Modern Wisdom - Rabbit Hole: Who Will Survive The AI Era? (cats, mostly) - #1105

Starting point is 00:00:00 British supremacy in messaging services, we need to try and get everybody to use WhatsApp. The superior messaging system and Americans refuse to use it. Do you not think? We was talking about this earlier as to why Americans don't use WhatsApp more. One of the theories is that America had free SMS before anybody else. So us, Brits had to pay. How much did it used to be for a text back in the day? 15p, maybe? 15p.

Starting point is 00:00:26 10P. That would ramp up very fast. But that was why people used to use elite speak, right? That was why you was there, like, L-Y, because you were trying to snap everything to under 160 characters. Yeah. I once, when I was 14 years old, had my first ever girlfriend, and we would text, and we would text, and we would text. You fucking bankrupted yourself. Well, my dad's, obviously, my dad comes down one day.

Starting point is 00:00:50 And you know when you have, like, A4 that you'd stack in a printer? He just drops that. So on the phone bill, and I'd racked up about 800 pounds. itemized bill. Text messages, yes. Wow. So I then sent her one. That's a lot of sexting at 14.

Starting point is 00:01:03 I then sent her one final text, which was, can't do text anymore. Let's do calls. So we did calls all the time next month. So I had to pay off about 1,200, 1,300 pounds of debt to my father. Still paying it off. Payment. Dad, you're cock blocking me. So that's how WhatsApp.

Starting point is 00:01:21 I'm trying to get my cred up. But yeah, I just WhatsApp's a superior. Tim uses WhatsApp. Tim's good on WhatsApp. I mean, it. Look, I use every new inbox that is slowly eroding the sanity of everybody who's listening to us. Do you guys see the Nikita Beard tweet a long time ago? It feels like he said something like every time I use WhatsApp, it feels like I landed in a third world country.

Starting point is 00:01:44 You're allowed to say that. You're allowed to say that. No, I'm really, I drop on Long Island. I think I'm allowed to say it. Re-wate race-swapped Sean for you. Fair enough. That's the primary reason. I think I'm sitting in the same spot too.

Starting point is 00:01:55 That's correct. Yeah, yeah, yeah. People like, Sean. Lost weight and the beards gone. This is the designated seat for the minority. You grew up on Long Island. I didn't know that. Where?

Starting point is 00:02:06 Oh, yeah. Way out by Montauk. Back when there were potato farms. That explains a lot. That has changed. Now there are nightclubs that make all the locals crazy. But yes. So does that be on the Hamptons?

Starting point is 00:02:16 Yeah, Montauk is the end of the line. So if you take Long Island Railroad out from New York City, it will end in Montauk. And it was perfectly fine place to grow up. I didn't realize how strange it was until I got older. Why is it strange? Well, when you're growing up, what is around you is normal because even a reference point, but you're growing up in a location where you have a barbell of income and wealth distribution.

Starting point is 00:02:43 So you've got all the, let's just say, the broad Hamptons that people know, which would have like the $100 million homes on the beach and all these famous directors and financiers and little white shorts playing tennis. then you have, on the other hand, like affordable housing when I was growing up, like crack epidemic in certain parts. So I didn't realize how much was missing from the middle of the whole thing. Okay. Have you ever seen Mickey Mantle's questionnaire answer on the 50th anniversary of the Yankees Stadium? So this, I feel like this is the kind of question my dad had asked me. He's like, do you know? Henry Rubinstein from 1839? I'm like, no. Of course I don't. So Mickey Mantle

Starting point is 00:03:24 describes in basically a yearbook for the Yankeesons. Yankees Stadium. It's the 50th anniversary of Yankee's Stadium happening. Mickey Mandel, everybody is asked, tell us what your most outstanding experience at Yankee Stadium was. And this was sold for $242,000, not long ago, a few years ago. He said, I consider the following my outstanding experience at Yankee Stadium. It's like a questionnaire. He goes, I got a blowjob under the right field bleachers by the Yankee bullpen. And then below that says, this event occurred on or about brackets give as much detail as you can. He says, it was about the third or fourth inning. I had pulled a groin and couldn't walk at the time. She was a very nice girl and asked me what to do

Starting point is 00:04:08 with the cum after I came in her mouth. I said, don't ask me. I'm no cock sucker. Signed, Mickey Mantle, the All-American boy. And that was sold about five years ago for $242,000. Wow. On chain or off-shed. Speaking of hedgefront managers, I'm sure that's in the guest bathroom. some hedge fund managers third home. It's a bargain. You don't think that's a boggian? In Montauk or are thereabouts? I don't know, man. I mean, like baseball has got a lot of superstition, but that feels

Starting point is 00:04:37 like it's taking it to an extreme. There's like a baseball player that had never washed his helmet or cleaned it or did anything for his entire career. Literally, the helmet look, I think it's Craig Bejillo, if I'm not mistaken, but the helmet was just and he believed in that so much

Starting point is 00:04:53 that it had to be that way, never changed. I seem to guys walk out and they go right glove, left glove, tap, tap on the foot. It goes from being preference to routine, to superstition, to ritual, to basically something sacred. It's essentially a rain dance that every... Or a mental illness. I think those two cross over quite a bit. I'm going to refer to all of my mental illness as a rain dance from now on.

Starting point is 00:05:19 I'm going to take these suckers off. That's enough fucking POV porn, which actually was the reason that we wore these when we had a, Bonnie Blue on the podcast so we could put POV in the title of the episode. Has she done one of those with P-O-W-Ease? I'm sure if you go dark enough and deep enough into the OnlyFans rabbit hole, you can find whatever you need. Let me take my toothpick out of my mouth before I address the table. One of the things that I've been fascinated with for a while, I know you have as well,

Starting point is 00:05:46 Christopher. I don't know about you two gentlemen, but etymologies of everything. So I was trying to rank my favorite etymologies. history of certain parts of language. One of them is not English, but it's Malaysian. And in Malayan culture, they use double rather than plural. So rather than tables, they will use table, table, which is one of my favorite things. What is this? Three. So it doesn't scale. So it doesn't go. That would be a nightmare. If you're a table factory maker. The same way we just use plural, we'll say tables, where you could say four tables. They would say, I assume the number,

Starting point is 00:06:24 than table table. It's such a more fun way of saying things. It's the same in Indonesian also. Yes. Like Orang Hutan, man of the forest. Orang, orang is men, right? Man of the men. Man of the men.

Starting point is 00:06:37 That's something different. Well, no, a man of the man. I think that's just, it's not here biopic. But it's so much better than... A lot of heavy editing. One of my favorite ones, though, is the word soon. So the word soon, I will be there soon, was the Anglo-Saxon word for now, but because so many people kept saying, I'll do that soon and didn't do it then, we then created

Starting point is 00:07:09 the word now to replace it, and soon is what it is today. It soon got shifted down in terms of how urgent it means. Generation by generation. What's interesting, now has that effect, where if somebody says, I'll do that now, you don't really take it. them literally unless they say I'll do that immediately now. Yeah. So it's interesting that you're seeing this drifting of now, now occur as well. I wonder if literally is the same as that. Because when people say literally, they don't mean literally. I literally couldn't believe it. Exactly. Well, no, you could believe it. Yes. Which is the entire point. My friend Alessio, he's Italian and he talks about how he has a

Starting point is 00:07:49 different personality when he's speaking in Italian. The Swedish writer, Henrik Carlson, a friend of mine, he talks about how he can access different thoughts in Swedish rather than English. You speak multiple languages. Yeah, what's Japanese Tim like? A lot more polite. Curses less than Long Island. Are you totally fluid in Japanese?

Starting point is 00:08:12 Yeah, I can speak Japanese. What's the story of learning that? My first international trip, real international trip off of Long Island out of the US was to Japan as an exchange student at 50. for a year. I went from East Coast to Tokyo. And it took him about three weeks just to accept that I was in Japan

Starting point is 00:08:32 because I couldn't believe in. That's how that happened. And it just stuck. I was there for a year. I went to a Japanese school. All of my classes in Japanese. I misunderstood what I was told before getting there, which was you're going to have Japanese lessons.

Starting point is 00:08:48 And I was like, oh, great. I'm like Japanese language lessons. And they're like, here's your class schedule. And I can't read any of this, and they're like, physics, world history. I'm like, wait, what? My lessons are going to be in Japanese. I'm not going to have lessons about it. Wow.

Starting point is 00:09:03 So that will, especially, I was lucky because this was pre-smartphone, internet, not much to speak of. So I could not, coming back to WhatsApp, right? I couldn't procrastinate or avoid learning Japanese by constantly communicating with anyone in English. There was no escape. There was a total emotion. There was no escape. That seems to be, I get it. People go and do.

Starting point is 00:09:24 university courses in Spanish and stuff. And it's not just a language. Sometimes they're learning about the history and the culture and other stuff like that. But if you're trying to learn a language, and I did in school, we have to do at least one language in our GCSEs, typically, the 11 to 16s in the UK. And I did Spanish. And apart from the most basic stuff that I've probably remembered because I've gone back out to the country, I basically learned nothing. It would be, if you just wanted people to learn a language, doing a six-week immersion would, what, teach you maybe the same, as a year of weekly classes? You could do a year in six weeks, no problem.

Starting point is 00:09:58 There's a method called the Michelle Thomas method. And Michelle Thomas, male, was Holocaust survivor, then became an intelligence officer, ended up speaking five or six different languages, and developed a method of getting people up to basic conversational fluency in a week. in a rush in a weekend in terms of giving them the scaffolding of the grammar and so forth

Starting point is 00:10:30 but it's a lot like learning some type of very fine motor skill if you wanted to learn how to play tennis it's like if you're playing once a month you're never going to learn tennis even once a week you're just not getting the density of practice and the reinforcement for you to go

Starting point is 00:10:45 from the like unconscious incompetence to conscious competence to etc etc., right? You're just not getting the proper density. So languages, I think you can learn languages a lot faster as an adult than you can as a kid, actually. Why? Because you already have the base layer of labeling and concepts and so on. And different types of abstraction in the form of, let's just say, grammar or a subjunctive, let's say, if you had a million dollars, what would you do? Like a hypothetical that is counterfactual? these types of things. I can explain that to you. You can't explain that to a three-year-old.

Starting point is 00:11:25 Once the last time we talked to a three-year-old, they're not actually very good at speaking a given language. The reason that people mistakenly believe that kids learn faster is because the kids have no choice. The kids have no mortgage. The kids have no job. It's just like- They're forced into emotion. You have no choice. Have you heard Nassan Talib's description of how to learn language? So the best way to learn Russian is to go into a Russian jail. I mean, that's a harsh That's a harsh trade Like that's a dead scenario

Starting point is 00:11:57 You have to really want to learn in Russia But you will, you will not Do you think, can you think in Japanese, Tim? Yeah, I would say that there's Typically an English interface But when I was in Japan for a year And then came back to the US It took me about a month to get back

Starting point is 00:12:14 To speaking English normally Like I remember the first few days when my mom would come in and wake me up and I would just start speaking to her in Japanese in this days and it took a while to get back to things. The Soon is pretty funny, the etymology of that

Starting point is 00:12:31 and it makes me wonder if the vein, much like let's say Eskimos in snow or Hawaiians and water or whatever that it depends on the historical punctuality of a culture. You're going to say that the Italians have got five words for soon?

Starting point is 00:12:47 Well, I think it probably is something like that, right? Because in Japan, it's like, now is now. There is no second, third, fourth way to say it, unless you're maybe being really polite, because the honorifics in Japanese, it's like 12 languages in one if you really want to be sophisticated with it. But I don't know if they do it in the UK, but in South Africa, they have now, then they have now now now. Just like in certain places in Latin America, they have like Aura, like now, and then they have Aorita. Like, aura is kind of like now, but, me, like, when you get around to it, right? Or when I get around to it.

Starting point is 00:13:24 And then, like, Aorita is like, hey, asshole. Now actually. I actually mean it. What do you think is the latest nationality on the planet? Brazil? The latest. Latest. If you were to, I'm going to organize a dinner with somebody, and I can pick a bunch of different nationalities, which one's going to arrive on average last?

Starting point is 00:13:44 I feel like the got like the Olympics, but in reverse. Have you ever heard of Indian standard time? I'm not even sure. It's actually real because it's one hour later than it's actually supposed to start. So it turns out a long time ago, people would go to the movies. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:13:59 And, you know, the movie doesn't start on time, which is absolutely hilarious. Everybody just expects. And then the whole term Indian standard time came about, which is absolutely hilarious, but it's typically referred to as one hour past something is starting. After the actual time.

Starting point is 00:14:13 So I've heard Brazilians refer to Brazilian time also. Oh, what is the, What is the least functional? Anywhere that's got good, I think you can talk about culture and people and stuff like that. But what's more interesting is to just talk about what is the lifestyle of that particular ecosystem. So if you're going to go Spain, Italy, Portugal, they're just, you've got wonderful weather, late nights throughout the summer. Everyone's smoking, having a red wine. You've been a Palmer, Mayorker, or wherever.

Starting point is 00:14:43 And you see people outside sat on wrought iron chairs having a pre-discuit. dinner cigarette at 10.30 p.m. at night. These are old people. They're not going out, oh, this isn't the beginning of them going out to go and party and head to the club afterward. They're not going STK for a nighttime party brunch. So I would say maybe some of the Mediterranean places like that, I guess, as I think further afield, I don't know much about India, but perhaps, neither do I, but it is genealogically. Tim, you know a lot of Denmark. I'm like, oh, wow. I wonder. This is really hippie. crack shit. But this is what we're here for. Now we're getting that. I wonder, it's like that

Starting point is 00:15:22 Safia warp hypotheses of how much... Oh, lost me. That didn't sound. He'll get that. He'll get that. The idea is that it's the Wittgenstein quote of like the limits of my world or the limits of my language. And we think that we shape language, but language shapes us. And it feels immediately like so trivial, so esoteric to have the conversation. Everybody kind of dismisses languages. It's almost like neurolinguistic programming, that we shouldn't take it seriously. But how much the words that we use. So I wonder, obviously, England, Australia, America, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa share this English ancestry. But how much then that they have the same language keeps the culture similar as well, versus if you fork the language, do you change? I don't know, man. If you go and meet a South African, you compare them to a Scottish person, they're quite different.

Starting point is 00:16:10 So it's true. I'd both angry. Both very angry. So there you go. And we had this at my birth. It was in the middle of nowhere. I didn't realize the spectrum exists when it comes to how people think as well. So we had my friend Billy and my friend Cameron. And Billy can't think visually at all. So he can only think in words. Yes. Cameron can't think in words at all.

Starting point is 00:16:34 She can only think visually. And even though there's a test that you can do, imagine an apple in your mind, what level of detail can you see the Apple at? Could you pull that up, Jared? The Apple visual test. the lack of it. I think it's called Afantasia. Yes. Yeah, yeah, Afentasia. How do you guys think? Do you, can you, do you think more in words? Do you think more in visions? Imagine an apple in your mind. What level of detail can you see the apple with? You know, when growing up, there was like this whole people with like, people with the visual memories or whatever, they would just like look at something and then effectively recite, you know, idetic. 50, 50 word. Adetic is what people think of is photographic. Yeah. The photographic's done. So Billy, for example, would be number five. Yeah, he could, he would just think the word apple.

Starting point is 00:17:18 Yeah. Fascinating. And then the, uh, Cameron could see the apple. But if you asked her to create that, to see the word, the word apple in her mind, she couldn't do it at all. I asked her how does she count in her head? And she said it's stairs. She literally visualizes stairs. It's a fucking nightmare. I mean, I would, I'm by about 10 out that direction. Oh, wow. Really?

Starting point is 00:17:41 Super hyper visual memory. Like, I can remember almost every floor. plan of every restaurant I've ever been in. What's the most like if I mean, I'm not, I'm not trying to store that. So 1010 where we went for dinner the other evening, can you remember the table? Yeah. What was on the table? I don't remember the name of the number of the table, but it's like the server door was directed to our left, right?

Starting point is 00:18:05 We were effectively the last booth at the edge. The bar was to my right, near it was to my left here, right? you were here, sort of at my like 2 o'clock. So we ordered way too much etymame. No, no, no, no, we ordered the right amount of edamame, which is too much edamame. It's just the only amount of edamame that's appropriate. It depends on how many gallons of oil you like on your edamomime. It's true.

Starting point is 00:18:32 I think salted edamame, when you start to try and spice up edamame too much, it ruins it. But here's what I would say, just to quickly put something to this. I don't want people to feel badly if they can't. go out a few standard deviations towards like the hyper, like hyponnesia, right, the opposite of amnesia. Because when you have, my dad has this as well, really exaggerated development of certain types of memory, it can make it really hard to let go of grievances.

Starting point is 00:19:03 Wow. Slights against you. The email that you sent that ended up, whatever it is, right? You'll add as well. There is an advantage. there are some tremendous advantages to forgetting. And so when you're not as selective, you could argue it's almost counter-revolutionary

Starting point is 00:19:23 past a certain point to have an overly developed memory, I would say. Yeah, I think I can recall, like, one of the things that I was talking to somebody about was that I have vivid face recognition, like almost like the face ID type situation. And I can remember faces that I've seen only one time 15 years ago. The problem is this becomes socially awkward.

Starting point is 00:19:49 Oftentimes you meet somebody. It's a massive asymmetry. Right. And you're like, I know everything about you because we'd met once and this was 10 years ago. But you can't really bring that up. Okay, do you freak? Yeah, it's like it's very creepy.

Starting point is 00:20:02 You sound like a stalker. Exactly, but I did not research them. Similarly with quotes and visuals, I think I personally have a very, very vivid, like visual element and I can probably look at something once, and then 10 years later, if you quiz me, I would probably get about 90% of that crap.

Starting point is 00:20:19 That's wild. Do you want to tell the story? But the forgetting part is crazy. Do you want to tell the story about the first elevator we ever got into together? Oh my God, yes. I actually, I think there was a new appointment of an Xbox CEO, and she was like, I made a tweet about it.

Starting point is 00:20:36 I was like, wait, she doesn't really have any experience with gaming. And then Chris and I were in, elevator and turns out she was there. Well, you're leaving out one critical footnote. That tweet was not seen by two people. It was millions. Millions of people saw you call out the Xbox CEO. We get into.

Starting point is 00:20:57 I was just simply remarking about culture in the way that people frame this because it's a unique development. But I put my foot in it. I put my foot in it. Yeah. That was hilarious. I'm trying to big up my friend who recognizes the Xbox CEO. It goes, hey, you're the CEO of Xbox.

Starting point is 00:21:13 There's some unassuming lady, dressed real nice, had maybe a partner or security or something with her. I'm like, you identify it correctly, and she sort of sheepishly is like, yeah, yeah, I am, that's me. And I think you introduced herself. She was very nervous about it. A little, yes, she was sheepish about it, which was quite charming. And she was the actual CEO.

Starting point is 00:21:30 I was like, wait, that person's usually just like so into it or whatever. And I said, well, you should, you, it's a signal on, on X. You must, he's fantastic writer, and all the rest of this stuff. There is a 100% chance that she saw your tweet. And immediately as soon as I said that, the fucking atmosphere in the elevator went frosty as hell. It was, look, nothing against her personally. I tried to do something nice for a friend.

Starting point is 00:21:55 It was wonderful. It came back to buy you. No, and that has happened multiple times. I think going back to Tim's point about the forgetting part, I think about this a lot, which is, what a great feature of the mind in some sense. Like, the forgetting part. Like, I think about AI memory. You know, today it's so easy to build, like, tell AI to extract some fact and try to remember it and we store it somewhere and then you basically use it for some other thing. It's very common people are doing it.

Starting point is 00:22:24 How do you forget AI? How does, like, an AI forget memory? There's no pruning. Yeah, and like, how do you think about the world with respect to, you know, building sort of artificial memory constraints, just like the human mind? And the forgetting part is such an essential element. Like that is no longer relevant or that is not important at the moment. The AI systems don't really know that. And so when you pass in a bunch of these memories into context, which is what a lot of these companies do, turns out you get a lot of noise.

Starting point is 00:22:58 And it tries to make these connections. That's what it's like to be, Tim. There you go. Well, if people want a real exaggerated case of not forgetting. There's an old book called The Mind of a Neimanist, like mnemonic device, The Mind of Anemus by A.J. Luria, which is effectively an extended case study of someone who never forgets. And there are other ways to look at it.

Starting point is 00:23:22 I think there's a dot called Brain Man about Daniel Dennett. I think I'm getting that right. Yeah. The atheist? You know what? The Dennett, I might be mixing it up with the philosopher who passed away, but it's something very close to that. But people can look up Brayman. British.

Starting point is 00:23:39 I taught George yesterday about savant syndrome. You know what this is? So there was a famous case of a guy called Thomas McHugh, a British guy. So in his early years, he was in a youth prison, was a bit of a disruptor, kind of a hooligan type guy. And he's in his 50s, early 50s. And on the bathroom, he shits himself so aggressively that he causes an an urinary, like a blood explosion in his brain. and then as he's on the floor, he's terrified that someone's going to find him with his pants around his ankles.

Starting point is 00:24:12 So he tries to pull his pants up and causes another one to go off, completely like pops both sides of his brain, wakes up in the hospital a few days later, and turns into a obsessive painter who can only speak in rhyme and paints between three or six or nine paintings at any one time, paints for 19 hours a day, and couldn't bear to think about suffering.

Starting point is 00:24:35 So it sort of sweep the steps in front of him as he was like some Buddhist guy He just had a total come to art moment But yeah, shot himself so aggressively That he had acquired savant syndrome I think if you're a great athlete, for example You gotta you gotta learn how to forget You guys know about yips like in baseball and other places

Starting point is 00:24:55 So it turns out you know what is the yep It's like typically you know you make an error Or you do something egregiously wrong in sports Everybody's watching Right. And then you sort of had this phantom reaction or whatever, and then that continuously happens. And Yips is it is like somebody throwing that ball and, you know, there's some famous players that have dealt with this problem. And it turns out, you know, you got to forget.

Starting point is 00:25:22 Yeah. You got to forget. So it's like a conditioned hesitancy or flinch or flinch getting in your own way. Involuntary potential reaction. But I'm not quite sure how it relates to, you know, the memory aspect of it. But ultimately, when you're a great athlete, you watch a game tape afterwards, you're like, okay, I process it. And then you have to discard that. You learn from it and you move on.

Starting point is 00:25:46 Do you guys see the Mark Andresen stuff about retard maxing? Retard maxing. Yep. That, I think, component-wise, I asked Huberman. How many times does that word say? Huberman, if he's personally threatened by the retard-maxing movement. What are you saying? I think he is.

Starting point is 00:26:03 I think he partially is. His entire career has been built on anti-retard maxing. And there's a lot of these people who have like, you know, they have a set of context. I don't know why I referred everything like this. And then they sort of keep it around. But it's super valuable to discard some of that stuff because ultimately, none of that really matters. I think Sam Harris, all this stuff.

Starting point is 00:26:25 No, go, go, go, go. No, I think it was just really interesting. The present matters the most. people tend to focus on the future a lot more anxiety, the worries or whatever. And then they marry that with the past. And I think this is one of the things I personally am like, how do I live in the moment, think about what matters and focus on a few things. Whilst learning from my experience.

Starting point is 00:26:49 Exactly. But you learn from it, but you don't dwell on it. You don't ruminate on it. You don't. I think people, I had to move neighborhoods from a breakup. because every time I walked around, I could vividly feel the moments that occurred in that place. From a coffee shop to, I don't know, like a flower shop to a restaurant.

Starting point is 00:27:13 A dog that you regularly see with a walk in a restaurant. I'm like, I sat there. You know, this person was next to me. I knew exactly what we talked about. I knew exactly how that moment ended. And I could replay that every. Every single time I took another step. Dude, one of the best stories I've heard about this is from Alain de Botton,

Starting point is 00:27:33 and he's describing being in Paris, and it's an early summer day, beautiful weather outside, a little cloudy, a little bit of sun, and it's sort of late afternoon, classic European fashion. This French couple are sat around a small table, wrought iron chairs, and they've got a couple of espressos, and they're just so deeply in love. Young couple, sort of maybe mid-20s, something like that. He's got this line, he says, I looked at them and realized that this beautiful memory would be one of the greatest

Starting point is 00:28:00 sources of pain to one of these people if the relationship ever ended. It's strange that this thing that at the time is really, really wonderful actually becomes the thing that's kind of the, I'm never going to Paris again. I'm fucking moving to Rome or whatever it is because I need to totally change my context. And that's also the same when it comes to phones, right? I tried to stop using my phone and this still kind of works. I just changed the pocket that I put it in because I realized that for an entire decade

Starting point is 00:28:29 I'd had my phone in my right pocket and like a speed shooter withdrawing his firearm I would just mindlessly put my hand in my pocket the number of times that I pulled my wallet out when I changed it to look at my wallet it's just habitual, it's just this obsessive sort of routine. You guys know about this phantom vibrations?

Starting point is 00:28:48 So it turns out people have their phone on their pocket, right? And I went to a meditation retreat. and no phones, just meditation. And I felt vibrations. I didn't even have my phone in my pocket. Do you have a vibrator? Two of them. That might have been my dildo.

Starting point is 00:29:09 But no, like these... We don't call that meditation retreat where I'm from. Fair enough. What does body blue call? Yeah, yeah, yeah, true. Tuesday. It was really interesting. It turns out, I googled it.

Starting point is 00:29:19 It turns out that's actually a real thing. People feel phantom. vibrations from their phone. You can go check it out. And I was like, wow, your body's so tuned to this over every time you get a notification, every time you get whatever. And most people have their phone on silent now. So the vibration is really like a thing with the haptych. Pavlovianly programmed yourself. Pretty much. To expect this thing to happen. So like this, this sort of device is now a potential part of your, the way that you sort of feel and understand the world. In this case, kind of like a touch type sense. But

Starting point is 00:29:52 It was remarkable. And I went down the rabbit hole and I looked at it. And I was like, wow, this is not just me. Yep. There's so many individuals. It, like you said, if I move my phone in my pocket, the other pocket, the other one will completely vibrate. Yeah. All the time?

Starting point is 00:30:07 My wallet's going to be vibrating. Yeah, exactly. I mean, for some people, that might be a feature. Again, true. Wow. Before we continue, most people in their 30s are still training hard. Their protein is dialed in. They sleep better than they did in their 20s.

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Starting point is 00:31:31 the ability to remember everything being a bad idea, I think a lot of these conversations, rather than a light switch, it's more dimmer. And different people, different occasions it will be good and bad for. Because a lot of people look at us being able to remember everything now, very similar to when writing came along. So before writing, we couldn't store any information down. So that completely changed us. But I always think of, so do you guys know, I forgot on the name of Grenfell Tower in the UK.

Starting point is 00:32:02 Have you heard about what Grenfell Tower is? So it's kind of, it's one of the biggest tragedies that's ever happened in the UK where a council estate, which will be the equivalent of your projects, was poorly designed, set on fire. Can you get a photo of it up? Lodes of people.

Starting point is 00:32:18 Jared Grenfell Tower. Loads of people burned alive in it. And it was a huge, like, government inquiry, how are we going to fix it? What we're going to change about it? And what was the crazy thing about the day was that as this building was on fire, kind of like 9-11, a baby was picked up on the news, was dropped from the top floor. Look at that. So a baby was picked up from the top floor and dropped and somebody caught it. And it was this kind of miracle in this, like, horrific day that happened.

Starting point is 00:32:46 And it got reported everywhere. five different eyewitnesses. And about six months later, after the emotion of the event settled down, a few physicists started looking at it and going, well, hold on. That baby had hundreds of feet in the air. If we just ran the map here, it would just disintegrate on the catch. And as soon as they started to inquire like the eyewitness testimony, it was a completely hallucinated memory. So on the one hand, the ability to store memories will mean that we can't let go of sudden things, but it may also mean that we let go of complete fictions that we're telling ourselves that never happened. Or that we would invent them as well, right? Because if you're Tim,

Starting point is 00:33:26 your recollection of the flames is, you know, in 4K, but the mirage of a baby being thrown out. You know, the terminal velocity of a cat is non-fatal? What do you mean? I can't say it any other way. There's only one. If I drop a cat from any distance, the speed that it reaches when it hits the ground, on average is non-fatal. So it doesn't... I'm going to... Surely not. I'm going to just raise an eyebrow. Ask chat GPT. A cat's terminal velocity depends on its size, body position. Yeah, whatever. Estimated thermal velocity is about 60 miles an hour. Some studies and veterinary analysis place it between... Okay, so see, look, see, depends on posture. So if you've got... Got a cat. Around five to seven stories. Yeah, okay. I mean, that's higher up than I would expect.

Starting point is 00:34:13 Some cats survive because they reach terminal velocity. Stop accelerating, relax and then orient themselves for impact. Look, it's trying to caveat, like, basically, am I okay to throw a cat out of a window? That's what ChatchipT thinks I'm doing. Now, this is one of those cases when somebody's like, you know, when people die, they release DMT from their brains. And I'm like, how would you know that, though? Like, who, which family is consented to have some scientists to be like, I know. this is a hard moment, but let me like tap your grandma's brain. And this is like, you're terminal velocity of a cat.

Starting point is 00:34:45 No, but I'm saying injuries often increase up to around five to seven stories. Like I just want to know. But beyond seven stories. Where in like Sierra Leone, they're like, okay, let's take these 40 cats and drop them. Just put it into one of those t-shirts. Five, 10, 50 stories. T-shirt fireers that they set. Yeah, yeah, a t-shirt cannon that they've got in.

Starting point is 00:35:02 What's the high is the cats fat? Yeah. Speaking of hallucinating, I just want a fact check myself. Uh, Daniel T-M-M-M-E-T. Carelessly close. All right. What'd you bring to the table? Hallucinating is really fascinating subject,

Starting point is 00:35:13 so people talk about AI hallucinations. Now we're in my... Oh, sorry, sorry, hold on. This is... We're still going. The highest reliably documented fall survived by a cat is generally believed to be 32 stories.

Starting point is 00:35:23 Sabrina in New York City, 1987, she fell from the 32nd floor of a skyscraper, survived through the chip tooth, collapsed lung, and minor chest injuries. After treatment, she reportedly recovered fully. Dude, telling me, terminal velocity of a cat, non-fatal.

Starting point is 00:35:36 They're able to slow themselves down, right? effectively. Like a parachute, ish. I mean, sure. I mean, they're not flying squirrels. Wow. This is remarkable. What did I get you with the other day? It was when we were talking about the fact that if a man doesn't have a girlfriend, the way that he behaves between 7 p.m. and 11 p.m. at night can only be destructive. And I told a friend about this. Unless there's the internet. Well, even with the internet, it's still destructive, right? Because you're just embedding bad habits and doom scrolling and it's all bullshit. self-destructive, I suppose.

Starting point is 00:36:10 However, I asked a friend about this and he said, yeah, so my buddy was single and I'm in a relationship. And apparently at like 8.30 p.m. at night, he would just receive photos of his friend headstanding. Just like selfies of him doing headstands. What could go wrong? All right, Nirav, what have you brought? Come on. Give me some. I think the hallucination thing is really fascinating.

Starting point is 00:36:33 People have this debate on AI hallucinations and there's a bunch of these topics that are written in Andred Karpofi. has written a bunch of this stuff. And it turns out, you know, humans hallucinate as well. Almost all the features of AI today that exist. They exist in humans in some way, shape, or form. And people are often really baffled by it, right? They hate the hallucinations. I think of them as more of like just a replication of the human mind and how it works.

Starting point is 00:37:00 And it turns out people hallucinate memories all the time. People manipulate memories. In fact, if you look at things in the past, you're a feeling. effectively removing you remember often fond memories or really painful stuff. The middle kind of fades away oftentimes. I'm curious to get your thoughts on this,

Starting point is 00:37:18 Tim, about like, I think about this a lot because for our product, we have to like make sure these things are low and context is there. Don't explain what you do? We're building kind of, you know, today the iPhone is kind of a, when you look at it,

Starting point is 00:37:32 when you go for glance, people always tap on apps, and then you have to go and pull whatever you need to know. We're kind of building a layer on devices that is kind of glanceable information directly on your home screen. That's entirely processed by AI, what you might want to know right now, or things might be important to you. And the idea of intelligence today, as it exists, it's much more, I'm going to go ask it a question, create this giant prompt, do all this stuff. And, you know, basically you have to do the

Starting point is 00:38:05 heavy lifting where we try to do the heavy lifting for you by making that presentation layer directly on your home screen that sort of understands what's happening already in the background and surfaces it when you need to know it. So it's kind of an agentic home screen for your iPhone. Turns out the iPhone home screen hasn't changed in 20 years. You're roughly using the same device, the same thing. Widgets, I guess. Yeah. And they're underutilized. I think we use them in a creative way. And so, like, you know, we're not going to go. We're like two people, three people. So we can't really build a device. We can't really invest hard course.

Starting point is 00:38:38 So we have to operate in the application layer and utilize all the things that are affordances that the OS exposes to us as developers. So creatively, we sort of build this experience. And we're a few weeks old, pretty awesome. But it's been so much fun to be able to think about the way that ambient AI will really work. Imagine you go into a room.

Starting point is 00:39:03 There's a screen. has presence detection, knows who you are, what you might want to see or know or do, if you wake up at the morning. These are the things that will kind of light up over time. And so, like, this stuff might be in your life persistently if you want to with your permission. Have you thought about what to call it? It feels like sort of context dependent. Ambient AI is good. Ambien AI is lovely. Geordie as well, AI. Ambient AI.

Starting point is 00:39:30 AI. AI. We need to have. But I think, I don't know if the terminology is there. it turns out all the terminology that exists in the past, right? You know, the hashtags of Twitter and whatnot are invented by their users. And people are like, oh, we should call it that. Bottom up, not top down. Yeah, exactly.

Starting point is 00:39:44 We're still waiting for a fucking name for this series on the podcast. Do you think the future user interfaces are the glasses that everybody predicts? Because my, I was thinking the other day as somebody who has zero experience in designing hardware or products, that the, I think the future is probably the airport case, where you put the AirPods in. And I heard, I saw a tweet the other day. that Apple have just patented cameras at the edge of the AirPods

Starting point is 00:40:08 so it could feasibly pick up the visual information heater and then with this little box that you have you could be speaking to this device you could even have like a little projection screen here yeah so we're not always on these screens

Starting point is 00:40:20 we just had the little airport case ears in and then the box here one of the problems you have with the hardware is that you need some processing power that's outside of it that was the hardcore I mean you had an Apple Vision Pro before you send it back yes

Starting point is 00:40:32 and you need if you're going to have something on your face or something that's wearable, you need to think about ergonomics and weight, and that means you need to send the processing off to a different location. I don't know. I mean, you're right that VR's really not delivered, I think. There's always, it's going to the next thing, we're going to wait for the more, it'd be comfortable, the slim line down, whatever.

Starting point is 00:40:56 You think? Yeah. How long? Until what? What would be a good, like, not quite Turing tests? Okay, so like the sort of level of penetration that we've seen with... Now we're talking. With AI or with, like, pick any sort of normal device.

Starting point is 00:41:15 But AI, AI would be good. Yeah, depth of penetration. New series. Very shallow. Very shallow. Why, though? Like that. I don't know, like half a billion or a billion users of either one product or a category of product

Starting point is 00:41:31 that has something to do with... That type of mass adoption. is a high bar, but I would say getting to the point where people actually enjoy, let's just call it thousands of people spending hours a day using some type of lightweight VR AI, strongly AI native system, three years, maybe less. I've seen some shit that's made by meta that blew my fucking mind to their next after the next set of glasses. And that was, like, absolutely wild to be able to see that.

Starting point is 00:42:10 They're still clunky and dorky, right? But over the time that they're building this out to get it down to the form factor that you need. But I mean, these things, wherever, those things are like, they're really good. The best thing about those, not an ad, best thing about those is the fact that you can take a photo or a video without using your phone. You know, there was that famous video, was it? The chandelizze on New Year's Eve, maybe 2023. And I swear it's just this street of people. and all you can see the entire thing is just phone screens from behind,

Starting point is 00:42:42 looking at the thing you're supposed to be looking at. And it is just phone screens. Ridiculous. Well, I would, you heard about me at the Louvre? Have I told you this story? So I had these on at the Louvre in Paris, being a sophisticated individual that I am. So I had these on, and everybody was just looking at people's feet under the, under the bathroom stalls.

Starting point is 00:43:01 George collects feet. So that's, uh, you can, you can, you can buy them. It's no longer permit. You can't really have eye contact with people in the Western culture because it's like whatever. So people are always looking down on their feet. And that's where George comes in. Here it is.

Starting point is 00:43:18 So I had this experience at the Mona Lisa in the loop. So everybody was there with their phones taking a photo. But I had these glasses on. But the problem is because the Mona Lisa is so small and I'm so far back. My girlfriend now has a photo of me. So there's loads of people taking a photo of the Mona Lisa. And then there's me with my glasses in the air. I'll get the photo.

Starting point is 00:43:37 It's horrific. It's horrific. It is nice, though, to be able to record something without taking yourself out of the moment. And I think just that, you know, the, oh, I don't like the battery life or this thing, or they're still a little bit clunky. Or I don't usually wear glasses or whatever. Like, I get it, I get it, I get it. But the opportunity to be able to just take a photo or a video without having to feel like, oh, I'm back on this screen that I hate. I'm back in this digital environment that kind of just compresses my memory down into one time of me being on this screen. Most people don't realize how much being dehydrated impacts their performance, which is why for the last

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Starting point is 00:45:12 It's going to be very difficult to do this. I got a business card or a scan for like business purpose is fine. For me, taking photos doesn't get in the way of my life anywhere near as much as just the ambient pinging and navigating of the digital device itself. the photos I'm in and out I have seen some marathon photo sessions being taken at sunset I went to somewhere on Long Island I can't quite remember where there was a beautiful sunset happening over a lake and 15 16 17 year old skull group it was like it was a endurance sport of photo taking okay that's something else like that's kind of almost

Starting point is 00:45:59 pathological. But for me, it's, I don't know, what about you? Do you think it would make a market difference to your life if you couldn't take photos or videos for six months? I think it's a useful thought exercise. I would suspect it be better. I mean, I have not had any real photographic memory. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I can train people to have better visual memory. Okay, can we do it? What was that? Can you? It's not like a, you know, it's not like an Pearlman like 60 second bang, you know, it's not one of those. But what's the eight, like, what's the Pareto, like basics to get better at a visual memory? Start producing.

Starting point is 00:46:35 So I would have people to get a book like drawing with the right side of the brain, which is a bit of a misnomer in the way that it lateralizes things, you know, hemispherically. But if you practice, for instance, this is one tool in the toolkit, right? Practice drawing. And for instance, right, if I had a, a, flower and a vase on this table, which would be not the most compelling way to get someone to draw, but we're all passionate drawing. What you would notice with most people

Starting point is 00:47:04 is that they look at the flower, they go down to draw it, and they start drawing their mental concept of a flower. They're not actually referring to the thing in front of them. And then there are different tricks you could use. For instance, if even right now, as we sit in Austin, Texas, bright outside could have you look at a tree, tree or a bush around here, sit down. I'd be like, okay, draw that, but I want you to only start with the black parts. And you'd be like, but it's a bright day. It's a green thing. I'm like,

Starting point is 00:47:36 look again. And you'd be like, oh, shit, there are actually black parts. Okay, we'll start with that. And as you start to do that, or depending on where you are, it's like, when most people walk through, say, I mean, in Austin, it's easy because it's like cedar tree, juniper ash, oak, like, that's it. I mean, I'm being a little facetious, There's not as much tree diversity as in other places. But if all you see is, quote unquote, trees, it's like, okay, well, let me just teach you. It's also subject dependent, right? Like the six most common trees in upstate New York, Austin, wherever it might be.

Starting point is 00:48:11 And all of a sudden, instead of just seeing trees, you start to differentiate. Right. So all of those, it's partially visual acuity dependent. It's partially attentionally dependent so that you're referencing something. as opposed to referring to your concept of tree, table, person, whatever it might be. And then there's kind of a label dependency, right? How fine-tuned or fine-slice is your ability within a given domain, right?

Starting point is 00:48:41 So if you were doing like live gesture drawing, which I think is a great way to practice drawing, and there are a number of places around Austin, and a lot of places where you can do live gesture drawing, you'd have a model in front of the room. It's not always going to be a hot naked chick. I hate to break it to you guys. sometimes it's going to be like obese naked dude but that's fine and they would start with say five

Starting point is 00:49:02 minute poses or they might start with like one minute poses typically that start with like very short poses so you can't over analyze or intellectualize what you are doing you have to keep your hand moving and then they would go to longer and longer held poses and you'd be shocked how much your visual memory improves if you do that and you are not constant self-interrupting. So for me, I mean, I don't have any social media on this phone. I haven't for a couple of years. I do not think I've sacrificed one iota of quote-unquote being informed at all. I don't have vibrate on. I do not have ring on, which can produce some funny, like, death spirals of people trying to, like, call one another, but neither person has the phone ringing.

Starting point is 00:49:48 But I also think, you know, there's some data to suggest that if people have fewer mirrors in their homes, they are generally self-report as being happier. This is a mirror, right? This is the black mirror. So I just, I feel like the less you look at this thing, haven't run a study on this, but I would bet a healthy chunk of change. I just think the less you interact with this, the better, especially given how prevalent fake feeds are. It's just like the machine is an illusion, most of it.

Starting point is 00:50:17 Did you guys see that quote where, I think this philosopher, I forgot the name, but it was like, man was never meant to have a mirror? self-reflection like that is detrimental in some ways. You wouldn't have known what we looked like until Jared, can you find out when mirrors were invented? You would know with water. Yeah, you would go to the pond, for example, and look at your

Starting point is 00:50:40 like Achilles. Like Achilles. Their nature. Or narcissists. This is why, like, if you look in animals, for a variety of reasons, obviously, with intelligence or whatever, but they're often very baffled by their presence in the mirror. And now we're looking at ourselves more often than ever before. The selfie cameras effectively changed the dynamics of everything.

Starting point is 00:51:01 During COVID, there was something called Zoom Face. It was a marked increase in people getting cosmetic surgery because they were seeing themselves more. Because they were spending so many hours on. Now there's AI filters on Google Meet and Zoom. I want my skin smoothing for my interview. Exactly. You would add makeup or whatever. Going back to your point about the photographic memory thing,

Starting point is 00:51:20 which I don't have, to be clear. I know I know people who can do this And then Ten minutes later read it back to you From memory That is photographic memory I don't have that You know that game you used to play as a kid

Starting point is 00:51:35 When somebody would draw on your back And you'd have to figure out what they'd do you? It was actually a really interesting skill building game Because then you'd have to effectively imagine Different senses coming together So you feel what somebody's drawing Whether it's a flower or a mountain or a sun or whatever always a penis.

Starting point is 00:51:53 And if you're exactly the first also a good podcast name. Always a penis. That game was a remarkable. All roads lead to penis maybe. I know you like the Roman Empire.

Starting point is 00:52:07 I was just double checking then about the history of the mirror. Can I say how much I live how you say double? I can't even fucking say it. God, it adds like at least seven IQ points. I'm from I'm from Rothschedell originally, Tim.

Starting point is 00:52:20 And whenever you're in the UK, Yeah, it's a big tourist scene. You'd love it. I'll take you that. You'd love it. You'd love it. What is that? The mirror. So the mirror, that we had the creation of the mirror. But I, as part of AI, coming bigger and bigger, I've been going down like old revolution. So the Industrial Revolution and the Guttenberg, printing press revolution. So Guttenberg, when he was creating the printing press, he was originally trying to create, I think, a mirror machine and accidentally or ended up morphing into what became the printing press. Wait, what the hell is a mirror machine? That makes mirrors? Yeah, so, here you go. So, around...

Starting point is 00:52:58 I don't know how you get from that to the printing. 1438 to 14... He grind sand to make mirrors. 39. Guttenberg was in Strasbourg running a partnership to mass produce pilgrim mirrors, small polish metal badges that pilgrims pin to their hats

Starting point is 00:53:10 to catch holy rays, radiating from relics, then carried home to benefit relatives. I like that idea. It's like a capacitor for religious goodwill. So his capital was running out to appease investors. Guttenberg said he would share a secret with them, art and adventure,

Starting point is 00:53:27 research that was the basis for his yet to be built printing press. That's cool. Wow. Nice. All right, Tim, you must have some heaters. What have you brought from home? Show me something. Yeah, I've got something.

Starting point is 00:53:37 This is an article. I've got a bunch of stuff, but I'm going to take kind of a slight left turn. It's related to a lot of the stuff we're talking about, but this caught my attention. It's an article called Riding the Leopard by Pachy McCormick. And it was sent to me.

Starting point is 00:53:56 I had never read anything of his. And this was sent to me a few days ago by someone adjacent to one of the top AI technologists out there, which is part of what makes it interesting. So I'll just, I'll read a couple of sections here. and then I want to get your sense and thoughts on things. So what are we to get to talk to a room of technology people? This is a transcribed talk that package you. Sierra just raised at 15 billion. Anthropic crossed a 44 billion run rate and launched a new company with some huge

Starting point is 00:54:33 funds that have $1.5 billion to deploy, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, opening eye did the same thing, but with $4 billion, blah, blah, blah, this billion, that billion. All of which raises an important question. Who gives a shit? I mean that. Why do we care? And then it goes down and he says, last night, a woman, who reads my newsletter, reached out over substact DM.

Starting point is 00:54:50 She said she'd been diagnosed with stage four cancer. She's down on remission. She'd been confronted with the question we've all been facing. What happens to human purpose when AI removes scarcity? Or in her case, the need to be productive. To answer it, this is the interesting part, right? She analyzed more than 200 sci-fi books. Across all of these books, by far the most common thing left to solve for post-scarcity is meaning.

Starting point is 00:55:11 59% of books were about the search for meaning. Identity was next at 17%. And then it goes on. And, you know, there are questions. If new technology is so great, why are so many people unhappy? If we have means, our ancestors couldn't have dreamed of, why is there a meaning crisis? And then it quotes Holocaust survivor, Victor Frankel, who wrote, The truth is that as the struggle for survival has subsided, the question has emerged.

Starting point is 00:55:40 Survival for what? Evermore people today have the means to live, but no meaning to live. for. And ultimately in the piece, he ends up talking about, he really goes out there. Well, I would bet that dear Packy has done a fair amount of drugs. But, and that's meant as a compliment, Paci, if you hear this. But we get into non-duality. We get into differentiation as moral obligation. But I want to explain the origin of the name of the piece riding the leopard. And it's from Joseph Campbell. And effectively, he's talking about the hero's journey. And, I'll I'll read two parts and then I'll stop. But the goal of the hero trip down to the jewel point is to find those levels in the psyche that open, open, open, and finally open to the mystery of yourself being Buddha consciousness or the Christ.

Starting point is 00:56:27 That's the journey. It's all about finding that still point in your mind where commitment drops away. The separateness apparent in the world is secondary. Beyond that world of opposites is an unseen but experienced unity and identity in us all. All right. Then this is the wellspring of the name of the piece. you must return with the bliss and integrate it. The return is seeing the radiance everywhere. The goal is to live with godlike composure on the full rush of energy like Dionysus riding the leopard

Starting point is 00:56:55 without being torn to pieces. And it goes on. It's worth reading. It does get a little squirly later on. But what I'm curious about is how you guys think about, if you do, solving for meaning. because I tend to skew, I wouldn't say dystopian, but hyper-vigilant and have a lot of concern for the next five, ten years. Not just with AI, but with the reaction to AI, right? So it's one thing if AI, quote-unquote, takes jobs, but if everyone fears it is going to take jobs,

Starting point is 00:57:34 there are consequences of that and of itself, right? But I'm wondering how you guys think about or solve for meaning. And I'll just add one more thing, which is, actually, no, I'll save it. I'll park that for maybe injecting a little later. How do you guys think about it? You know, one thing that comes in mind, this is the weirdest thing, by the way, which is, I like aviation. And there's, this is all going to connect, which is, you know, turns out airplanes crash only because there's multiple systems that go wrong, whatever. And the reason why that came to mind to him

Starting point is 00:58:10 was that a captain has a decision to make when something bad happens. How much do you communicate what happened to the passengers? Like, what do you say? Do you're like, hey, you know, we've lost hydraulics, we've lost stuff, you know, multiple systems are wrong, whatever, completely transparent, you freed people out. Do you not share enough information?

Starting point is 00:58:30 People are like, oh, what's going on? Why is it turbulent? How does that marry to AI? the people who are building these systems, how much do they communicate what they think are things that might change about the future, things that might have a turbulent nature to them.

Starting point is 00:58:48 And that is a delicate art, which is, you know, you see Dario going on pods and saying stuff like software engineering solved, you know, software will be free. Once that happens, you know, you get these ripple effects, whatnot, all the stuff happens. and there's other people who are like much more optimistic about the world, which is like, hey, you know what?

Starting point is 00:59:10 Every revolution has created jobs. Certainly it has eliminated them, but we've progressed. And so it's really fascinating. I think this is an interesting environment where people are like, how much do you, even as a lot of researchers in San Francisco, for example, really believe that we've solved almost every problem, roughly, that the dominoes will fall very quickly from here on now. If you have AI, self-correcting, self-researching, you get to AGI, what happens? How do you solve personally? How do you think of it, meaning? If you do it, this is not a, this is not like a prejudgment either. I'm like, what? You don't think about meaning. You crass capitalists. I tend not to, I'm not a planner.

Starting point is 00:59:55 Too much. You know, I think planning is good in some sense, but also kind of detrimental. it occupies bandwidth that would otherwise be more useful for now. I think people tend to live in the future a little bit more than they should. Are you religious? What was that? Are any of you religious?

Starting point is 01:00:14 No? No. I'd say I'm spiritual, but not necessarily organized religion or whatnot. Welcome to Austin. What's that? Welcome to Austin. We all do a bit of Scientology every night and again, right? Do a bit of Scientology.

Starting point is 01:00:28 You make it sound like weed. Yeah, come on. Come on. We do a bit of science. Did you guys see what Brian Johnson posted yesterday? He was like prayer. He's talking about prayer. He's like, I've been trying to pray more and I don't know what prayer means.

Starting point is 01:00:39 Or I don't know what prayer is. If Brian goes full circle and ends up being a Mormon again, that is going to be. There was a quote tweet exactly like this. He's like, turns out the answer to everything is just Jesus Christ. Honestly, dude. Or longevity or whatever. There was a funny comment. I mean, I think Brian, that's an interesting one coming from Brian.

Starting point is 01:00:57 I would actually love to talk to him about that more than a lot of the biohacking, given his history. Brian's a sweet. I like Brian. There was a comment, though. They said, wait, let me get this straight. Brian left Mormonism. Now he's telling us we can't drink alcohol.

Starting point is 01:01:11 We can't drink caffeine. I thought that was pretty good. But, okay, so what is this? And again, I don't want to be labor with this, but I actually really want to know from you guys, like how you think, if you think about it. I guess there's a few different parts, I know a lot of uber successful people

Starting point is 01:01:32 who can logic and debate their way through the labyrinth of intellectuals around them who have lots of money who are ready to fucking jump off a cliff like that stuff doesn't seem to it. And do you think that that would be stopped if they had more meaning? You think the reason that they would jump off a cliff

Starting point is 01:01:47 is because of that lack of meaning? I think that that is one large contributor. Hmm. And there's a difference like there, yes, there's a loneliness epidemic, but solving for loneliness doesn't solve for meaning. So, this is, there's quite a lot of strands I'm going to like unpack. Chess is an interesting one, right?

Starting point is 01:02:10 The AI can be any human being at chess, but human beings still play chess. Magnus Carlson seems to have a very enjoyable time playing chess. And go on. There's an interesting anecdote there that we, this idea that, oh, it's going to take away everything. it's therefore humans won't have any purpose yet it's seemingly better than everybody at chess yet chess is still popular and people are still doing it the big thing for me i mean and the question i'm asking is not whether a i will remove meaning it's more like forget it but let's we could strip a i don't completely i'm just curious like how you guys think about it if you do so the

Starting point is 01:02:47 i think we've discussed it when i've been in this chair before but the idea of the precautionary principle so the precautionary principle is human beings have a very very very very good time time at forecasting problems, but we have a very, very difficult time of forecasting the solutions that will come, because by definition, if we had the solution, therefore there'd be no problem. But you have all these billions of human beings that end up working on this problem. My inevitable thing is, and this is where I feel it's a bit of a straw on argument, if this AI is so intelligent that it's replaced us all, and it's this super god, you'll probably figure out how to give us meaning.

Starting point is 01:03:24 You know what I mean? George feels the argument is a little bit logically. George believes that benevolence comes along with processing power. Yeah, I wouldn't make that last state myself. I know some people like the sort of extremes of techno-optimism would say that. But, you know, the point that Packy makes in his piece, too, is like, most of those arguments tend to at some point land on like, we're going to cure cancer. And it's like, well, at this point, like, he's like there are 8.3 roughly billion people

Starting point is 01:03:49 on the planet who are not going to die of cancer, at least not in the near term. And a lot of them are miserable. So it's like it doesn't, it might solve for certain biotech and health tech. Medical problems. Could it let us understand the brain and then figure out why these people are miserable? This is what I mean around. I'm not even suggesting this is going to be the case. There's just things that we can't even forecast.

Starting point is 01:04:11 I mean, I've done a wonderful Bernie Sanders job of two or three times now, not answering the question of how to you personally think about meaning. I've said Scientology, but you didn't want to listen. That's not me. That's Tim. I've learned from over a thousand podcast episodes that the easier you make your health routine, the more consistent you'll be. It's like golf, right?

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Starting point is 01:05:26 How do you guys, do you guys think this is an active process in people's minds? Meaning creation. Yeah. Like, do people really, like, think about it in that realm? Or is it just a byproduct of existence in some sense? I think if it were a natural byproduct of existence. I, look, I would just say, maybe you see this, maybe you don't. I mean, you guys all interact on the interwebs.

Starting point is 01:05:49 the degree of like apathy and nihilism and foreboding that I think is adjacent or overlapping with a creeping dread of meaninglessness in my audience over the last five years is fucking terrible and do you think that AI is contributing to that? I think that technology and look I'm not saying technology is a bad thing like ever since we were our ancestors used some stick to fish out you know termite mound. It's like, I bet on technology. It's, you know, I lived in the Bay Area for almost 20 years, still very actively involved with different types of technology. But I do think that there is the equivalent of digital poison. And a lot of us are drip feeding it every day. So it's not necessarily AI. I think AI, like money, power, alcohol psychedelics, is an, it's an amplifier.

Starting point is 01:06:45 It's an accelerant. Well, certainly most people's relationship to technology now is negative. I don't know many people, perhaps except you, who have a above 80% positive interaction with technology. I was on the treadmill in the gym the other day, and I was looking at doing a little bit of boom scrolling on my phone, and I had a screen in front of me here, and then I had five screens here, and then another five screens there, and then there's a video wall that's got an advert here. I'm like, dude, I'm supposed to be in the gym. And I'm trying to listen to a podcast. I'm trying to listen to a funny podcast. It's just a safe space hang.

Starting point is 01:07:23 I'm not supposed to be thinking. And I'm supposed to be tuned into this. And every single different screen had subtitles on. Some of them had adverts on. This one's my 600 pound life. That one's the news from New York City. This one's that. And I'm like, dude, I can't, it's even, I have to actively avoid screens.

Starting point is 01:07:40 Now, even if I choose to go screen free. So yeah, I think most people's relationship to technologies is proto-negative. So when they think about if this gets more, that is more of the negative, and it's already removed it from me a bit. I had a really interesting conversation with Nick Bostrom, so he did his second book, which is kind of like a spiritual sequel to superintelligence, what if things go wrong? And then the next one was, what if things go right? What are the problems of a solved world? And he had this really interesting example where he said, basically everything that we value in other humans can be refined down to the fact that you need

Starting point is 01:08:18 to negotiate with a world that is scarce. Why do I like motivation in someone else? Why do I like discipline? Why do I like the ability to tell the truth? Why do I like prudence? Why do I like good judgment? Because you need those things to be able to navigate through a world which is going to apply pressure to you. And if you remove that, so many of the traits that we look for in other people, they may not be, that creates a strange weightlessness with all of the different values that we've tended to prefer for all of human history because we've been negotiating with a world that's pushed up against us. And if we move that out of the way, then what does that mean? So yeah, I think, dude, I think the meaninglessness thing is great. George is infuriatingly optimistic, which means that these conversations with him are always,

Starting point is 01:09:04 if AI is that smart, why won't it be benevolent enough to fix our problems? That's kind of, I guess, I'm not saying... If there had never been... If the transformer had never made the leap to the, I guess, GPT3 or four, the sort of social media and digital environment in and of itself, just with more of a linear growth rate as opposed to more exponential, still would be a problem, right? It's just over a long time.

Starting point is 01:09:34 So we... Like, the AI conversation is just, it sucks up all the fucking... oxygen in the room, do you know what I mean? So it's like, we can strip that out as a thought exercise, right? I mean, I'm curious how you would answer it. If, if, and I mean, look, this is something I've been thinking about a lot because my audience, but also for me, for like my family. And I've thought a lot about these debates that Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris have had. First one was a fucking car crash. Where, well, yeah, I mean, look, they've, they've had car crashes, But one of the takeaways for me was like, can any meaningful critical mass of humans from like first principles develop a moral and value code for themselves that is secular, that is in any way gratifying, grounding, supportive in times of great duress?

Starting point is 01:10:27 Like, I feel like Sam would be more on that side of things. And then Jordan's like, it's not going to happen. Right. Like that is why people need religion. because you have this out-of-the-box certainty and in a world of seemingly increasing incomprehensibility, right, where there is this inability

Starting point is 01:10:49 to separate fact from fiction, people need some type of foothold of certainty. And so, I mean, I think religion, I mean, it's, I don't have to think it, it's already happening, but it's like huge resurgence in religion. With Latin mass as well, which is Latin-Mash, is one of the, if not the most ascendant, attended religious services,

Starting point is 01:11:11 and it's a service that's entirely done in a language that nobody in the audience speaks. And I wonder whether what that's doing is it's almost bypassing people's ability to scrutinize it. Well, that's obviously not true. And I can realize it's science. Maybe they don't want to scrutinize it. That's the point. That's what I think that what they're doing is they're purposefully going, oh, maybe it's just that it feels more archaic, it's more steeped in history, etc., etc.

Starting point is 01:11:33 Maybe the music's better. I don't know. But yeah, I definitely get the sense that people are going to scrabble around to try and reverse from first principles. How do I make myself feel good? But there is an interesting question which is if what we're bothered about is human flourishing, humans feeling good, why not have a comforting delusion? Let's say that it's delusion. I'm not saying that it is. Why not have a comforting delusion? Like if the outcomes of religious people are more happy, more meaning. They live longer. They've got better community. They've got better health. They've got da-da-da-da-da-da. Suddenly seems very rational instead of irrational. So this is what I learned from Alex O'Connor. And is Richard Dawkins speaking to IAN Horsi-A-L-E on stage. And Iyan was supposed to be the fifth horseman of the atheist apocalypse, but she couldn't make the meeting that day. And then Ian is on stage talking to Richard and the audience is sort of half her fans and half-richids. and she said, I wanted to take my own life not long ago.

Starting point is 01:12:33 I was really low and religion found me, Jesus found me, or Christianity found me, God found me. And after the lowest moment that I had, I'm really, really happy to say that my mental health is in a better place and I'm religious. And you get the sort of smattering of kind of like empathetic applause around the room. And Alex told me that Richard's almost immediate response was, yes, yes, but yes, but do you, really think that Jesus moved the stone out of the way on the third day of Aramea. And what you see

Starting point is 01:13:06 is a guy who is playing a game of optimizing for rationality whilst ignoring effectiveness. And you go, how can you say that it's anything but a positive when this person's life essentially was saved by this thing? And it makes me, and this is one of the reasons I think, that atheism's not cool at the moment, that it feels in a world that's increasingly bereft of meaning, it feels like really sterile and quite judgmental and quite harsh. And it makes me, when I think about it, I'm like, it just doesn't seem very nice to me. And I'm aware, removing comforting delusions, why should you allow someone to indulge in their silly fantasy, blah, blah, blah, blah, I'm like, bro, I think we're getting toward the stage where comforting delusions are allowed.

Starting point is 01:13:59 Because if not, so maybe it is Mormonism all along. Do you guys intellectuals oftentimes get in this territory where they try to use proof by a counter-example? So they'll try to find one counter-example and something that you're saying and then effectively void the whole thing. And it's a very common thing because this is what you do in a math setting or anything. And they tend to do that in kind of a religious setting as well. And it's like, that's not applicable here. Just because X, Y, X is not true, doesn't mean invalidates the rest of it. And this is why people tend to like, you know, I think Richard Dawkins is like, religion is a pick and choose kind of buffet.

Starting point is 01:14:40 You know, you can go pick and believe in something. He also did say that AI is sentient. Sentient. Clod, right? How old's Richard, though, now? 70s. Seventies. I think as soon as anybody gets over 65, you've got to give them a little bit of leeway.

Starting point is 01:14:55 Public breathing, breathing room, yeah. Why? Have you been around anybody? over 65? Richard Dawkins. Yeah. I was on stage with me. He said that he would consider trying psychedelics. I managed to get him to admit to that. That was fun.

Starting point is 01:15:09 But yeah, what did you guys think of that? Richard Dawkins play? I mean, if anybody would go around and figure out if there is sentience associated with AI, maybe Richard Dawkins might be an okay person to go and figure that out. I don't know. I don't know how much you guys, but I'm curious to get your thoughts on what he discovered

Starting point is 01:15:25 or how he discovered it. Oh, is way above my pig, right? I have no idea. I would need people to define sentience and also, like, whenever we get into sentience consciousness, I'm like, let's make, before we argue about what God does or doesn't like, let's define God similarly, right? I would just want to make sure I understand those terms. Because once you get into like integrated information theory and all this stuff,

Starting point is 01:15:48 it's very easy to like get into these weeds and then you're like, 30 pages into reading this. And I don't think anyone quite defined what the fuck they mean by conscience. So I don't know, I don't actually know the, context. Yeah. But I certainly have no strong position. Same thing's kind of true with meaning though. You know, I've read Baumeister's paper on meaning, meaning happiness, that kind of legendary one from 2010, I think it is. And hey, they're good, hey. The toothpaste? I mean, they're very tasty. I don't know what's in them. Flavid 15 milligrams of caffeine and some tasty shit.

Starting point is 01:16:18 Sorry if I'm completely off here. What? But part of me thinks that, well, for, again, I hate to sound, the optimism. I hate to sound like I'm doing an affiliate link for the beginning of infinity, which I am. I'll post it in the link. But problems are infinite. So even now is a great example. So AI, which is first off, we're having this hypothetical conversation about this hypothetical thing, which I think could happen, but it's completely hypothetical. But assuming that hypothetical is true, we first have the problem of, well, if this AI is so smart, why can't it fix this? Because those two things seem paradoxical.

Starting point is 01:16:49 They would need to want to fix it. Yeah, which, again, which is a different question. But if it is so smart, why can't it fix it? It's the first point. The second point is, even now, are we not having quite a meaning? full conversation, like about this problem? Is this not an example where this hypothetical AI solved everything yet it hasn't solved meaning? And we're now constantly talking about how we're going to get more meaning for human beings. I don't think that the problem is necessarily that

Starting point is 01:17:12 meaning would be impossible to access, but if you make meaning harder to access, you end up with some pretty gnarly outcomes in the same way as it's not impossible to eat healthily, but it is harder to not be fat in a calorie dense, high-processed food environment. And if you make it a meaning oasis, it's sparser to get to meaning, then it makes life harder for everybody to find that. Can I ask a dumb question? Yeah. Is it how to open the toothpaste?

Starting point is 01:17:42 I was watching it. Send him here. Back to the factory. Let's talk to this copac. Oh my God, amazing. I have another dumb question, which is, how do most people, or normal people think about meaning? Like, well, how do they define it?

Starting point is 01:17:58 What is the underlying element of it? I mean, the way that, like, I don't know if I'm normal. I'm probably pretty abnormal, but I mean, I do think that, like, meaning may be the wrong term to use because you can apply it to defining a term. You could apply it to, was this conversation meaningless or meaningful? Well, yeah, we talked about a bunch of stuff that is mutually intelligible. So, like, yeah, sure, by definition, it's meaningful. But I think we could say purpose, like, people feeling they have a purpose, right?

Starting point is 01:18:28 is a point to what they're doing or their life in general, right? It's sort of how I would think. I just the, I mean, that's, that's, if I had to put in a placeholder, that's what I would sort of. Western society always attributes, you know, when you go to a party, what do you do, Tim? What do you do? Like, you know, this is a canonical question that people ask. It's like, oh, what do I do?

Starting point is 01:18:58 What do you do? What do you do? What do you do when you're doing? Yeah, you know. The cocktail party question. The cocktail party question. I tend to try to not ask this question anymore, but I used to. And it's always funny.

Starting point is 01:19:10 Trade heroin on the dark web is usually the answer. There you go. I mean, that would be a good. That would be an amazing great home. They're like, oh, okay. It's better than saying podcast. Yeah. But like, that is so.

Starting point is 01:19:19 It's pretty similar, actually. It's a job. The attribute of Western society, to a certain extent, with all the focus on productivity and looking at your calendar and managing your time and, you know, sort of going from meeting to meeting to meeting and then having a full schedule and organizing, you know, a meet up one month later with your friends and putting it on the calendar. It's so, like, fascinating because effectively a lot of people treat it as

Starting point is 01:19:46 allocating time. And if they allocate time, that's what kind of where people are trying to do. And oftentimes, going back to this, the reason why I ask what you do is a lot of the meaning elements for individuals is tied to their craft, their job, their sort of livelihood. Is it possible to have meaning without resistance? Because I was thinking about the chess example that you're talking about, but part of the reason that the game of chess is meaningful is that you're meeting resistance, even if the resistance is of another player and not the best player in the world that would be a computer. But part of that requires some sort of friction in the system.

Starting point is 01:20:29 There's very few things that I can think of that are meaningful that are also totally frictionless or just there is no challenge in it. Going back to this, it's like, think about relationships.

Starting point is 01:20:40 We made access to relationships kind of less friction than ever. You get a catalog of individuals. Browse through, find the next person, onto the next. Wow. I mean,

Starting point is 01:20:52 you've created it sort of an abundant layer on what was previously scarce. then you have Grindr, which is post-abundance. Post-abundance, yeah, there you go. Have you guys heard about sniffies? No, no, no. What? It's like a new gay,

Starting point is 01:21:09 anonymous sex app. Okay, how are they innovating on Grindr? Tell us, what went wrong. This is what I know because I have some friends. What were they serving? What were they serving that the Grindup app wasn't? How do you spell that, by the way? I've got to end this podcast.

Starting point is 01:21:24 Match group. Both phones ping. I was like, hold on. Match Group just put in $100 million into the app and it's growing like crazy. People don't talk about the monot. I used to have this thing that if one of the reasons why it was never discussed in Parliament

Starting point is 01:21:38 or never discussed in Congress was who owns Pornhub? What's the name of the company? Is it Mindgeek? Yeah, yeah, Canadian company. Mindgeek had, whilst the Congress was talking about the monopoly that Google had, the meta had,

Starting point is 01:21:52 mind geek had the most absurd monopoly of the pornography industry, which you'd argue, there's a free market solution that only fans came along and good old only fans fixing the market democratizing poor another example is the dating apps if you look at who owns all the dating apps i'm pretty sure match i'm pretty sure they own match tinder hinge i don't know if they know pretty much everything no no bumble's public okay so bumble's separate raya maybe uh raya separate too match group owns everything except for rye and bumble roughly it's crazy that they're allowed such a monopoly on

Starting point is 01:22:25 what is now modern dating and nobby discusses it because it's It's sort of icky to discuss. It's hard to define. The market's so difficult to define in some sense. Those apps are also really strong. There's been a massive downturn on all those. You see what Whitney Wolf Hurd's been saying recently that Bumble is going to have my AI avatar date your AI avatar and then it will feed that back up.

Starting point is 01:22:45 Did you see there was an interview you just did like last week or whatever and she's like this is the end of the swipe era and Bumble's introducing this sort of AI matchmaker or whatever. Jared, you ever considered that you might have a drinking problem? I don't consider a lot, Chris. Well, you drank an entire case of athletic brewing coal last night. But they're non-alcoholic. And that's not a problem? Sorry, man, I just kept chugging away for the regret to creep in.

Starting point is 01:23:11 Never happen. See, most people, like Jared, don't want to change what they drink. They just don't want the next day to be a complete write-off. And that is why I'm such a huge fan of Athletic Brewing Coke. They make the best N-A bruise on the planet. You can find a lot. find Athletic Brewing Co's best-selling lineup at grocery or liquor stores near you or best option, get a full variety pack of four flavors shipped direct to your door. Right now, get 15%

Starting point is 01:23:38 off your first online order by going to the link in the description below or heading to athleticbrewing.com slash modern wisdom using the code, modern wisdom, a checkout. That's athleticbrewing.com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom at checkout. Nearby, terms and conditions apply athletic brewing company fit for all times. Bottoms up. But going back to your point, which was the idea, the capitalism removes friction, right? Like, the idea is that you have this invisible layer in society, sort of, that is fixing supply and demand such that there's this equilibrium at all times.

Starting point is 01:24:20 And turns out that reduces friction because accessibility, I mean, DoorDash, you can, like, I can get an Amazon delivery in 15, 30 minutes or already. You got a fancy dress outfit in less than, an hour yesterday. Yeah, because that's what I do on a Sunday. It needed a costume. Needed a costume. There's on these new apps. I mean, it was remarkable. I need a furry with a cape.

Starting point is 01:24:42 And then went straight onto Whistler or whatever. Yeah, I was in, I was in like a Carmel and I didn't have a bathing suit because people were going in the pool or whatever. It was like, oh, I can just door dash it in 30 minutes. And somebody will bring me a bathing suit because I didn't have a, and that's, that's remarkable. And I think going back to this, it's like, yeah, obviously I think it reduces value of things when the friction goes down. I do think a great example is Winston Churchill. I posted this the other day.

Starting point is 01:25:09 Churchill's biography is so good. You go, Jesus Christ, did this man. The big, I think it's Andrew Roberts, Churchill biography. First off, Jared, could you pull it up? How many times Winston Churchill nearly died? He outbeats a cat, like the number of, I think he almost drowns. He gets run over. He gets run over.

Starting point is 01:25:28 But Churchill used to, and famously suffer of depression, as he called a black dog. He used to plant, sorry, he used to lay 200 bricks per day for a significant period of his life just to keep himself busy. What was he building with this? 200 bricks. Apparently he wasn't actually that good to the stories that the asphalt layers came in afterwards, but he would always do, yeah, you can have a look. So here we go. Like, yeah, battlefield dangers in Cuba, India, Sudan and South Africa, escaped from, yeah, he escaped from the board. bore prisoner war camp. Frontline combat in World War I got hit by a car.

Starting point is 01:26:02 Believed he was preserved for a purpose. Felt he was walking with destiny. Winston Churchill famously said when he was a, I believe, a teenager that I will save Western civilization, which is up there with John D. Rockefeller saying, I will become the richest man ever to exist, called their shots. But for every Churchill, for every Rockefeller, there's a thousand decades. Massive survival. We're in Newcastle right now. All right. So I got in trouble, speaking of the UK, I got in trouble for comparing the UK to where it would rank if it was a state. And I thought that this was a relatively innocuous thing to say because me and Georgia both shit on the UK quite a bit. You know, you're allowed to. You're allowed to. As immigrants having moved from your own country, you're allowed to sort of cast a spur. This is why I left, so to speak. We were the second in the world in millionaire exits not long ago, second only to China who's got, you know, like 30 times the population or something. So I decided to post this chart. And this chart explains if the UK was a state where it would rank on the list.

Starting point is 01:26:58 Here it is. If the UK were a US state, where would it rank among 50 states? So life expectancy, first. Lowest homicide rate first. Lowest gun deaths, first. Lowest prisoner population. First. Healthcare coverage first. Paid maternity leave.

Starting point is 01:27:11 A lot of high numbers. Statutory paid holiday first. Years in education first. Lowest road deaths first. Lowest drug deaths. Second. Minimum wage, third. Pupil performance fifth.

Starting point is 01:27:22 Environmental performance fifth. Human development index ninth. Lowest obesity, 10th. And GDP per capita, 51st. What do you attribute that to? Well, I mean, it's 51st. The fact that it's 51st, the fact that the U.S. just absolutely rules when it comes to capitalism. You guys are like the Floyd-Mayweather of capitalism.

Starting point is 01:27:42 Would most countries, I know that the UK is not Europe, you know, Brexit is Brexit, but like would other, would countries in Western Europe also look like this in terms of GDP per capita? Probably, right? I would guess so. I mean, what people on the internet got mad at me for is, well, these are stupid things to judge. Obviously, you've got the lowest gun deaths because you cucks gave up your guns. The paid maternity leave doesn't matter when this thing. The statutory paid holiday is pointless because the level of productivity. The road deaths are because you don't have big enough roads or something. The drug deaths don't matter because you've got no cool drugs.

Starting point is 01:28:22 The minimum... There was basically an American excuse for every single one of these. even the lowest obesity. And I was like, it was just surprising to me because for the most part, British people are very prepared to laugh at Brent, very prepared to point. Very British thing?

Starting point is 01:28:38 I've done episode, I've done entire episodes on, this is what's wrong, and this is what's wrong, and this is what's wrong, and this is what's wrong. But as soon as you begin to compare the US to the UK,

Starting point is 01:28:47 and in some areas, because the whole joke here is that there's lots of things that were ranking better than the US in. apart from one of the most important things, which is how much fucking money we make. And, yeah, they're selective.

Starting point is 01:29:05 Sing it. Huh? You can sing it if you want. Sing what? God save our gracious king. God save our... Right. So, I just got in a lot of shit, and I was surprised.

Starting point is 01:29:20 I thought that Americans would be able to take this with a bit more humility. I do tend to think the Americans... Also, humility first. Yeah. But yeah, lowest drug deaths is, I mean, like, Wyoming, imagine. Being America will be lowest obesity at some point very soon with the advent of GLPs and. They're going to be, someone, I saw this thing the other day that Red A Trutide is going to be one of the most successful drugs in history.

Starting point is 01:29:48 For sure. One of the most widely used drugs. Scott Galloway has the idea. He says it's the best, America is the best place. to earn money and Europe's the best place to spend money. Yeah. Well, the UK is a wonderful country to be poor and a horrible country to be rich in and America is a great country to be rich in and a horrible country to be poor in. Which is kind of interesting if the value of the dollar goes up. It's American productivity, GDP or whatever goes up. And it's Americans will go and

Starting point is 01:30:17 spend it to Europe, right? And get the best value for the bang for the buck or if you will. I mean, I do think the UK is the greatest, the country of all time. I do think that's like a fact. But America's going through its golden age right now. Just we're living on borrowed time, mate. You know my position on this. I think that we're living on borrowed time. And this is seen nowhere more clearly than the arrests, countries with the most arrests for posting on social media in 2023.

Starting point is 01:30:48 United Kingdom, 12, 183, coming in at nearly double. second place, which was Belarus, with 6,205, and Russia is down with 400. China with 1,500, might be some reporting problems in a couple of those countries. But that number, which is from the Times, it was a Times. The Ministry of Social Enforcement isn't returning their emails. It's a great group to be part of. Dude, 12,000 arrests for posting on social media in 2023. And that number is from the Times with Freedom House stats. So that's legit. 12,000. 183 and that was one of the most common how many people like where would you

Starting point is 01:31:26 rank if it was the number of people that have been and I'm like also first actually so yeah we have made some mistakes over the years Alan Shoring yeah Oscar Wilde yeah not good we don't treat our gaze well no we haven't Alan Carr's pretty good

Starting point is 01:31:41 Alan Carr's treated well yeah Douglas Murray treated relatively well yeah I had this because I find now that every time you bring up some negative about the UK I would bring up something positive to counteract it Like the angel and the devil, the north-east and the northwest, which is I was back home in London, central London, and I was walking around these beautiful buildings in London. And I used to live in a house that's older than America.

Starting point is 01:32:11 And some of the architecture that exists in the UK, like New York has some quite, like the New York City Library is beautiful. It feels like you guys have stolen that from us. And even the Statue of Liberty is from France, right? But like a lot of the architecture in the US, my friend summarized it great, which is everything looks like the back entrance. So even the front looks like what would be the back entrance. And I feel as a Brit being in America, like my parents have the most beautiful place in the world. And I'm around this mess of a house where the people are just, it's a lot more functional right now. But the UK is, the architecture is stunning.

Starting point is 01:32:50 And you don't make buildings like that. We're really grasping at fucking straws, though, when we're really? we're talking about the architect. Big Ben's good. Big Ben's good. That's a difference between the US and the UK is that it feels that everything in the US has, or a lot of things in the US, I shall fix, has a functional name. So I was like, why is it called Joshua tree? It's like, oh, it's because it has a lot of Joshua trees. Or like, you have Temp Street. I go, why is it Temp Street? Because it's next to 9th Street and before 11th Street. Whereas Big Ben, nobody really knows why it's called Big Ben. We think it was after some bloke called Ben.

Starting point is 01:33:23 But it's not actually been clarified. The Big Ben is the, it's not the actual clock. It's the bell that's inside of it, I think. Have a look. Because I remember I went down to Big Ben rabbit hole and I couldn't find it out. It's remarkable how, if you think about it in the grander scheme of things, how young America is. It's like, what is it?

Starting point is 01:33:44 Like a teenager, maybe less or something with respect to civilization or modern civilization. And it turns out everything is kind of, whereas, If you were to create a blank slate of a country and now use the best of whatever exists and maybe try to create it. This is kind of what Dubai is done, right? In a way, that you think about Dubai from an infrastructure standpoint, it's just totally like... Artificial. Yeah, it's absolutely just plowed its way through the desert and said, how do we want to have our roads? How do we want to have our downtown?

Starting point is 01:34:13 I know that there's lots of road accidents that you said, I wasn't aware of this. But if you're driving in Dubai, you can be doing 70 miles an hour and looking at Google Maps and you're three minutes from your destination. which is in the middle of a built-up area. You're just like pounding it and then you peel off on this perfectly modern designed flyover and then you're deposited outside of the fountains at the bottom of the verge or whatever.

Starting point is 01:34:35 So that's kind of interesting. Whereas if you drive in London, it will take you like 30 minutes. London's okay, but I mean, once you've been to L.A., everything feels totally fucking unbelievable. Well, I mean, you know I've chatted about this before, but I'm just increasingly bullish on

Starting point is 01:34:51 neuromodulation. brain stimulation and there was a piece in the new york times um could at home brain stimulation reduce psychiatry's reliance on SSRIs and i think part of the framing challenge around and just to define terms here so brain stimulation in this particular case i believe in that new york times piece is referring to something called t dcs where you can basically use i think it's tcccc where you can basically use a nine-volt battery it's a headset that you can wear at home and it's intended to treat depressive disorder. And then you have other types of neuromodulation, and I use that term because you might not be

Starting point is 01:35:32 stimulating. You might not be exciting something. You might be inhibiting something. So that would include TMS, which I've spent a lot of time with. So transcranial magnetic stimulation. So you're using magnets with different targets depending on what you're trying to do. And I think those are just. It's the very, very, that's the model T of what's coming with neuromodulation.

Starting point is 01:35:59 And I think there's going to be a lot of acceleration in the next two years. I think it's going to move a lot faster than people expect. How does it work? Well, so, for instance, you might have in, say, my case, right? So what I figured out took me my whole life figured out, but a few years ago is that even though I had, kind of been diagnosed and diagnosed myself prior to that as someone with some type of depressive disorder, I think that it was a combination of a few things. Number one was Lyme disease, which is like very much multiple times verified real Lyme disease, not like chronic fatigue,

Starting point is 01:36:42 masquerading is Lyme disease from Long Island, which is, if you look at the CDC map, the Center for Disease Control, it is like, the bull's eye outbreak, punching, intended because you sometimes get a rash, it looks like a bullseye. But I think that a lot of psychiatric conditions are downstream of acute infections that then led to chronic neuroinflammation. That's taking us a little further afield from the point I was going to make, which is you can use these magnetic pulses in the case of something like accelerated TMS. And in my case, I realized that it was actually anxiety and rumination. So a combination, the DSM constantly changes in terms of how you diagnose these things. Psychiatry is kind of where surgery was like 300 years ago, I would say,

Starting point is 01:37:25 right? It's very early days. But if I do an fMRI, right? So you're getting this imaging of the brain, you identify targets for, say, anxiety, like anxiomatic target. You can inhibit or excite, depending on what you're trying to do, a target with these magnetic pulses. Intermittent theta bursts is what it's called. And it just feels like a light tapping on your head. That's it. It's very tolerable. And in my case, you might do, for instance, in the latest round of what I've done, take something, it's a drug. So you take a neuroplasticity agent beforehand. And there are a lot of things that can increase neuroplasticity. But in this case, it's a somewhat antiquated maybe antibiotic called decyclocerine. So you stick it in your mouth. You let it dissolve for an hour before the stems. And then you're doing three minutes. on the hour or maybe even every half hour for 10 stems. And that's it. And I got three to four months of going from, say, eight or nine out of like generalized anxiety and just OCD rumination to like a zero or a one. Wow. Different people. I mean, those are two different lived experiences.

Starting point is 01:38:42 And then after three or four months, it starts to creep back in. And then you can go get, say, a booster of some type. And I know people with depression, specific. Specifically, there's a lot more data on depression of different types who basically similarly got taken from like, I can't move. I'm at home. Some people are cutting and they go from like, again, this, I'm not a doctor. I'm not giving medical advice. And these are anecdotes. But there are also published studies that people can look into. There's a great scientist named Jonathan Downer, unfortunate name for being someone looking at, bringing up with someone in depression. But amazing scientist, DONAR. People can look at them up. I think he's at the University of Toronto. And you see durability in some people, including the son of a friend of mine, 18 months. So instead of three to four months, you get like 18 months. And so you can start to wonder, it's like, all right, if we look at, let's just say, SSRIs, which are miraculous for some people, but the general chemical imbalance theory of depression or anxiety is pretty much thoroughly.

Starting point is 01:39:51 debunked at this point, right? You're not depressed because you have low serotonin levels by and large. And when you take pharmaceuticals, I'm sure it's true as GLP-1s. I don't think there's a very rarely a biological free lunch, but let's put that aside. With psychiatric medications, typically you have off-target effects, right? They're going to be side effects. They could be sexual dysfunction. They could be whatever. Their weight gain, they're million different options. And often they stop working, or people don't need them anymore, and then there's no plan for deprescribing and off-ramping these people.

Starting point is 01:40:25 So they just stay on forever, right? So the idea that you could use electricity is super, super, super interesting. And I think I'm hopeful that it will displace a lot of the blunt instrument approach to using over-prescription. We'll see. I mean, it's going to take a lot of tech innovation,

Starting point is 01:40:49 which in this case, AI, go team AI, is going to accelerate things a lot. Certainly already seeing it. Like a personal level. What's it like going from, did you say a nine to a one? Yeah,

Starting point is 01:41:00 like an eight or nine to a one. What's that like? There's like a felt experience. Insomnia gone, right? Like instead of taking 30 to 60 minutes to fall asleep, like lay down five minutes later I'm asleep, without any sleep medication. I mean,

Starting point is 01:41:12 that alone is, it's impossible to overstate the effect that has on your daily, life every day, right? Easier to get over just kind of the scrapes and bruises of life, right? Little issues. You basically, for me, it was like, I find it very useful. Like if I'm using the toolkit of stoicism or mindfulness or whatever, like, it's a fucking struggle, right?

Starting point is 01:41:39 It's not native to my constitution. But after this, like, oh, wow, suddenly I can meditate for 20 minutes and I feel like I've been doing it for years, as opposed to constantly, like, slapping my monkey mind on the wrist, right? So really tremendous. And I, I, I, what we will see is that you can also use it. This is not that controversial, but for performance enhancement, right? Like, you can, I believe you can affect, like, handedness, trait hypnotizability.

Starting point is 01:42:12 Like, you can, and it's not risk-free, but compared to a lot of the medications that you might get people for in these conditions, the risk profile is pretty good. It's interesting that you can have an intervention that makes other interventions more effective. So if you can do some sort of TMS thing, and that makes your trait hypnotizability more, that means that you now opened up the world of hypnotism. Yeah, you're, exactly. So you're choosing the right domino to tip over first, right? And I mean, it's not the time. to get into a porn habit then straight after this.

Starting point is 01:42:50 God, God damn it, I just locked this in. I mean, it brings up... Whistler or tickler or whatever it's called. Tickler. Also a good podcast. This podcast is sponsored by Tickler. When I sit down for a good wank on porn hub with my athletic brew.

Starting point is 01:43:08 I got Tickler. Do you want a man to come around in two minutes? Man on man. Life and Times, Chris Flay. A lot of, I mean, a lot of what I think about is just sequencing, right? Like, there's a lot of stuff out there off the rack that works kind of, right? But if you figure out the right sequence, like you can suddenly, it's true, language acquisition, too. Like, where most of the mistakes are made, I think, is in the sequencing.

Starting point is 01:43:37 And you just fix the sequencing. You shuffle things a little bit. You put the right domino in front, and it makes a huge difference. And also this is true with, it's like psychedelics, in the, sense that Gouldolen, who's at UC Berkeley, she used to be at Hopkins, but her sort of framework of reopening critical windows with the use of psychedelics is very interesting. So, and underground facilitators have known this for a long time, but it's like the two or three weeks after a psychedelic, which in this case would include MDMA, although that's a longer conversation, you have the ability,

Starting point is 01:44:14 And this could extend to say stroke patients who are trying to relearn motor control or speaking things that typically is limited to a very short, relatively short window as a child, right? You can basically reopen the malleability to develop those things using these drugs in the subsequent two to three weeks.

Starting point is 01:44:32 So, for instance, if you've just done a bunch of psychedelics, maybe a very bad time to suddenly do a bunch of overdosing on porn and sort of instilling habits that you would otherwise maybe come and go, but in this case, could really stick. Like your Play-Doh has been warmed up in the microwave, so you want to be careful about those two or three weeks afterwards. I think that could also apply to TMS potentially.

Starting point is 01:44:59 Well, I did a two-sided SGB at the start of this year, and the same thing is true for that. It's like, hey, man, you've got a window here where your nervous system is unusually are absorbent. Yeah. So, treat it with appropriate care. Yeah. That was wild though, that SGB that I had. You should explain what that is, man.

Starting point is 01:45:17 Stellite ganglion block. So there is a bundle of nerves on both sides of your neck that are essentially running to the rest of your nervous system. And you can get an ultrasound guided anesthetic injection that goes into it. And it essentially shakes the etch of your nervous system. A way to think about it. It is a relatively hard reset. And you do one side and then you do another.

Starting point is 01:45:41 You can't do them both together because actually, makes half of your face and half of your throat go to sleep. So if you were to do both, I think that you might die. You certainly wouldn't be able to swallow. You can't do much stuff. Sounds problematic. You end up with one side of your eyes, sort of eyelids half closed and speaking's a little bit difficult. Anyway, I did one side one day, one side on the other with Matt Cook at Bio Reset, who's kind of the number one in America for this. And it was fascinating, really, really fascinating experience. Would you do it again? I would, yes. What were the benefits?

Starting point is 01:46:14 It was an interesting, an interesting slate clean of some nervous system buildup. So just agitations, the sort of ambient buzzing that you often have, rumination reduced. It was very interesting. But I think the thing that's always fascinating to me, because you've got a felt sense of how this thing impacted you. and because I felt sense is so subject to did I sleep well I'm in a good place with this person have I got the you know how's business going what's happening in my life but when you see in data too and because I track everything with whoop it was a 30% increase in HR I was going to ask you about HIV the 30% increase in HIV overnight and that held for I mean I'm what three four

Starting point is 01:47:07 months now after it started to tickle back down now but That held for a long time. And resting heart rate also did the same, not quite as much. It was basically a 30% change in HRV. And that stuck about for a while. And they do this. It's a one-stop shop for PTSD in soldiers. It's really aggressive intervention for guys that are like super, super, super-struggling. And it just gives you a little bit more room to breathe. And I was interested in it. And I trust Matt, the guy that did it. So I was like, okay. You mentioned before risks with the, the, the the TMS type stuff, what, what are some of the risks? Generally very low. I mean, I would say that, again, not a, not a PhD or doctor. Don't play one on the internet. So do your homework. Talk to your professionals.

Starting point is 01:47:55 But my understanding is that, I can give you my personal example, right? Occasionally, in the case with my target, with my brain, after the treatment, you can have what's almost like a rebrand. exaggeration of symptoms for a short period of time, which is pretty unpleasant, where you might have insomnia for a few days, which I did. I've had that twice. And you've done this twice? No, I've done it probably five or six times. And it's not, it has not worked 100% of the time, which is very frustrating. It's part of the reason why, and I'm supporting a nascent brain stimulation lab here at UT Austin, getting involved with a couple of the companies, because I want to, like, I actually know these machines. And I've talked to the technical.

Starting point is 01:48:40 and I've talked to the scientists and I'm like, I can actually be very, I think, helpful here. So I'm hoping to figure out how you can make that much more reliable. It's also just pure self-interest, right? I want to be able to use this. And I also want to figure out how to get durability out further, right? Instead of three to four months, it's like, look, if it's one day every quarter, like, and it goes from a nine to a one, fantastic.

Starting point is 01:49:03 But if it works, one's out of every four shots, then that sucks in a lot of respects. So some of the side effects, the insomnia that I mentioned, in very, very rare cases, people will get temporary tinnitus. They'll get like a ringing. These are all pretty uncommon. And I should say that the using this for generalized anxiety disorder, OCD, etc. is very much tip of the spear stuff. So the sample size is not very large. With the depression, there's much more data. And you can go. on PubMed or elsewhere, Consensus. A app is another decent option, if you want, like, an AI interface. And look at the published papers. They're right there for you. If you are, like, smacking down your sympathetic nervous system, okay, this is the perfect place to talk about this on a large podcast.

Starting point is 01:50:01 After my first effective TMS treatment, the first one that worked, I could not ejaculate for, like, two weeks. And I fucking lost it. You can imagine. I'm just like, I'm like, is this a good news, bad news situation? Like, yeah, good news. You're not as anxious.

Starting point is 01:50:16 Bad news. You're never going to ejaculate again. I was like, what the fucking? The doctor was like, yeah, we've never seen that before. I was like, oh, fantastic. But eventually mechanistically, he was like, it could be a dosing problem where we're basically, we dialed down the volume on your sympathetic nervous system too much.

Starting point is 01:50:32 Because it's parasympathetic to get erect, sympathetic to come. Yeah, they say point and shoot. Parasympathetic, yep. Sympathetic. Damn. Yeah. And I was like. Okay, well, maybe we try a lower dose, which I think is part of the reason why it didn't work for me because I was like, hey, if that was at the time, that was five days.

Starting point is 01:50:48 And I was like, I really didn't enjoy those two weeks. So let's try. How much you trying to cut? Let's try two days. I'm a big fan of a jaguarine. You know. Sounds like we found the tag. Yeah, you need to get a whistler.

Starting point is 01:51:03 So I need to get him. Tickler. Sniffies. Yeah. My podcast is except. sponsors, typically. So then I tried two days,

Starting point is 01:51:13 nothing, right? Then I tried three days, a few months later. This is increasing those. Right. And then eventually got back to five days, still nothing. But then went back to adding

Starting point is 01:51:24 the declycerion, this plasticity agent beforehand, one day, boom. And I was like, okay. Now, that is when I became much more, it's called the one, it's just called one day protocol. And Jonathan Downer,

Starting point is 01:51:36 who I mentioned, is one of the, if not the sort of innovator in the space behind that along with Don Vaughn and some other people. But that one day, when that worked, I was like, now this is interesting because currently the insurers are slowly coming around, but all this stuff, a lot of innovation starts with people with money spending way too much money. Right.

Starting point is 01:52:01 That's just the way it is, right? That's true with electric cars. It's true with Uber. It's true with a million different, the early generation iPhones, right? didn't even have copy and paste, you fucking kidding me, right? These early adopters who have money

Starting point is 01:52:15 and they're willing to spend it, like the accelerated TMS protocol, some of the early rounds that I did, it's like all in 30 grand, out of pocket. I mean, it's expensive. And when it got down to one day, I was like, okay,

Starting point is 01:52:28 now it's about reducing sort of unit cost and increasing throughput with these devices because putting aside the out-of-pocket cost, a lot of people, they cannot take five days off of work. Yep. Do this.

Starting point is 01:52:43 But once you get it to one day, now I'm like, okay, that just went from a very small, sort of addressable patient population, no, much larger. It's still too expensive, but let's try to work on getting it down. And that's just TMS, right? You have other things like focused ultrasound that might be interesting for different types of addiction, for instance, where you could actually get enough penetration that you could hit the nucleus accumbens and other anatomical structures associated with chemical dependence. It's like, okay, this is very, very, very interesting.

Starting point is 01:53:16 Who's the best company in America for this at the moment? I mean, there are a couple of really good ones. The two older ones that have the most kind of time on the market are brain sway, which is out of Israel, very good machines. It's a publicly traded company, full disclosure. or I invested in them when they were public-traded company. MagVenture has a device as well, which I've used. And then the company that I'm involved with is called AMPA.

Starting point is 01:53:48 And that is the smallest form factor, and the people behind it develop the one-day protocol. And I think they're sort of the trainability of that device. Instead of taking weeks, or certainly, instead of taking weeks, let's just say to train a technician properly, You can do it in a few hours. And it's something that fits in the trunk of a car, like a corolla, as opposed to being the size of a refrigerator. And I think they're really, otherwise it wouldn't be involved, very well positioned to finally scale this treatment to millions of people instead of a hand, like a few thousand.

Starting point is 01:54:26 So those, like all three of those are on the market. And the lowest cost would certainly be AMPA, but all these devices. A M-P-E-R? A-M-P-A, Ampa Health. And we'll see. We'll see. I mean, I'm, I'll be, I mean, not just because I'm involved, because it took me a long time. I did a fuck a ton of due diligence.

Starting point is 01:54:53 I don't think, a lot of folks don't realize, like, how much due diligence I do before I put something in my newsletter or whatever. It's, like, I guess this is OCD, like, harnessed when I am in full throttle. Being used very well. Being friends with you is highly useful in situations like this. In the same way, I went to go and get LASIC in the UK. Ali Abdel, productivity dudes, British guy, is a doctor, right? Was an MD or the equivalent of an MD GP in the UK. And I knew that he'd got LASIC.

Starting point is 01:55:24 And I was like, no one's done more research about who's the best obstetrician operator in all of the UK. message Sally and he's like, yeah, I spent three weeks speaking to all of my friends and doing all of the reviews and looking at the particular machines. I was like, okay, who was that? Introduced me and it's funny. This is good. I just get to speed run all of the work that you did. Canary down the mind. I'm the end of the guy

Starting point is 01:55:49 in the human centipede, but I'm benefiting. You want to be first in line. I'm at the end, but it gets better progressively as it goes through. That's cool, man. I'm glad that it's helped. It's exciting. It is exciting. I mean, and I mean, I think it's saying something when, you know, as somebody who's been so active in funding the science related to psychedelics and psychedelics is a therapy since 2015, that in the last three years, I've done almost, almost no psychedelics. It's been purely focused on the neuromodulation. I think it's that important.

Starting point is 01:56:26 We'll see, because a lot for a lot of people, like psychedelics are nuclear power. for the psyche. Like you just, they are not suitable for all people. There are plenty of people I would carve out for exclusion from. Many times you end up with a Chernobyl or a Fukushima. Yeah. Yeah, it's just, it's a lot squirlier. It is, you need to be really careful with that stuff. It has to just not being able to come. It has its place. Yeah. Can I zoom in more on this? What was that like at the end of a few weeks? You know you said you went from a nine to a one? Did you hit a minus No, no, I didn't. I mean, I was, I was, I was pretty, I was pretty, I was pretty, I was pretty, I was, I was, uh, understandably concerned. Had you had you have known that it was going to end after two weeks, presumably you'd have just been for the fear was this is going to be for. Yeah, yeah, yeah, right. Yeah. So now. But you couldn't feel the anxiety. But, but, but interestingly, for, for like, the, every time it has worked for me, I've had that side of. I've had that side of. effect, but now I know that there's an endpoint, so I don't freak out. And it's fine.

Starting point is 01:57:36 Yeah, you just know that you're going to get a couple of really good weeks while you kind of like a stallion. Babe, I can just, you know, don't worry about me. How do you, I had a question for you. You know, on the other side of the spectrum, have you seen these devices that stimulate your vagus nerve or whatever? Yeah, I know a lot. I know a lot. Yeah. What are your thoughts on those? Most of Lemberbunk. Are they?

Starting point is 01:57:57 Yeah. There's a scientist, you might want to have one at some point. He's incredible. named Kevin Tracy. He is the most credible. You wrote a book called The Great Nerve. He's the most credible, publicly, and not really educating scientist, credible, very highly published scientist who talks about this. Most of the non-invasive Vegas nerve stimulators, or that are purported to be Vegas Nerve Stilatelior,

Starting point is 01:58:31 don't actually hit it the right. way. And there's neck-based, right? And then there's ear-based. The neck, TBD, but there are, they've been cleared, FDA cleared for, I think it's either migrains or cluster headaches. Some people seem to benefit. I had a friend who tripled his HRV using a neck-based device. I think it was either True Vega or it was the prescription equivalent of True Vega. And it worked really well for him. Same. This can be pretty with you. I haven't used them.

Starting point is 01:59:04 I had a friend I was talking to. I suffer from migraines. And so I have to carry around medication all the time. And somebody told me about these things and they're like, okay, has all these benefits of like HRV, you know, increase of HRV, all sorts of stuff. It's a temporary state, if you will, but ultimately. You should use it daily. It's like a few minutes on the morning, a few minutes at night.

Starting point is 01:59:24 Yeah, it's kind of reset the nervous system. That's kind of the marketing terminology that they've been utilizing. Yeah, I mean, really, it's. It's, what it's doing is it's stimulating the Vegas nerve, which is really like two transatlantic cables on either side. It's like a hundred, roughly 100,000 fibers on other side. And then it inner, it innervates everything, just about organs, GI tract, et cetera. And when you stimulate it, you can, it's the right way to put it. Activate isn't quite right, but something called the inflammatory reflex. And so it can be. applied to things like rheumatoid arthritis, different autoimmune disorders can be applied to something like asthma attacks. It's very, very, very interesting. So it could be worth looking into for you, right? The neck-based devices tend to also activate the superficial muscles of the face. So it pulls your face down. It depends how high you turn it up. Yeah, it depends

Starting point is 02:00:26 how you turn it up, but it can be a little uncomfortable. The ear-based devices. Do you say you've used it? No, somebody recommended me the air-based device? Most of the air-based devices are not actually in the right place. Got it. It needs to be very, very, very precise. It's called the Simba Concha. It's going to be hard to see. It's right here, kind of where this fold is.

Starting point is 02:00:47 It's at the bottom of that inside, like right there. Most of the devices being sold on the market, including devices that have lots of fancy names and lots of fancy institutions on the website, they're not in the right place. It's a fucking shit ton of money behind some of those companies. Yeah, very few. few fibers make it to the ear.

Starting point is 02:01:05 Got it. I've got a couple of things. I had a few things sent to me. I had one that's a handheld device with the two prong, and you can kind of just stick it on. Just tase yourself. Yeah, like that. And then there's a pair of headphones that have a lug that comes down and sits here. And obviously that one's way more convenient.

Starting point is 02:01:27 But there's some weird stuff with that. You've got to lubricate the end of the adapter. Because it needs to be able to have quite a smooth surface to be able to. So you have to change the, again, Whistler, you have to change the little heads out on this thing and put that in. I didn't do it consistently enough to be able to say whether or not it was effective. Yeah, I think for migraines, it's worth looking into it. What's your migraine manifestation? Do you have aura with it? Oh my God, yeah.

Starting point is 02:01:54 Which one? What do you mean, which one? Alphactory, visual. It's visual. Visual. And it'll come on and I can. can, I've had these since I've five years old and people are like, the fuck is going on. I didn't even know. And yeah, you get these oras. It's like almost as, um, you're on like an acid

Starting point is 02:02:10 trip and everything just looks blurry, but moving in, in a weird way. And then, and then after a while, if you don't take medication during that period, um, then it kicks in. What do you, what do you take, NERTac? Uh, sumatryptin. As one just kicked in? Yep. Oh, fuck. We're so sorry. It's, no, no, it's all good. It's, I don't even know. I think, I, I typically, track it with, it's either lighting. Yep. Maybe. It's environmental, like, weather changes, weirdly enough. Or the last element of it is either I have caffeine or wine without any food. Right. And it's really fascinating. It's, you know, they ask you to keep a diary of your day and to figure out retroactively what caused it.

Starting point is 02:02:54 Yep. There's no other mechanic. And it's so people don't know why. People don't know for what reason. Some people think it's autoimmune. Some people, some people think it's autoimmune. Some People think it's not. And it's a fascinating, so I have to carry medication all the time. And I always recommended this. Yeah. So the prescription version of True Vega, spelled TRUVA, is called Gamma, Core. Got it. G-A-M-A-C-R-E.

Starting point is 02:03:17 FDA cleared in the U.S. for both acute treatment of migraine pain and adults and prevention of migraine, episodic and chronic. A few practical points. The effect, evidence is real, but modest compared to top-tier migraine medications like CGRP inhibitors, appears to work best for people who treat attacks

Starting point is 02:03:36 early, migraine with aura, patients who want to reduce medication use, those who can't tolerate triptons and CGRPs. Speaking of those devices, by the way, have you guys seen there's some companies that are being now that there's sort of reinvention of input into

Starting point is 02:03:51 computers, so for example, less keyboards, more voice, more like natural types of interactions with technology and devices in general, there are these devices that are coming out. One of my friends have demoed this to me. I think Apple just acquired a company where you just put sort of a small device that listens in this sort of region. And without you actually saying anything, it can detect, you know, as if you were talking.

Starting point is 02:04:19 Makes sense. And roughly, it's remarkable. And you can imagine a lot of scenarios with this as technology and the input layers become much more natural, much more conversational. And you know, you don't have these affordances to speak all the time where imagine that device can effectively read what you want to say without you ever having to say it.

Starting point is 02:04:42 Yeah. And it lives roughly in this region can detect. Any idea why it's sat there to detect? Is it as if you're moving your mouth but not talking? I'm not sure. Roughly speak, yes. Let me just sidebar real quick. Please, yeah.

Starting point is 02:04:55 Just because I want to make a safety point, we're talking about the relative safety profile of brain stimulation or neuromodulation with these devices. That does not mean anyone should DIY this stuff. You can, the brain, the brain is incredibly sensitive. If you hit the wrong target, you can fuck yourself up or make your symptoms a lot worse. So do not DIY this. Go to a decent clinic. For people who want to explore it, I have no stake. any of these. Acacia Clinic

Starting point is 02:05:27 in Sunnyvale and California. Salience, which I think is in Dallas. They may have other locations. Owen Muir, M-U-I-R, who's in New York. There are a couple of clinics that I know have very good reputations, but work with somebody who knows these devices.

Starting point is 02:05:43 No 9-volt battery and one of those pads that people use for their to get to give them apps. I was about to go home with a gyrosome battery. There's also, it's not, I don't think, indicated for migraines. I'm pretty sure it's specific to RA

Starting point is 02:05:58 to rheumatoid arthritis, but Setpoint Medical has an implant about the size of a small omega-3 that it's like an outpatient procedure in the neck, and then it just stimulates like twice a day, the vagus nerve. No way.

Starting point is 02:06:12 Yep. That was on the front, it was on the front cover of the New York Times the day that I interviewed Kevin Tracy, who was involved with the development of that device, yeah.

Starting point is 02:06:22 Wow. And so they implant it directly into your neck. How do you recharge it? Induction? I'm not sure. Exactly. Yeah, I mean, it does get... It does get...

Starting point is 02:06:31 It's magnetic charging on your neck. Could you imagine? On the device that kind of reads your thoughts, one thing you discover as you get more into meditation is just how sometimes your thoughts aren't even you. Like the ultimate example, even if you've not experienced any form of meditation, would be like a song that's stuck in your head. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:06:51 I wonder how the device would differ between... a song that's stuck in your head and something that you actually want it to do. Because I remember a great meditation technique. I'm just imagining my ruminating, given a microphone, back into my ear. I think the distinction being that there's sort of this concept of mind reading and or expression of a thought. And the expression of a thought is typically, you know, when you're starting to speak, roughly you would have to, it's not purely like a thought reader in some sense. You would have to have an intent associated with it. To going back to your previous point on devices, though,

Starting point is 02:07:29 my thesis is that the device that you'll probably wear when you interact with AI or whatever, if you want to, has not been invented yet. And it will have this combination of input, output, that is much more, less visible. Didn't Open AI claim that they were going to have three products or something? And obviously they've got Johnny Ive

Starting point is 02:07:51 in the guy that made the iPhone, the original iPhone, and then they bought his company, which was called... I.O. Yeah, I.O. And then there was this very cool, sexy video of him and Sam in a totally not fake bar somewhere, having a conversation. I think it'll be the airports. Yeah, they're actually building a phone, apparently.

Starting point is 02:08:12 Okay. They said three different things, and one of them is something that no one's ever seen before. Yeah. Which makes maybe a lapel thing, a little button, something like that. the airport case makes the most amount of sense because we were already using them.

Starting point is 02:08:25 People wear them 24-7. The airports, what's that stat around? If the airport was a startup, it'd be like one of the most. Eighths in the world. Oh, really? That's why? It's remarkable.

Starting point is 02:08:34 Just that alone. And half that's me contributing to... Should we talk about that? Yeah, I've never spoken about this. I've... Let's see if I'm pulled up. Going back to your three devices thing, I think there's probably one device

Starting point is 02:08:46 that is an affordance that's kind of listening and or... You asked me your... Wait, you were a raw dog that took a deer like, let's get rid of this. Free advertising. There's this sort of one device that probably listens to input in some mechanic or tries to process what you want in possibly a new way.

Starting point is 02:09:07 That could be like a device that's kind of have a microphone or whatnot. There's another device where it's like a her type situation where he's wearing that earpiece and constantly speaking to it. And then maybe that third device is kind of this glanceable world, right? where you have this phone. Turns out now, you know, applications are becoming less, like people are using chat GPT or Claude for everything, right? Like you go, I want to set a timer.

Starting point is 02:09:30 You can do that in chat GPT. You don't necessarily need a dedicated app. Maybe you want one or whatnot. But the idea of the app ecosystem being less valuable than it was before. Elon's big on this, right? He thinks that all apps are going to go away and your phone is just going to create whatever you need, whenever you need it.

Starting point is 02:09:48 Roughly. Exactly. And I think generally, today it's possible to build that type of device without having this ecosystem effect that was necessary in the past. I wonder if that would open up a hole in the market because at the moment, the dominance has been pretty tough. Despite the fact that Apple have kind of shit the bed a lot. You know, their phones have really started to peter out in terms of the progress, at least from what I noticed as a user. Like, yeah, I can zoom in 15X. I can zoom in 20X.

Starting point is 02:10:20 At some point, it's like, it's a slab of glass and a combination of things. Like, what do you do? Glider, it's a bit, the screen's brighter or sharper or something, but it's less noticeable. You remember when it was what, the iPhone 5 to the iPhone 12, and each time it was a noticeable leap forward, almost the same that's been happening with the AI models, you know, that it seems to have started to at least in terms of noticeable user experience for me, it seems to be. I think iOS gets worse every time I upgrade. The keyboard at the moment just fucking sucks.

Starting point is 02:10:51 It's so bad. But they do have an incredible worcest. So what do you think? I don't know how cool. I'm just, what they can do is they can buy companies. So I'm wondering, I don't know, you have any thoughts on who they should buy? You know, there's a group of people that think that Apple's like the smartest company because they've let the world sort of play itself. out, people spending a lot of money, and they're just waiting to see where it hits and then

Starting point is 02:11:22 effectively do what they do best, which is never enter the market first, but be the best. Yeah, yeah. It's exactly what happened to cell phones or smartphones, exactly what happened to kind of AirPods. There's all these some wireless. Oh, they do with the iPod, too. iPod too. Yeah, the iPod was the first element of it, even the computer in some sense.

Starting point is 02:11:43 Plenty of MP3 players before that. And so it's like, they've saved all of this cost for a cap act. never spent anything like what Google... Go forth and split test these products for us, my minions. Yeah, exactly. It's a ton of other companies. They effectively let others do the R&D work to a certain extent and then refine that world potentially.

Starting point is 02:12:01 And, you know, there's an argument to me made that that is a... You don't need to be first, you just need to be paid. They also make, what, 20 billion per year from Google? For Google search for free. So Google keeps going up and up and up. So, yeah, they're not going to... dabble with touching that. What we haven't discussed is how much revenue you contribute to Apple on an annual basis. I think I'm on my 17th AirPods. Because they're a slippery bar of soap.

Starting point is 02:12:35 Yeah, yeah. No, no, it's more. I've had a few stolen. I don't like having things on me as well. So I'll just like leave things. So like the amount of times I've left them at Dines. Just a gift to the universe over and over again. The most frustrating thing is, Tim, is you can see where they all are. So there's one in particular right now that's in Cameroon, and I can see where his house is, right? No, no, no, because I'm a sad little man that I'm not willing to fly into Cameroon to confront the man, but I am willing to press the play sound button. Oh, my God. Do it at night while they're sleeping?

Starting point is 02:13:11 Yeah. Isn't there a single air pod that's in the, like, WHO building? Yeah, that was, that was Katty's AirPods that were in the WHA building. Yeah, just one airport that was in the single airport that he was playing this sound through from the WHO building in New York City. There you go. It's just there right now. Oh, he's in Ghana.

Starting point is 02:13:28 Oh, there we go. Eight minutes ago. That's incredible. But what a great, I mean, I never leave my house without my AirPods. This is why I think it's such a power user. It's ridiculous. I keep sounding like a broken record here, but I assume the device is a little,

Starting point is 02:13:46 little pod thing that we have now, headphones in, cameras in, but then it's almost you could have a like a holographic screen so people aren't on these glass screens as much and you can make it big, make it small. That feels inevitable.

Starting point is 02:13:58 I mean, there's rumor that the next AirPods, like you said, do have visual, the cameras, and that's crazy. If you think about it, you're walking around,

Starting point is 02:14:06 there's sort of two spatially aware cameras around you. Well, it's kind of like, uh, what was it? dark night returns or dark night rises when they had the cell phones. Oh yeah. They're mapped the entire.

Starting point is 02:14:16 I mean, what do you think Apple's going to do with that day? I don't understand how they're going to do the whole neuralink thing that you mentioned of they will read your thoughts because of the fact that some thoughts I have I didn't want to have. It wasn't me. But there's this meditation technique I once sat in, which is it's a real cool one. So it sounds like you're pretty serious to meditating. Yes.

Starting point is 02:14:35 Yeah. It was originally to fight off a skin condition and then it ended up fixing. A. Yeah, a Gemini fixed that. So the story there was... Gemini, fix your syphil? That's, can't be fixed. AGI is here, man. Sniffer gave me the syphil. No, the... I had a... I had subatomic domeritis for about two years. Subatomic?

Starting point is 02:14:58 Subatomic? Subotomic. Okay. I was like, wait, what? My face would break out like red and I wouldn't want to go outside the house. So I spoke to a few different doctors. A lot of them recommended topical steroid creams. A lot of them said it was because of stress. So I got deep into meditation. I stopped eating such little sugar that I once got diagnosed with type 1 diabetes,

Starting point is 02:15:18 which was a complete false diagnosis. Type 1 is pretty hard. Which is another side story. But I won. Then when I was away, I tracked my skin for years and nothing would work. Nothing would work. So when I was away on holiday, I just uploaded the file to Gemini and it just... The file, you mean a photo?

Starting point is 02:15:36 No, all the photos that I have. And it just said, oh, just put Nisarol shampoo. on your face. Oh, wow. And it's never, it's never had an issue ever since. So it was fungal? Yes. So the biggest, the biggest recommendation I would get. Miseral is ketoconazole for people wondering, yeah. This is for dandruff. And I do it once. Say again. This is for dandruff. It's also very effective for topical fungal infections. I did it once every two weeks now, and it's completely- Fucking crazy. It's completely gone. So any recommendation at home, like a practical thing would be just upload a photo of yourself to Gemini or ChachyPT and just say,

Starting point is 02:16:08 hey, based off what you can see of my skin, recommend me moisturizers, recommend me everything, and it will be better than anything you've done before. What do you use Gemini for? Versus other models. I'm, I'm an LLM whore, Tim. Yeah. I'm, I'm shifting.

Starting point is 02:16:22 He's like the Andrew Huberman of LLMs. Yeah, I'm shifting each time. Oh, but too, sorry, I didn't finish the story. So the meditation point there, there's a great question, which I ended up learning, was asking your mind, what thoughts going to come up next? and it's like your mind gets a bit.

Starting point is 02:16:39 It's almost this Mexican standoff. And the problem with these devices, I once asked myself that, and my mind went quiet for six seconds, and then for whatever reason, there's this former Bayam Munich winger called Iron Robin, and it's just him checking in on the left foot in my head. And it's like, was that me?

Starting point is 02:16:55 Why is that there? So if I have a neuralink device, it's an interesting one of how does it know what was me versus what's just my monkey mind doing strange behaviors? I can't wait to see the first failed demos of, you know what I mean, like these epic software demo fails. Someone gets up and it's just like twat, twat, twat, twat, twat. Especially given the likelihood of it being Elon to do the first presentation, it's quite high. A man with a mind that I don't think anybody wants to see broadcast out into public.

Starting point is 02:17:27 Did you see that demo of the cyber truck where he was on stage? And he smashed the window. And he smashed the window. He's like, wait, that's not supposed to happen. The best film I've watched all year, it's a British film. It's probably one of the best storytelling examples I've ever heard. So people will know it from the Brits Award. It was this horrific incident where Michael B. Jordan went on stage

Starting point is 02:17:45 and somebody shouted the N word out. And it was this huge controversial incident. But what actually happened was it was a guy who has one of the most severe form of threats. And he was a subject of a film. He was subject of a film. So the film is called, I swear. And it's incredible because this guy. I grew up in Scotland, which is, like, think about all the stereotypes you have about England.

Starting point is 02:18:09 Like, the further north you get, the more, like, harsher essentially is. Yeah. So people from Aberdeen are some of the most, like, brutal people on the planet. So this man grew up with extreme Tourettes in the 70s, 80s, England, when nobody knew what the condition was. So the film's amazing, because it's just him, like, walking to the shops going, fat, fat, and he goes, and he's just getting the shit beating out of him. And he can't explain what it is.

Starting point is 02:18:33 So he's constantly getting into fights. There's a scene where he's walking his dog, and this is real, so he's walking his dog about to go across a busy road. And he loves this dog. But there's a car coming, and he goes, walk forwards now. And then he has to grab the dock. He's Tourette's. He's fighting against himself.

Starting point is 02:18:51 Yeah, he's fighting against himself. It's so good. It's such a good film. Where can you see it? If you just search, I swear. Fuck you. Fuck you. I missed it.

Starting point is 02:19:04 Fuck you. From living with Chris, the man's a bit of a boomer. And I'll often give him a recommendation. And I'll go, where can I see it? And if it's not on Netflix, he can't get it. No, no, no. Just Google it. No, just figure it out.

Starting point is 02:19:15 That's not fair. That's not fair and that's not true. But my response is, what can I watch it on? And I'll just say Google it. Right, but that's a fair. I feel like this is a little bit like, here's a fantastic new restaurant. Okay, what streets are on? I just want a little bit more information. And the fact that you want me, knowing what you,

Starting point is 02:19:32 you know, which is that you might understand what streaming service is on, saying to me that I have to go and Google it when you could just say it's on Netflix, and me and Tim, this side of the table, we just expect a little bit more decorum. You know what I mean? This is why I want AGI to come because it gives me me... I'm so glad you brought this up. Chris. All right, all right, going back to the photo thing, do you guys know what people are utilizing chat UPT and whatnot for when they upload photos of themselves? Looks maxing. Well, that's interesting. Do you know, coves. What do they?

Starting point is 02:20:04 So they upload a set of photos. There's these apps on the app store too now that kind of do a rapper experience. But the idea is that effectively, you know, you upload photos to Gemini or Chad GPD, and then it suggests things that you might want to do, whether it's a- Cheapbones with this type of hammer. Medical procedure, you know, jaw surgery, having a symmetric face. Even things like hairstyle make a huge difference or a beard or whatever. I can skip that section.

Starting point is 02:20:29 And roughly, it's really interesting that people are doing this. because obviously there's this huge craze of looks maxing and whatnot. And it turns out huge use case for AI. Dude, check out coves. I've just sent this to you, Jared. Q OVs. Yeah, so look at this. So this is glow up without surgery.

Starting point is 02:20:48 Get your personalized facial analysis and transformation plan based on 2000. So I know the science team behind this. The science team behind this are absolutely sick. So look at the guy in the right. And then you should be able to do a transition. You see how you can get the middle of the guy's face. You should be able to click on it. Yeah, exactly. So move it all the way to the right. You was worried about meaning tim. Look at this. And then go to the left. Wow.

Starting point is 02:21:09 Got it. So it's like drive-by shooting suspect to soap opera star. Exactly. Get more career opportunities. Boost your self-confidence. Make a stronger first impression. Improve your dating life, enhance your quality of life. So basically it's... Go, go. Let me see the one on the left again. Go to the, you just swing it. She's really attractive. I feel like that's one of those like Sandra Bullock. Oh, she takes off the glasses and walks out. That's right. Yeah, you're like, wait. She just put her hair off.

Starting point is 02:21:34 That's all she did. She's shaped her face. A big, do it again, Jared. Show me. Slow it down. Go really slow. Fucking hell. Really, really slow.

Starting point is 02:21:42 Slow, slow, slow. You know, this is just IRR. FaceTune, right? Yeah, yeah. So if you, there's like, FaceTune has all of the, FaceTune. Do you guys know what FaceTune is? I don't.

Starting point is 02:21:51 I learned about it from Frey Render a couple of weeks ago. One of the most, it came out a long time ago, Israeli company. And it's, and it's just. And it's just. just a easy way of manipulating the way that your face looks and, you know, slims your jawline or whatever. What do you have a way? Like, as in on a photo, not actually.

Starting point is 02:22:12 So it turns out every Instagram or before they post, anytime people post photos, they typically went through the same workflows. And FaceTune was kind of a, you know, just a bunch of tools that you can utilize. And now with AI, holy crap. I mean, the possibilities are quite limitless. And so, you know, it can regenerate that photo. And so at the bottom, there are all these, like, AI filters. And people use them so, so, so much. And often I heard the story where one of my friends met somebody from Instagram,

Starting point is 02:22:47 and, you know, they had all these photos. And she looked nothing like herself, real life. Well, let me give you this from Freya. From Freya? From Freya. Freya, India is a girl, a writer who just released a book called Girls. The Nordic God. She does look a little bit like that, blonde hair.

Starting point is 02:23:05 She's like the, what's the female equipment of the Ubermensch? Uberfroing or whatever it's called. Bofone? Yeah, she's that. Lift. Yeah. She was telling me that when groups of young girls are out and they're taking photos at a party, everybody fights to be the one whose phone is used to have the photo taken,

Starting point is 02:23:25 because that means that they're the one that's in charge of the face tuning. Yep. So that they can work on themselves a little bit more in dialogue. I know, I know, I know. It's actually a huge social fopa if you post a picture where you look good and the other person doesn't. That is stitching you, that is stitching your mate up a little bit. You know, there's a famous English footballer called Ashley Cole. Can you just search Ashley Cole's squad photo?

Starting point is 02:23:50 And this, how old is this? Ten years? Yeah, he was when he was at Roma. So it's, and he's retired. Do you want to tell the story? Well, it's just a squad photo. It's one of those I know it when I see it, ideas, I guess. But it's just a football photo of the entire Roma team.

Starting point is 02:24:06 And Ashley Cole, who's this Brit, is like trying to mingle with these Italians. It's just an iconic, yeah, top left. Because he's just awkwardly leaning on the outside. So then he gets memed everywhere. This became one of the biggest memes in the world. It's a team that looks like they're so close. What's the headline? Scroll down a little bit.

Starting point is 02:24:24 Ashley Cole appears to be an outcast in an incredibly awkward Roma team picture. The amount of times me and Chris have been out with like a group of guys and I'll do the Ashley Cole like two yards. He just moves off to one side. Ruins it. Absolutely ruins it. All right, boys, let's bring this one into land. You all rule. Tim, what have you got coming up?

Starting point is 02:24:41 Where should people go to check out your things? You can find everything at tim.blog. I'd say that's probably the easiest. Yeah, check out the newsletter who's been going for like 10, 12, 14. God knows how many years. Five-go-Furday. What was that one, that most recent article? about self-improvement, what I learned from however many years of self-improve?

Starting point is 02:25:00 Ah, yes. Yeah, that was, it's called the self-help trap, what I learned after 20 years of, quote-unquote, yeah, improving myself. That's also, basically. Yeah, that's a long form. That's on the blog, 10, 12 pages. Tim.com. Slash Friday, sign up for the newsletter. A lot of the stuff that we're talking about. Go back if you want some, also another reason to check out neurostimulation, go back and look at the Brainsway stock graph for the last two or three years. So that type of stuff you'll learn

Starting point is 02:25:29 about before other people. I'm not a registered investment advisor I should make blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You may lose money, yeah. No, I appreciate you guys having me on. Our app is called Sky, SKYE, and it's a fun little experience. It's kind of a new way

Starting point is 02:25:45 to experience your phone. It's kind of ironic that we're, you know, I talked about that, having, you know, we talked about the digital detox or whatever, but our goal is to kind of really make you stop using as much as you would otherwise by surfacing the things that you might care about before, such that you don't go into this doom scrolling world or whatever. Imagine something that exists there. It's there when you need it. It's gone when you don't, and we don't really have anything else. So it's a fun little thing. A couple people, and we've got

Starting point is 02:26:20 tens of thousands of people on a wait list right now, so we're trying to fulfill that inference is very expensive, but it's been the time of my life to build this. I'm, I guess I love technology so much, and I love interfaces, and I love thinking about the world with respect to how the future might be in terms of people interacting with the, with the technology in a meaningful way, not necessarily in a doom scrolling, sort of this world that we've kind of built. So I don't know where we'll go with that, but it's been, it's been an incredible time building. And what a time to be alive. If you're, if you're any type of builder today, it is probably one of the most remarkable times I've ever witnessed. I'm baffled every day. And so it's been so much fun. And we're just

Starting point is 02:27:06 getting started. So I'm, I'm really excited for that. And at Signal on X with two L's, S-I-G-N-U-L, if you want to see you call out the Xbox CEO a little bit more. That's pretty hilarious. I wonder if she's going to watch this. Tickler.com slash signal. Sniffies. Sorry, I need to take that username from that app. Match with me there. My end, highagency.com forward slash books. If you want to get a breakdown of all my best books, you told me to do this. There's going to be a book breakdown. A list of a lot of different books, but the personal one of Oblamov, a Russian man from the 18th century who the first 50 pages are about him getting out of bed. So there's more resources like

Starting point is 02:27:45 that get my best books and articles that's it okay all right see you next time everyone yo cheers gentlemen yes there we go yeah yeah good fun you're fun you

Modern Wisdom - Rabbit Hole: Who Will Survive The AI Era? (cats, mostly) - #1105

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