do they want to punish themselves or do they want to fail, that I don't know. But you see this, they deliberately move themselves to close to the sun, and you can see it when it's happening

Starting point is 00:43:44 because like, if they get too far from the sun, they deliberately move back to close to the sun. And you can see it when it's happening, because if they get too far off from the sun, they deliberately move back towards it. They come right back and they want the risk. And so anyway, like, yeah, so murder is the civilization of progress. This is how progress happens. When these people crash and burn, the natural inclination is to judge them morally.

Starting point is 00:44:02 I tend to think we should basically say, look, and I don't even know if this means like given the memorial pass or whatever, but it's like look, like this is how civilization progresses, and we need to at least understand that there's a self-secret official aspect of this, that may be tragic and often is tragic, but it is quite literally self-secret official.

Starting point is 00:44:20 Are there any examples of great innovators who were able to compartmentalize their risk taking to such a degree that they had what seemed to be a morally impeccable life in every domain except in their business pursuits? Yeah, that's right. So some people are very, some people are very highly controlled like that. Some people are able to like very narrowly and I don't really want to cite myself in example on a lot of this, but I will tell you like as an example, like I know I will never use debt

Starting point is 00:44:48 in business number one, you know, number two, like I have the most placid personal life you can imagine number three, I'm the last person the world is ever going to do an extreme sport. I mean, I'm not even going to go on the saw on the ice bath. Like I'm not doing any of this, like I don't know doing any of that. I'm not co-skying. No, I'm not. I'm not on the tight. I'm not on the tight. And I'm not, you know, I'm not going down to see the Titanic. I'm not doing any of this. Like, I don't know. I'm not co-skeying. No, I'm not. I'm not on the tight. I'm not on the tight. And I'm not, you know, I'm not going down to see the technic. I'm not doing any of this. I'm not doing any of this stuff.

Starting point is 00:45:10 I have no interest. I don't like golf. I don't ski. I have no interest in any of this stuff. Right. And so like, there are, and I know people like this, right, who are very high achievers. It's just like, yeah, they're completely segmented.

Starting point is 00:45:19 They're extremist takers in business. They're completely buttoned down on the personal side. They're completely buttoned down, you know, financially. They're, you know, they're, they're scruped down on the personal side, they're completely buttoned down financially. They're scrupulous with following every rule of law. You can possibly imagine. But they're still fantastic innovators. And then I know many others who are just like,

Starting point is 00:45:32 their life is on fire all the time in every possible way. And whenever it looks like the fire is turning into embers, they figure out a way to like, relight the fire, right? And they just really want to live on the edge. And so I think that's maybe, I think that's an independent variable. And again, I would apply the same thing. I think the same thing applies to the arts, you know, classical music as an example, like I think Bach was, you know, as an example, one of the, you know, kind of best musicians of all time had just to completely sedate personal life, you know, never had any ever at behavior at all in his

Starting point is 00:46:02 personal life, you know, family man, tons of kids, apparently, you know, killer of the community, right? And so like, if Bach could be Bach and yet not like burn his way through, you know, 300 messages or whatever, you know, maybe you can too. So in thinking about these two different categories of innovators, those that take on tremendous risk and all domains of their life and those that take on tremendous risk in a very compartmentalized way, I don't know what the percentages are, but I have to wonder if in this modern age of the public being far less forgivable, what I'm referring to is cancel culture. Do you think that we are limiting the number of innovations in total, like by just simply frightening or eliminating an enormous category of innovators

Starting point is 00:46:47 because they don't have the confidence or the means or the strategies in place to regulate. So they're just either bowing out or they're getting crossed off, they're getting canceled one by one. So do you think the public is less tolerant than it used to be or more tolerant? Well, the systems that I'm not going to be careful here, I think the large institution systems are not tolerant of what the public tells them they shouldn't be tolerant of. And so if there's enough noise, there's enough noise in the mob, I think institutions bow out. And here I'm referring not just to,

Starting point is 00:47:27 they essentially say, okay, they let the cancellation proceed. Or they, and maybe they're the gavel that comes down, but they're not the lever that got the thing going. And so I'm not just thinking about universities, and I'm also thinking about advertisers, I'm thinking about the big movie houses that cancel a film that a given actor

Starting point is 00:47:45 might be in because they had something in their personal life that's still getting worked out. I'm thinking about people who are in a legal process that's not yet resolved, but the public has decided they're a bad person, et cetera. My question is that we're really talking about the public. I agree with your question, and I'm going to come back to it, but I'm going to, I'm going to, I'm going to, I'm going to examine one part of your question, which is this really the public we're talking about. And I would just say exhibit A is who is the current front runner for the Republican nomination today. The public least on one side of the

Starting point is 00:48:16 political aisle seems very on board. Number two, look, there's a certain musician who like, you know, flew too close to the sun, flew himself to Smitha Reigns, he's still hitting all time highs on music streams every month. The public seems fine. Like, I think the public might, I would argue the public is actually more open to these things than it actually maybe ever has been. And we could talk about why that's a case. I think it's a differentiation, and this is what your question was aiming at, but it's a differentiation between the public and the elites. And so, so, so, I, my's a differentiation. And this is what your question was aiming at, but it's a differentiation between the public and the elites. And so my view is everything that you just described as an elite phenomenon. And actually, the public is very much not

Starting point is 00:48:51 on board with it. Interesting. And so what's actually happening is the division, what's happened is the public and the elites have gapped out. The public is more forgiving of what previously might have been considered kind of ever-nure extreme behavior. Right? It's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's,

Starting point is 00:49:06 it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, everything that's amazing and great and also terrible about America. If we took Mike Tyson to dinner tonight at any restaurant anywhere in the United States, what would happen? You would be loved. Oh, he would be like doored. He would be the outpouring of enthusiasm and passion and love would be incredible. Like it would be unbelievable. This is a great example. Like it just like then and again, I'm not even gonna drop more. I'm not even gonna say I agree with

Starting point is 00:49:42 that or disagree with that. I'm just like, we all intuitively know that the public is just like 100% like absolutely. Like he's a legend, like he's a legend. He's a living legend. He's like a cultural touchstone. Absolutely. And then you see it when he shows up in movies, right? He shows, I have to remember the,

Starting point is 00:49:55 I mean, the big breakthrough where I figured this out with respect to him because I don't really follow sports. But when he showed up in that, it was that first hangover movie and he shows up and then, you know, it was, I was in a theater and like, the just goes, but man, it's crazy. They're so excited to see him. Yeah, he evokes delight. I always say that Mike Tyson is the only person I'm aware of that can wear a shirt with

Starting point is 00:50:14 his own name on it. And it somehow doesn't seem wrong. In fact, it just kind of makes you like him more. Yeah. It's, his ego feels very contoured in a way that, uh, he knows who he is and who he was. And, and yet there's a, there's a humbleness woven in. Maybe as a consequence of all that he's been through. I don't know. Um, but yeah, people love Mike. Public lesson now, exactly. Now, you know, if he shows up to like lecture at Harvard, right? Like,

Starting point is 00:50:40 I think you're probably going to get it a reaction. I don't know. I don't know. I mean, David Simon, you know, the guy who wrote the wire gave a talk at Harvard and it sounded to me based on his report of that, which is very interesting in fact, that people adore people who are connected to everybody in that way. Like I feel like everybody loves Mike from above his status, the sides, below his status, he's just sort of, he occupies this halo of love and adoration.

Starting point is 00:51:13 Okay, all right. Yeah. And then look, the other side of this is the elites. And you're kind of alluded to this, the institution. So basically it's like the people who are like, at least nominally in charge, or feel like they should be in charge.

Starting point is 00:51:22 Yeah, I want to make sure we define the elite. So you're not necessarily talking about people who are wealthy or talking about people who have authority within institutions. So the ultimate definition of elite is who can get who fired? Right. Like that's the ultimate. Who can get who fired boycott a blacklisted ostracized? Like when pushed prosecuted, jailed, like when push comes to shove.

Starting point is 00:51:43 Right. I think that's always the question. Who can destroy his career? And of course, you'll notice that that is heavily asymmetric. When these fights play out, like there's very clear where it's like I can get the other side firing, which side, which side can't. And so, yeah, so look, I think we live in a period of time where the elites have gotten to be extreme in a number of dimensions. And I think it's characterized by for sure extreme group think, extreme sanctimony, extreme moral, I would say, duchin, extreme, this weird sort

Starting point is 00:52:09 of modern puritanism, and then an extreme sort of morality of like punishment and terror, I guess, they're perceived enemies. But I wanted to go through that because I actually think that's a very different phenomenon. I think what's happening there leads is very different that what's happening in the population at large.

Starting point is 00:52:24 And then, of course, I think there's a feedback loop in is very different that what's happening in the population at large. And then of course, I think there's a feedback loop in there, which is I think the population at large is not on board with that program. I think the elites are aware that the population is not on board with that program. I think they judge the population negatively as a consequence. That causes the elites to harden their own positions. That causes them to be even more alienating

Starting point is 00:52:41 to the population. And so they're in sort of an oppositional negative feedback loop. And it's it's going to be. And, you know, it's, but again, it's a certain question to who can get who fired. And so, you know, elites are really good at getting like normal people fired, ostracized band, you know, hit pieces in the press like whatever, you know, for normal people to get elites fired, they have to really light band together, right, and really amount to serious challenge, which mostly doesn't happen, but might be starting to happen in some cases. Do you think this power of the elites over stemmed from social

Starting point is 00:53:15 media, sort of going against its original purpose? I mean, when you think social media, you think you're giving each and every person their own little reality TV show, their own voice. And yet, we've seen a traumatic uptick in the number of cancellations and firings related to immoral behavior based on things that were either done or amplified on social media. It's almost as if the public is holding the wrong end of the knife. Yeah so the way I describe it so I so I use these two terms and there's somewhat interchangeable but it leads in institutions and then there's so many interchangeable

Starting point is 00:53:49 because who runs the institutions the elites, right? So it's a sort of a self-reinforcing thing. Anyway, institutions of all kinds, institutions, everything from the government, bureaucracies, companies, nonprofits, foundations, NGOs, tech companies, you know, on and on and on, like people who are in charge of big complexes, and that carry a lot of basically power and influence and capability and money as a consequence of their positional authority. So the head of a giant foundation may never have done

Starting point is 00:54:16 anything in their life that would cause somebody to have a high pinoom as a person, but they're in charge of this gigantic multi-billion to our complex and have all this power of the results. So that's just to define terms, the least institutions. So it's actually interesting. Gallup has been doing polls on the following question of trust in institutions, which is sort of a,

Starting point is 00:54:35 therefore proxy for trust in elites, basically since the early 1970s. And what you find, and they do this across all the categories of big institutions, basically everyone I just talked about, a bunch of others, big business, small business banks, newspapers, broadcast television, the military, police, and so they've got like 30 categories or something. And basically what you see is almost all the categories basically started in the early 70s at like 60 or 70% trust.

Starting point is 00:55:00 And now they've basically almost across the board, they've just done it, they had a complete basically linear slide down for 50 years, basically my whole life. And you know, they're now bottoming out, Congress and journalists bottom out at like 10%. Like the two groups, everybody hates are like Congress and journalists. And then it's like a lot of other big institutions

Starting point is 00:55:21 are like 20s, 20s, 30s, 40s. Actually, big business actually scores fairly high, tech actually scores quite high, the military score is quite high, but basically everything else has really caved in. And so, so this is sort of my fundamental challenge to everybody who basically says, and you didn't do this, but you'll hear the simple form of this, which is social media caused the current trouble. And it's called this an example. You collapse in faith in institutions and the leads, let's call that part of the current trouble. Everybody's like called as an example. You collapse in faith and institutions and

Starting point is 00:55:45 elites, let's call that part of the current trouble. Everybody's like, well, social media caused that. I was like, well, no, social media, social media is new, right? In the last, you know, social media is effectively new, practically speaking since 2010, 2012, was when it really took off. And so if the trend started in the early 1970s, right, and has been continuous, then we're dealing with something broader. And Martin Gurry wrote, I think, the best book on this, called The Revolt of the Public, where he goes through this in detail. And he does say that social media had a lot to do with what's happened in the last decade. But he says, yeah, if you go back, you look further, it was basically two things coinciding. One was just a general change in the media environment.

Starting point is 00:56:21 And in particular, the 1970s is when you started, and especially in the 1980s, is when you started to get specifically talk radio, which was a new outlet. And then you also got cable television. And then you also, by the way, it's actually interesting in the 50s, 60s, you had a paperback books, which was another one of these, which was an outlet. So you had like a fracturing in the media landscape

Starting point is 00:56:40 that started in the 50s through the 80s. And then of course, the internet, like, it went open. Having said that, if the elites and institutions were fantastic, you would know it more than ever. If you see this information as Marx, that's a bull. And so the other thing that he says, and I agree with, is the public is not being tricked in the thinking that the elites and institutions are bad.

Starting point is 00:56:57 They're learning that they're bad, right? And the mystery, and therefore, the mystery of the Gallup poll is why those numbers aren't all just zero, right? Which are arguably in a lot of cases where they should be. I think one reason that, by the way, he thinks this is bad. So he and I have a different view. So here's our he and I disagree. He thinks this is bad. So he basically says you can't replace it leads with nothing. You can't replace institutions with nothing if if because what you're just left with is just going to be wreckage. You're going to left with a completely basically, you know, atomized out of control society that has no ability to

Starting point is 00:57:27 marshal, you know, any sort of activity in a direction. It's just going to be a doggy dog awful, you know, world. I have a very different view on that, which we can, which we can talk about. Yeah, I'd love to, I'd love to hear your views on that. Yeah. I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor inside tracker. Inside tracker is a personalized nutrition platform that analyzes data from your blood and DNA to help you better understand your body and help you meet your health goals. I'm a big believer in getting regular blood work done for the simple reason that many of the factors that impact your immediate and long-term health can only be analyzed from a

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Starting point is 00:58:32 If you'd like to try Inside Tracker, you can visit insidetracker.com slash Huberman to get 20% off any of Inside Tracker's plans. Again, that's insidetracker.com slash Huberman to get 20% off. The quick question I was going to ask before we go there is I think that one reason that I and many other people sort of reflexively assume that social media caused the demise of our faith in institutions is, well, first of all, I wasn't aware of this lack of correlation between the decline in faith in institutions and the rise of social media. But secondarily, we've seen some movements

Starting point is 00:59:11 that have essentially rooted themselves in tweets, in comments, in posts that get amplified. And those tweets and comments and posts come from everyday people. In fact, I can't name one person who initiated a given cancellation or movement because it was the sort of dog piling or mob adding on to some person that was essentially anonymous. So I think that for many of us, we have the bottom-up perspective. Oh, someone sees something in their daily life or experiences something in their daily life

Starting point is 00:59:46 and they tweet about it or they comment about it or they post about it. And then enough people dog pile on the accused that it picks up force and then the elites feel compelled obligated to cancel somebody. That tends to be the narrative. And so I think the logical conclusion is, oh, social media allows for this to happen,

Starting point is 01:00:08 whereas normally someone would just be standing on the corner shouting or calling lawyers that don't have faith in them. And you get the air and Brockovich model that turns into a movie, but that's a rare case of this lone woman who's got this idea in mind about how big institution is doing wrong, or somebody is doing wrong in the world, and then can leverage big institutions.

Starting point is 01:00:29 Excuse me. But the way that you describe it is that the elites are leading this shift. So what is the role of the public in it? I mean, just to give it a concrete example, if for instance no one tweeted or commented on me too or no one tweeted or commented about some ill behavior of some, I don't know, University faculty member or a business person, would the elite have come down on them anyway? Oh, yeah. So it was happening.

Starting point is 01:01:03 So basically what I've seen over the years, it's so much astroturfing right now. There are entire categories of people who are paid to do this. Some of them we call journalists. Some of them we call activists. Some of them we call NGO, non-profit. Some of them we call university professors. Some of them we call grad students.

Starting point is 01:01:21 Like whatever, they're paid to do this. I don't know if you've ever looked into the misinformation industrial complex. There's this whole universe of basically these funded groups that basically do quote unquote misinformation and they're constantly mounting these kinds of attacks. They're constantly trying to gin up this kind of basically

Starting point is 01:01:38 panic because somebody to get fired. So it's not grassroots. It's the opposite grassroots. No, almost always you trace these things back. It was a journalist. It was an activist. It was a public figure of some kind. These are entrepreneurs.

Starting point is 01:01:53 These are entrepreneurs in a sort of a weird way. They're basically their job mission calling in line. It's all wrapped up together. Like they're true believers, but they're also getting paid to do it. And there's a giant funding. I mean, there's a very giant funding complex for this coming from certain high profile people who put huge amounts of money into this.

Starting point is 01:02:10 Is this well known? Yes, well, so I mean, it isn't my world. So this is what the social media companies have been on the receiving end of for the last decade. It's basically a political media activism complex with very deep pockets behind it, and you've got people who literally are people who sit all day and watch the TV network on the other side, or watch the Twitter, or physical side, and they wait, they basically wait. It's like, every politician, this has been the case for a long time now, every politician who goes out and gives stuff speeches, you'll see there's always somebody in the crowd with a cancorder, or with now with a phone recording them, and that's somebody from the other campaign

Starting point is 01:02:41 who's paid somebody to just be there and record every single thing the politician says so that when I met Romney says whatever the 47% thing they've got it on tape and then they clip it and they try to make it viral. So, this stuff is, and again, like look, these people believe what they're doing, I'm not saying it's even dishonest, like these people believe what they're doing, they think they're fighting a holy war, they think they're protecting democracy, they think they're protecting civilization, they think they're protecting whatever it is they're protecting. But but they and then they know how to use the tools. And so they know how to they know how to try to gin up the outrage. And then by the way, sometimes it works in social cascade.

Starting point is 01:03:13 Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes they cascade. Sometimes they don't. But if you follow these people on Twitter, like, this is what they do every day. They're constantly trying to like life as fire. Right. I assume it was really bottom up, but it sounds like it's sort of a middle level and then it captures the elites and then the thing takes on our life of its own. By the way, it also intersects with the trust and safety groups at the social media firms who are responsible for figuring out who gets promoted and who gets banned right across

Starting point is 01:03:38 this. And you'll notice one large social media company has recently changed hands and has implemented a different kind of set of trust and safety. And all of and has implemented a different kind of set of trust and safety. And all of a sudden a different kind of boycott movement has all of a sudden started to work. It wasn't working before that. And another kind of boycott movement is not working as well anymore. And so there's an internet, for sure, there's an intermediation happening. Like look, the stuff that's happening in the world today is being intermediate through social media because social media is the defining media of our time. But there are people who know how to do this and do this for a living. So no, I very much view this as a, I view very much the cancellation wave like this whole

Starting point is 01:04:12 thing. It's an elite phenomenon. And when it appears to be a grassroots thing, it's either grassroots among the elites, which is possible because there's fairly large number of people who are signed up for that, particularly crusade. But there's also a lot of astroturfing in the stake in place inside that. The question is, okay, what point does the population at large get pulled into this? And maybe there are movements at certain points in time where they do get pulled in, and then maybe later they get disillusioned, and so then there's some question there.

Starting point is 01:04:39 And then there's another question of, well, if the population at large is going to decide what these movements are, are they going to be the same movements as the elites want? How are the elites going to react when the population actually, like fully expresses itself? Right. And so there's, and like I said, there's a feedback loop between these where the more extreme the elites get, they tend to push the population to more extreme views on the other side and vice versa. So it ping, ping, ping, ping, pong's back and forth.

Starting point is 01:05:00 And so, yeah, this is, yeah, this is our world. Yeah, this explains a lot. Yeah. I want to make sure that I'm at Taiyabi. So that Mike Schellenberger Matt Taiyabi, a bunch of these guys have done a lot of work. I just just if you just look into what's called the misinformation industrial complex, you'll find a network of money and power that is really quite amazing. I've seen more and more Schellenberger showing up, right?

Starting point is 01:05:22 And he's just looking on this stuff. He and he and Taiyabi, they're just literally just like tracking money.'s just like, he's on this stuff, he and he can't tie me that. They're just, they're literally just like tracking money. It's just like, it's very clear how the money flows. Including like a remarkable amount of money out of the government, which is of course like in theory, very concerning. Very interesting. The government should not be funding programs that take away people's constitutional rights

Starting point is 01:05:40 and yet somehow that is what's been happening. Very interesting. Yes. rights and yet somehow that is what's been happening. Very interesting. Yes. I want to make sure that I hear your ideas about why the decline in confidence in institutions and is not necessarily problematic. Is this going to be a total destruction and burning down on the forest that will lead to new life?

Starting point is 01:06:01 Is that your view? Yeah. Well, so this is the thing. And look, there's a question if you're, there's a couple questions in here, which is, it's like, how bad is it really? Like, how bad are they? Right? And I, you know, I think they're pretty bad.

Starting point is 01:06:13 A lot of them are pretty actually bad. And so that's one big question. And then, yeah, the other question is like, okay, if an institution has gone bad, or a group of elites have gone bad, like, can, can, is this wonderful word reform, right? Can, can, can, Can they be reformed? And everybody always wants to reform everything.

Starting point is 01:06:27 And yet somehow, like, nothing ever, whatever gets reformed, right? And so people are trying to reform, housing policy in the Bay Area for decades. And, you know, we're not building or building fewer houses than ever before. So somehow reform movements seem to lead to more, just more bad stuff.

Starting point is 01:06:41 But anyway, yeah, so if you have an existing institution, can it be reform, can it be fixed from the inside? What's happened in universities? There's a lot of professors at Stanford as an example who very much think that they can fix Stanford. I don't know what you think it doesn't seem like it's going in productive directions right now. Well, I mean, there are many things about Stanford that function extremely well. It's a big institution. It's certainly got its issues like any other place. They're also my employer. Mark's giving me some interesting looks. He wants me to get a little more vocal here.

Starting point is 01:07:08 Um, no, no, you don't know. Oh, no, I, I mean, I think that, um, yeah, I mean, one of the things about being a researcher at a big institution like Stanford is, well, first of all, it meets the criteria that you described before, you know, you look to the left, you look to the right or anywhere above or below you and you have excellence, right? I mean, I've got a Nobel Prize winner below me, whose daddy also want a Nobel Prize, and there is scientific offspring is likely to win.

Starting point is 01:07:30 I mean, it inspires you to do bigger things than one ordinarily would, no matter what. So there's that, and that's great, and that persists. There's all the bureaucratic red tape about trying to get things done and how to implement decisions is very hard, and there are a lot of reasons for that. And then of course, there are the things that,

Starting point is 01:07:49 many people are aware of, there are public accusations about people in positions of great leadership, and that's getting played out. And the whole thing becomes kind of overwhelming and a little bit opaque when you're just trying to run your lab or live your life. And so I think one of the reasons for this lack of reform that you're referring to is because

Starting point is 01:08:09 there's no position of reformer, right? So deans are dealing with a lot of issues, provosts are dealing with a lot of issues, presidents are dealing with a lot of issues, and then some in some cases. And so, you know, we don't have a dedicated role of reformer. Someone to go in and say, listen, there's just a lot of fat on this, and we need to trim it, or we need to create this or do that. There just isn't a system to do that.

Starting point is 01:08:33 And that's, I think, in part, because universities are built on old systems, and it's like the New York subway. It's amazing, it still works as well as it does, and yet it's got a ton of problems also. Well, look, so the point we can debate the university specifically, but the point is like, look, if you do think institutions are going bad,

Starting point is 01:08:51 and then you have to make it, number one, you have to figure out if you think institutions are going bad, the population largely does think that. And at the very least, the people who run institutions ought to really think hard about what that means. But people still strive to go to these places,

Starting point is 01:09:03 and I still hear from people who, like for instance, did not go to college, are talking about how a university degree is useless. They'll tell you how proud they are that their son or daughter is going to Stanford, or is going to UCLA, or is going to, or ban a champagne. I mean, it's almost like, to me, that's always the most shocking contradiction. It's like, yeah, like these institutions don't matter. But then when people want to hold up a card that says why their kid is great, it's not about how many pushups they can do

Starting point is 01:09:29 or that they started their own business most of the time. It's they're going to this university. And I think, well, what's going on here? So do you think the median voter in the United States can have their kid go to Stanford? No, no, no. And if the median voter in the United States could have their kid admitted to Stanford,

Starting point is 01:09:43 even with perfect SAT? No, no. No, no, no. In this day and age, the competition is so fierce that it requires more. Yeah, so like, so first of all, again, we're dealing here, yes, we're dealing with a small number of very elite institutions. People may admire them or not.

Starting point is 01:09:59 Most people have no connectivity to them whatsoever. In the statistics, in the polling, universities are not doing well. The population at large, yeah, they may have fantasies about their kid going to Stanford, but like the reality of it is, they have a very, very, say, collapsing view of these institutions.

Starting point is 01:10:14 So, anyways, there's actually a straight to the question of alternatives then, right? Which is like, okay, if you believe that there's collapsing faith in the institutions, if you believe that it is married, at least in some ways, if you believe that reform is effectively impossible, then you are faced with, and we can debate each of those, but like a population at large seems to believe a lot of that. Then there's a question of like, okay, can it be replaced?

Starting point is 01:10:35 And if so, like, are you better off replacing these things basically while the old things still exist, or do you actually need to basically clear the field to be able to have a new thing exist? The universities are a great case study of this because of the student loans work, right? And the way student loans work is to be able to be a, to be an actual competitive university and compete, you need to have access to federal student lending. Because if you don't, everybody has to pay out a pocket and it's completely out of reach for anybody other than a certain class of either extremely rich or foreign students.

Starting point is 01:11:02 So you need access to federal student loan facility to get access to federal student loan facility, you need to be at accredited university. Guess who runs the accreditation council? I don't know. The existing universities, right? So it's a self-londering machine. Like they decided the new universities are, guess how many new universities get accredited, right?

Starting point is 01:11:21 Each year to be able to get zero. Right? And so as long as that system is in place, and as long as they have the government wired you just get accredited, right, each year to be able to be able to zero, right? And so as long as that system is in place, and as long as they have the government wired the way that they do, and as long as they control who gets access to federal student loan funding, like, of course, there's not going to be any competition, right? Of course, there can't be a new institution that's going to be able to get to scale, like it's not possible. And so if you actually wanted to create a new system that was better in the, you know, I would argue dozens or hundreds of ways it could obviously be better if you were starting

Starting point is 01:11:48 today. It probably can't be done as long as the existing institutions are actually intact. And this is my counter against to Martin, which is like, yeah, we look, we, we, if we're going to tear down the old, there may be a period of disruption before we get to the new, but we're never going to get to the new if we don't tear down the old. When you say counter to Martin, you're talking about the author of Revolta, the part of the Harker. Yeah. What Ranguri says is like, look, is he said basically what Martin says is as follows, the elites deserve contempt. But the only thing worse than these elites that deserve contempt

Starting point is 01:12:17 would be no elites at all, right? And because any basically says on the other side, on the other side of the destruction of the elites and the institutions is nihilism. You're basically left with nothing. And then by the way, there is a nihilistic streak. I mean, there's nihilistic streak in the culture and the politics today. There are people who basically would just say, yeah, just tear the whole system down, right?

Starting point is 01:12:35 And they're without any particular plan for what follows. And so I think he makes a good point in that you want to be careful that you actually have a plan on the other side that you think is actually achievable. But again, the counter argument to that is if you're not willing to actually tear it on the old, you're not going to get to the new. Now, what's interesting of course is this is what happens every day in business, right? So like the entire way, like how do you know that the capitalist system works? The way that you know is that the old companies, when they're no longer

Starting point is 01:13:02 like the best of what they do, they get torn down, and then they ultimately die, and they get replaced by better companies. Yeah, I haven't seen a series in a while. Exactly. And what's so interesting is we know in capitalism and market economy, we know that that's the sign of health, right? That's the sign of how the system is working properly. And in fact, we get actually judged by antitrust authorities in the government on that basis. Right? It's like the best defense against antitrust charges is no people are like coming to kill us and they're doing like a really good job of it. Like that's how we know we're doing our job. And in fact, in business, we are specifically, it is specifically illegal for companies in the

Starting point is 01:13:35 same industry to get together and plot and conspire and plan and have things like these accreditation bureaus. Like we, we would get, if I created the equivalent in my companies of the kind of accreditation bureau that the universities have, I'd get straight to federal prison. And a trust violation, Sherman Act, straight to prison. People have been sent to prison for that. So in the business world, we know that you want everything subject to market competition. We know that you want creative destruction. We know that you want replacement of the old with superior knew. It's just once we get outside of business, we're like, oh, we don't want any of that. We want basically stagnation and log rolling, right? And basically institutional, you know,

Starting point is 01:14:08 and such, who is like, you know, entanglements and conflicts of interest, you know, as far as the I can see. And then we're surprised by the results. So let's play it out as a bit of a thought experiment. So let's say that one small banding together of people who want to start a new university where free exchange of open ideas, where unless somebody has, you know, egregious behavior, violent behavior, you know, truly sexually inappropriate behavior against somebody, you know, the committing a crime, right? They're allowed to be there. They're allowed to be a student or a faculty member

Starting point is 01:14:40 or administrator. And let's just say this accreditation bureau allowed student loans for this one particular university, or let's say that there was an independent source of funding for that university such that students could just apply there. They didn't need to be part of this elite accredited group, which sounds very mafia-like, frankly, not necessarily violent, but certainly coercive in the way that it walls people out. Let's say that then there were 20 or 30 of those or 40 of those.

Starting point is 01:15:12 Do you think that over time that model would overtake the existing model? Is it interesting that those don't exist? Remember the Sherlock Holmes, the dog who didn't bark? It is interesting that those's done exist, right? So there's two possibilities. One is like nobody wants that, which I don't believe. And then the other is like the system is wired in a way that will do simply not allow it.

Starting point is 01:15:34 And then you did a hypothetical in which the system would allow it. And my response to that is no, of course the system won't allow that. Or the people that band together, you know, have enough money or get enough resources to say, look, we can afford to give loans to 10,000 students per year. 10,000 is a trivial number when thinking about the size of a university. Most of them hopefully will graduate in four years and there'll be a turnover. Do you think that the great future innovators would tend to orient toward that model more than they

Starting point is 01:16:05 currently do toward the traditional model. I mean what I'm trying to get back to here is how do you think that the current model towards innovation as well as maybe some ways that it still supports innovation. Certainly cancellation and the risk of cancellation from the way that we framed it earlier is going to discourage risk takers, of the category of risk takers that take risk and have every domain that really like to fly close to the sun and sometimes into the sun.

Starting point is 01:16:33 Or are doing research that is just not politically. Right. Yeah, looking into issues that, how will you know. Right, that, that, you know, we can't even talk about on this podcast probably without causing a distraction of what we're actually trying to talk about. It gives up the whole game right there, exactly.

Starting point is 01:16:48 Yeah. So I keep a file, and it's a written file, because I'm afraid to put it into electronic form of all the things that I'm afraid to talk about publicly. Because I come from a lineage of advisors who are all three died young, and I figure, if nothing else, I'll die, and then make it into the world. And when I'll say five, 10 years, 20 years,

Starting point is 01:17:08 and if not, I know we're certainly going to die at some point, and then we'll see where all those issues stand. In any event, is that what's getting longer? Over time or shorter? Oh, it's definitely getting longer. Isn't that interesting? Yeah, it's getting much longer. I mean, there are just so many issues

Starting point is 01:17:23 that I would love to explore on this podcast with experts and that I can't explore just because even if I had a panel of them because of the way that things get soundbited and segmented out and taken out of context It's like the whole conversation is lost and so unfortunately there are an immense number of equally interesting conversations that I'm excited to have, but it is a little disturbing. Do you remember Lysenkoism? No.

Starting point is 01:17:52 Oh, so Lysenko, so famous in the Soviet Union, this is the famous thing. So there was a genetic, geneticist named Lysenko. And that's why it sounds familiar, but I'm not calling to mind it. Well, he was the guy who did, he did communist genetics, the field of genetics with the Soviets did not approve the field genetics because of course they believed in the creation of the new man and you know, totally quality and genetics did not support that. And so if you were doing like traditional genetics, you were, you know, you know, at the

Starting point is 01:18:17 very least fired, if not, if not killed. And so this guy, let's think of us, stood up and said, Oh, I've got Marxist genetics, right? I've got like a whole new field of genetics that basically is politically compliant. And then they actually implemented that in the agriculture system of the Soviet Union. And it's the origin of one of the big reasons that the Soviet Union actually fell, which was they ultimately couldn't feed themselves. So, create a new notion of biology as it relates to genetics.

Starting point is 01:18:38 Politically, right? And so, and so, and they, not only created it, they taught it, they mandated it, they required it, and then they implemented it in agriculture. Interesting. So, yeah, so it's, I never understood. There are a bunch of things in history I never understood until the last decade, and that's one of them. Well, I censor myself at the level of deleting certain things, but I don't contort what I do talk about. So I tend to like to play on lush open fields. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:19:02 Just makes my life a lot easier. This goes to the rot. This goes to the rot. And I'll come back to your question. But this goes to the rot in the existing system, which is we've I'm by the way, I'm no different. I'm just like you. Like I'm not trying not to let myself on fire either. But like the rot in the existing system and my system,

Starting point is 01:19:14 I mean the institutions and the elites. The rot is that the set of things that are no longer allowed. I mean, that list is like obviously expanding over time. And like that's a, like historically speaking, that doesn't end in good places. Is this group of a particular generation that we can look forward to the time when they eventually die off?

Starting point is 01:19:33 It's third of the boomers plus the millennials. So good, we've got a while. Good news, bad news. I mean, Gen X is weird, right? Gen X is weird, because we kind of slipped in the middle. We were kind of the, I don't know, like, I don't know how to describe it. We were the kind of non-political generation kind of sandwich in the middle. We were kind of the, like, I don't know how to describe it, we were the kind of non-political generation kind of sandwich between the boomers

Starting point is 01:19:48 and the millennials. Gen Z is a very, I think, open question right now, which way they go. I could imagine them being actually much more intense than the millennials. On all these issues, I could also imagine them reacting to the millennials and being far more open-minded. We don't know which way it's going to go yet. It's going gonna go, it might be different groups of them. I mean, I'm Gen X also, I'm 47. You're 50, 50, yeah. Right, so more or less same. So, group was in John Hughes films

Starting point is 01:20:11 and so where the the jocks and the hippies and the punks and the world divided, they were all segmented. But then it all sort of mishmash together a few years later. And I think that had a lot to do with, like you said, the sort of apolitical aspect of our generation. I mean, we just knew, the genus just knew the boomers were nuts, right?

Starting point is 01:20:30 Like, all the cr- I mean, this is the canonical, right, one of the great sitcoms of the era was family ties, right, with the character Michael P. Keaton. And he was just like this guy, he was just like, yeah, my boomer hippie parents are crazy.

Starting point is 01:20:42 Like, I'm just gonna like go into business and like, I should do something productive. Like, there was something like iconic about that character in our culture. And, you know, people like me were like, yeah, my boomer hippie parents are crazy. Like, I'm just going to like go into business and like, I should do something productive. Like, there was something like iconic about that character in our culture. And people like me were like, yeah, obviously, going to business, you don't like political activism. And then, you know, it's just like, man, that came whipping back around with the next generation.

Starting point is 01:20:56 So just to touch real quick on university things. So look, there are people trying to do, and I'm actually going to do a thing this afternoon with the University of Austin, which is one of these. And so there are people trying to do new universities. You know, like I would say, it's certainly possible. I hope they succeed. I'm pulling for them.

Starting point is 01:21:09 I think it'd be great. I think it'd be great if there were a lot more of them. Who founded this university? This is a whole group of people. I don't want to freelance on that, because I don't know originally who the idea was. University of Austin, not UT Austin. Yeah, so this is not UT Austin.

Starting point is 01:21:22 It's called University of Austin, or they call it, I think it's UAT what is it UATX? And so and it's a lot of very sharp people associated with it and and they're they're they're gonna try to very very much exactly like what you described there and try to do a new one I would just tell you like the wall of opposition that they're up against is profound right and part of it is economic Which is can they ever get access to federal student lending and I you know I know, I hope that they can, but I, you know, it seems nearly inconceivable the way the system is rigged today. And then, you know, the other is just like they're gonna, they're already have come under, I mean, anybody, anybody, anybody who

Starting point is 01:21:57 publicly associates with them who is in traditional academia immediately gets lit on fire, right? And there's like, you know, cancellation campaigns, campaign. So they're up against a wall of social ostracism. Wow. They're up against a wall of press attacks. They're up against a wall of, you know, people just like doing the thing, pouting on any time anybody says anything, they're gonna try to like run the place down. This reminds me of like Jerry Springer episodes

Starting point is 01:22:18 in her all the Rivera episodes, where, you know, it's like if a teen listened to, you know, like Danzig or Marilyn Manson type music or Metallica that they were considered a devil or ship. Like, right, now we just laugh, right? We're like, that's crazy, right? People listen to music with all sorts of lyrics and ideas and looks and, and that's crazy. But, you know, there were people legitimately sent to prison, I think with the West Memphis three, right? These kids out in West Memphis that looked different, acted different, were accused of murders that eventually it was made clear they clearly didn't commit.

Starting point is 01:22:55 But they were in prison because of the music they listened to. I mean, this sounds very similar to that. And I remember seeing bumper singers free the West Memphis three, and I thought this was some crazy thing. You look into it, and this isn't, it's a little bit niche, but, I mean, these were real lives, and there was an active witch hunt for people

Starting point is 01:23:13 that looked different and acted different. And yet, now we're sort of in this inverted world where on the one hand, we're all told that we can express ourselves however we want, but on the other hand, you can't get a bunch of people together to take classes where they learn biology and sociology and econ in Texas, wild. Yes.

Starting point is 01:23:34 Also, the simple explanation is this is puritanism. Right. So, this is the original American puritanism that just like works itself out through the system in different ways, different times. There's this religious phenomenon in America called the Great Awakening. There'll be these periods in American history where there's basically religiosity fades

Starting point is 01:23:51 and then there'll be the snapback effect where you'll have this basically this, you know, frenzy basically of religion. You know, in the old days it would have been, you know, tent revivals and people speaking in tongues and all this stuff. And then in the modern world, it's, you know, it's of the form that we're living through right now.

Starting point is 01:24:05 And so yeah, it's just basically these waves of sort of American religious. And remember, religion in our time, religious impulses in our time don't get expressed, because we live in more advanced times, right? We live in scientifically informed times. And so religious impulses in our time don't show up as overtly religious.

Starting point is 01:24:21 They show up in a secularized form, which, of course, conveniently is there for not subject to the First Amendment separation in church and state, right? As long as the church is secular, there's no problem, right? And so, but we're acting out these kind of religious scripts over and over again, and we're in the middle of another religious frenzy. There's a phrase that I hear a lot, and I don't necessarily

Starting point is 01:24:42 believe it, but I want your thoughts on it, which is, the pendulum always swings back. Yeah, not quite. So that's how I feel, too, because, you know, I'll take you. I'll be great. Take any number of things that we've talked about. And, you know, I should so crazy, you know, the way things have gone with institutions, or it's so crazy, the way things have gone with social media, it's so crazy,

Starting point is 01:25:03 feeling the blank. And people will say, well, the angel will always swing his back. Like it's a stock market or something. After every crash, there'll be an eventual boom and vice versa. By the way, that's not true either, right? Right, most stock markets, we have of course, survivorship, it's all survivorship.

Starting point is 01:25:20 Everything is surviv- It's all everything you just said is obviously survivorship bias, right? So if you look globally, most stock markets over time crash and burn and ever recover. The American stock market has always recovered. Right, I was referring to the American stock market. Yeah, but globally. But the reason everybody refers to American stock market is because it's the one that doesn't do that. The other 200 or whatever, the crash and burn and ever recover. Let's go check in on the art, you know, on Argentina's stock market right now. I think it's coming back anytime soon. Yeah, my father is Argentine and immigrated to the US in the 1960s, so he would

Starting point is 01:25:50 definitely agree with you. Yeah, it doesn't come back. When they're stocks crash, they don't come back. And then like, Sancoism, like the Soviet Union never recovered from like Sancoism, it never came back. It led to the end of the country. You know, literally the things that took down the Soviet Union or oil and wheat and the wheat thing, you can trace the crisis back to Lysenkoism. And so, yeah, no, look, I know most things back is true only in the cases where the panelist thinks back, everybody just conveniently forgets all the other circumstances where that doesn't happen.

Starting point is 01:26:18 One of the things people, you see this in business also, people have a really hard time confronting really bad news. I don't know if you've noticed that. I think every doctor who's listening right now is like, yeah, no shit. But like, there are situations, I've seen business, there are situations that, it's a Star Trek, remember Star Trek,

Starting point is 01:26:36 the Kobayashi Maru simulator, right? So the big lesson have become a Star Trek captain is you have to go through the simulation called the Kobayashi Maru and the point was, there's no way, it's a no win scenario, right? And then then it turned out like captain Kirk was the only person to ever win the scenario and the way that he did it was he went in ahead of time and hacked the simulator, right? It was the only way to actually get through.

Starting point is 01:26:54 And then there was a debate whether to fire him or make him a captain. So they made him a captain. And like, you know, the problem is in real life, like we, you do get the copiashimaru on a regular basis, like there are actual no win situations that you can't work your way out of. As a leader, you can't ever cop to that, because you have to carry things forward and you have to look for every possible choice you can, but every once in a while, you do run into a situation where it is really not recoverable. At least I've found people just cannot cope with that. What happens is they basically then they've actually just excluded from their memory that it ever happened.

Starting point is 01:27:25 I'm glad you brought up simulators because I want to make sure that we talk about the new and emerging landscape of AI, artificial intelligence. And I could try and smooth our conversation about moment to go with this one by creating some clever segue, but I'm not going to. Except I'm going to ask, is there a possibility that AI is going to remedy some of what we're talking about? Let's make sure that we earmark that

Starting point is 01:27:54 for discussion a little bit later. But first off, because some of the listeners of this podcast might not be as familiar with AI as perhaps they should be, we've all heard about artificial intelligence, people hear about machine learning, et cetera, but it'd be great if you could define for us what AI is. People almost immediately hear AI and think, okay, robot's taking over. I'm going to wake up and I'm going to be strapped to the bed and my organs are going to be pulled

Starting point is 01:28:21 out of me. The robots are going to be in my bank account, they're going to kill all my children and dystopia for most. Clearly, that's not the way it's going to go. If you believe that machines can augment human intelligence and human intelligence is a good thing. So tell us what AI is

Starting point is 01:28:44 and where you think it can take us both good and bad. Yeah, so there was a big debate when the computer was first invented, which was in the 1930s, 1940s. People like Alan Turing and John von Neumann and these people. And the big debate at the time was because they knew they wanted to build computers, they had the basic idea. And you know, there had been like calculating machines before that, and there had been like, there have been these looms that you basically programmed with a bunch cards.

Starting point is 01:29:10 And so there was like, there was a prehistory to computers that had to do with building sort of increasingly complex calculating machines. So they were kind of on a track, but they knew they were going to be able to build, they call it general purpose computer, that could basically, you could program in the way that you program computers today. But they had a big debate early on, which is should the fundamental architecture of the computer

Starting point is 01:29:27 be based on either A, like calculating machines, like catch registers and looms and other things like that, or should it be based on a model of the human brain? And they actually had this idea of computers model on the human brain back then. And this was this concept of so-called neural networks. And it's actually fairly astonishing from a research standpoint. The original paper on neural networks actually was published

Starting point is 01:29:48 in 1943, right? So they didn't have our level of neuroscience, but like they actually knew about the neuron, and they actually had a theory of like neurons interconnecting in synapses and information processing in the brain even back then. And a lot of people's time basically said, you know what, we should basically have the computer from the start being modeled after the human brain, because if the computer could do everything that the human brain can do, like that would be the best possible general purpose computer.

Starting point is 01:30:11 And then you could have it do jobs, and you could have it create art, and you could have it do all kinds of things like humans can do. It turns out that didn't happen in our world. What happened instead was the industry went in the other direction it went, basically, in the model of the calculating machine or the cash register. And I think practically speaking that kind of had to be the case because that was actually the technology that was practical at the time.

Starting point is 01:30:32 But that's the path. So we all have experiences with up to and including the iPhone in our pocket, as computers built on that basically calculating machine model, not the human-trained model. And so what that means is computers as we have come to understand them, they're basically like mathematical savants at best. So they're really good at doing lots of mathematical calculations. They're really good at executing these extremely detailed computer programs.

Starting point is 01:30:57 They're hyper literal. One of the things you learn early when you're a programmer is as a human programmer, you have to get every single instruction you give the computer correct, because it will do exactly what you tell it to do. And bugs in computer programs are always a mistake on the part of the programmer. You never blame the computer. You always blame the programmer because that's the nature of the thing that you're dealing with.

Starting point is 01:31:18 One downscore off and the whole thing. Yeah, yeah. And it's the programmer's fault. And if you talk to any programmer that I agree with, this will be like, yeah, if there's a problem, it's my fault. I did it. I can't blame the computer. The computer has no judgment.

Starting point is 01:31:28 It has no ability to interpret, synthesize, you know, develop an independent understanding of anything. It's just literally just doing what I tell it to do, stuff by stuff. So for 80 years, we've had this just, you know, this very kind of hyperlateral, you know, kind of model computers. These are called, technically, these are what are called

Starting point is 01:31:44 by Neumann machines. Based after the mathematician, Sean Neumann machines, based after the mathematician John von Neumann. They run in that way. And they've been very successful and very important, and our world has been shaped by them. But there was always this other idea out there, which is, OK, how about a completely different approach, which

Starting point is 01:31:56 is based much more on how the human brain operates, or at least are kind of best understanding of how the human brain operates, right? Because those aren't the same thing. It basically says, OK, what if you could have a computer and should it be hyperliteral? What if you could have it actually be conceptual, and creative, and able to synthesize information,

Starting point is 01:32:15 and able to draw judgments, and able to behave in ways that are not deterministic, but are rather creative. And the applications for this, of course, are endless. that are not deterministic, but are rather creative. And the applications for this, of course, are endless. And so, for example, the self-driving car, the only way that you can make a car, you cannot program a computer with rules to make it a self-driving car.

Starting point is 01:32:35 You have to do what Tesla and Waymo and these other companies have done now. You have to use AI. You have to use this other architecture. And you have to basically teach them how to recognize objects in images at high speeds the same way, basically the same way the human brain does. And so those are so-called neural networks running inside.

Starting point is 01:32:49 So essentially, let the machine operate based on priors. You know, we almost clipped a boulder going up this particular drive. And so therefore, this shape that previously the machine didn't recognize as a boulder and now introduces to its catalog of boulders. Is that so? Yeah, we've got a good example. Or it may even start for self-driving car. There's something in the road.

Starting point is 01:33:11 Is it a small child or a plastic shopping bag being blown by the wind? Very important difference. If it's a shopping bag, you definitely want to go straight through it. Because if you deviate, of course, you might, you're going to make a fast, it's the same challenge we have when we're driving. Like, you don't, you don't want to swerve to avoid a shopping bag because you might have something that you didn't see on the side.

Starting point is 01:33:29 But it's a small child for sure you want to swerve, right? And so, but it's very, but like in that moment, and you know, small children come in different, like, shapes and descriptions and are wearing different kinds of clothes. They might tumble onto the road the same way a bag would tumble. Yeah, they might look like they're tumbling. And by the way, they might not be, you know, they might be wearing a Halloween mask, right? It's the face, they might not like they're tumbling. And by the way, they might not be wearing a Halloween mask. Right. They might not have a recognizable human face. Right. It might be a kid with one leg.

Starting point is 01:33:51 Right. You definitely want to not hit those. Right. So you can't, this is what basically we figured out is, you can't apply the rules-based approach of a non-human machine to basically real life and expect the computer to be in any way understanding or resilient to change it to basically things happening real life. And this is why there's always been such a stark divide between what the machine can do and what the human can do.

Starting point is 01:34:12 And so basically what's happened is in the last decade, that second type of computer, the neural network base computer, has started to actually work. It started to work actually first, interestingly, in vision, recognizing objects and images, which is why the self-driving car is starting to work. Face recognition. Face recognition. Face recognition. I mean, when I was started off in visual neuroscience, which is really my original home in neuroscience, the idea that a computer or a camera could do face recognition better

Starting point is 01:34:35 than a human was like a very low probability event based on the technology we had at the time, based on the understanding of the face recognition cells and the fusiform gyros. Now you would be smartest to put all your money on the machine. You want to find faces and airports even with masks on and you know, at profile versus straight on, machines can do it far better than most all people. I mean, they're the super recognizers,

Starting point is 01:35:02 but even they can't match the best machines. Now, 10 years ago, what I just said was the exact reverse. Right. That's right. Yeah. Right. So, face faces, handwriting, right. And then voice, right, being able to understand voice. Like, if you use, just as a user, if you use Google Docs, it has a built-in voice transcription. They have sort of the best industry leading kind of voice transcription. If you use voice transcription in Google Docs, it's breathtakingly good. You just speak into it and it just like types what you're saying. Well, that's good because in my phone,

Starting point is 01:35:29 everyone's in the wall, I'll say, I need to go pick up a few things and I'll say, I need to pick up a few fongs. And so Apple needs to get on board. Whatever the voice recognition is that Google's using. Maybe it knows you better than you think. Um, so that was not the topic I was avoiding discussing, you know. No, so that's on the list, right?

Starting point is 01:35:47 That's on your list. So, look, there's actually, there's a reason actually why Google's so good, and Apple is not right now at that kind of thing. And it actually goes to actually the, it's actually an ideological thing of all things. Apple does not permit pooling of data for any purpose, including training AI, whereas Google does. And Apple's just like stake their brand on privacy.

Starting point is 01:36:08 And among that, it's sort of a pledge that they don't like pooling your data. And so all of Apple's AI is like AI that has to happen locally on your phone, whereas Google's AI can happen in the cloud, right, it can happen across pool data. Now, by the way, some people think that that's bad, because they think pooling data is bad.

Starting point is 01:36:22 But that's an example of the shift that's happening in the industry right now, which is you have this separation between the people who are embracing the new way of training AI's and the people who basically for whatever reason are not. Excuse me. You say that some people think it's bad

Starting point is 01:36:34 because of privacy issues. And I think it's bad because of the reduced functionality of that AI. Oh no. So you're definitely going to get. So there's three reasons AI AI has started to work. One of them is just simply larger data sets, larger amounts of data. So specifically, the reason why objects and images are now, the reason machines are now

Starting point is 01:36:53 better than humans at recognizing objects and images are recognizing faces is because modern facial recognition, AI's are trained across all photos on the internet of people, billions and billions and billions of photos, right? A limited number of photos of people on the internet. Attempts to train facial recognition systems 10 or 20 years ago, they'd be trained on thousands or tens of thousands of photos. So the input data is simply much more fast. Much larger. This is a reason to get to the conclusion on this.

Starting point is 01:37:18 This is the reason why ChatGPT work so well is ChatGPT, one of the reasons ChatGPT work so well is it's trained on the entire internet of text. And the entire internet of text was not something that was available for you to train an AI on until it came to actually exist itself, which was new in the last, basically decade. So in the case of face recognition,

Starting point is 01:37:35 I could see how having a much larger input data set would be beneficial if the goal is to recognize mark-end reasons face because you are looking for signal to noise against everything else, right? But in the case of chat GPT, when you're pooling all text on the internet and you ask chat GPT to say, um, construct a paragraph about, um, mark injuries and prediction of the future of human beings over the next 10 years, um, and the, uh, likely to be most successful industries. You can chat chat, JAPT, that.

Starting point is 01:38:06 If it's pulling across all text, how does it know what is authentically marked in Dreson's text? Because in the case of face recognition, you've got a standard to work from, a verified image versus everything else. In the case of text, you have to make sure that what you're starting with is a verified text from your mouth, which makes sense if it's coming from video, but then if that

Starting point is 01:38:31 video is deepfaked, all of a sudden, what's true, your valid mark-end reason is of question, and then everything chat GPT is producing that is then of question. Right. So I would say there's a before and after thing here. There's like a before there's like a before chat GPT and after GPT question, because the existence of GPT itself changes changes the answer. So before chat GPT, so the reason the written version of the reason today is trained on data up till September 2021, they're caught off of the training, they're trained to set up till September 2021, almost all text on the internet was written by a human being.

Starting point is 01:39:07 And then most of that was written by people under their own names. Some of it wasn't, but a lot, but a lot of it was. And why you know us from me is because it was published in a magazine under my name, or it's a podcast transcript. And it's under my name. And generally speaking, if you just did a search on like, what are things Mark Andreessen has written and said 90 plus percent of that would be correct. And somebody might have written a fake parody article or something like that, but not that many people were spending that much time writing fake articles about things that I said. So many people can pretend to be you. Exactly. And so generally, you can kind of get your arms around the idea that there's a corpus of material associated with me, or by the way, same thing with you. There's a corpus of YouTube transcripts and other your academic papers and talks you've

Starting point is 01:39:43 given. And you can kind of get your hands around that. And that's how these systems are trained. They take all that data collectively, they put it in there. And that's why this works as well as it does. And that's why if you ask JetGPT to speak or write like me or like you or like, you know, somebody else, it will actually generally do a really good job because it has that, it has all of our prior text in its training data.

Starting point is 01:40:03 That's it from here on out, this gets harder. And of course, the reason this gets harder is because now we have AI that can create text. We have AI that can create text in industrial scale. Is it watermarked as AI generating text? No, no, no, no. Now how hard would it be to do that? I think it's impossible.

Starting point is 01:40:17 I think it's impossible. There are people who are trying to do that. This is a hot topic in the classroom. I was talking to friend who's got like a 14 year old kid in a class and there's like these recurring scandals. Like every kid in the class is using ShedGPT to write their essays or to help them write their essays. And then the teacher is using one of

Starting point is 01:40:34 there's a tool that you can use that it purports to be able to tell you, you know whether something was written by ShedGPT, but it's like only right, like 60% of the time. And so there was this case where the student wrote an essay where their parents sat and watched them write the essay. And then they submitted it and this tool got the conclusion incorrect.

Starting point is 01:40:50 And then the student feels outraged because he got unfairly cheated. But the teacher is like, well, you're all using the tool. Then it turns out there's another tool that basically you feed in, text, and it actually, it's sort of, it's called, they call it a summarizer. What it really is, is it's the cheating mechanism

Starting point is 01:41:04 to basically just shuffle the words around enough so that it sheds whatever characteristics we're associated with. So there's like an arms race going on in educational settings right now around this exact question. I don't think it's possible to do, there are people working on the watermark, I don't think it's possible to do the watermarking,

Starting point is 01:41:19 and I think it's just kind of obvious why it's not possible to do that, which is you can just read the output for yourself. It's really good. How are you actually going to tell the difference between that and something that a real person wrote? And then by the way, you can also ask JetGPT to write in different styles, right? So you can tell it like, you know, write in the style of a 15 year old, right?

Starting point is 01:41:37 You can tell it to write in the style of, you know, a non-native English speaker, right? Or if you're a non-native English speaker, you can tell it to write in the style of an English speaker, a native English speaker, right? And so the tool itself will help you evade. So I, I don't think that I think there's a lot of people who are going to want to distinguish, right, for real versus fake. I think those days are, I think those days are over. Genies out of the bottle. Genies completely out of the bottle. And by the way, I actually think this is good. This doesn't map to, this doesn't map to my world view of how we use this technology anyway, which, which we can come back to.

Starting point is 01:42:06 So there's that. So there's that. And then there's the problem, therefore, of like the so-called deep-take problem. So then there's the problem of like deliberate, basically manipulation. And that's like one of your many enemies, like if you're increasingly all these enemies,

Starting point is 01:42:20 like mine, who basically is like, wow, I know how I'm going to get him, right? I'm going to, I'm going to create, I'm going to, I'm going to use it to create something that looks like a human transcript and I'm going to have him say all these bad things. And I'm a video or a video or a video. I mean, Joe Rogan and I were deepfaked in a video. I don't want to flag people to it. I won't, so I won't talk about what it was about, but where it, for all the world,

Starting point is 01:42:43 look like a conversation that we were having and we never had that specific conversation. That's right. So that's going to happen for sure. So what there's going to need to be is there's need to be basically registries where basically you, you, like in your case, you will, you will submit your legitimate content into a registry under your unit cryptographic key. And then basically there will be a way to check against that registry, whether that was the real thing. And I think this needs to be done for, for sure, for public figures and you should be done for politicians and you need to be done for music. What about taking what's already out there

Starting point is 01:43:13 and being able to authenticate it or not? In the same way that many times per week, I get asked, is this your account about some, a direct message that somebody got on Instagram? And I always tell them, look, I only have the one account, this one verified account, although now with the advent of pay-to-play verification, makes it a little less potent as a security blanket

Starting point is 01:43:35 for knowing if it's not this account, then it's not me. But in any case, these accounts pop up all the time pretending to be me. And I'm relatively low on the scale, not low, but relatively low on the scale to say like a Beyoncé or something like that who has hundreds of millions of followers.

Starting point is 01:43:54 So is there a system in mind where people could go in and verify text, click yes or no, this is me, this is not me. And even there, there's the opportunity for people to fudge to eliminate things about themselves that they don't want out there by saying, no, that's not me, it wasn't, I didn't actually say that or create that.

Starting point is 01:44:11 Yeah, no, that's right. And so, yeah, so technologically, it's actually pretty straightforward. So the way to implement this technologically is what's called public key cryptography, which is the basis for how cryptography information is secured in the world today. And so basically what you would do,

Starting point is 01:44:23 the implementation for me, this would be, you would like, you would pick whatever is your most trusted channel.. And so basically what you would do, the implementation for me this would be you would like, you would pick whatever is your most trusted channel. Let's say it's your YouTube channel, as an example, where just everybody just knows that it's you on your YouTube channel because you've been doing it for 10 years or whatever. And it's just obvious.

Starting point is 01:44:34 And you would just publish like in the About Me page on YouTube, you would just publish your public cryptographic key that's unique to you. Right, and then anytime anybody wants to check to see whether any piece of content is actually you, they go to a registry in the clouds somewhere and they basically submit, they basically say, okay, is this him? And then they can basically see whether somebody with your public key, you had actually certified that this was something that you made. Now, who runs that registry is an

Starting point is 01:44:59 interesting question. If that registry is run by the government, we will call that the Ministry of Truth. I think that's probably a bad idea. If that registry is run by the government, we will call that the Ministry of Truth. I think that's probably a bad idea. If that registry is run by a company, we would call that, basically, the equivalent of like a credit bureau or something like that. Maybe that's how it happens. The problem with that is that company now becomes hacking target number one, right, of every person on Earth, right, because if anybody breaks into that company, you know, they can fake all kinds of things. Yeah, they own the truth. Right, they own the truth, Right, they own the truth. And by the way, insider threat, also their employees can monkey with it.

Starting point is 01:45:27 Right, so you have to really trust that company. The third way to do it is with a blockchain. Right, and so with the crypto blockchain technology, you could have a distributed system, this distributed database in the cloud that is run through a blockchain. And then it implements this cryptography and the certification process. What about quantum internet? Is that another way to encrypt these things?

Starting point is 01:45:45 I know most of our listeners are probably not familiar with quantum internet, but put simply it's a way to secure communications on the internet. Let's just leave it at that. It's sophisticated and we'll probably do a whole episode about this at some point. But maybe you have a succinct way of describing quantum internet, but that would be better. And if so, please, please offer it up. But is quantum internet going to be one way

Starting point is 01:46:06 to secure these kinds of data and resources? Maybe in the future, years in the future. We don't yet have working quantum computers in practice. So it's not currently something you could do, but maybe in a decade or two. Tell me, I'm going to take a stab at defining quantum internet one sentence. It's a way in which, if anyone were to try and peer in

Starting point is 01:46:23 on a conversation on the internet, it essentially would be futile because of the way that quantum internet changes the way that the communication is happening so fast and so many times in any one conversation is essentially changing the translation or the language so fast that there's just no way to keep up with it. Is that more or less accurate? Yeah, conceivably. Yeah, not, yeah, but yeah, someday. So going back to AI, most people who hear about AI are afraid of AI. And I, well, I think most of those who aren't informed.

Starting point is 01:46:54 This goes back to our Elite Sources, Mass' thing. Oh, interesting. Well, I heard you say that, and this is from a really wonderful tweet thread that we will link in the show note captions that you put out not long ago, and this is from a really wonderful tweet thread that we will link in the show note captions that you put out not long ago and then I've read now several times. And that everyone really should take the time to read. It probably takes about 20 minutes to read it carefully and to think about each piece

Starting point is 01:47:17 and it's highly recommended. But you said, and I'm quoting here, let's address the fifth, the one thing I actually agree with, which is AI will make it easier for bad people to do bad things. So yeah. Yeah. So yes, so first of all,

Starting point is 01:47:37 there is a general freak out happening around AI. I think it's primarily, it's one of these again, it's an elite driven freak out. I don't think the man in the street knows cares or feels one way or the other because there's not a relevant concept and it's probably just sounds like science fiction. So there's, I think there's an elite driven freak out that's happening right now. I think that elite driven freak out has many aspects to it that I think are

Starting point is 01:47:55 incorrect, which is not surprising. I would think that given that I think the elites are incorrect, but a lot of things, but I think they're very wrong about a number of things. They're saying about AI, but that said, look, it's a, it, look, this is a very powerful new technology. This is a new general purpose, like thinking technology. So what if machines could think and what if you could use machines that think and what if you could have them think for you? There's obviously a lot of good that could come from that.

Starting point is 01:48:19 But also, criminals could use them to plan better crimes. Terrorists could use them to plan better terror attacks and so forth. And so these are going to be tools that bad people can use to do bad things for sure. I can think of some ways that AI could be leveraged to do fantastic things like in the realm of medicine and AI pathologist, perhaps can scan 10,000 slides of histology and find the one micro-tumor cellular aberration that would turn into a full-blown tumor, whereas the even mildly fatigued or well-rested human pathologists as great as they come might miss that. And perhaps the best solution is for both of them to do it,

Starting point is 01:49:05 and then for the human to verify what the AI has found and vice versa. That's right. And that's just one example. I mean, I can come up with thousands of examples where this would be wonderful. So give another one by the way, medicine. So you're talking about some analytic result,

Starting point is 01:49:19 which is good and important. The other is the machines are going to be much better bedside manner. They're going to be much better dealing with the patient. And we already know there's already been a study, there's already been a study on that. So there was already a study done on this where there was a study team that scraped thousands of medical questions off of an internet forum and then they had real doctors answer the questions and then they had busy GPT-4 answer the questions and then they had another panel of doctors score the responses. So there were no patients experimented on here.

Starting point is 01:49:46 This was a test contained within the medical world. But the judges, the panel of doctors, or the judges scored the answers in both facial accuracy and on bedside manner on empathy. And the GPT-4 was equal or better on most of the facial questions analytically already. And it's not even a specifically trained medical AI. But it was overwhelmingly better on empathy.

Starting point is 01:50:12 Amazing. And so, and you know, I don't think, yeah, I don't know. You treat patients directly and you're working, you don't, yeah, so we run clinical trials. Right. But I don't do any direct clinical trials. So I, you know, I've no direct experience of this, but from the surgeons, like we if you talk to

Starting point is 01:50:28 surgeons, or you talk to people who train surgeons, what they'll tell you is, like, surgeons need to have an emotional remove from their patients in order to do a good job with the surgery, the side effect of that. And then by the way, look, it's a hell of a job to have to go in and tell somebody that they're going to die, right? Or that they have. So you're never going to recover. They're never going to walk again or whatever it is.

Starting point is 01:50:43 And so there's sort of something inherent in that job where they need to keep an emotional reserve from the patient to be able to do the job. And it's expected that them has professionals. The machine has no such limitation. Like the machine could be as sympathetic as you want it to be. For as long as you want it to be, it could be infinitely sympathetic. It's happy to talk to you at 4 in the morning. It's happy to sympathize with you.

Starting point is 01:51:03 And by the way, it's not just sympathizing you in the way that, oh, it's just making up words to why do you to make you feel good. It can also sympathize with you in terms of helping you through all the things that you can actually do to improve your situation. And so, boy, can you keep a patient actually on track with a physical therapy program? Can you keep a patient on track with a nutritional program? Can you keep a patient off of drugs or alcohol? And if they have a machine medical companion that's with them all the time, that they're talking to all the time,

Starting point is 01:51:30 that's infinitely patient, infinitely wise, infinitely loving, right? And it's just gonna be there all the time. And it's gonna be encouraging. And it's gonna be saying, you know, you do such a great job yesterday. I know you can do this again today. College of behavioral therapy is an obvious fit.

Starting point is 01:51:44 Here, these things are gonna be great at CBT, and that's already starting. But you can already use the CHGPT as a CBT therapist. If you want, it's actually quite good at it. And so there's a universe here that's, it goes to what you said. There's a universe here that's opening up, which is what I believe is it's partnership

Starting point is 01:51:59 between man and machine, right? It's a symbiotic relationship, not an adversarial relationship. And so the doctor is going to pair with the AI to do all the things that you described, but the patient is also going to pair with the AI. And I think it's good. I think this partnership that's going to emerge is going to lead, among other things, to actually much better health outcomes. I mean, I've relied for so much of my life on excellent mentors from a very young age and still now in order to make best decisions possible with the information I had.

Starting point is 01:52:32 And rarely where they available for in the morning, sometimes, but not on a frequent basis. And they fatigue like anybody else. And they have their own stuff like anybody else, baggage events in their life, etc. What you're describing is sort of AI coach or therapist of sorts that hopefully would learn to identify our best self and encourage us to be our best self. And when I say best self, I don't mean that in any kind of pop psychology way. I mean, I could imagine AI very easily knowing, you know, how well I slept the night before and what types of good or bad decisions I tend to make it to a clock in the afternoon when I've only had five hours of sleep or maybe just less REM sleep the night before.

Starting point is 01:53:13 I might encourage me to take a little more time to think about something. Might give me a little tap on the wrist through a device that no one else would detect to, you know, refrain from something, you know. Never going to judge you. It's never going to be resentful. It's never going to be upset that you didn't listen to it. to, you know, refrain from something, you know. Never gonna judge you. Never gonna be resentful. It's never gonna be upset that you didn't listen to it. Right, it's never gonna go on vacation.

Starting point is 01:53:30 It's gonna be there for you. Like, I think this is the way people are going to live. It's gonna start with kids and then over time it's gonna be at all. So the way people are gonna live is they're gonna have a exactly friend, therapist, companion, mentor, coach, teacher, right, assistant, and that, that, that, or by the way, maybe multiple of those.

Starting point is 01:53:46 Maybe that we're actually talking about six different personas interacting, which is the whole other possibility. But they're gonna have a committee. A committee, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, exactly. I should have different personas. And maybe by the way, when they're difficult decisions

Starting point is 01:53:56 to be made in your life, maybe what you wanna hear is the argument among the different personas. And so you're just gonna grow up, you're just gonna have this in your life, and you're gonna always be able to talk to it, and always be able to learn from it, and always be able to help it.

Starting point is 01:54:09 And it's gonna be a symbiotic relationship. It's gonna be a much better way to live. I think people are gonna get a lot out of it. What modalities will it include? So I can imagine my phone has this engine in it, this AI companion, and I'm listening in headphones as I walk into work, and it's giving me some, not just encouragement, some warning, some thoughts

Starting point is 01:54:32 that things that I might ask Mark and Dreson today, that I might not have thought of, and so on. I could also imagine it having a more human form. I could imagine it being tactile, having some haptic, so tapping to remind me so that it's not going to enter our conversation in a way that interferes or distracts you, but I would be aware, oh right, you know, things of that sort, I mean, how many different modalities are we going to allow these AI coaches to approach us with?

Starting point is 01:55:00 And is anyone actually thinking about the hardware piece right now? Because I'm hearing a lot about the software piece. What does the hardware piece look like? Yeah, so the entrepreneur is where Silicon Valley is going to kick in. So the entrepreneurial community is going to try all of those. Right? And by the way, the big companies and startups are going to try all those. And so obviously there's big companies that are working.

Starting point is 01:55:18 The big companies that are talking about a variety of these, including heads up displays, ARVR, kinds of things. There's lots of people doing voice, you know, the voice thing is a real possibility. It may just be an earpiece. There's a new startup that just unveiled a new thing where it's actually they actually project. So you'll have like a pendant, you wear on like a necklace

Starting point is 01:55:37 and it actually like projects like literally like project images like on your hand or like on the table or on the wall in front of you. So like maybe that's how it shows up. Yeah, there are people working on so-called haptic or touch-based kinds of things. There are people working on actually picking up nerve signals out of your arm to be able to be able to do

Starting point is 01:55:56 there's some science for being able to do basically like sub-localization. So maybe you could pick up that way, build conduction. So yeah, these are all going to be tried. So that's one question is the physical form of it. And then the other question is the software version of it, which is like, okay, what's the level of abstraction that you want to deal with these things in?

Starting point is 01:56:16 Right now, it's like a question answer a paradigm, a so-called chatbot, like the highest question gets an answer, answer, answer, question gets an answer. But what you want that to go for sure to more of a fluid conversation, you want it to build up more knowledge of who you are and you don't want if it's a bad word, but I don't know. I don't know if it's a bad word, but I don't know. I don't know if it's a bad word, but I don't know. I don't know if it's a bad word, but I don't know. I don't know if it's a bad word, but I don't know. I don't know if it's a bad word, but I don't know. I don't know if it's a bad word, but I don't know.

Starting point is 01:56:34 I don't know if it's a bad word, but I don't know. I don't know if it's a bad word, but I don't know. I don't know if it's a bad word, but I don't know. I don't know if it's a bad word, but I don't know. I don't know if it's a bad word, but I don't know. I don't know if it's a bad word, but I don't know. silent. And normally, at least in my head, unless I make a concerted effort to do otherwise, I don't think in complete sentences. So presumably these AI, these machines could learn my style

Starting point is 01:56:59 of fragmented internal dialogue. And maybe I have an earpiece and I'm walking in and I start hearing something. But it's some, you know, advice, et cetera, encouragement, discouragement. But at some point, those sounds that I hear in an earphone are very different than seeing something or hearing something in the room.

Starting point is 01:57:20 We know this based on the neuroscience of musical perception and language perception. Hearing something in your head is very different. And I could imagine at some point that the AI will cross-apprecipice where if it has inline wiring to actually control neural activity in specific brain areas, and I don't mean very precisely even just stimulating a little more prefrontal cortical activity, for instance, through the earpiece. You know, a little ultrasound wave now can stimulate prefrontal cortex in a non-invasive way. That's being used clinically and experimentally.

Starting point is 01:57:48 That the AI could decide that I need to be a little bit more context aware, right? This is something that is very beneficial for those listening that are trying to figure out, how to navigate through life. It's like, you know, know the context you're in and know the catalog of behaviors and words that are appropriate for that situation and not It's like, you know, know the context you're in and know the catalog of behaviors and words that are appropriate for that situation and not others.

Starting point is 01:58:07 And, you know, this would go along with agreeableness, perhaps, but strategic agreeableness, right? Context is important. There's nothing diabolical about that. Context is important. But I could imagine, yeah, I recognizing, ah, we're entering a particular environment. I'm now actually going to ramp up activity

Starting point is 01:58:24 and prefrontal cortex a little bit in a certain way that allows you to be more situationally aware of yourself and others, which is great unless I can't necessarily short circuit that influence, because at some point the AI is actually then controlling my brain activity and my decision making and my speech. I think that's what people fear is that once we cross that precipice, that we are giving up control to the artificial versions of our human intelligence. Yeah. And look, I think we have to decide. We collectively and we as individuals, I think have to decide exactly how to do that. And this is the big thing that I believe about AI.

Starting point is 01:58:59 There's just a much more, I was like, practical view of the world than a lot of the panic that you hear. It's just like these are machines. They're able to do things that increasingly are like the things that people can do in some circumstances, but these are machines. We build the machines. We decide how to use the machines. When we want the machines turned on, they're turned on, and we want them turned off, they're turned off. And so, yeah, so I think that's absolutely the kind of thing that the individual person

Starting point is 01:59:18 should always be in charge of. I mean, everyone was, and I have to imagine some people are still afraid of CRISPR, of gene editing. But gene editing. But gene editing stands to revolutionize our treatment of all sorts of diseases. You know, inserting and deleting particular genes in adulthood, right? Not having to recombine in the womb a new organism is an immensely powerful tool. And yet, the Chinese scientist who did CRISPR on humans, this has been done, actually did his postdoc at Stanford with Steve Quake, then went to China, did CRISPR on humans, this has been done, actually did his postdoc at

Starting point is 01:59:45 Stanford with Steve Quake, then went to China, did CRISPR on babies mutated. Something I believe it was the HIV, one of the HIV receptors. I'm told it was with the intention of augmenting human memory. It had very little to do in fact with limiting susceptibility to HIV per se, to do with the way that that receptor is involved in human memory. The world demonized that person. We actually don't know what happened to them, whether or not they have a laboratory now or they're sitting in jail. It's unclear. But in China and elsewhere, people are doing CRISPR on humans. We know this. It's not legal in the US and other countries, but it's happening.

Starting point is 02:00:27 Do you think it's a mistake for us to fear these technologies so much that we back away from them and end up 10, 20 years behind other countries that could use it for both benevolent or levelant reasons? Yes, and you know, look the details matter. So it's technology by technology, but I would say there's two things. You always have to think in these questions,

Starting point is 02:00:46 I think in terms of counterfactuals and opportunity cost, right? And so, so, Christopher's an interesting one. Christopher, he manipulates the human genome. Nature manipulates the human genome. You're like, you know, what kinds of ways. Yeah, when you pick a spouse and you have a child with that spouse, you're doing genetic recombination.

Starting point is 02:01:02 You are really, yes. You are quite possibly, if you're Genghis Khan, you're determining the future of humanity, right? Like, like, yeah, nature, I mean, look, mutations, like, so this is the old question of like, basically, you know, this is all state of nature, state of grace, like, you know, basically is nature good and then they're for artificial things are bad, you know, which is kind of shot. A lot of people have have ethical views like that. I'm always at the view that like, nature's a bitch and wants us dead.

Starting point is 02:01:30 Like nature's out to get us, man. Like nature wants to kill us, right? Like nature wants to involve all kinds of horrible viruses. Nature wants to plagues. Nature wants to do, you know, whether, you know, like nature, nature wants to do all kinds of stuff. I mean, like the original, the original, nature religion was the original religion, right? Like that was the original thing people worshipped. And the reason was because nature was the thing that of stuff. I mean, look, the original, nature religion was original religion, right? Like that was the original thing people worshipped.

Starting point is 02:01:46 And the reason was because nature was the thing that was out to get you, right? Before you had scientific and technological methods to be able to deal with it. So the idea of not doing these things to me is just saying, oh, we're just gonna turn over the future of everything to nature. And I don't think that that, there's no reason to believe

Starting point is 02:02:02 that that leads in a particularly good direction or that, you know, that's not a value-neutral decision And then the related thing that comes from that is this always this question around what's called the percussion principal Which shows up in all these conversations on things like CRISPR which basically is this it's this principle that basically says the Inventors of a new technology should be required to prove that it will not have negative effects before they roll it out This of course is a very new idea. This is actually a new idea in the 1970s. It's actually invented by the German Greens in the 1970s. Before that, people didn't think in those terms. People just invented things and rolled them out. And we got all of modern civilization by

Starting point is 02:02:38 people inventing things and rolling them out. The German Greens came up with the precautionary principle for one specific purpose. I'll bet you can guess what it is. It was to prevent famine, nuclear power. It was to shut down attempts to do civilian nuclear power. And if you fast forward 50 years later, you're like, wow, that was a big mistake, right? So what they said at the time was, you have to prove that nuclear reactors are not

Starting point is 02:03:02 going to melt down and cause all kinds of problems. And of course, as an engineer, can you prove that that will never happen? Like you can't rule out things that might happen in the future. And so that philosophy was used to stop nuclear power, by the way, not just in Europe, but also in the US and around much of the rest of the world. If you're somebody who's concerned about carbon emissions,

Starting point is 02:03:20 of course, this is the worst thing that happened in the last 50 years in terms of energy. We actually have the silver bullet answer to unlimited energy with zero carbon emissions, of course, this is the worst thing that happened in the last 50 years in terms of energy. We actually have the silver bullet answer to unlimited energy with zero carbon emissions, nuclear power. We choose not to do it. Not only do we choose not to do it, we're actually shutting down the plants that we have now, right, in California. We just shut down, you know, the big plant.

Starting point is 02:03:37 Germany just shut down their plants. Germany is in the middle of an energy war with Russia, right, that we are informed as existential for the future of Europe. But unless the risk of nuclear power plant meltdown has increased and I have to imagine it's gone the other way, what is the rationale behind shutting down these plants and not expanding? Because nuclear is bad, right?

Starting point is 02:03:56 Nuclear is, nuclear is, nuclear is, nuclear is bent tagged. It just sounds bad, nuclear. Yeah, yeah, yeah, go nuclear. Nuclear, well so what happened? We didn't shut down postal offices and you hear it go postal. So what happened was so so nuclear technology arrived on planet earth as a weapon, right? So it arrived in the form of the first thing that is in the middle of World War 2. The first thing that it was the atomic bomb, they dropped on Japan and then and then there were all the debates

Starting point is 02:04:17 that followed around nuclear weapons and disarmament and there's a whole conversation to be had by the way about that. There's different views you could have on that. And then it was in the like 50s and 60s where they started to roll out civilian nuclear power. And then there were accidents. There was like, you know, through mile island melted down and, you know, and then Chernobyl, you know, melted down. And so if you're in the Union and even recently, you know Fukushima melted down. And so, you know, there have been meltdowns. And so I think it was a combination of it's a weapon. It is sort of icky.

Starting point is 02:04:42 It's a scientist sometimes that it's an X factor. Right. It's sort of, you know, it's a scientific, sometimes it's the X factor, right? It's sort of, it's radioactive, it glows green. And by the way, it becomes like a mythical fictional thing. And so you have all these movies of like horrible super villains power by light and clear energy and all this, all this stuff. Well, the intro to the Simpsons, right, is the nuclear power plant and the three-eyed fish and the, you know, all the negative implications of this nuclear power plant and the three-eyed fish and all the negative implications of this nuclear power plant run by at least in the Simpsons idiots.

Starting point is 02:05:11 That is the dystopia where people are unaware of just how bad it is. And who owns the nuclear power plant? This is like evil capitalist, right? So it's connected to capitalism, right? And so we're blaming Matt Graning for the demise of a particular of the people. He certainly didn't help. No, he didn't.

Starting point is 02:05:30 Right? But it's literally this amazing thing, where if you're just like thinking, if you're just thinking like, rationally scientifically, you're like, okay, we want to get rid of carbon, this is the obvious way to do it. So, okay, fun fact, Richard Nixon, did two things that really mattered on this. So one is he defined in 1971 something called Project

Starting point is 02:05:46 Independence, which was to create a thousand new state-of-the-art nuclear plants, civilian nuclear plants in the US by 1980, and to get the US completely off of oil. I cut the entire US energy grid over to nuclear power, electricity, cut over to electric cars, the whole thing, like detached from carbon. You'll notice that didn't happen. Why did that not happen? Because he also created the EPA and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission,

Starting point is 02:06:07 which then prevented that from happening. Nuclear Regulatory Commission did not authorize a new nuclear plant in the US for 40 years. Why would he hamstring himself like that? You know, he got distracted by what? Yeah, he had by watergate and Vietnam. I think Ellsberg just died recently. The guy who released the Pentagon papers, yeah. So, it's this thing.

Starting point is 02:06:26 It's complicated. But it's the, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly, it's this thing. Yeah, he didn't, you know, he left office shortly thereafter. He didn't have time to, you know, fully figure this out. I don't know whether he would have figured it out or not. You know, look Ford could have figured it out. Carter could have figured it out.

Starting point is 02:06:37 Reagan could have figured it out. Any of these guys could have figured it out. It's like the most obvious, and knowing what we know today, it's the most obvious thing in the world. The Russia thing is the amazing thing is like Europe is literally funding Russia's invasion of Ukraine by paying them for oil, right?

Starting point is 02:06:49 And they can't shut off the oil because they won't cut over to nuclear, right? And then of course what happens, okay, so then here's the other kicker of what happens, right? Which is they won't do nuclear, but they want to do renewables, right? It's a sustainable energy. And so what they do is they do solar and wind.

Starting point is 02:07:02 Solar and wind are not reliable because it sometimes gets dark out and sometimes the wind doesn't blow. And so then what happens is they fire up the coal plants, right? And so the actual consequence of the precautionary principle for the purpose it was invented is a massive spike in use of coal. That's taking us back over a hundred years. Yes, correct. That is the consequence of the precautionary principle. Like that's the consequence of that mentality. It's a failure of a principle on its own merits for the thing it was designed for. Then there is a whole movement of people who want to apply it to every new thing.

Starting point is 02:07:34 This is the hot topic on AI right now in Washington, which is like, oh my God, these people have to prove that this can never get used to bad things. Sorry, I'm hung up on this nuclear thing. I wonder, can it just be renamed? I mean, seriously, I mean, there is something about the naming of things. We know this in biology, right? I mean, you know, Lamarkey and Evolution and things like that. These are bad words in biology, but we had a guest on this podcast that Oded Rashavi,

Starting point is 02:07:59 who's over in Israel, who's shown, you know, inherited traits. But if you talk about his Lamarkeyin, then it has all sorts of negative implications, but his discoveries have important implications for everything from inherited trauma to treatment of disease. I mean, there's all sorts of positives that await us if we are able to reframe our thinking around something that, yes, indeed, could be used for evil.

Starting point is 02:08:22 But that has enormous potential and that is an agreement with nature, right? This fundamental truth that, at least to my knowledge, no one is revising in any significant way anytime soon. So what if it were called something else? It could be nuclear. It's called, you know, sustainable, right? I mean, it's amazing how marketing can shift our perspective of robots, for instance, or, anyway, I'm sure you can come up with better examples than I can, but is there a good, solid PR firm working from the nuclear side?

Starting point is 02:08:55 Thunbergian. It's a great Thunbergian. So, Thunbergian. Thunbergian. Like, if she got, if she was in favor of it, which by the way, she's not. She's that setting asset. She said that 100%. Yeah. Based on. Based on. I mean, like, I mean, like, I of it. Yeah, which by the way, she's not she's dead setting as it she said that 100% Yeah, based on based on

Starting point is 02:09:08 I mean, the early in principles the prevailing the prevailing ethic in environmentalism 50 years is that nuclear is evil like they won't consider it There are by the way certain environmentalists who disagree with this and so Stewart Brand is the one that's been the most public and he has impeccable credentials in the space and he wrote the whole There's catalogs. Yeah, and he's written a whole bunch of really interesting books and he wrote a recent book that goes through in detail. He's like, yes, obviously the correct environmental thing to do is nuclear power. And we should be implementing project independence. We should be building a thousand.

Starting point is 02:09:35 We should specifically. We should. He didn't say this, but this is what I would say. We should hire Charles Koch. We should hire Koch industries. Right. And they should build us a thousand nuclear power plants. Right.

Starting point is 02:09:44 And then we should give them the presidential metal freedom for saving the environment. And that would put us to independent of our reliance on oil. Yeah, then we're done with oil. Like we're just think about what happens. We're done with oil, zero emissions. We're done with the Middle East. We're done.

Starting point is 02:09:57 We're done. We're not drilling. We're not drilling on American land anymore. We're not drilling on foreign land. Like we have no military entanglements in places where we're drilling. We're not, you know, dispoiling Alaska. We're not nothing.

Starting point is 02:10:07 No offshore rigs. No, nothing. We're done. And you basically just, you build state of the art plants, engineered properly. You have them just completely contained when there's nuclear waste. You just entomb the waste, right? And concrete.

Starting point is 02:10:16 And so it just sits there forever. It's this very small footprint, you know, kind of thing. And you're just done. And so this is like the, to me, it's like scientifically, technologically And so this is like the most obvious thing in the world. It's a massive tell on the part of the people who claim to be pro environment that they're not in favor of this. And if I were to say, tweet that I'm pro nuclear power because it's the more sustainable form of power, if I hypothetically did that today, What would happen to me in this? In the crypto fascist, you know. I'm just saying, dirty.

Starting point is 02:10:48 People with Catholicists, you know, master, how near you. I'm unlikely to run that experiment. I was just curious, that was what we call a Gdonkin experiment in our experiments. You're a terrible human being. We were looking for evidence, you're a terrible human being, and now we know it.

Starting point is 02:11:01 Right, this is a great example of the, I gave Andrew a book on the way in here with this, my favorite new book is the title of it is when Reason goes on holiday. And this is a great example of it is the people who are, the people who simultaneously say their environmentalists and say they're anti nuclear power, like the positions simply don't reconcile.

Starting point is 02:11:18 But that doesn't bother them at all. So let me be clear, I predict none of this will happen. Amazing. I need to learn more about long-clear power. Long-cool. Long-cool. Long-cool, invest in coal. Because you think we're just going to revert.

Starting point is 02:11:32 It's the energy source of the future. Well, because it can't be solar on wind, because they're not reliable. So you need something. If it's not nuclear, it's going to be either like oil and natural gas or coal. And you're unwilling to say bet on nuclear because you don't think that the sociopolitical elitist trends that are driving against nuclear are likely to dissipate anytime soon. Not a chance. I can't imagine. It would be great if they did, but that they are the powers that be are very locked in on this as a position.

Starting point is 02:12:02 And look, they've been saying this for 50 years and so they have to reverse themselves off of a bad position, they've got for 50 years and people really don't like to do that. One thing that's good about this and other podcasts is that young people listen and they eventually will take over. And by the way, I will say also, there are nuclear entrepreneurs.

Starting point is 02:12:18 So there are actually a bunch of young entrepreneurs who are basically not taking no for an answer and they're trying to develop. And particularly as people try to develop new very small form factor nuclear power plants with a variety of possible use cases. So, you know, look, maybe, you know, maybe they show up with a better mouse trap

Starting point is 02:12:36 and people take a second look, but we'll see. We'll just rename it. So my understanding is that you think we should go all in on AI with the constraints that we discover we need in order to reign in safety and things like that, not unlike social media, not unlike the internet. Not unlike what we should have done with clear power. And in terms of the near infinite number of ways that AI can be envisioned to harm us, how do you think we should cope with that set psychologically?

Starting point is 02:13:10 You know, because I can imagine a lot of people listening to this conversation or thinking, okay, that all sounds great, but there are just too many what-ifs that are terrible, right? You know, what if the machines take over, what if, you know, the silly example I gave earlier, but, you know, what if one day I get logged into my, you know, hard earned bank account and it's all gone. You know, my, I version of myself like ran off with someone else and with all my money, right? Right? I'll write it, my AI coach abandoned me for somebody else after it learned all the stuff that I taught it. It took off with somebody else. Yeah. Stranded, you know, and it has my bank account numbers.

Starting point is 02:13:48 Like this kind of thing, right? You could really make this scenario horrible. Right. If you kept going. Yeah. Well, we can throw in a benevolent example as well to counter it. But it's kind of fun to think about where the human mind goes. Right.

Starting point is 02:14:02 So first I say we got to separate the real problems and the fake problems. So there's a lot of the size fiction areas I think are just not real. And once you decide it as an example, that's not what is going to happen. And I can explain why that's not what's going to happen. So there's a set of fake ones. The fake ones are the ones that just aren't,

Starting point is 02:14:16 I think, technologically grounded, they're not rational. It's the A, it's going to wake up and decide to kill us all. It's going to develop the kind of agency where it's going to steal our money. You know, plenty of our espouse and everything else, our kids. Like that's just, that's not how it works. And then there's also all these concerns, you know, destruction of society concerns. And this is, you know, misinformation, hate speech, deep fakes, like all that stuff,

Starting point is 02:14:37 which I don't think is a real, is actually a real problem. And then there's a, but people have a bunch of economic concerns around, you know, what's going to take all the jobs, all those kinds of things. We could talk about that. I don't think that's actually the thing that happens. But then there are two actual real concerns that I actually do very much agree with. And one of them is what you said, which

Starting point is 02:14:55 is bad people doing bad things. And there's a whole set of things to be done inside there. The big one is we should use AI to build defenses against all the bad things. And so for example, there's a concern. AI use AI to build defenses against all the bad things. And so for example, there's a concern, AI is going to make it easier for bad people to build pathogens, design pathogens in labs. But bad scientists can do today, but this

Starting point is 02:15:13 is going to make it easier, easier to do. Well, obviously, we should have the equivalent of an operation warp speed operating in perpetuity anyway. But then we should use AI to build much better bio defenses. And we should be using AI today to design, like, for example, full spectrum vaccines against every possible form of pathogen, right? And so, so defensive mechanism hacking, you can use AI to build better defense tools, right? And so you should, you should have a whole new kind of security suite wrapped around you, wrapped around your data, wrapped around your money, where you're, you're having AI, repel,

Starting point is 02:15:42 attacks, disinformation, hate speech, deep fakes, all that stuff, you should have an AI filter when you use the internet, where you shouldn't have to figure out whether it's really me or whether it's a made up thing, you should have an AI assistant that's doing that for you. Oh, yeah. I mean, these little banners and cloaks that you see on social media, like this has been deemed misinformation. But, you know, if you're me, you always collect.

Starting point is 02:16:02 Right, right, right, because you're like, what's behind the scrim? And then, or this is a, I don't always look at the, this image is gruesome type thing. Sometimes I just pass on that. But if it's something that seems debatable, of course you look. Well, and you should have an AI assistant with you when you're on the internet.

Starting point is 02:16:20 And you should be able to tell the AI assistant what you want. So, yes, I want the full experience to show me everything. I want it from a particular point of view, and I don't want to hear from these other people who I don't like. By the way, it's going to be my eight-year-old is using this. I don't want anything that's going to cause a problem and I want everything filtered.

Starting point is 02:16:35 And AI-based filters like that, that you program in control are going to work much better and be much more honest and straightforward and clear and so forth than what we have today. So anyway, so basically what I want people to do is think every time you think of like a risk of how it can be used, just think of like, okay, we can use it to build a countermeasure. And the great thing about the countermeasures is they can not only offset AI risks, they can offset other risks, right?

Starting point is 02:16:55 Because we already live in a world where pathogens are a problem, right? We ought to have better vaccines. Anyway, right, we already live in a world where they're cyber hacking and separatarism. They already live in a world where there is bad content on the internet. And we have the ability now to build much better AI-powered tools to deal with all those things. I also love the idea of the AI physicians, you know, getting decent healthcare in this country is so difficult. Even for people who have means or insurance, I mean, the number

Starting point is 02:17:22 of phone calls and weights that you have to go through to get a referral to see a specialist, I mean, it's absurd. Like, I mean, the process is absurd. I mean, it makes one partially or frankly ill just to go through the process of having to do all that. I don't know how anyone does it and grant I don't have the highest degree of patience, but I'm pretty patient and it drives me insane

Starting point is 02:17:44 to even just get a remedial care. The highest degree of patience, but I'm pretty patient and it drives me insane to even just get a remedial care. But so I can think of a lot of benevolent uses of AI and I'm grateful that you're bringing this up and here and that you've tweeted about it and that thread again, we'll refer people to that and that you're thinking about this I have to imagine that in your role as investor nowadays that you're also thinking about AI, quite often in terms of all these roles. Does that mean that there are a lot of young people who are really bullish on AI and are

Starting point is 02:18:14 going for it? Yeah. Okay. This is here to stay. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:18:09 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. which is sort of in this liminal place where biotech companies aren't sure if they should invest or not in CRISPR because it's unclear whether or not the governing bodies are going to allow gene editing.

Starting point is 02:18:30 Just like it was unclear 15 years ago if they were going to allow gene therapy but now we know they do allow gene therapy and immunotherapy. So there is a fight. And I have said that there is a fight. There's a fight happening in Washington right now over exactly what should be legal or not legal.

Starting point is 02:18:43 And there's quite a bit of risk I think attached to that fight right now, because there are some people in there that are being, if it's only a very effective story to try to get people either outlaw AI or specifically limit it to a small number of big companies, which I think has potentially disastrous. By the way, you also is like super negative. You know, the EU has turned super negative on basically all new technology, so they're moving to try to outlaw AI, which if they succeed, now it's long.

Starting point is 02:19:06 Yeah, it's like flat out, don't want it. But that's like saying you're gonna outlaw the internet. I don't see how you can stop this trend. I'm frankly, they're not a big fan of the internet either. So like, I think they regret that the EU has a very, especially the EU bear crafts that people run the EU in Brussels have a very negative view on a lot of modernity.

Starting point is 02:19:24 But what I'm hearing here calls to mind things that I've heard people like David Goggan say, which is there's so many lazy, undisciplined people out there that nowadays it's easier and easier to become exceptional. I've heard him say something to that extent. It almost sounds like there's so many countries that are just backing off of particular technologies because it just sounds bad from the PR perspective that

Starting point is 02:19:46 you know it's creating great and low-hanging fruit opportunities for people to barge forward and countries to barge forward if they're willing to embrace this stuff. It is but you number one you have to have a country that wants to do that and that does exist and there are countries like that and then the others look they need to be able to withstand the attack from stronger countries that don't want them to do it. Right so like EU like EU has you know But then the others, they need to be able to withstand the attack from stronger countries that don't want them to do it. So EU has nominal control over whatever it is, 27 or whatever member countries.

Starting point is 02:20:12 So even if you're like whatever, the Germans get all fired up about whatever, like Brussels can still in a lot of cases just flat out, basically control them and tell them not to do it. And then the US, I mean, look, we have a lot of control over a lot of the world. But it sounds like we sit somewhere sort of in between. Like right now, people are developing AI technologies in US companies. Right. So it is happening. Yeah. Today it's happening. But like I said, there's a set of people who are very focused in Washington right now

Starting point is 02:20:37 about trying to either ban it outright or trying to, as I said, limit it to a small number of big companies. And then look, China's got a whole, the run of this is, China's got a whole different kind of take on this, right, than we do. And so, they're, of course, going to allow it for sure, but they're going to allow it in the ways that their system wants it to happen, right? Which is much more for population control and implement authoritarianism. And then, of course, they are going to spread their technology and their vision of how society should run across the world.

Starting point is 02:21:06 So we're back in a Cold War dynamic like we were with the Soviet Union where there are two different systems that have fundamentally different views on issues, concepts like freedom and individual choice and freedom of speech and so on. And we know where the Chinese stand. We're still figuring out where we stand. And there are a lot of—I'm having a lot of schizophrenia, I'm having specifically a lot of schizophrenia conversations of people in DC right now where if I talk to them in China doesn't come up, they just like hate tech, they hate American tech companies, they hate AI, they hate social media,

Starting point is 02:21:33 they hate this, they hate that, they hate crypto, they hate everything and they just want to like punish and like ban and like they're just like very very negative. But then if we have a conversation half-hour later when we talk about China, then the conversation totally different. Now we need a partnership between the US government and American tech companies to defeat China. It's like the exact opposite discussion, right? Is that fear or competitiveness on China specifically? On in terms of the US response in Washington, when you bring up these technologies like, you know, I'll lump CRISPR in there, things like CRISPR, nuclear power, AI, it all sounds

Starting point is 02:22:04 very cold, very dystopian to a lot of people. And yet, there are all these benevolent uses as we've been talking about. And then you say you raise the issue of China, and then it sounds like this big, you know, dark cloud emerging. And then all of a sudden, you know, it's, we need to galvanize and develop these technologies to counter their effort. So is it fear of them, or is it competitiveness or both? Well, without them in the picture, you just have this.

Starting point is 02:22:31 And basically, there's an old better one who's saying, as me, my brother, me, and my brother, guess my cousin, me and my brother, my cousin, against the world, right? So it's actually, it's evolution in action. If I think we'd think about it, is if there's no external threat, then the conflict turns inward. And then at that point, it's evolution in action. If I think we think about it, it is if there's no external threat, then the conflict turns inward.

Starting point is 02:22:47 And then at that point, there's a big fight between specifically tech, and then I was to say generally politics. And my interpretation of that fight is it's a fight for status. It's fundamentally a fight for status and for power, which is like if you're in politics, you like the status quo of how power and status work in our society,

Starting point is 02:23:03 you don't want these new technologies to show up and change things, because change is bad. Change threatens your position, it threatens your, the respect that people have for you and your control over things. And so I think it's primarily a status fight, which we can talk about. But the China thing is just like a straight up geopolitical

Starting point is 02:23:20 us versus them, like I said, it's like a Cold War scenario. And look, 20 years ago, the prevailing view in Washington was, we need to be friends with China, right? And we're going to be trading partners with China. And yes, they're a totalitarian dictatorship, but like if we trade with them over time, they'll become more democratic. In the last five to 10 years, it's become more and more clear that that's just not true. And now, there's a lot of people in both political parties in D.C. who very much regret that and want to change too much more of a sort of a Cold War footing. Are you willing to comment on TikTok and technologies that emerge from China that are

Starting point is 02:23:51 in widespread use within the US, like how much you trust them or don't trust them? I can go on record myself by saying that early on when TikTok was released, we were told the Stanford faculty that we should not and could not have TikTok accounts nor we chat accounts. So there are a lot of really bright Chinese tech entrepreneurs and engineers who are trying to do good things. I'm totally positive about that. So I think many of the people it mean very well.

Starting point is 02:24:20 But the Chinese have a specific system. The system is very clear and unambiguous. And the system is everything in China is owned by the party. It's not even owned by the state, it's owned by the party, it's owned by the Chinese Communist Party. So the Chinese Communist Party owns everything, and they control everything. By the way, it's actually illegal to this day.

Starting point is 02:24:35 It's illegal for an foreign investor by equity in a Chinese company. There's all these, like basically legal machinations that people do to try to do something that's like economic equivalent to that, but it's actually still illegal to do that. The Chinese have no intention. The Chinese Communist Party has no intention of letting foreigners own any of China, like

Starting point is 02:24:51 zero intention of that. They regularly move to make sure that that doesn't happen. So they own everything, they control everything. So I was sorry to interrupt you, but people in China can invest in American common sense you all the time. Well, they can't subject to US government constraints. There is a US government system that attempts to mediate that, called SIFIUS, and there are more and more limitations being put on that.

Starting point is 02:25:13 But if you can get through that approval process, then legally you can do that, whereas the same is not true with respect to China. And so they just have a system. And so if you're the CEO of a Chinese company, it's not optional. If you're the CEO of bite-down, serve CEO, 10 cents, it's not optional. Your relationship with the Chinese Communist party

Starting point is 02:25:32 is not optional, it's required. And what's required is you are a unit of the party and you and your company do what the party says. And when the party says we get full access to all user data in America, you say yes. When the party says you change the algorithm to optimize to a certain social result, you say yes. Right. So it's just, it's whatever, it's whatever, it's whatever a Xi Jinping and his party, Kadre's side, and that's what gets implemented. If you're the CEO of a Chinese tech company, there is a political officer assigned to you

Starting point is 02:25:59 who has an office down the hall. And at any given time, he can come down the hall, he can grab you out of your staff meeting or board meeting, and he can take it on the hall, and he can make you sit for hours and study, Marxism and Xi Jinping thought, and quiz you on it and test you on it. And you'd better pass the test, right? So it's like a straight political control thing.

Starting point is 02:26:17 And then by the way, if you get crosswise with them, like, you know. So when we see tech founders getting called up to Congress for what looks like interrogation, but it's probably pretty light interrogation compared to what happens in other countries. Yeah, it's a state of state power. They just have this view of top down state power, and they view it's their system, and they view it as necessary for lots of historical and moral reasons that they've defined, and that's how they run, and then they've got a view that says how they want to propagate that vision outside the country.

Starting point is 02:26:46 And they have these programs like Belt and Road, right? That basically are intended to propagate kind of their vision worldwide. And so they are who they are. I will say that they don't lie about it. They're very straightforward. They give speeches, they write books, you can buy Xi Jinping speeches,

Starting point is 02:27:01 he goes through the whole thing, they have their tech 2025 plan, it's like 10 years ago, it's their whole AI agenda. It's all in there And is there a goal that you know in 200 years 300 years that China is the superpower trolling everything about yeah or 20 years 30 years or two years three years Yeah, they got a shorter horizon. I mean look there. Yeah, they're there. I mean if you're it's like you know I don't know everybody's a little bit like this. I guess but yeah, if you're they want to win Well, the the crisper and humans example that I gave earlier

Starting point is 02:27:28 was interesting to me because, first of all, I'm a neuroscientist and they could have edited any genes, but they chose to edit the genes involved in the attempt to create super memory babies, which presumably grow into super memory adults. And whether or not they succeed in that isn't clear. Those babies are alive and presumably by now walking talking as far as I know. Whether or not they have super memories isn't clear.

Starting point is 02:27:55 But China is clearly unafraid to augment biology in that way. And I believe that That's inevitable that's going to happen elsewhere Probably first for the treatment of disease, but at some point I'm assuming people are going to augment biology to make smarter kids I mean people Not always, but often will select mates based on the traits They would like their children to inherit

Starting point is 02:28:23 So this happens far more frequently than could be deemed bad because either that or people are bad because people do this all the time. Selecting mates that have physical and psychological and cognitive traits that you would like your offspring to have. CRISPR is a more targeted approach of course. You know, the reason I'm kind of giving this example and examples like it is that I feel like so much of the way that governments and the public react to technologies is to just take that first glimpse and it just feels scary. You think about the old Apple ad of the 1984 ad. I mean, there was one very scary version of the personal computer and computers and robots taking over and everyone like a Tom Tons. And then there was the Apple version where it's all about creativity, love and peace and

Starting point is 02:29:08 it had the pseudosychedelic California thing going for it. Again, great marketing seems to convert people's thinking about technology such that what was once viewed as very scary and dangerous and dystopian is like an oasis of opportunity. So why are people so afraid of new technologies? So this is the thing I've tried to understand for a long time because the history is so clear. And the history basically is, every new technology is greeted by what's called a moral panic.

Starting point is 02:29:40 And so it's basically this like historical freak out of some kind of the causes people to basically predict the end of the world. And you go back in time and actually this historical sort of effect, it happens even in things now where you just go back and it's ludicrous, right? And so you mentioned earlier the satanic panic of the 80s and the concern around heavy metal music. Right before that, there was like a freak out around comic books.

Starting point is 02:30:00 In the 50s, there was a freak out around jazz music in the 20s and 30s, it's devil music. There was a freak out, the rival of bicycles caused a moral panic in the like 1860s, 1870s. Bicycles? Bicycles, yeah. So there was this thing at the time. So bicycles were the first, they were the first very easy

Starting point is 02:30:15 to use personal transportation thing that basically let kids travel between towns, you know, quickly without any overhead, you have to take a ride, take a ride, take a ride, just jump in a bike and go. And so it was, there was a historical panic, specifically around at any overhead, you know, you have to take care of your horse, just jump to the bike and go. And so it was, there was a historical panic specifically around at the time, young women, who for the first time were able to venture outside the confines of the town to maybe go boyfriend another town. And so the magazines at the time ran all these stories on this phenomenon, medical phenomenon called bicycle face. And the idea of bicycle face was the exertion caused by pedaling a bicycle would cause your face, your face would grimace, and then if you were on the bicycle for too long

Starting point is 02:30:49 your face would lock into place. And then, right, and then, sorry, I'm just saying, right? And then, you would be unattractive and therefore of course unable to then get married. Cars, there was a moral panic around car, red flag laws, there are all these laws that greeted the automobile, automobile free people out. So there are all these laws. In the early days, the automobile,

Starting point is 02:31:08 in a lot of places, you had to, you would take a ride at automobile. And automobiles, they broke down all the time. So it would be, you only rich people had automobiles. It would be you and your mechanic in the car, right, for when it broke down. And then you had to hire another guy to walk 200 yards in front of the car with a red flag. And he had to wave the red flag. And so you could only drive as fast as he could walk, as the red flag was to warn people that the car was coming. And then, and then, I think it was Pennsylvania, they had the most draconian version, which was, they were very worried about the car scaring the horses. And so there was a law that said,

Starting point is 02:31:42 if you saw a horse coming, you needed to stop the car. You had to disassemble the car. And you had to hide the pieces of the car behind the nearest hey, bail, wait for the horse to go by. And then you could put your car back together. So anyways, this example, there's an electric lighting. There was a panic around like, it's going to come like completely ruined,

Starting point is 02:31:59 you know, this is going to completely ruin like the romance of the dark. And it was going to cause, you know, a whole new kind of like terrible civilization where everything is always brightly lit. So there's just like all these examples and so it's like okay what on earth is happening that this is always what happens. And so I finally found this book that I think has a good model for it. The book is called Men Machines in Modern Times and it's written by this MIT professor like 60 years ago so it predates the internet but it uses a lot of historical samples and

Starting point is 02:32:28 what he says basically he says there's there's actually a three-stage response. There's a three-stage societal response to new technologies. It's very predictable. He said stage one is basically just denial, just ignore. Like we just don't pay attention to this. Nobody takes it seriously. We just like there's just a blackout on the whole topic. He says stage one, stage two is rational counterargument. So stage two is where you line up all the different reasons why this can't possibly work. It can't possibly ever get cheaper.

Starting point is 02:32:50 You know, this, that, you know, not fast enough or whatever the thing is. And then he says stage three, he says is when the name calling begins. So he says stage three is like when, right, right. So when they failed ignore it and they failed to argue society out of it, they move to the name calling, right? And what's the name calling? The name calling is, this is evil. This is moral panic.

Starting point is 02:33:10 This is evil. This is terrible. This is awful. This is going to destroy everything. Don't you understand all this, this is horrifying. And the person working on it or being reckless and evil and all this stuff

Starting point is 02:33:20 and you must be stopped. And he said the reason for that is because basically fundamentally, what these things are is they're a war over status. It's a war over status and they're for a war over power. And then, of course, ultimately, money but the status, human status is the thing. And so, because what he says is,

Starting point is 02:33:37 what is the societal impact of a new technology? The societal impact of a new technology is that reorder status in the society. So the people who are specialists in that technology become high society. So the people who are specialists in that technology become high status and the people who are specialists in the previous way of doing things become low status and generally people don't adapt. Generally, if you're the kind of person

Starting point is 02:33:54 who is high status because you're in a volupted adaptation to an existing technology, you're probably not the kind of person that's going to enthusiastically try to replant yourself onto a new technology. And so this is like every politician who's just like in a complete state of panic about social media, like why are they so freaked out about social media? Because they all know that the whole nature of modern politics has changed.

Starting point is 02:34:13 The entire battery of techniques that you used to get elected before social media are now obsolete. Obviously, the best new politicians in the future are going to be 100% creations of social media. And podcasts. And we're seeing this now as we head towards the next presidential election that podcasts clearly are going to be featured very heavily in that next election because long form content is a whole different landscape. So this is exactly

Starting point is 02:34:35 this is the road. So so so so Rogan your Rogan's had like what like he's had like Bernie he's had like Tulsi he's had like a whole series of things. Okay, most recently. And that's create a lot of contribution. A lot of centuries, but also my understanding. I'm sure he's invited everybody. I'm sure he'd loved to have Biden, I'm sure he'd loved to have Trump on. I'm sure he'd. You have to ask him, I mean, I think that,

Starting point is 02:34:53 every podcaster has their own ethos around who they invite on and why and how. So I certainly can't speak for him. But I have to imagine that any opportunities have true long form discourse that would allow people to really understand people's positions on things, I have to imagine that he would be in favor of that sort of thing. Yeah, or somebody else would, right?

Starting point is 02:35:15 You know, some other time, I've got cast from Donnelly Wood, right? And so there's a, if you, my point, my, exactly, I totally agree with you, but my point is, if you're a politician, if you're, if you're a legacy politician, right, you have the option of embracing the new technology. You can do it anytime you want, right? But you don't, they're not. They won't, like, they won't do it. And why won't they do it?

Starting point is 02:35:34 Well, okay, first of all, they want to ignore it, right, they want to pretend that things aren't changing. You know, second is they want, like, they have rational counterarguments for like why the existing campaign system works the way that it does in this and that, and the existing media networks, and like here's how you'd like to do things

Starting point is 02:35:46 and here's how you give speeches and here's the cozy way and the tie and the thing and the pocket square and like you've got your whole system. It's how you succeeded was coming up to that system. So you've got all your arguments as to why that won't work anymore. And then and then we've now proceeded to the the the name calling phase, which is now it's evil right now it's evil for somebody to show up in you know on on on a stream God forbid for three hours and actually say what they think. It's going to destroy society. So it's exactly right. It's like it's a classic example of this pattern.

Starting point is 02:36:11 And anyway, so Morrison says in the book, basically, this is the forever pattern. This will never change. This is one of those things where you can learn about it and still not. The entire world can learn about this and still nothing changes because at the end of the day, it's not the tact that's the question. It's the reordering of status.

Starting point is 02:36:28 I have a lot of thoughts about the podcast component. I'll just say this because I want to get back to the topic of innovation of technology. But on a long form podcast, there's no safe zone. You know, the person can get up and walk out, but if the person interviewing them and certainly Joe is the best of the very best, if not the most skilled podcaster in the entire universe at continuing to press people on specific topics when they're trying to bob and weave

Starting point is 02:37:02 and wriggle out, he'll just keep, you know, either drilling or alter the question somewhat in a way that forces them to finally come up with and the answer of some sort. And I think that probably puts certain people's cortisol levels through the roof such that they just would never go on there. Well, I think there's another deeper question also or another question along with that, which is how many people actually have something to say? I think there's another deeper question also or another question along with that which is how many people actually have something to say? Real substance right like how many people can actually talk in a way that's actually interesting to anybody else for any length of time

Starting point is 02:37:41 Like how much substance is there really and like a lot of historical politics was to be able to manufacture a facade where you honestly as far as I you can't tell Like how deep the thoughts are like even if they have deep thoughts like it like it's kept away from you, they would certainly never cop to it. That's going to be an interesting next. What is it about, you know, 20 months or so? Yeah. I think it's an excellent. The panic in the name calling, I've already started.

Starting point is 02:37:55 Yeah, I was gonna say, this list of three things denial, you know, the counter argument and name calling. It seems like with AI, it's already just jumped to numbers two and three. Yes, correct. We're already at two and three and it's kind of leaning three. Yes.

Starting point is 02:38:10 Yeah. That's correct. Well, so it is unusual just because it had, so new technologies that take off, they almost always have a prehistory. They almost always have a 30 or 40 year history where people try and fail to get them to work before they took off. AI has an 80 year prehistory, so it has a very long one. And then it just, it all of a sudden started to work dramatically well, like seemingly overnight.

Starting point is 02:38:31 And so it went from basically, as far as most people were concerned, it went from, it doesn't work at all to it works incredibly well in one step. And that almost never happens. And so I actually think that's exactly what's happening. I think it's actually speed running this progression, just because if you use mid-journey,

Starting point is 02:38:44 or you use GPT or any of these things for five minutes, you're just like, wow. Like obviously this thing is gonna be like, obviously in my life this is gonna be the best thing ever. Like this is amazing, there's all these ways that I can use it. And then therefore immediately you're like, oh my God, this is gonna transform everything.

Starting point is 02:38:57 Therefore, step three. Right, straight to the name calling. So, in the face of all this, there are innovators out there. Maybe they are where they are innovators. Maybe they are already starting companies or maybe they are just some young or older person who has these five traits in abundance or doesn't, but knows somebody who does and is partnering with them in some sort of idea. And you have an amazing track record at identifying these people, I think in part, because you have

Starting point is 02:39:32 those same traits yourself. I've heard you say the following, the world is a very malleable place. If you know what you want and you go for it with maximum energy and drive and passion, the world will often reconfigure itself around you much more quickly and easily than you would think. That's a remarkable quote because it says at least two things to me. One is that you have a very clear understanding of the inner workings of these great innovators. We talked a little bit about that earlier, these five traits, et cetera. But that also you have an intense understanding of the world landscape.

Starting point is 02:40:11 And the way that we've been talking about it for the last hour or so is that it is a really intense and kind of oppressive landscape. You've got countries and organizations and the elites and journalists that are trying to, not necessarily trying, but are suppressing the innovation process. I mean, that's sort of the picture that I'm getting. So it's like we're trying to innovate inside of a vice that's getting progressively tighter.

Starting point is 02:40:35 And yet, this quote argues that it is the person, the boy or girl, man or woman who says, well, you know what? that all might be true, but my view of the world is the way the world's gonna bend. Or I'm gonna create a dent in that vice that allows me to exist the way that I want. Or you know what, I'm actually gonna uncurl the vice the other direction. And so I'm at once picking up a sort of pessimistic,

Starting point is 02:41:03 glass half empty view of the world, as well as a glass half full view. And so tell me about that. And tell me, could you tell us about that from the perspective of someone listening who is thinking, you know, I've got an idea and I know it's a really good one, because I just know. I might not have the confidence of extrinsic reward yet, but I just know. There's a seed of something. What does it take to foster that?

Starting point is 02:41:30 And how do we foster real innovation in the landscape that we're talking about? Yeah, so part is I think you just, I think one of the ways to square it is, I think you as the innovator need to be signed up to fight the fight. Right, so and again, this is where like the fictional portrayals

Starting point is 02:41:45 of startups, I think, take people off course or even scientists or whatever, because when there's great success stories, they get kind of purified after the fact. And they get made to be cute and fun. And it's like, yeah, no. If you talk to anybody who actually did any of these things, like no, these things are always just brutal exercises

Starting point is 02:42:01 and just share willpower and fighting forces that are trying to get you so So so part of it is you just you have to be signed up to the fight and this kind of goes to the conscientiousness thing We're talking about it. We also my partner Ben uses the term courage a lot, right? Which is some combination of like just stubbornness but coupled with like a willingness to take pain And not stop And you know have people think very bad things of you for a long time until it turns out, you know, you hopefully prove yourself, prove yourself correct.

Starting point is 02:42:28 And so you have to do that. Like it's a context sport. Like it's, these aren't easy roads, right? It's a context sport. So you have to be signed up for the fight. The advantage that you have is an innovator. It is, at the end of the day, the truth actually matters. And all the arguments in the world,

Starting point is 02:42:46 the classic Victor Hugo quote, is there's nothing more powerful in the world than an idea whose time has come, right? Like, if it's real, right? And this is just pure substance. If the thing is real, if the idea is real, like if it's a legitimately good scientific discovery, you know, about how the nature works,

Starting point is 02:43:03 if it's a new invention, if it's a new work of art, and if it's real, you know, then you do at the end of the day, you have that on your side. And all of the people who are fighting you and arguing with you and telling you know, they don't have that on their side, right? It's not, they're showing up with some other thing, and they're like, my thing is better than your thing. Like, that's not the main problem, right? The main problem is like, I have a thing, I'm convinced everybody else is telling me it's stupid, wrong, it should be illegal, whatever the thing is. But at the end of the day, I still have the thing.

Starting point is 02:43:32 Right, and so at the end of the day, like, yeah, the truth really matters, the substance really matters, if it's real. It's really, I give you an example. It's really hard historically to find an example of a new technology that came into the world that was then pulled back. And, you know, we could, you know, nuclear is maybe an example of that, but even still,

Starting point is 02:43:49 they're still, you know, nuclear, they're still nuclear plants like running today. You know, that still exists. You know, I would say the same thing as scientific, like at least I have amazed you this. I don't know, I don't know of any scientific discovery that was made, and then people like, I know, I know there are areas of science that are not politically correct to talk about today, but every scientist knows the truth. The truth is still the truth. I mean, even the geneticists in the Soviet Union

Starting point is 02:44:13 who were forced to buy in a lysencoism like knew the whole time that it was wrong. Like that I'm completely convinced of. Yeah, they couldn't delude themselves, especially because the basic training that one gets in any field establishes some court truths upon which even the crazy ideas have to rest and if they don't as you pointed out, things fall to pieces. I would say that even the technologies that

Starting point is 02:44:31 did not pan out and in some cases were disastrous but that were great ideas at the beginning are starting to pan out. So the example I'll give is that most people are aware of the Elizabeth Holmes, Thernos, a debacle to put it lightly. You know, analyzing what's in a single drop of blood as a way to analyze hormones and disease, the antibodies, et cetera. I mean, that's a great idea.

Starting point is 02:44:58 I mean, it's a terrific idea. As opposed to having a flambatomist come to your house or you have to go in and you get tapped with a, you know, and then pulling vials and the whole thing. There's now a company born out of Stanford that is doing exactly what she sought to do, except that at least the courts ruled that she fudged the thing and that's why she's in jail right now. But the idea of getting a wide array of markers from a single drop of blood is an absolutely spectacular idea.

Starting point is 02:45:28 The biggest challenge that company is going to confront is the idea that it's just the next Theranos. But if they've got the thing, and they're not fudging it, as apparently Theranos was, I think everything will work out, all of Victor Hugo. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, because who wants to go back? Like, if it's real, it's gonna work out. I'll uh, Victor Hugo. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Cause who wants to go back?

Starting point is 02:45:45 Like, if they, if they, if they, if they get to the work, if it's real, it's going to be, like, this is the thing, the opponents, the opponents, they're not bringing their own ideas. Like, they're not bringing their own ideas better than yours. Like, that's not what's happening. They're bringing the silence or counterargument, right, or a name calling. Right. Well, this is why I think people who need to be loved probably stand a reduced chance of success.

Starting point is 02:46:11 And maybe that's also why having people close to you that do love you and allowing that to be sufficient can be very beneficial. This gets back to the idea of partnership and family around innovators because if you feel filled up by those people local to you, in your home, then you don't need people on the internet saying nice things about you or your ideas, because you're good, and you can forge forward. Another question about innovation is the teams

Starting point is 02:46:39 that you assemble around you. And you've talked before about this sort of small squadron model, you know, sort of David and Goliath examples as well, where, you know, a small group of individuals can create a technology that frankly outdo what a, you know, a giant like Facebook might be doing, or what any other large company might be doing. There are a lot of theories as to why that would happen, but I know you have some unique theories. Why do you think small groups can defeat large organizations? So, the conventional explanation is I think correct, and it's just that large organizations

Starting point is 02:47:16 have a lot of advantages, but they just have a very hard time actually executing anything because of all the overhead. So large organizations have combinatorial communication overhead, right? The number of people who have to be consulted, who have to agree on things, gets to be staggering. The amount of time it takes to schedule the meeting, gets to be staggering. You know, you get these really big companies and they have some issue they're dealing with. And it takes like a month to schedule the pre-meeting to like plan for the meeting, which is going to happen two months later, which is then going to result in a post-meeting,

Starting point is 02:47:43 which will then result in a board presentation, which will design results in a planning off site. Right. So I thought academia was bad, but what you're describing is giving me highs. Kafka was Kafka was a documentary. Yeah. This is, yeah. So it's just like these are, I mean, look, you'd have these organizations at a hundred

Starting point is 02:47:58 thousand people or more, like you're more of a nation state than a company. And you've got all these competing internal, you know, it's the better one thing company. And you've got all these competing internal, it's the better one thing I've said before, you've got all these internal. At most big companies, your internal enemies are way more dangerous to you than anybody on the outside. Can you elaborate on that? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, your big competition,

Starting point is 02:48:15 at a big company, the big competition is for the next promotion, right? And the enemy for the next promotion is the next executive over in your company. Like that's your enemy. The competitor on the outside is like an abstraction. Like maybe they'll matter someday, whatever. I gotta be that guy, inside my own company. Right, and so the internal warfare

Starting point is 02:48:33 is at least as intense as the external warfare. And so yeah, so it's just, I mean, this is just all the iron law of all these big, big bureaucracies and how they function. So if a big bureaucracy ever does anything productive, I think it's like a miracle. Like it's like a miracle to the point

Starting point is 02:48:45 where there should be a celebration. There should be parties, there should be ticker tape parades for large organizations that actually do things. That's great, because it's so rare, it doesn't happen very often. So anyway, so that's the conventional explanation, whereas small companies, small teams, there's a lot that they can't do,

Starting point is 02:49:02 because they're not operating at scale, they don't have global coverage, and all these kind of, they don't have the resources and so forth, but at least they can move quickly, right? They can organize fast, they can have, if there's an issue today, they can have a meeting today, they can solve the issue today, right? Everybody they need to solve the issue

Starting point is 02:49:17 is in the room today, and so they can just move a lot faster. I think that's part of it, but I think there's another deeper thing underneath that that people really don't like to talk about. It takes a respectful circle to where we started, which is just the sheer number of people in the world who are capable of doing new things is just a very small set of people. And so you're not going to have a hundred of them in a company or a thousand or 10,000. You're going to have three, eight or ten maybe.

Starting point is 02:49:41 And some of them are flying too close to the sun. Some of them are blowing themselves up. Right And some of them are flying too close to the sun. Some of them are blowing themselves up, right? Some of them are. So I actually first learned this, so my first actual job was at IBM when it was, and when IBM was still on top of the world, right, before it caved in in the early 90s. And so when I was there, it was 440,000 employees,

Starting point is 02:49:58 which, and again, if you inflation adjust, like today for that same size of business, inflation adjusted, market size adjusted, it would be, it's equivalent today of like a two or three million person organization. It was like a, it was a nation state. There were 6,000 people in my division, you know, we were next door to another building that had another 6,000 people in another division.

Starting point is 02:50:14 So you just, you could work there for years and never meet anybody who didn't work for IBM. The first half of every meeting was just IBM or is introducing themselves to each other. Like it's just mind-boggling in the level of complexity, but they were so powerful that they had four years before I got there in 1985, they were 80% of the market capitalization of the entire tech industry. So they were at a level of dominance that even Google or Apple today is not even close to.

Starting point is 02:50:39 Right, at the time. So that's how powerful they were. And so they had a system and it worked really well for like 50 years. They had a system which was it mostly employees in the company were expected to basically rigid follow rules. So they dressed the same, they acted the same, they did everything out of the playbook, you know, they were trained very specifically. But they had this category of people they call wild ducks. And this was an idea that the founder Thomas Watson come up with wild ducks. And the wild ducks were they often have the formal title of an IBM fellow and they were the people who could make new things

Starting point is 02:51:09 and there were eight of them. And they got to break all the rules and they got to invent new products. They got to go off and work on something new. They didn't have to report back. They got to pull people off of other projects to work with them. They got, you know, budget when they needed it. They reported directly to the CEO.

Starting point is 02:51:26 They got whatever they needed. He supported them in doing it. And they were glassbrickers. And they showed up. The one in Austin at the time was this guy, Andy Heller. And he would show up in jeans and cubby boots. And amongst an ocean of men and blue suits, white shirts, red ties. And put his cubby boots up on the table.

Starting point is 02:51:42 And it was fine for Andy Heller to do that. And it was not fine for you to do table. And it was fine for Andy Hull and it was not fine for you to do that, right? And so they very specifically identify, we have like almost like an aristocratic class within our company that gets to play with different rules. Now, the expectation is they deliver,

Starting point is 02:51:57 their job is to invest the next breakthrough product. But IBM management know that the 6,000 person division is not going to invest the next product. We know it's going to be a crazy Andy Heller and his in his government boots. And so I was always like very impressed. And again, like ultimately IBM had its issues, but like that model worked for 50 years, right?

Starting point is 02:52:15 Like worked incredibly well. And I think that's basically the model that works. And so it's a paradox, right? Which is like how do you have a large bureaucratic regimented organization, whether it's academia or government or business or anything that has all these real followers and all these people who are jealous of their status

Starting point is 02:52:31 and don't want things to change, but then still have that spark of creativity. I would say mostly it's impossible. Mostly it just doesn't happen. Those people get driven out, right? And in tech, what happens is those people get driven out because we will fund them. These are the people we fund. I was going to say, yeah, I, I, these are the, you were in the business of finding and funding the wild. The wild docs, that's exactly right. And actually, this is actually closed, closed the loop. This is

Starting point is 02:52:56 actually, I think the simplest explanation for IBM, ultimately, CabeDen and then HP sort of in the 80s, also, you know, these, I've the H.P. kind of where model, there were these incredible, monolithic, incredible companies for 40 or 50 years. And then they kind of both caved in the 80s and 90s. And I actually think it was the emergence of venture capital. It was the emergence of a parallel funding system where the wild ducks or in H.P.s case, their super start to medical people

Starting point is 02:53:18 could actually leave and start their own companies. And again, it goes back to the university discussion we're having is like, this is what doesn't exist at the university level. This certainly doesn't exist at the university level. This certainly does not exist at the government level. And until recently in media, it didn't exist until there's this thing that we call podcast. Exactly, right? Exactly, right.

Starting point is 02:53:34 We've clearly picked up some momentum and I would hope that these other wild duck models will move quickly. Yeah. But the one thing you know, right? And you know this, like the one thing you know is the people on the other side are going to be Matt as hell. Yeah, they're going to, well, I think their past denial, um, the counter arguments continue. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:53:53 The name calling is prolific. And calling is fully underway. Yes. Well, Mark, we've covered a lot of topics, but as with every time I talk to you, I learn, oh, so very much. So I'm so grateful for you taking the time out of your schedule to talk about all of these topics in depth with us. You know, I'd be remiss if I didn't say that it is clear to me now that you are hyper realistic about the landscape, but you are also intensely optimistic about the existence of wild ducks and those around them that support them and that are necessary for the implementation of their

Starting point is 02:54:30 ideas at some point. And also you have a real rebel inside you. So that is oh so welcome on this podcast and it's oh so needed in these times and every time. So on behalf of myself and the rest of us here at the podcast, and especially the listeners. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.

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Huberman Lab - Marc Andreessen: How Risk Taking, Innovation & Artificial Intelligence Transform Human Experience

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