Mysterious Universe - 36.12 - MU Podcast - The Skill Trap | Outsourcing Ourselves

Episode Date: September 25, 2026

Welcome back to MU! As AI and automation get better & better at doing our jobs, they may also be slowly doing away with the way humans have always learned to become good at them. With examples from robotic surgery, Michelin kitchens, warehouses, bomb disposal, banking, and more, our second installment of Matt Beane’s The Skill Code explores how we build real expertise, and how intelligent machines could either hollow that process out or help create an entirely new kind of apprenticeship.  Welcome to your Plus+ extension, and thank you all for joining us on Plus+! Buddhists believe that millions of super cool people reside in this underworld paradise called Agartha. Their daily lives and their destiny are directed by a wise, all-powerful ruler known as Rigden-jyepo, also known as the King of the World. Rigden-jyepo kicks it in Shamballah, the capital city of Agartha, which is allegedly accessed through many secret entrances from the surface world, found hidden within the towering monasteries of Tibet, guarded by jolly llamas sworn to protect the secrets of the underworld. The Skill Code: How to Save Human Ability in an Age of Intelligent Machines TDI Industries This Hollow Earth: The Astounding Investigation Into the Lost World Beneath Our Planet's Surface Nicholas Roerich’s artwork - Order of Rigden Jyepo Shamballah by Nicholas Roerich -1930 Life and works of Alexander Csoma de Körös Fundamental Principles of Vedanta Historic Ensemble of the Potala Palace, Lhasa Beasts, Men and Gods by Ferdinand Ossendowski The Voynich Manuscript has a new interpretation Hollow Earth, Hyperborea, Agartha, Shambhala LinksPlus+ ExtensionThe extension of the show is EXCLUSIVE to Plus+ Members. To join. click HERE.Links Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Do I have that right? Yeah, episode 12. Nice. Nice. Yeah. First try and everything. Well, that. Today on the show, we're going to be covering the last part of the skill code by Matt Bean.

And this is from 2024. And if you are on Plus, you will have already listened to the first part. And if you're not, well, you have some catching up to do. I am Joe Hodgdon. Joining me, of course, is the great and powerful Brandon Thompson. Thomas. Oh shit. What's up, dude? How y'all doing? What's up to come up with some nicknames for you at some point. If you feel compelled, not obligated, but yeah, yours is easy and fun. Like, it's so easy. Like, an infinite number of them. So, yeah. All you have to do is look up the lists of bro words and you have Joe words. It's that easy. I've challenged myself outside of that realm. It is so, like, ubiquitous that I've challenged myself outside and not found it to be that much of a challenge more of just a fun creative exercise. Yes, but have at it, sir. We're all in anticipation of what you come up with.

Well, nothing really rhymes very well with Brandon, so. That's what I'm saying. It's kind of some work. That's what I'm saying. I believe in you, though. Does that help you may dip into other languages, you know? Yeah, very well could. I mean, we have tools at our disposal,

which we will be talking about here today. No limit. Before we go in, though, if you are not on plus, obviously the links are in the show notes, and you're missing out on two-thirds of what we do, If you don't do that. Right. And it's kind of hard to track what we're doing here unless you're getting all three parts weekly because it just kind of like today, we're doing a second part of a show I started Tuesday.

So it's, or the extension, whatever it was. It is all blending together. Highly recommend you guys just come join us for the flow instead of the dip in and out. You're welcome to dip in and out. It's so much more fun in the flow, though. And like Joe said, so much more value over there. You get a higher bit rate feed. You get for the max plus there, you get.

all of the back episodes as well. The Ben and Nairn had done for over 20 years, man. It's a huge compendium of stuff. Come join us over there, guys. That is where it's at for sure. We have this huge hollow earth saga going on. He hasn't missed a shit ton of stuff. Come hang out.

If you're just catching the Friday show, like we said, you're missing out on the bigger picture here, which is probably why a lot of people on YouTube are like, oh, we don't know what's going on. Well, you got to come over here, sorry. Not to mention. Yeah, like you said, Well, it was at max is 15 bucks a month.

You know how many shows that is? That's an insane number of shows for the cost of like one Starbucks. So, yeah. Yeah, not even. And we're not even burnt coffee. It's way better. We taste better than their shit too. It's great.

I do want to give a shout to listener Rylund out of Oregon. He's kind of right up the road from me. And he's just had nice words to say specifically about your Hollow Earth saga that's been going on. So thanks. Oh. Oh, thanks, Ryan. Out there in the trenches doing landscaping and shit. If you dig across anything, buddy, let me know, please, because that is fucking awesome, dude.

There's folks we know out there that'll find bricks just in yards with crazy old dates on them, like ridiculous dates of stuff. And then pits just everywhere. There's holes leading into inner earth all over the place over there. Have you ever heard of the account? I think it's on TikTok, but a bunch of places. The Adventure Twins? No, I don't think so.

Dude, Stellium 7, Mike Wilkerson, shout out. sent me these guys fascinating stuff. They just go on to people's lands who give them permission about rumors of an old well in a cave or something like that that they water's coming out of, they've been using it, but they don't go into the cave. They go back in this thing. It's like these massive caverns, dude,

that lead miles and miles and miles down on these folks just private property hanging out. Really? These amazing videos. Yeah, some of them are the ones where they're squeezing through things that are half full of water and you're like, I don't care for those. But some of it's just awesome. These guys find stuff all over, especially out

Oregon. And that's allegedly where that hollow earth entrance where the coastline is just eight miles down on the other side. You guys are right there. Very cool. Great segue though. So in this saga you have on the hollow earth, what do you have coming up in plus later on? Yeah, we're going to go to Tibet. We're going to start our hollow earth journey in Tibet. We're going to go down from there. But even in that area, all of the legends about Shambala, Shangri-La, Agartha, this hidden inner entrance to earth guarded by these llamas for centuries that know exactly what's going on. Also speak of In your lands folks that come out and participate in the local wares of some of the small villages and then go back into the earth there.

We're going to go deep for episode number three of our Hollow Earth saga from Warren Smith's 1977 work, This Hollow Earth. And we're just going to keep it going here, man. So we're going to go over to Tibet. Talk to some llamas about what they think. Hell yeah. Can't wait. Like if we were talking before the show, I could listen to Hollow Earth stuff all day because it's just, it's just. it's just enough of outside of our general reality that it's just I can't get enough of it because it's like I think you were saying it takes you out of this daily grind thing like oh let's think about the earth's butt hole for a minute and I love it it reminds me of why the distractions out here on the surface are so loud and noisy and look at me and vote and make sure this is important to you and all that kind of shit is because of shit like this Joe it's because there are so many really cool things just right here and literally beneath your

feet. This is a porous ground that we inhabit here. It's got entrances all over the place. And even to civilizations people don't even know about just in their backyard, just 30 feet down right there. It's an insane amount of stuff going on. So who's to say that any of it isn't accessible? A lot of these rock faces as well are holograms, allegedly, that with the right bloodline, you can walk up to the thing and then opens like a portal for you. You put your hand through it as if a rock's not even there. So some of it's just optical illusion and keep people out. It's such a a widespread facade and especially when you, you know, enter into the mainstream science view of everything that you've got to follow those, that physics, even with that physics, this is a

fascinating tale with all kinds of cool shit coming up. So definitely, I'm joining us guys for him. No. And the only, I guess, pushback I would have against Hollow Earth is that the government says that's not real. So obviously they wouldn't lie. So it's all bullshit, right? I say, thank you guys. Because whatever you are saying, I'm very curious, say in real, I'm very curious about. So to kind of not like backtrack or anything, but in the first segment of this

book, he kind of goes over what he called the three Cs of the skill code and that is challenge complexity and connection. And it sounds super corporate jargon and I hate that kind of thing, but he does it in a great way that's actually

interesting and fun. And we're going to have the three Ds later too. Stay tuned for that, if you know what I mean. I can guess one of them. So we talked about what, Andre the chef last time and Kristen the... Kristen, the surgeon. Yeah, and how they... Beth.

...are going to get into some AI talk because that's apropos for the current time. And again, this is from 2024, so I think we mentioned it last time, but I wanted to kind of catch up with this guy and see what he thinks now. Because two years and AI time, might as well be centuries. It's dinosaurs. You know, it's like, what do you think now, dude? Because when he put this out, I mean, you've got to think he was writing this in 23. Right.

It's published in 2024. And he's already calling the exact thing that we're seeing now. So yeah, I definitely want to see if he has a follow-up book or if we can get him on for an interview or something at some point. Absolutely. But the basic premise of the challenge of the Cs is that you want to get your ass kick just the right amount. So, and, oh, if you. want some little snippets, join us on Instagram or TikTok or anywhere else because we put plus episodes out on those platforms, but only like 30 seconds.

Yeah. A little teaser. Well, just a tip. So when you get past the whole challenge part of it, like you want to, when you're in an apprenticeship or learning a new trade, you want you want a challenge because otherwise, what are you doing? You're staying there doing the same thing you've done the whole time, whether it was chopping onions as Andre was in the kitchen or doing the same thing in the surgical room and

then the expert comes in and does the actual part of it. What happens when you take out that challenge part of it? And that's kind of where he's going with AI on it. But he gives a different example of the next C is complexity, right? And he, uh, uh, just for context here, uh, Matt Bean, the author was actually, we called him a voyer. He, he kind of just followed people. around and watch their experience in different fields, different technologies, and just

kind of documented everything he saw. And the next woman he gets to is a CETA. Sita? S-I-T-A? What did you say? Sita. C-T-A. Where's she from? I don't know.

I didn't note that. It doesn't matter. It's Albuquerque Saita. If it's anywhere else, C-T. I would say C-T-A. So she's a shift supervisor at the warehouse and it's like a family-owned business and it took her five years to get to that position so she's you know six days a week six 30 in the morning type of job and it's a kind of a

I've never worked in a place like this but it's like a warehouse that handles a random assortment of things so they they ship out like pet treats and pile displays and lighting kits it's like an amazon warehouse yeah kind of like a family owned amazon probably Etsy or something like a Distribution Center. Okay. Things come in from one place and then they get moved from a central location, which is this place, then to other places. Yeah, from what I can tell people that want to sell stuff, send it to them, and they do the shipping and processing. Kind of like drop shipping, maybe, something like that.

Okay. Yeah, yeah. Again, it took her five years to get to this position and she's just head on a swivel all the time. She's like, I think he describes her as like a detective in a warehouse because she's constantly, oh, I smell dog treats that I shouldn't smell dog treats here so packaging is probably torn she's going around looking at different boxes and all this stuff trying to figure out where the problems are do that robots we'll get there too she she started out though her whole job was putting perfume samples into bags minimum wage repetitive ass just bag comes in perfume goes in

next bag it's like the uh i love lucy with the chocolate factory you know she ends up eating them. Right, right. Yeah, just just the worst type of job you can imagine. But her supervisor, Philip, was watching her and he kind of noticed that she was a little bit, we could call it noticing. She was looking around a lot. Uh-oh. Can't have that. She'd watch what happened before the bags got to her and what happened farther down the line. So he's like, you know what? Go over to boxing for a bit and just look at it. He didn't give her some big corporate jargon speech or anything. He's like, just watch the tape machines. Tell me what you see. And just by doing that for a day,

she realized that the taping machine was putting a lot of pressure on the packages. And then he sends her back to her other job. But now when she gets back to her putting samples into the bags, she'd give the bags a little shake so the weight was more like evenly distributed and they wouldn't get crushed by the tape machine. So, and Philip notices this. And he's like, all right, let's move you again over to here. Now just watch the product.

So now she saw where this in. incoming merchandise got broken or lost or, you know, stolen, factory workers, right? Mm-hmm. And she saw how these quality problems were recorded. And then she went back to her regular spot. And she started telling coworkers not to dig around inside the product bins because they were damaging things.

Just grab them from the top. It's easy, right? And Phillips like, okay, so would you notice when you were looking at all this? And she said, well, there's too many starts and stops. He's like, okay, figure out why. Why? A couple days later, she comes back and she says, well, replenishment was getting bogged down because the smaller product kept falling to the bottom of these bins. So it was harder to get him out quickly. And so on the spot, he promotes her to lead in that department, replenishment.

Oh, yeah. She got moxie. And it surprised the shit out of her because she'd never worked in replenishment ever. But Phillips, like, I figured out that you understand something that's more important than this individual job. you're learning the system as a whole. Right. That's the complexity part of this, is that you're learning the whole system.

And we talked about that a little bit on the last one with, like if you start a podcast, you could know that you have to talk into a mic, but you don't understand how to do that and then get it to the crowd or how to get it distributed or whatever. Yeah. And that's the difference between, you know,

knowing this narrow task and knowing the whole way the system works. Yeah, versus being compartmental. mentalized to just do one thing. Put this in that bag and don't look at anything else. Yeah. Just do your repetitive task over and over again. Just don't pay attention.

Don't notice anything. And so by the time the author here, Matt, is watching her as the supervisor position five years later. He's like, okay, so the way you're looking at your job is just second nature now. So the smell of dog treats or scuff marks or these messy bins or whatever, you know what it is. instinctively now because you've had this broader scope to look at the whole job in. And so to kind of contrast that, though, he brings up another guy named Arnold. And he's also a warehouse worker, but it's a way more automated facility, probably way newer. You know, it's like robotic arms are doing a lot of the actual like packaging and doing all this stuff.

And his job is basically to just help the robots out. He's like a personal robot assistant. So the robot drives something, he picks it up for him, grabs it a cup of coffee, sends an email for it. You know, he's just, he's not doing anything that has much impact on the way the whole system works. Right. And so he actually, Arnold even says he's like, I feel like a robot myself. Like this is, I'm just doing these rote tasks that have nothing to do with the actual thing. I'm just, oh, the robot took a shit.

So now I got to call somebody who knows what they're doing to. fix it. Oh, I picture the robot taking an actual shit and him walking around with little bags and needing to clean it up like a dog. Yeah, just drop some oil on the floor. And stopped working. Right. So the difference in these two cases, though, is that in the more automated facility with Arnold, everything was loud. You couldn't see your coworkers because there's machines everywhere. There's nobody to come around and notice the extra effort or the extra, I don't know, intelligence that the employee is showing. Oh, yeah, it's value.

Yeah. Yeah. So he didn't get a chance to have this complexity of this job. He's just still wiping the robot's ass basically all day. Right. So then he brings it to kind of more of the connection aspect of this whole thing. And this is Emily. And she's a director of enterprise sales at a software company, you know.

Hey, congratulations. Can you imagine? No. Pass. Not for me. No. But her team sells software and it's used to manage like these enormous construction projects like skyscrapers and bridges and things I'm really glad I'm not a part of. But I do appreciate bridges and buildings sometimes.

That is nice. Yeah. Being like I'd like to be on that side of that body of water. Oh, cool. Someone thought to put a bridge here. Me. Yeah. I'm glad you have the engineering skill to do that.

Same with medical stuff for me. It's a hard pass, but I'm glad there's people who do it. Yeah. Yeah. And one of her newer sales persons is named Brandon. Hey. He did not say hard pass. He was all in.

And he, I mean, he really looks up to Emily because it's kind of like, you know, his boss. So they sit down for their quarterly pipeline review. Ugh. Again. Gross. And he's ready to go. He's like, I'm going to show you what I did. I'm doing it so good.

And he really is. He hasn't made any catastrophic mistakes. his numbers are on point and she's like you know what I'm still disappointed he's like okay and she's like no listen you're playing it too safe yes your prospects are moving along but you're not getting challenged enough and she's like you're kind of like reluctant to push these leads further or whatever you know with his sales and you're wasting too much time on these leads that aren't going anywhere and he's like well I'll be damned you're right it's like I'm already kind of frustrated with the size of these deals and how slowly they're going.

And I just hadn't figured out why yet. And she's like, do you want some advice on how to change that? He's like, no, give me two weeks. I'll come up with it myself. And she just says, okay, go for it. She's like, I trust you. And that's the best part about this is that she didn't just give him the answer as to what was going on. She said, here's the problem.

Fucking figure it out. Yep. She knows that Brandon will get it sorted. Yeah. And then she does the same, well, the same basic thing with another. sales dude name Anoush buddy. Hang on, let's follow up. Brandon, did he come back and he crushed it or are we going to come back to that? Oh, we'll come back to it. Oh, okay. Thank you. I thought you were leaving us on that like, oh, that was in. Anyway, go ahead. I trust you. So Anoush just landed this

a pretty big meeting with like a Fortune 500 company. It's like the biggest deal he's ever handled. And Emily joins up in the meeting and she just shuts up. She's like, you got this. You set the agenda. You run the whole conversation. And obviously, you know, she'd step in where she needed to, know, a suggestion, why don't we have a dinner while we're here or whatever. But she didn't just swoop in and take over it because this is an important account and she lets Anous have it. And this is this connection for, well, at least from Bean's perspective. It's not like, oh, we have to like cut our hands and become blood brothers and spend Christmas together or anything. It's just there's enough trust and respect between these two people that the more experienced person is willing to put something potentially,

you know, big into their hands because we trust you, right? Yeah, it's good for him. And Emily knows what that feels like because that's exactly how she got to where she was. Earlier in her career, she was like a sales development rep working around three more experienced people. And when she started getting these really good leads, they started inviting her onto calls just to listen. And she was like, always, I will always accept that.

I'm going to start asking questions, participate and all this stuff. And eventually all three of these guys vouched for her when she was ready for her first, like, real sales executive job. And later, after she helped, like, organize this particularly good sales deal or whatever, one of the guys invited her or an introduce her to a guy named Bert and made a specific point of crediting Emily for her part in the deal. And Bert hired her just like that. And eventually these other three guys weren't her superiors. They were peers and colleagues and, you know, friends she could still call for advice. Yeah. And so when Emily lets Brandon do this whole thing with his problem or, you know, let a new run this Fortune 500 meeting, she's passing along the same opportunity that somebody gave her one time.

And none of this, like, requires some giant corporate mentorship or anything with, you know, badges and HR websites. nobody can remember the passwords to. What? It's just somebody who's super experienced going, yeah, come on in here. That's enough to change your whole career. There are other ways to do things is what you're saying? Yeah, I'm saying it too, you know, not what you know. And that too.

Yeah. But then so eventually the C word, which shall not be named hits in 2020. And everybody's working from home. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Oh, oh. Everybody's working from home. And she's like, Emily's like, oh, my God. how do you sell this enterprise software when you can't even meet your customers?

But she's like, you know what? I'm going to meet this problem head on. I'm going to do more calls, maybe shorter calls, but, you know, better digital material, video conferencing, all this stuff. So she's working with IT and she goes to these Zoom virtual sales conferences and it works out. And she becomes kind of a geek about it. She's like, oh, this is like the future, right? And her team is super experienced and they keep producing.

the deals are moving forward and everyone's doing their jobs. And if you're looking at numbers, it looks fucking awesome. Successful transition, right? But then a few months into this, they get a really good deal and it's over a Zoom call as everybody did in 2020. And everyone's, you know, high five with emojis or whatever. Oh, yeah. She gets this private message from Nadine. It's one of the younger sales development reps.

And Nadine's like, dude, the team is dying. We're totally losing our edge. And Emily just calls her immediately and they talk for a bit. And she's like, so Nadine's like, oh, so here's what the dashboard numbers aren't showing. The customers are fine. The team just isn't learning from each other anymore. So nobody's bumping into each other on the way to get coffee in the morning or, you know, the junior reps or whatever. They're not like eavesdropping on the senior people working through some weird problem.

everybody's compartmentalized into their own little section of this company. And that has catastrophic effects on morale and everything else. Yeah. I was lucky enough that when that whole thing happened, that was probably just a sci-op. Anyway, it was a, I had a different view on the whole thing because you can't deliver packages from home. Yeah. That'd be cool, but at the moment you can't do that. So I'd never missed a day of work through that whole time.

So when people were talking about, oh, you go work from home now. It sucks and all. I'm like, I don't even know how to like empathize with you because I've been out on the road every single day. Yeah. But yeah, so basically this, this transition to this e-commerce Zoom work, there's less chances to like just come across something unexpected or, you know, less interactions where somebody maybe notices that you're ready for a better challenge. And I would, I mean, as far as the narrative goes, they say that nobody intentionally removed any of this. I would disagree. I think part of it was intentional or at least.

Yeah. But that's a different show. Have you ever seen the TDI Industries logo? Nope. Okay. So here I've pulled up and I'll just go ahead and link this one out on it to link it. an image of the TDI Industries logo.

Now here's an example of what Joe is talking about. Someone walked into a room and thought that that logo didn't look like three dudes jerking each other off. And someone else did. And they snickered and they didn't say anything. And now we all can't unsee that. But a big room full of people, meaning well, that didn't want to argue with one another,

When one said it looked good and they had good enough reasons and they spent a lot of money on it. So you might as well. They said, okay, cool. Yeah, we're into that. That looks great. But I can never see this and not picture three days just giving each other crossover handies. That is a two D circle jerk if I've ever seen one. I know.

And TDI Industries, God bless you. This is a free plug for you. I don't even know what you do. But this right here, I've seen these vans drive around all over the place and we snicker at them because there's some of us like the adult jokes in kids movies. We get this. is amazing and a room full of people have proved it. So I'll go ahead and like that for everyone's enjoyment. So basically this supposedly improved technology, they kept the work part of it, but weakened the whole system that produces better workers in the first place.

Yes. And Beans like, dude, Emily's team was basically like running on a treadmill. Like, yes, you're doing work, but you're not going anywhere. So if we go back to the example of Andre from the last show and he needed Jane to give him these problems that were just a little bit beyond his current ability. Same with Cita. She needed Philip to let her see beyond whatever station she was working at. And Brandon and Anush Buddy, they needed Emily to trust them with work. They hadn't completely like mastered yet.

And the important thing here is that none of these things, none of these arrangements here are. like especially efficient at least in the short term because think about a new guy at work everybody knows a new guy at work they're almost always slower they ask questions they fuck things up they need attention they're yeah they're just it's like a uh an ape trying to look at a fucking microwave it's like how do i work this and i've had no shade at my last job had plenty of these people these absolute lumbering knuckle dragging silverbacks that just don't don't know what the hell they're doing. And it's, it's annoying because it's like, oh, I have to train this guy today.

Okay. I guess. How fun is it, though, whenever you send, if you're in restaurants, right, what's the, what's one of the first ones you do to the trainees? Restaurants are closing down for the evening. You tell them to what. Oh, you show them the goat. Yes.

Well, from waiting, yes. Ours was to go empty the hot water out of the tea thing. So you have them take pitcher after pitcher, you know, because the hot water is on a spicket on the tea. deal, but it's on the spout. It never runs out. So they are there for, and we would get people running 20 buckets, 30 buckets, for they'd figure this out.

Like, is this plugged into the wall? Does this ever end? How does it hold this much? Like, the math starts adding up in their head. We would also send them next door to other restaurants for cups of sugar. We'd be like, dude, go next door and get us a cup of sugar. We'd just ran out. We need it real bad. And they go, okay. And they run over there with their trainee bad time. Just shit like that. Like, they're fun. It's called hazy.

Right. Yeah, but then there's catastrophic mistakes. Like the one time I worked at Denny's. they had one of the new cooks and we had trained him when you empty the friar oil. First of all, let it cool down a bit first. Oh. First thing, right, cool it down a bit. Turn it off at least for an hour. He not only didn't cool it down, but he thought it would be okay to pour it into a plastic bucket.

Oh. Long story short, hot oil all over the goddamn floor. But it's like on the last show we talked about these mistakes that you never forget. Yes. Guess what he never did again? Yeah. Never did that again. Let me tell you it. You might have even gotten written up for that. Fundamentally, this is a fuck around and find out place. I truly, truly feel that. Oh, yeah. And so, yeah, these things happen. But also, we're all around to witness your findouts. And so it's fun.

Yeah. So this, at least in Emily's case, is kind of a mild version of what happens when technology makes that inefficient beginner just unnecessary. and it starts showing up in a lot of other places too like AI can let a senior engineer do this analysis without even having the junior engineer who used to help and the software can let a senior banker pull information that used to require work from a younger analyst and it's just taking out this kind of middle ground of what makes you an expert in your field is the fuckup phase the find around find out phase this and that's where he's kind of getting at with technologies that it's kind of removing the what he called the desirable difficulties it's removing that whole part of it and that's a huge piece of what makes you good at something is knowing when you fucked up how you did and how to not do that again and it's kind of taking that out of the picture that's what I love about anyone who's been on a job for a long time that you learn from they have learned most of the ways not to do it. They've got some great

stories, but you can get caught up pretty much and get a really good bearing without needing to do a bunch of those things on your own, but just talking to those old dudes who've been there for a real long time. Yeah. Right. It's like what we talked about with vibe coding that I had never heard of before. It's this. Yeah. You just tell the AI,

hey, make me this game or this program or whatever, but you have no clue how to script Python or anything. So it's, you're taking out the hard part, which is learning how to code and giving it to something else. And yes, again, his main point is in the short term. That's awesome. Productivity goes up. Everybody makes more money. But then in 20 years, what does that look

like? It's a bubble, though. That's the... This is like a tragic bubble. I am glad, though, because he's very measured in the way he talks about AI specifically. He's like, I'm not fear porn in you. It's not this doom thing. I think there's ways we can make this work. I'm just pointing out obvious problems in this idea of apprenticeship in skill coding and knowing how to do things or not do things more importantly. Yeah, it's an exploitive system that's been handed to a bunch of people to exploit them. And they're exploitive themselves. So it's a circle jerk. Again, the TDI, I referenced the TDI industry's logo guys. It's linked in the show description. Maybe that'll be the thumbnail for this one. Yeah. We don't want to give them more free marketing though. I don't even know what they do.

I thought it was a little more interesting because he's not like, hey, it's going to take our jerbs. He's like, if the machine lets the expert do everything without this beginner phase, then where exactly do these future experts come from? Like how it is a bubble in that sense, yeah. You can see this long term. You can see that we're screwing the shit out of whoever needs these kind of things later on because no human's going to be able to do this anymore. And that's not a good thing, man.

The rebellion is going to be to retain tasks that you're like writing. That's an act of rebellion. man, to keep up your literacy? That's ridiculous. Why would you be doing that? But guys, keep that going. I never thought I'd have to say this, but read shit, write stuff with your hands. Like, learn an instrument.

Learn how to do Rubik's Cube. My dad challenged us one time. He bought us all Rubik's cubes for Christmas one time. He said he'd give 50 bucks to the person who could come back that next Christmas and do it. I was the only one who did it. I got my 50 bucks. Nerd. I know.

But what I'm saying is I was doing that rather than listen to some elected lizard turd, whatever, You know, some selected actor to stand there and tell me how I should feel and what I should be scared of. Yeah. Basically anything, even a Rubik's Cube is better than listening to that. Yeah, that's what I figured. I traded the time for it. And I feel it was a worthy investment. Yeah.

So, again, when he's like, okay, this sounds great. This increased productivity and this new technologies, you know, allowing an experienced person to do things without needing much help from somebody below them. And that sounds great because immediately, you know, in the present tense, it is great, usually. Well, because you can cut jobs and then you can say, well, we spent less this year on getting the same result. Exactly. This infinite growth corporate model, which is not sustainable. Yeah, jeans. You owe me a Coke.

So he takes corporate law and these bigger firms, these bigger like corporate law firms, they're using AI to automate things like document review, which sounds terrible and I would never want to do it, even though we kind of do document review for the show, but it's way more interesting. But it's flawed. It's very flawed. It's got a lot of challenges to it. And so if you're basing things on that technology

and not also going over it with a human, then that's going to be problematic, I would think, yeah. You would think. And what you do is you just overwhelm the workload to where it has to be done by AI because that's the amount of time you've got to do it. That's the thing is that then you get used to this, way of doing things and then if you go back you're losing money.

Right. Yeah. So it's not, I mean, foresight is important people. How gross. It's at the end, right? We've talked about it, but this is it. Like, we're witnessing it. We really are.

This is so fascinating. It hits me more every day, but man, how fun. It's maybe the end of a cycle, like we like to say. It's definitely that. Yeah, we'll go that way. Yeah. I mean, people in the Industrial Revolution, think about that. they're like, this is the end of the world.

Like, think about when computers came out for the first time and started being used across everything, everyone was like, this is the end of the world. Right. Yeah. Horses to cars. Yeah. Yeah. Horses to car. Anything.

Any new technology, you're always going to have detractors. And the most part, they're right about 50% of the time. The other 50% it works and it improves our life. So this is why I like his kind of measured approach to this. Yes. But I love that he's pointing out how important humans are. This is so great. Yeah.

So when he's talking about things like this document review and these big law firms, it used to take a ton of time from these junior lawyers. And so it's great. The senior lawyers can move faster and the clients don't have to pay as many hours, whatever. Everybody wins, right? Except the junior lawyer who used to be involved in those cases because even though this document review thing, which just sounds like hell on earth to me, it's tedious. But what it gives this junior lawyer is an experience on a real case that the experience attorneys are working on. So they could see, you know, what mattered to them or, again, ask questions. They got corrected.

And they started picking up, you know, new pieces of this larger job. But when you automate this tedious task, then you might accidentally also automate away their reason for being in the room for the human. Right. You're training the robot to take over. And that's what most people are worried about with this. And he actually cites something from law.com. Didn't know that was a website. And there's a warning, I guess, that basically says an entire generation of lawyers are missing out on training in professional development as this happens.

Yay. So he's like, and another thing happens in policing, I guess, too. Take flock cameras or automated things in police. leasing. That's a big fucking problem now. Yeah, but it's unconstitutional. It doesn't stand up. Yeah, that's true. But everyone needs to know that. All you got to do is know that. Yeah. Did I tell you about how Jen got a ticket in the mail?

Oh, yeah. With someone else was driving it, she wouldn't even there. But you guys had to take time and prove that. Just wanted it a third way. Which is automatically unconstitutional, right? Because we're not supposed to prove our innocence. They're supposed to prove our guilt. But they flip it on you. with red light cameras and they're like prove that wasn't you but i told i was like dude no put it on them say prove that is me yeah and they were like okay yeah that's dismissed like ah that's what i fucking thought yeah if it took longer than that you can send him a fee schedule we don't have time to go into all that but yes yes they owe you for inconveniencing you yeah and it's so stupid because

they're assuming your guilt by sending you that ticket and nine times out of ten people just pay it because they want it to go away and that's what they're counting on that's tacit consent Yes. Even if there's a picture of you going through, I don't recommend this, but enter at your own risk here. But even if there is and you can see your face in it, you could still say, I don't know who that is. Prove it was me. How can you do that? They can't prove it was you.

Right. Absolutely cannot. There could be someone in a me mask driving around. We know those exist. I've seen Mission Impossible. Yeah. My car was at the shop. Maybe they were taking it for a test drive.

Prove that's me. And they don't. And they automatically dismiss it. It's the easiest ticket to get out of. Just a little sidebar. It's the easiest to get out of because it's unconstitutional and not lawful. That's why. And it's a private company out of fucking Georgia or something.

Yeah, it's so stupid. The whole red light camera thing, it's horseshit. Yeah. Yeah. So he goes through a couple more examples of this, though, not only with these predictive systems with the police, but like investment banking has its own version of that, I guess. There's some program or whatever called fact set and. capital IQ that can like pull together market analysis and all this you know company valuations like

super quick uh side note 2021 was a record year for banking profits is that right isn't that odd yeah how weird i don't know i don't know why that is some folks didn't experience that they experienced something else didn't they i mean i've heard a lot of people call 2020 in that whole thing the largest wealth transfer in history uh huh that's a rabbit hole for you to go down if you want to. For those that participated in it, yeah. They paid with their actual money and time and spirit a little bit and soul. That's okay. But he points out a ton of different fields like journalism, radiology, data science, education, long haul trucking, all of these things that are getting more and more automated. And when you think of automation, at least in the sci-fi sense,

you think, great, Star Trek future. Awesome. We have replicators. We can just squirt like, put in what we want for food and it just squirts it out. It's probably all petrol based, but that's what I'm saying. It'll be humans. It'll be soiling green, something like that. So yeah, if it's offered to you in this societal mindset with the lizard turds and where they are right now, it's not going to be to your benefit. Yes, I completely agree that we would like something different, but closing that goal and gap is where we're at with that, which is a fascinating place to be. This is what you were right when you said. It's the end of the old world. This is a new, cycle coming about and just to be here for it's pretty interesting it's really cool but this this bit of

it like man hang on to your humanity gang because it's um just being offered by these people who call themselves humans all around you it's just very interesting hold on to it's the most valuable commodity now trust them anymore yeah even people at the store dude i'm like are you human because seriously are you the most retarded human or you like what is going on what i like is i've thought this for years I've been in this for so long that I've kind of considered that folks I'm talking to aren't real people for a long time. So I'm doing great with this. It's like easing into salinity whenever you're old. I'm going to do great with it.

I'm already, I'm fine. That's how I knew I was getting old too. I was like, get off my damn lawn. Oh, I felt that way for, I'm an independent property owner as well. So I felt that way for a minute. I don't think that's got anything to do with being old. I think that's, I got to do with your personal constitution. Yeah.

Yeah. So one of the better examples that he comes up with is computer chip design. Have you ever looked at a microscope, like an electron microscope or whatever it is, zoom in of a processor chip? Dude, that is fucking alien technology. You can't convince me otherwise. Like, I know it's like lithography or whatever, however they do it, but that's alien tech. I'm convinced. Yeah, there's tiny little, I think, scale, right?

They employ people on the next scale down at each level to build one thing in a giant warehouse for them, perhaps. And then it's real easy. For my multiverse battery. Right. And then they scale it. They add it to this realm and then there it is. Yeah. So the design of like a modern, I don't know, chip for your phone or computer or whatever, it's insanely complicated because everything interacts.

You move one little component and I don't know. Maybe you improve like heat management, but then that creates a problem with power consumption. and you fix that, now something else gets worse and blah, blah, blah, blah. So before these newer, at least AI-assisted design tools, which is probably all AI by now, really. But a really skilled engineer could spend, like, maybe close to a week working through all the possible configurations of this. And the junior engineers were really useful during that whole process

because the senior engineer would give them, you know, simpler pieces of this thing to run an analysis on. And then they bring the results back, Senior person would review them, junior asked questions, it's the same apprenticeship idea. But then AI comes on the scene, and now the senior engineer can run this algorithm overnight, basically, that, you know, takes huge numbers of these possible configurations of the chip. Then the software, this AI software, comes back with all the options. Senior engineer can use his, you know, years of experience to judge whether those actually make sense. So he gets to spend more time on kind of the cool problem.

And the work does get done faster and there's less mistakes. But then what happens? The junior engineer becomes an option. So companies start leaving them out. Like, why wouldn't they? Right. The junior's slower. He makes mistakes.

There's, it always needs somebody to stop what they're doing and explain shit. So, but meanwhile, the software never walks into your office and says, Hey, you got a second? Which, I mean, everybody knows is like, 45 minutes, that's time. That's the kind of hair splitting that they do in these companies, down to minutes. I'm not even kidding. I worked for a big corporation. They would question you over five extra minutes on the clock. And it's because it scales with 400,500,000 employees,

that's a fuck ton of money if everybody's five minutes on the clock when they shouldn't be. So I get it from that perspective, but it's just gross. It's just polishing a turd at this point, right? It's just to keep the machine going. We must insert something new to completely remove humans. And, you know, folks have talked about this. Maybe that what we've been doing this entire time was this. This is the end game goal for humanity.

We were just the first stage of the rise of the machines. And really, our job is now just to make sure that they're okay and moving and got good momentum. And then we just fade off into the end of the background and become slaves for our food. and then, you know, fade off into the background there. Or something better. I mean, we said it before, but think about all the data centers. We're literally building the matrix. Like the actual matrix is getting built.

Or something better, right? Yeah. Hopefully something better. Hopefully it's a matrix too, because that one was cool, too. Yeah, never forget that when they got in the matrix, they just went from one matrix to another. They didn't leave anything. They just went from one level of a system to a different cold or shittier system.

Some inception shit. Yeah. Like when did Morpheus figure out that was also a matrix? Right. Never show. Yeah. So the thing he's kind of pointing out here too, though, is that the job itself doesn't necessarily disappear. It's this learning inside the job that disappears.

And that's kind of sneakier because you can have two people with the same fucking title, like 20 years apart who are basically doing the same work. But one of them is getting way less exposure to the. actual experiences that produced the previous generation of experts. And companies probably don't notice this for a bit because it's a short term, like we said, numbers look fantastic, infinite growth. Our stakeholders are happy. Great. Clap, clap, clap.

Let's go golf. Mr. Miyagi is just rolling in his grave right now, dude. Wax on, wax off. There are so many things that this applies to because what you're doing is not the actual thing. You're learning something much greater about the reality around you, but much more important. importantly about yourself. About yourself. Yeah.

Which is the most important thing. That's what it's all about. Know thyself. One of the other examples is going back to the surgery or the medical system. You know, he said that he was analyzing this one hospital. And for six years, he was looking at these like anonymized, like robotic surgery records. And I guess he found that for every resident in the operating room, patients spent about 25% long. under anesthesia.

And I guess the average procedure was two residents. So if you take them out of it, he calculated that the patient could spend about two hours and 15 minutes less under anesthesia, while the hospital could lose $9,000 less in additional cost on the average case. So imagine you're running that hospital like a corporation because that's what they are. So on one side, you have an expert surgeon, faster procedure, less the anesthesia, lower cost, blah, blah, blah. On the other hand, you have dear old Kristen, who needs practice from the first show. Bless her heart. Yeah. Yeah. So good luck putting that into your quarterly earnings presentation or whatever the fuck they do.

Yeah. So he's not saying that there's like an obvious villain here or anything. Beginners objectively do make work slower. They objectively make more mistakes and they, you know, training them costs more money. So this technology is just giving these corporations and organizations a way easier way to stop paying that cost. But eventually somebody has to pay it because Kristen doesn't just magically wake up one morning with 20 years of surgical experience. So who's going to suffer? Us, probably. You know, I'm going to go ahead and call this, okay? We talked about Chris Matthew, if you guys want to hear our interview we did with him back in the thing there.

And I can't remember if it's in the plus extension or what, but we talked about how they, They'll put people in jail sentences for like 30 minutes, but they'll experience 30 years worth of a jail sentence. Remember we talked about this? Yep. Well, could this apply then to skill? Are they going to attempt to say, look, we know that robots took everything over and ruined this time for you to where you can learn all these things. We can set in a 20 and back type program here where sit here for like 15 minutes instead of going to an alien world, you're going to sit here and learn how to weld and learn how to paralegal, whatever, for 20 years. and then you come back and now you have all this wisdom and this knowledge, right?

Sort of like the Matrix. They would literally download skill sets into your head in an amount of time because they've been outsourced and that's the only way to do it now. He actually gets to that at the end, that exact kind of idea. Oh, really? Fantastic. Oh, great, great. If you think about it too, the benefit to the teacher, the patience and different approaches and new things you learn about whatever you're teaching when you teach it. This is an old adage, man. If you want to be great at something, teach it. I taught guitar just so that I would have to learn guitar better.

I was just kind of sitting there with the basic stuff, and I was just not challenging myself. And I figured, well, if someone else is asking me how to play this thing, I'm going to need to know more about it. So that was something I put myself that desirable difficulty is what he said. And I choose these. They've made me better. But if you deny a teacher, the opportunity to teach, that's huge.

They've got wisdom to share. They've got so many things that they can help you with. And that's a great thing for them as well. That's part of them humaning too, because learning doesn't stop. It doesn't mean you get to the position you're an expert. Now you know everything. No, now you've got to carry that on and make sure that the legacy you leave is the knowledge you have is passed on. And someone can execute it and then also improve on that.

Exactly. And that's kind of the whole idea of this book is that we're losing that or we have the potential to lose that, I guess. Now I feel like an old man. Now I feel like the get off the lawn of humanity of like the old man in me is coming out. Like I'm telling robots get off my lawn, you know? I don't want you in all the things that I need to deal with later. You might actually be doing that at some point in the future. Get off my lawn, you stupid robot.

I don't need that Amazon package. Fuck off. Outstanding. What a great time to be alive, man. This is awesome. So then he goes back to what he called shadow learners. You might remember Beth from the last episode. We do remember Bass.

She is awesome. Yes. Yeah. What they called, quote, cheating is she's going in her off time and learning how to use these robotic surgical things so that she knows what to do. And she's already like miles ahead of Kristen who was just following the basic protocol. And it's, I mean, technically not cheating. He uses that loosely. No, it's brilliant.

You're using your off time to learn new skills. I see no problem with that. I did the same thing when I delivered package. You know what I did? I told you eight, nine, ten hours a day. I'm listening to lectures, stand-up comedians, and you, of course, and all of these things that built towards what I'm doing now. I didn't know that was going to happen, but I was building a skill. I didn't even know I was going to have to use later. And it was great. I was getting paid to do it while doing a different job. And you'd still be doing that just maybe if you didn't choose podcasting. You'd just go home and just be

a better what you did. You'd carry one box from one side of your yard to the other, like, real fast, like sprints, you'd pick it up, you know, in your off time. And you'd train, you'd have a headband on in the back with music. I can picture this. You're like, babe, I can do this. Listening to Eye of the Tiger. Yeah. On repeat, yes, in multiple languages. So when he's talking about these shadow learners, uh, he talks about this guy named Gerardo. And he works at another warehouse. And it specializes in Chinese foods, I guess. And so officially, like on the books, he's just another floor worker guy. But unofficially, he's the guy that everyone goes looking for when something starts going wonky with the machines.

So what he did to acquire these skills, this very ambitious guy, is anytime these outside, like technicians or, you know, repairmen or whatever would come into repair the equipment. He would just follow him around super creepy, right? Looking over their shoulder. He's like, how do you do that? Yeah. Yeah. He's like listening to the machinery and touching it while it's running. Super creepy droider. I love him already.

But he's learning what a healthy machine feels sounds like, you know, eventually this warehouse installs robots that move pails of conge. You know what conge is? No, what is conge? It's like this rice. I looked it up earlier. It's like this rice broth or something. It's weird. Rice broth.

Some Chinese food. I don't know. All right. Yeah. So that's a. sentence we get to say in 2026. Yeah. Yeah. And the robots do this really great until reality realities and a conveyor belt gets sticky or a bucket arrives crooked or whatever. The things that machines hate. And so he starts making little adjustments. And at one point, he,

he kind of fucks with this entry slide thing so that the pales line up more reliably. Oh, yeah. And it totally improves the throughput enough that the company doesn't need somebody standing there constantly helping the system like poor Arnold the robot assistant yeah they took your job so he has this weird combination of like warehouse knowledge

mechanical knowledge and like a decent familiarity with these robots that are in there but what does he get poor Gerarder what does he get for this the same title same pay nada so Bean actually quotes a

line from some operations manager or something that says talent froze through this building like a water And the problem is they're not like really good at catching it though. So Gerardo has basically invented his own apprenticeship because his official organization never gave him one. Yeah. And his shit doesn't exist.

Yeah. It's just your every man, man. Everybody needs a Gerardo, dude. And it's inspiring, but kind of shitty. And that's the corporate world we live in. If you work for one of these companies, it's like you can bust your ass. And guess what? You're going to get paid the same as the guy.

that sleeps for an hour in his truck on the side of the road. I'm not naming names. I'm just saying I know people. Yes. Yes. Yeah. And what's funny is the less effort gets higher rewarded. They're like, is something different about you?

You need a raise. They're like, dude, I get more rewarded by not having as much work. I saw this over and over when I worked at my delivery company. If I was great at doing my job and, you know, I was off at four, first of all, that's kind of sucked because I worked by the hour, so I'd make less money. But you know what they'd do? go, hey, go out and help this guy because he's not done yet. I'm like, he had 60 less stops than me.

Why is he not done yet? He's busy. So now I got to, okay, cool. Yeah, bare minimum. Bare minimum. So then he brings us to a senior banker. Everybody loves bankers. And this is Darren.

And he's been doing this for about 20 years and he's trying to make like the next level up managing director or something. And then these tools we talked about earlier, fact set and capital IQ. you. If anybody's in this world, tell me what the hell that is. I'm sure it's software of some sort, but I already know what his hair looks like. So all of a sudden, these problems or these tasks that used to take a couple hours, just seconds, done. And Darren knows, he's like, I got to understand these systems, but there's kind of a social problem here because I'm the senior guy. I'm supposed to know what the hell I'm doing. And it's kind of hard to keep that facade going while you're simultaneously leaning over somebody's shoulder going, hey, which button is it? How do you open Excel?

How do you send an email? You see those dudes. And I was in an industry where you start at the bottom, man, and you work your way up. And then when you got a little hiring you started getting into sales, they started hiring people straight out of college who had no clue what the business was about who hadn't rolled beer a day in their life and broken down in drafts or anything like that, had no idea. And it was detrimental to the place. It was so bad. They never got respected. Nobody gave a shit what they said.

It was far more dissonance was created by it. No, not in the efficient sense. It happens in everything. Like going back to the police example, I have a buddy that, uh, total dork, like nerd dork. Shout out. Christian nerd dork. Nope, no shade. I love the guy.

But he, uh, he ended up getting a master's in business administration at like 25 maybe. Uh-huh. Got hired off the start. street for CHP, which for people outside of California is California Highway Patrol. It's the state troopers. Hired off the street at like twice the salary, probably some kind of stripe on his shoulder. Yeah. Never worked a damn day in policing in his life. And he's like a wiry, scrawny, dorky dude. And there is, I'm sure, well, he got stations in like central LA, but there were people that were not happy about that. Oh, yeah. Like, you don't even know the day to day things that we do. Yeah. You just

have a piece of paper that says you know what business and you're going to tell us how to police to his credit he's probably one of the most educated cops out there but still it's like do you know what you're doing book smarts right yeah he knows statutes and stuff but what do you do in these situations you know how do you control your heartbeat your psychology after having something dramatic happen that you need to then clock out tomorrow or clock in tomorrow for just bizarre man well luckily he also we used to go hunting together back in the day so he knows how to shoot things. So that's good for police.

Well, that's good. Yeah. Well, he must not have had too high of an IQ if he got hired as a cop. No comment. I think of that story where the guy got denied because he had too high of an IQ. That's what they said. We can't hire you because are too smart. Definitely happened.

You'll ask too many questions. We want order followers. Yeah. No shade to your buddy. I'm sure he's very nice. No shade to the military. But military is kind of the same thing. They're like, we want.

Definitely. We want bullet sponges. Go out there. And guess what? The ones with actual IQs, never see combat. That tells you all you need to know. Yeah, yeah. They're flying the things around that we're talking about.

Anyway, getting on with this. So, Darren, this banker guy, he grabs these two junior people, Alan and Gay. And they're way better at this whole software thing. And they start working together. And at first they're meeting like almost every day, maybe an hour or so at time. And then Darren brings his... 20 years of banking judgment, you know, and Alan and Gabe bring the technical knowledge. Darren's asking dumb questions, at least to them, because they know which buttons to push, right?

Yeah. They're running reports. He gets the output. They kind of troubleshoot together. And they talk about how people might misuse the systems. And because Darren has kind of arranged this privately, he at least temporarily can look like an idiot without going in front of the whole company. And over time, he gets really good at that. like really good.

And Matt being here, the author says that Darren becomes a stone cold killer with the technology compared with senior colleagues who are still living, you know, on Excel and Google search or whatever. And being in another researcher, they came up with this word that's called inverted apprenticeship. So the expert is the novice and the juniors have become the experts. Yes. Except Aaron still knows way more about actual bank. So everybody's got something everybody else needs. And that's kind of a useful thing in this whole discussion. So with all this crazy, rapidly changing technology, the person with the biggest title might not be the expert anymore.

Some 23-year-old junior analyst or something might understand an AI tool better than the 50-year-old guy that knows more about the actual company. Yeah. But yeah. So the partner, though, understands the business better. and if they actually work together, maybe they can both come out smarter. But he says that Darren's version is actually pretty rare. He said in his research, fewer than one in ten of these inverted apprenticeships,

as he calls them, really benefited both sides. So usually the senior person found a way to get what they needed from the junior without giving much back. Yes. Yes, exploited, take the ideas for themselves. Yes. Yeah. We've seen Christmas vacation. Oh, yeah.

Yeah. This shadow learning isn't exactly. his solution to that. The one field or profession where he finds a new technology doing almost the opposite of what happened to Kristen, instead of separating the expert from the learner,

the machine brings them closer together. And this is an interesting case of a, what are they called? I had it written down here somewhere. Anyway, it's the bomb, the bomb guys, the bomb cops, you know, that go into places

and a few bombs. Okay. Okay. They're EODs or something. Yeah, EODs. Explosive object diffuser maybe? Detination. I did look it up.

I would think diffuser, yeah. So this is a dude named Ernie. And, you know, he's walking down this abandoned road in 109 degree heat, wearing a 75-pound bomb suit in this shrapnel proof helmet and all that. And what he's looking for is this beat-up Pokemon backpack near a schoolyard. So potential IED, right? Got to catch him all. And he's moving towards it, you know, looking for the wires or anything disturbed.

You go through all the procedures he's learned over and over and over. And before robots came into this field, this is how they did this. Isn't that crazy? Yeah. And it wasn't that long ago. Dude just strolled up. Mm-hmm. Hurt Locker.

Oh, yeah. It was actually longer ago than I thought. I guess it's called the Packbot. And it, well, I entered military service in the early 2000s. and eventually these EOD teams started figuring out a new way around it. So the problem was before that, before this PackBot thing came into service, Ernie's walking through trying to diffuse this bomb,

but his trainees back in this bomb-proof truck. Safe. And maybe they have a radio or something, but he can't exactly like FaceTime him while he's trying to diffuse a bomb, give him a little TED talk on how to do it. Sure, they can debrief later and he can be like, this is what I did, this is what I found. But again, it goes back to the first part of this book is the hands-on is important,

especially for that kind of thing. Yeah. But his argument with this pack-bought thing is that now they can sit in the truck together with the controls. It's like a PlayStation controller controlling this little bot, and he can show him in real time. This is a wire you want to cut. This is when you don't want it.

He's giving him hands-on training from the camera from this pack-bot thing. And it's got one little, like, arm or whatever. whatever, you know, that comes out. Mm-hmm. So it changed that whole dynamic. So the expert can actually teach while the learner does the work. So compare that with Kristen from the first part. They both have an experienced professional, a novice, and a robot.

But in Kristen's operating room, the robot makes it easier for the attending surgeon to do pretty much everything himself. Right. And then the resident gets pushed away from all the action. But in the case of Ernie and DeShan here, his. little trainee, it makes it easier to put the novice into the actual action, the actual job that you're doing. It's so weird because it's the same technological revolution or end of an age, totally different outcome though.

Right. Because how do you do that when you're operating on a human? Do you go, oh yeah, you cut this what? I mean, I guess it's still high stakes. You're diffusing a bomb, but that's what I'm saying. I don't see it being much different actually. They could apply the, they could all go to bomb school and learn how to sit there next to each other with two different controllers and do this together because they're both working on

very tedious tasks that have high stakes. So I don't really see where the conflict of interest there is. I think it's because he with the bomb thing, he can give him the control. Like if everybody's cleared out of the area, maybe it's not as high of stakes. If everyone's cleared out of the area, then it's like, this is a training moment. Like this is what I know. You do the controls. Don't cut that wire, cut this one. And then if it goes off, then no harm, no foul, except to, the school yard, I guess. You took out a Panera bread. Yeah. Yeah, but if you're cutting the wrong wire in a human, oh, now he's dead.

Right. I don't know. It's still a bit different, but yeah. So to go back to his example about the junior versus the senior, you know, a 22 year old could know the software, but the 50 year old knows the business. Great. Put them together. And Matt's saying like, follow the skill here. Stop assuming a title tells you who should be teaching who. Yes. And stop designing all of these workflows around making the highest status person as individually productive as humanly possible, which is the whole model. They had a whole successful-ish reality show on this, undercover boss, right?

These people who own these companies went into places and had no clue what they were doing. Brilliant. So, I mean, obviously sometimes the more senior person needs to teach than then sometimes the junior person does. I've seen this a lot too. I mean, having a kid and having him grow up with technology in a different way than I did. We were the last generation that knew what the world looked like before and after the internet. Yeah. These new, it's hard to even fathom that kids now only know that.

Right. That is weird to me too. Yeah. It trips me out. Yeah. Sometimes we have to figure things out together, right? I'm like, you know how to do more? He's like, oh, you know how to do that on your phone?

I'm like, no, I don't care. like oh yeah you just go to this setting and do that like oh cool yeah change a tire a little shit meanwhile yeah meanwhile i can show him how to change a tire or oil or something like that yeah so it's this uh symbiotic thing and that's kind of where he's getting out with the whole idea he's like it's a tool it's like what we said before it's a tool sure it can be used for massive evil just like anything else but if we can figure out a way to symbiotically make these old things and new things come together, it's going to work out fine.

And it, yeah, that's where I'm at with it, too. I think it will work out fine. There's, there's enough people that know the, the benefits and the drawbacks of things like AI that we'll find out, it's probably going to be rough, but we'll find a middle ground at some point, is my idea. I'm going with your optimism on it.

Yes. I'm split. I'm right down the road. It's such a fog for me. I don't know, because I could see it going so many different directions. Some of them great. some of them not so great. Either way it's going to be great because it's going to be change and change is what is occurring here.

The only constant. It's just the way in which change is brought about from the perspective of a human who would like to live a comfortable life, blah, blah, blah, I don't know. I'm with you though that it's going to change for sure. Yeah. That's the only thing I'm sure of. Yeah, for sure. So he kind of leaves us with a hypothetical. He's like, all right, imagine it's 2037 and there's this lady named, Sarah is a 37-year-old welder. A woman welding, sure. They're out there. I'm just kidding. Oh, yeah. Go for her. But we're jumping to the future, right? So it's super progressive.

Absolutely. They get paid the same. Yeah. No, they get paid more. Oh, wow. No. She's working in this high-end custom shop. She's been welding for years. She knows her shit. And then a university comes to her shop with this weird job that has a quantum computing rig. He's going super futuristic with it. Okay.

Yeah. And she can handle most of it, but one part of it requires ultrasonic welding. That's actually a thing. Did you know that? Okay. It makes sense that it would be. I'm sitting here thinking about it and it would. Yeah.

They destroy gallstones within you with sound. Yeah. Yeah. It's ultrasonic welding of like plastic components. So it's like jiggle it and often they stick together. Sure. In lay terms, of course. Friction welding.

Yeah. And Sarah's never done this before and neither as her boss. And so she's like, well, I'm going to take the job anyway. I'll figure it out. I have two weeks. And in this hypothetical future, Bean says that she logs into something called SkillNet. And this global AI-assisted apprenticeship network. System already knows what she's, roughly what she's capable of based on her previous work.

So it knows this particular job is difficult enough to kind of stretch her without being completely outside of her reach. Difficulty, right? Uh-huh. Or the challenge phase. Right. So then it starts helping her prepare. and she gets this simulated practice with totally unfamiliar equipment, but it's right on her workbench,

and she's looking at it through like augmented reality goggles. And in this Star Trek future, it's not telling her exactly what to do. She's allowed to make mistakes and guess and get feedback from it, and it gets harder and harder and harder. It's like a flight simulator type of thing. Yeah, yeah. That's a great example. And by the time the real equipment comes in,

she's like, oh, I have 10 hours of this simulated practice. and earned a basic certificate in ultrasonic welding. So then that's where you have Andre's challenge, except now an AI can create it on demand, but Sarah still needs a human. So SkillNet, skill net, which might as well just be SkyNet. Skynet, yeah. They find this system finds an experienced ultrasonic welder,

and before they ever meet, Sarah watches examples of his previous work and, you know, answers questions about what she's seeing. this dude gets to look at her answers so when they actually connect he already has like some sense of what she understands or the experience she has and they work together remotely like we do on Zoom. Hey

and Sarah's wearing these these AR glasses and gloves and the other dude can see what she's doing and you know even appear in her workspace virtually this holographic type of thing like Tupac. Yeah yeah and then eventually Sarah does the actual work and she has the actual

controls and other dude coaches her. So what he's going for in this super hopeful look of it is that it will eventually become or will need it to be this apprenticeship model just in a different way. I think that's probably the best way you could look at it, is that whether it's immediate or not, which I don't think it will be, but it's going to end up having to be something like that. I think he's more of a profit than an optimist.

He's like, no, this is what's going to have to happen. And with AR technology and AI and all this stuff, that's, it's not that futuristic or sci-fi to me. No, this does not sound that crazy. We already have AR. We already have, I mean, I had a, for a while, I had one of those, uh, oculus or whatever, the VR things. Oh, yeah. Fun for some things, not my cup of tea for the most part. But I can see, I mean, they have AR glasses now.

I don't know if they're Rayban meta glasses or whatever that can, it's AR. You can see shit that isn't there on your glasses. Right. And most people thought that that would be great for games. It would be. I'm with it. I would love doing that. But for practical or skilled use, that has so many potentials.

Even surgery or something. If you can practice in an AR environment where everything's super high-res and you're like, oh, I got to cut this tendon or do whatever, that's hands-on apprenticeship without the risk until you're ready to practice medicine, as they say, on a human. So I liked it. Absolutely. If the air could be good enough as well, you could overlay that into the body cavity of the patient you've got in front of you and it can map out all the arteries. It can highlight the one that you do need to cut, you know, that type of assistance because it's still muscle memory for your hand than to go down and do the actual action. But sort of a, hey, buddy, how about right here? You know, kind of a hint. That would be like a tattoo artist practicing on an orange.

You know, it's like, oh, you get the practice, the general idea, and you get in, you get the experience without risk of fucking somebody's leg up or whatever. Right. You know, and I'm connecting this back to the stories that we've heard of folks who have talked about that 20 and back program, right, where they leave and they go to Mars for 20 years and then they come back, but it's really only been 15 minutes here on Earth. Yeah. We've talked about scale and stuff like that.

But it could be also that that was the testing ground for the technology you're talking about right here. Yeah. They tested on military folks first, of course. They make them feel this elaborate stuff. They learned skill sets. They didn't test, and then they then test their ability to retell certain things over length of time, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then, yeah, you could roll this out.

And that's probably what they're talking about, about jail sentences being reduced to 30 minutes. But it feels like it was 30 years or whatever. But these skill sets would be a more positive way to utilize that technology. Yeah. I know Kung Fu. Yeah. So, and of course, if you get into, you know, futurism with like neuralink and things we've talked about before, I could see that coming into play in a big way.

with the way that, it's not AR anymore. It's black mirror. You put the little thing on your, on your temple, and now you're in San Junipero. You know, like it,

anything crazy, again, nothing off the table. I can see that totally happening. So, but he still kind of like warns at the end. He's like, so if that's the way this is going to go,

after I use this thing, whatever it is for five years, like, what will I be better at? And if it's something that, benefits you great. And if the answer is just, oh, I use this thing for five years, maybe keep an eye on that. Because if it's not, you know, improving yourself or others, then what are you, you're playing a video game. That's what you're doing. So, yeah, just keep an eye on that. Is this a metaphor for social media?

Yeah, probably. But yeah, that's about it. I mean, there's a bunch more. He has so many stories in there that I've left out. So if you want to get a copy of it, we'll link it in the show notes, the skill code. by Matt Bean, 2024. But I thought it was a great perspective on it. Nice and balanced. Not fear, porny, but also kind of pointing out the problems that are there and might be there in the future. So if you guys have any comments or, you know, ideas on where this AI revolution is going, feel free to email us. Yeah.

But yeah, that is it. Remind us again what's coming up in Plus and we'll get the hell out of here. Yeah. We're going to do part three of this Holloway. Earth, part three is the secrets of Shambala. So we're going to be transported whisked away over to Tibet. And we're going to hang out. So get your robes and finger symbols ready for this one.

We're going to go deep into the Hollow Earth and find out what the secrets and those who guard them and just really fascinating stuff about these guys that just come and just attempt to find this thing. They're led to this incredible town out in the middle of fucking nowhere with heaps of temples up on this thing. Some very elaborate, some not so much. and allegedly down in one of the run-down ones, right? Like in Indiana Jones, when he picked the cup of Christ,

the first guy picked the chose poorly, right? Because he picked the real ornate one. So if you stroll into one of these ornate ones, perhaps, they go, oh, yeah, Shambal is right down here, buddy. And then you're led to a tunnel where you're fed to some giant beast or something. I don't know. But there's these fascinating tales of folks going out there talking to llamas, what the llamas have to say about the folks in the inner earth

and all of the things that occur within that. So we're going to go deep and continue our series of this hollow earth. in part three. Can't wait. And these, I'm really liking these sagas. I know I've told you that, but I, these multi-part things really, uh, give the book room to breathe a bit and we can. Yes. Chat about it in between and all that and so like when we first started doing this, I thought I had to cover a whole book every episode. And you've shown me, I don't have to do that. No. I can cover one chapter and go into depth on it. So, well, takes the pressure off. It does. And it's really nice too, because we get to go really deep within these things that you and I have talked about and heard about for well over 20 years now.

You know the things they talk about on coast to coast, Jonathan Gray, stuff like that. But we get to really go into depth with these. Instead of one isolated part of it, let's put together a tapestry of this. There's a myriad of things that have to do with this one topic. The last episode, holes in the polls, that was fascinating, just based on the fact that there's no physical North Pole. You guys can go look, check the links in the show description for that. Sign up. Check it out.

going deep on this is so important. And again, you know, because people then can go, oh, well, Hitler, he did something with it. Yeah, but we're going to really talk about it. We've got treasures and tunnel vaults still to talk about. Like these legends just go, pun intended, deep, man. And it's just been a fun saga. And we're only getting started. It's a bottomless pit right now.

We don't even know how long it's going to go. So sign up in the lengths, guys. We're really having a good time with it. Now, I can't wait to see where it goes because I've never gone this deep, again, pun intended on Hollywood. Yeah, it's all in there. The cursory overview of what. what people think and whatnot, but to go this deep into it is, it's great. I love it. Maybe make you want to grab a shovel and just start digging a big asshole in your backyard. Maybe not that far down.

You might find an entrance to this place and be able to be able to get on down there. Who knows? Who knows? I used to do that when I was a kid, start digging in my backyard because I thought for sure I'd find something like a treasure chest or something, but maybe I would just dig to China. I don't know. Maybe, or Shambala, it's right down there, dude. And we are going to talk about the Von Noich manuscript. Have you ever heard of this thing? You asked me about it earlier. And I know the name, but I don't know what it says. We are going to go into

the feminine interpretation of this of what they're doing now with their period blood and moon water and the results of that. Gross. Well, it's interesting. And we're going to talk about it as well for a little gist of the tip here in our extension. So yeah, man, when are you?

Let's get to this damn thing. Let's get to it. And if you're on plus, obviously, stick around. We'll have a quick music break, and then we'll get right into that. If you're not on Plus, sign up in the links below. You are missing out. But yes, we'll catch you in the extension, and for everybody else, we'll catch you next week. To your Plus Extension, and thank you all for joining us here on Plus.