The Pomp Podcast - #1128 Chris Williamson On Understanding Human Nature & Modern Wisdom

Episode Date: November 28, 2022

Chris Williamson is the host of the “Modern Wisdom” podcast. In this episode, we discuss evolutionary psychology, changing careers, the modern man, space travel, human evolution, and his takeaways from speaking to individuals like Jordan Peterson & Jocko Willink. ======================= Amberdata provides the critical data infrastructure enabling financial institutions to participate in the digital asset class. We deliver comprehensive data and insights into blockchain networks, crypto markets, and decentralized finance. Download our Digital Asset Data Guide at https://www.amberdata.io/pomp ======================= OKX is the world's most powerful crypto exchange and is now the second largest in terms of volumes. It offers a comprehensive trading platform with over 730 spot trading pairs, 280 derivatives markets, and 1000 options markets. It processes 400,000 requests per second with 30 gigabyte per second data throughput and 99.95% uptime. For pro and institutional traders, they’ve just launched the OKX Liquid Marketplace, an on-demand liquidity network with multiple brokers where you can instantly trade spot, derivatives, and multi-leg structures at the price you want while bypassing the order book. They offer up to a 50% discount now. Go to OKX.com and try it now. ======================= Arculus knows a thing or three about security. Your assets are accessible through 3-factor authentication and by using the Arculus Wallet App and Arculus Key Card. Your keys are generated and encrypted on the Arculus secure element, rated CC EAL6+. This means you – and only you - own your keys and therefore, your crypto. Keep your digital assets secure and safe from exchange freezes, bankruptcies, and hacks with Arculus. Save 20% through 12/10 with promo code POMP ======================= This episode is brought to you by Eight Sleep. The Eight Sleep Pod is a tech layer that fits onto your mattress like a fitted sheet. The Pod dynamically cools and heats each side of the bed, to maintain the optimal sleeping temperature for what your body needs. With the Pod, you can start sleeping as cool as 55°F or as hot as 110°F. The result: Clinical data shows that Eight Sleep users experience up to 34% more deep sleep. Go to eightsleep.com/pomp  for exclusive holiday savings and ring in the most wonderful time of night. Eight Sleep currently ships within the USA, Canada, the UK, select countries in the EU, and Australia. ======================= Bullish is a digital asset exchange that offers industry-leading order depth, consistently tight spreads, and new ways to earn, with world-class security. Combining innovations of DeFi with the performance of a traditional, centralized order book, Bullish lets you trade with certainty across variable market conditions. All in a regulated environment. Learn more at Bullish.com and follow @Bullish on Twitter today. ======================= With a Messari Pro subscription, you gain access to exclusive industry-leading long-form daily research reports, daily crypto news & insights in your inbox, advanced asset screeners, curated sets of charts and metrics and so much more. Try Messari Pro today! Get up to 25% off their Messari Pro membership by visiting www.messari.io/pro and entering promo code "POMP" at checkout. =======================

what's up everyone this is anthony pompliano most of you know me as pomp you're listening to the pomp podcast simply the best podcast out there now let's kick this thing off chris williamson is the host of a podcast called modern wisdom i really enjoy listening to it and i highly suggest you go check it out in this conversation we talked about a lot everything from evolutionary psychology to whether you would condemn your family to go on a generational spaceship to preserve humanity and also we talk about many of the things that he's learned from his guests like Jordan Peterson, Jocko Wilnick, and many others. I really enjoyed this conversation with Chris,

and I hope you guys enjoy it as well. Once you get done listening to this episode, jump on Twitter, let us know what you liked and what you didn't like, what you agreed with and what you didn't agree with. We really appreciate the feedback and it's how we get better. All right, let's get in this episode with Chris.

I hope you guys enjoy this one. Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational

purposes only. All right, guys, bang, bang. I've got Chris here with me. I thought a great topic to start out with would be reinvention. I think you and I both, we've had like multiple lives, maybe not nine like a cat, but multiple lives. Walk me through like how you've thought about reinventing yourself multiple times. Is it intentional or does it kind of just happen? are you following your interests what's going on yeah good point so uh i do a podcast now and for a long time i was a nightclub promoter and in between that i did reality tv so i guess i've done a few different iterations or whatever of being me and um yeah i think that what you end up doing is outgrowing whatever it is that you do now and whatever you think you're calling is kind

of like a crab inside of a shell and then it gets uncomfortable and you start to notice that things don't feel too right and then you end up having to get rid of that so my journey was go to uni start a business running nightlife have a great time i'm a young 20 year old guy like running nightclubs and everybody knows my name and i'm on the front door and stuff like that but then toward the end of your 20s i think a lot of guys encounter what i call the manopause which is this sort of situation where you realize all of the values and things that you used to look up to in other people aren't going to serve you anymore and they don't serve you and for me like getting drunk and going out and having fun and stuff was fantastic at 21 but at 29 30 i was

think is this really all that I've got to offer the world is this you know going out and partying with the boys on a weekend is that really what I'm gonna like max out life at so I had to let go of some of those things one of the problems that you see is some people aren't prepared to let go of that because they're scared of whatever's on the other side of it or maybe they don't have any role models around them or any support in their friend groups that allow them to go on and do that so for me I had to the pandemic was a really good thing it was terrible for a lot of people but it was great for forcing a change in my life because it shut down all nightclubs basically for two years. So I had to learn that I could exist without that. What is it like to not

be the business owner I was before? And another big part of it, and it may be the same with you, is letting go of the identity that you used to be. Who am I if I'm not X? If I'm not the investor, if I'm not the podcaster, the club promoter, the reality TV guy, who am I then? Is that something that you noticed with yourself as well? Yeah. And I like the framing of it's outgrowing who you were rather than like a U-turn or like a hard right. It's, you're still the same person. You're almost just kind of expanding, whether it's your ambition, your interest or whatever. And if you're outgrowing something that I think insinuates improvement or, or like kind of moving forward. But it also means that like you're building on top of the things that you previously

learned or experienced. So like a nightclub, while they probably have some negative connotations in some circles, I think there's also a lot of people who say to themselves, you probably learned a hell of a lot about human psychology, about business, about negotiating, about a memetic desire. Like talk a little bit about that experience and like, what exactly do you extract, you know, in hindsight from running nightclubs that now you can actually use in the world? Biggest learnings, the almanac of running nightclubs. Um, one of the biggest things, especially for business people is the usefulness of anticipation when it comes to launching a product or doing anything else. So what's interesting about nightlife, especially

in Newcastle the northeast of the UK these clubs weren't like what you've got here in Miami huge super clubs that have got very distinct identities they were all basically rooms where people could get drunk to music like you can dress it up however you want you can call it whatever you want this one can have pink branding and this one can give away free shots and this one can have R&B music and this one can have house music but basically it's the same product so all that you're really competing on is the marketing and the hype and what we realized was that if we created a very protracted, drawn out launch sequence, it got people really bought in. And I came to realize or believe that a lot of people don't have all that much to look forward to, especially if you're

young, you're 18 to 23, you can't afford to go and do the things maybe that you want to do. So you look forward to the next Jake Paul fight, right? You look forward to the next release of Game of Thrones or whatever it is, because that's a big part of your existence. And what you need to try and do as a business is inject yourself into that. So there's a study done where they got people to self-rate their level of happiness throughout an entire night out and the happiest point of the entire night was getting ready with their friends at about 7 p.m so their friends would come over and they had some music on and the girls were doing the makeup or the boys were playing drinking games or whatever why well it's often as humans our anticipation of the event is

actually more enjoyable than the event itself so we tried to port this across into business and the way we did that was that if we were to release a new event that we had coming up soon we would announce something big coming soon like more details this sunday and then we might release the day of the week or the venue that we were working in and then we would release a teaser and then we would release a full trailer and then we'd release the launch date with tickets drawing that out allows you to give something it extends the anticipation and the enjoyment of that experience and it really brings people into the narrative so i was like that that was cool and i now do this with modern wisdom my podcast if i've got a big guest i have a couple

of big guests coming up my audience will hear about it a month before it happens i'll be like i've got someone big coming here's the person that's coming here's what i'm recording here's some shots from behind the scenes here's when it's going to be released here's a countdown to when it's released like that's just me bringing them along for the ride i'm in it already and so that that's definitely one big takeaway i mean there's a ton of other interesting shit like watching men fight outside of nightclubs is fucking fascinating why so because it's called the male monkey dance and there's usually a bunch of different steps i can actually take you through them so what you see when you look at particularly male aggression uh under uh how would you say like

less encumbered circumstances i.e that their front brain isn't working quite so much uh so male monkey dance first off you start with eye contact and a hard stare what you're doing there is you're actually sizing up your opponent like do i actually want to even begin confronting this person you see this in animals as well that they'll see each other and they'll begin to move but they won't actually do anything that's too confrontational the hard stairs enough verbal challenge so like what are you looking at that will always come next what you're trying to do there uh male vocal tone is a massive indicator of formidability so one of the biggest things that you have your vocal box grows as you grow taller so what you're looking for deeper voices are

perceived as being more formidable and more intimidating so when you say what are you looking at like what do you want you're actually using the voice box as a proxy for how tough the other guy is and yours as well so you'll hear that men will lower their voice when they do that number three the closing of distance possible chest bumping and this is when the arms extend as well so what you're doing with the arms extending and you see this in ufc fighters right they'll do that when they stand on the scales they're trying to make themselves look as big as possible dogs do this the hackles get raised uh like all animals try and make their physical size as big as possible if they're trying to um stop confrontation and what's actually

interesting that's happening here is at each step you're trying to avoid confrontation you're not trying to get to the stage where you actually do have something physical occur humans are 100 times or they're one percent as aggressive as chimps but they have the same level of death lethality so it's a hundred times more lethal and happens a hundred times less frequently reason being that the ability of humans to be able to kill each other was enabled by tools and weapons and like that means that you need to be very very careful you need if you want to go you need to go whereas it seems like chimps much more aggressive but they're not going to they're not going to do as much damage so you've got the closing of distance chest bump arms again like

that's just feeling them out especially if you were to do a push like that finger poke or two-handed push to the chest number four like that again like does this person really want to go like i need to feel their power i need to feel how big they're at any stage here someone could step in someone could try and sort of de-escalate the situation what you're also doing is you're allowing other people to get in and maybe separate you guys so that neither of you show a loose face and then finally a dominant dominant hand roundhouse punch if the person is uh untrained in combat so that's the sequence that you see but when you watch it you see guys they'll circle each other like why are you circling each other well that's what stag deer do as well like stag deer circle each other

they're gonna size each other up they're gonna like move from left to right that's fucking interesting another thing that i learned recently which i thought was absolutely fascinating is that there's unspoken rules in a no rules fight so for instance if you see a street fight first off the opponents are always going to be usually males of a similar size and a similar age and a similar competence it makes no sense for a man of 35 years old to try and fight a 12 year old or a 70 year old, right? The reason that you have a fight is in order to determine who is the most physically dominant between two people where the answer isn't already obvious, right? So we need the fight in order to be able to judge what's going on here. So you think, okay, we need a reliable test of

whether me or you are tougher in a street fight. So what that means is that we need to play by the same rules. Because if you play by a set of rules that's different to mine, that makes the outcome of the contest neutralized it's no longer a reliable sense of whether or not one is tougher than the other so eye gouging uh like groin shots biting um usually kicking when someone's on the floor all of this even in a no rules street fight would usually be frowned upon and especially if someone was to pull a weapon out if you're having a fist fight and then someone pulls out a knife all bets are off now this is no longer a reliable test of whether or not one person's uh tougher than the other and the fascinating thing is this gets reflected in movies so think about uh the

born supremacy or the born ultimatum every single film jason bourne goes into some apartment in paris and there's some bastard in a black balaclava waiting for him and they'll start with a fist fight right so fair contest two men equal sort of size equal sort of competence and usually jason will hit him and smash him through a table or whatever then the guy will pull out a weapon but jason doesn't have a weapon okay so what we see here is that the opponent has escalated and jason now somehow needs to use a less effective tool in order to be able to even the stakes so he'll get like in one of them he kills a guy with a biro and another one he uses a book sort of punches this book into his chest or into his neck or something so again with that you even written

into movies we have this inherent understanding that there are rules that people are supposed to follow and that when someone breaks them that kind of opens up another level and almost always the guy falls out of a window after jason like hits him with the book or something and then he falls to his death um but yeah watching the aggression of guys watching uh mating dynamics generally like who goes for who and the chatter procedure and then learning about uh the anticipation effect like those were three pretty big learnings what are some of the other unwritten rules that you see especially like around mating so the fighting i think you just nailed it right in terms of uh i think everyone who's seen a fight happen whether it's at a nightclub or somewhere

else can say yep i saw this this this and this and like that's pretty much how they go i also think it's interesting that young boys uh when they fight which many of them do almost all of them do at some point in their life uh they are almost reinforced certain social norms like don't kick that guy in the dick right is like a uh a thing that you know that you can do but there's almost like a gentleman's uh agreement that like if we're gonna fist fight like that's off limits so this kind of unwritten rule when it comes to the nightlife and mating what are some of the rules there or unwritten rules that like every single person that runs a nightlife uh venues like yep i know this happens but like the average amateur eye may not actually realize what's going

on so girls that walk into nightclubs with jackets around their shoulders but not their arms in the sleeves almost always get kicked out within 30 minutes that's got nothing to do with mating that's just like a fucking effect that i've noticed you see a girl walk in all of the door staff will go she's going to get kicked out soon and sure enough she does i don't know what it is there's just something girls stop stop putting your hands not in the sleeves of your jacket because it causes you to get into fights or whatever like a half an hour later um when it comes to mating in nightclubs particularly it's kind of just like a rough hewn thing because alcohol is involved it can be quite like serendipitous if you're at the right place at the

right time there's a famous show the in-betweeners in the uk and um they're talking to each other oh no actually no this is american pie where they say you know you see those movies and in them like drunk girls make mistakes with guys we could be those guys like that i think is what a lot of uh copulation and and and the dating that occurs in nightlife comes from but certainly some of the interesting stuff i've i've learned recently that kind of relates to that and also relates to the male monkey dance there was a study done where they got uh videos of men they showed videos of men to both women and to men they asked the women how sexually attracted they were to the guys they asked the men how likely they thought that man was to win a fight with another man

18 months later they came back to the guys that were in the videos and they looked at how many sexual partners they'd had over the last 18 months the girls sexual attractiveness ratings had zero correlation the men's judgments of formidability were both strong and significant in terms of predicting the number of sexual partners interesting so men and their understanding of formidability is a better predictor of mating success than female sexual attraction at least self-rated female sexual attraction right there's a difference between stated uh and revealed preferences like it might be that they don't want to say that they're actually attracted to this guy whatever it might be um but that's and that's been replicated a ton what it suggests is that

women pick off the top of a competing hierarchy of men they just let men fight it out between this is peterson's thing right you just let men work out the hierarchy between them and then you just take the top filtering from that we were talking earlier on like before we started about some high-performing friends and stuff the guys that you know that are high-performing women will just let men do what they need to do and then they'll go okay he's the guy that won like women that have no interest in sport will be attracted to the best player on the team you don't even know the rules of the game you literally have no idea what the rule you you don't know how to trade you don't know how to fucking here's a good one guys that are great at esports like dudes that are fantastic

at gaming do you even play does the girl even play this game probably not but she knows that that guy's the best. And if he's the best, that's the one that I want. How much of that is, uh, women are attracted to men and maybe even men are attracted to women who are just excellent at something. Right. So it ends up being, um, the FTX blow up recently happened. And, uh, there is a Tumblr for, uh, the CEO, uh, the woman who is the CEO of the hedge fund. And in it, I guess she had a list of like, here's all the things that I find attractive in men. And one of them was like, uh, control multiple world governments or like like like something that was just like wait what right uh okay sure uh but like to me that's like a a measure of excellence i guess yes like how

much of it is just literally it doesn't even matter what the thing is whether it's physical it's intellectual it's uh spiritual or whatever it's just like if you're excellent that is attractive to somebody yeah so i'm not sure about this in the data but you know anecdotally people like to admire their partners you don't want to pity your partner right like if you've got someone that's competent at something if your missus is really good at what she does it's fucking cool it's kind of sexy that she's good at her thing now you don't want to be better at your thing than you are but you wanted to have her own thing and definitely for men absolutely for men that there's just there's something attractive about being an admirable person about having traits and being

someone that others look up to you have to remember as well you've got this sort of pre-selection thing that if other people look up to you that makes it easier for you to choose that partner because you go well everybody else is looking toward this particular person they're the ones that are the best why don't i follow that so yeah i think that you're right that competence is something generally that's like attractive and uh and admirable and works well to improve mate value what about safety right so we we talked earlier about uh if there's a fist fight between two men they try to look as big as they possibly can. There, there's almost this like testing and formability, uh, um, like probing that's going on. Uh, how does mating and that fit into it?

Is it, uh, if you see a guy go and knock another guy out, I'm assuming most people would come to the conclusion like, Oh, women are going to say, Oh, that guy is attractive. That is somebody that I want to go talk to or whatever. But, uh, what about the perception? So there is no fight. There is no ability to actually get a, uh, kind of objective answer as to who would win in that fight is it just whoever's perceived to provide the most safety or is there some other way to look at it yeah so this is looking at the evolutionary psychology stuff that i've been kind of obsessed by recently um it seems like fundamentally women want guys that are protectors and providers right so you need to be someone that is useful if the world comes to an end and can

either outrun outfight or outpay the people that are in the room right like that's a good way to look at it so yeah i think if you were to ask most women would you rather be with a guy that makes you feel safe or with a guy that makes you feel unsafe a guy that can protect you or a guy that can't protect you most of them are going to go for the one that can protect them if you were to ask guys the same question about women i don't think that that's going to matter so much because fundamentally women on average don't tend to be able to provide as much protection so yeah i think that there's a safety element there there's a pre-selection that dominance is something that's very that seems to be very attractive in women uh dude i learned some fucking fascinating stuff

about women's ovulatory cycles okay the way that their behavior changes it's fucking wild so when women are in the first half of their cycle they're fertile they can get pregnant during that time they have a preference for masculinized faces they have a preference for men's t-shirts that are higher in testosterone so if a man that's higher testosterone and lower testosterone and she gets to smell both of them she'll prefer the one that's high t now you get toward the back end of the cycle and women prefer men who have got more feminized faces they prefer men that are lower in testosterone the interesting thing is now because of hormonal birth control being so widely used women are naturally suppressing their cycles and they're stuck in

that second half so women at the moment are over selecting for more feminized men for low testosterone men and this means that we're fucked it's it's not it's not it's not great for a certain cohort of guys out there. What's the society though? Well, no, because you're selecting for men previously who wouldn't have been the ones that would have been mated with. Now there's an interesting question to ask about, should you, should you use the old rules of high dominance, high testosterone as being the preference criteria for women to now mate with, given that we have a secure world that doesn't need that anymore? Like that's an interesting question to ask, but what definitely seems to be the case is women who choose their partners when they're on birth

control report lower levels of sexual satisfaction with them when they come off and this is like the golden rule if you're in a relationship if you're a girl or a guy and you're on birth control you need to come off before you decide to get married move in together do all of that sort of stuff because a lot of the time women's hormonal profile changes so much that they find out that when they come off birth control, they're just not that attracted to their partners anymore. So, uh, I was at dinner with my wife and a couple of other couples. And the woman who sat next to my wife was a, uh, I want to say sexual psychologist, maybe she said. Um, and it was one of those things where like, you don't really think those people exist until they tell you that's

what they do. And so, uh, she also happened to be very forthcoming and constantly just like interjecting into the conversation, all these things that she understood. So like we were learning a lot, which was interesting, but also at the same time, we're like, we're trying to have conversation. Like it's not all about the, uh, the sexual psychology of it. And she said this and it blew my mind because she was basically explaining not in such an eloquent way, but she was explaining that like there in her mind was a very, uh, high correlation, or at least some connection in some way that can be measured between, uh, the rise of birth control and the increase in divorce rate. And what she was trying to explain was like, the later you get in your

life, the less you may actually be using the birth control. And therefore that could be driving the higher divorce because actually your preferences have changed. And it fascinated me. I was like, I'd never even thought about that, but it seems like the science is starting to catch up to that. And so you're saying, Hey, maybe the woman should come off of birth control as a, Hey, I really want to make sure that I'm attracted to this person. But is there actually an argument that like, if you want to make a good selection of, uh, uh, a husband, if you're a woman that being on birth control could like deter that or like somehow muddy the waters and like you're increasing the odds of making a false positive choice yeah for sure i mean if there is a risk

that when you come off birth control you're going to be more dissatisfied with your partner a solution to that is to just not be on birth control but obviously that's you're sort of rolling the dice a little bit there unless you want to be completely celibate as a woman and then you've got other like other types of uh protection which you know those also have they're not completely perfectly secure so and and just real quick i think there's also this part of like what is someone optimizing for like from a male standpoint or a female standpoint like what what are you optimizing for a lot of times like people will come to me and they're like oh i'm in this situation you know what do i do and what my question is just like what are you optimizing for

what do you want right like yeah and if you can determine what you want there's a lot of people who say like i don't want to get pregnant right or i don't want this or i do want x or y and so if you understand that, then you probably can actually structure your life and what you're doing on a day-to-day basis to pursue what you want, which therefore then will drive outcomes that you may or may not, uh, intend. The problem is that most women and guys don't know the side effects that come with hormonal birth control. Like they'll know how it makes them feel. Most girls say that it sort of dampens down their sex drive, that it makes them feel both like pleasure and pain, happiness and sadness less, uh, richly. Um, and it does a bunch of, it makes them more

tired makes them gain weight makes them more hungry make a bunch of other stuff right that's second half of the cycle stuff um but the psychological things i don't think that many people have known about the research is dr sarah hill if anyone's listening and they like the sound of this uh your brain on birth control or i've actually got an episode which will be out by the time that people are listening to this so they can go and check that out on modern wisdom it's dr sarah hill and um the issue that you have is if women aren't fully aware of the psychological side effects of being on birth control then not making it would be like you making some sort of call with regards to investment without knowing all of the information to do with the market of

the company you were investing in and you go well if i knew more would i have made a different call well yeah but you didn't so it's important that you educate uh women around this and yeah for sure the issue that you have with regards to divorce medium term longer term absolutely could be due to women staying on birth control maybe even staying on it through the wedding as well okay now let's finally have kids you do decide to come off in order to have children and attraction drops because how would the world change if men had to take birth control and men had to be the ones giving birth so we keep men and women biologically in terms of like testosterone levels estrogen psychology like all these components but in mythical land not possible but in mythical land

we just said okay now the responsibility is for the man to remember to take birth control the responsibility is that the man's psychologically going to be impacted by doing this to prevent pregnancy uh the uh my wife and i've talked about like i don't think there would be as many babies if men had to get pregnant it would be fucking chaos like nah fuck that dude i mean there's a there's an interesting question around like why isn't there a male uh birth control pill and that's the reverse of what you're asking if it was on men to take that birth control the magic pill whatever yeah whatever it is that stops women from getting pregnant the woman is putting her future in the hands of a man saying yeah don't worry honey like i took it this morning at least

if a woman misses her own pill she knows that it was within her control but if the man misses it and she gets pregnant she still bears all of the costs while he's the one that said that he was doing the thing if men were the ones that got pregnant the world would be a fucking shit show why because men aren't predisposed to be uh as patient as conscientious as nurturing as loving as caring they don't have the same profile that is needed in order to be able to raise children in that way they're an important person to have around the house but any far i mean you know you're it's first birthday of one of yours today yes would you say that it's right that within the first couple of years you're kind of more like an observer when it comes to raising children

there are certain parts for sure where the extreme example is like the baby is crying at night it's six months old and no matter what you try to do for that baby that baby don't give a shit about you it wants her mom and she's like where is mom and so you can go you can have the greatest voice and sing you can uh try all kinds of different positions you can do whatever you want you could be in the circus the baby wants the mom and uh i'm assuming that most of that is just biological just, you know, human instinct and saying, where's my mom? My mom has safety. My mom has food. My mom has like all these things. Um, and so it then brings into question, like, well, what happens for the babies who unfortunately don't have the mom in the first year, the first five years or

whatever. Uh, and then what is the divergence of path, right? Like one of the things, um, I've talked about on the podcast before is, uh, there was a study done where, uh, kids of families that are considered more affluent, they hear more words and it's something on the order of magnitude. I think it was like either 3 million or 30 million. I can't remember exactly, but like millions of more words are spoken to them before they get to kindergarten than kids who are from families that are not affluent.

And so what you can see is already, there's like this compounding effect. Well, we know that hearing more words and more language helps you to develop your brain faster and you become more advanced. So now all of a sudden you start to overlay affluence with the development of a child simply because the parents either have time

or they care or they whatever, to speak to the child more than if they didn't qualify for as high of an affluence level. It's fascinating. Well, remember as well that affluence and income is probably going to be correlated with a bunch of heritable traits, like maybe IQ, maybe spatial awareness, maybe memory and reasoning,

maybe conscientiousness, orderliness, stuff like that. So yeah, you do get this, what's called a Matthew principle. Okay, what's that? From the Bible, from those who have everything, more will be given. From those who have nothing, more will be taken. and this is how you end up with uh the haves and the have-nots right um and yeah the the stuff when you're looking at um child rearing is fucking terrifying there's some behavioral genetic stuff

which i've been uh into into for a little while book called blueprint by robert plowman who's probably the world's number one behavioral geneticist and uh i'm gonna play a little game with you all right okay so i'm so terrified i'm going to ask you how heritable you think different traits are amongst people in terms of a percentage. So 100% would be, you are like, it's 100% heritable. 0% is there is no correlation between your parents and you. Okay. Okay. Eye color. Eye color. Uh, probably low. Heritability. Yes. 95%. Now you have me thinking like, what does he think I'm going to say? So I can say the other. Okay.

All right. Good height. Height. Uh, probably pretty high. 80%. Okay. Weight. Weight. Uh, also pretty high 70 70 70 schizophrenia oh i don't know maybe it is like uh one of two one of three like type thing 50 okay autism autism uh probably lower 70 wow it's much higher okay school achievement school achievement oh i would actually think that's probably most people would think it's low but i think it's probably higher 60 okay verbal ability 60 remembering faces 60 spatial Facial ability, like navigation, 70%. General intelligence, like reasoning, 50%. And personality, 40%.

So basically, this guy- What about just pure IQ? 0.8 by the end of life, 80%. So all of the school, all of the nutrition, all of the studying, all of the time spent listening to fucking podcasts and having an Ebbinghaus forgetting curve spaced repetition program

to help you remember your notes and your Anki playlist, all of that is worth 20%. Like the single best thing that you could do for your kids if you want to improve their outcomes in life is choose the person that you have them with very carefully. That's the most important thing.

Now, the problem is this gets perilously close to eugenics, right? But everybody's committing eugenics when they choose one partner over another. Like, why is it that you like your wife and don't like another wife? Well, it's because there are certain cues that she has given you that you interpret quite rightly

as like beauty and poise and grace and kindness and all of these things. But like, when you actually boil those down, they're fitness cues. like the cues that i have fantastic genetics the sons and daughters that we would have together would be of high genetic quality like that is what you're talking about so when it comes to the heritability fact like it's really uncomfortable to hear that all that you're doing everything that you're doing with regards to your like let's say spatial reasoning which i think was 50 or something

like all of the work that you do on that fighter pilots and stuff like basically everybody that's good at most of the things that they do had a huge predisposition when it came to it like it would be very very hard for you to have to not have the genes for like conscientiousness which is the hard-working go-getter thing and for you to be a pro athlete like almost all pro athletes are probably going to be in like the 90th percentile or something for conscientiousness and um this is difficult in a meritocracy right because you're supposed to own your own successes and also if you own your successes then the people who are failures own their failures during uh ancient greece the word that they referred to the beggars on the streets as was

unfortunates they were called the unfortunates because lady fortuna hadn't blessed them right and i think fortuna was the the god that had um the the scales and the reason for that was that with one hand she gives but with the other hand she takes away uh roll the clock forward now and what do we call the people that don't succeed and lay about on the couch? They're losers. So we've gone from a situation where fortune was something that was bestowed on all of us and taken away from all of us to now something where people are the owners and the architects of their own failures. But when you look at some of the stuff from behavioral genetics or an affluent family to a non-affluent family, how is 50 million fewer words? You arrive at kindergarten at three years

old four years old you're on the back foot yeah you can outwork that but again i think it's i think it's unrealistic to claim that people have the an even playing field when they come in this episode is brought to you by amber data if you're a financial institution entering the digital asset class you'll need access to granular on-chain and market data from multiple venues to power research trading risk management and compliance amber data delivers comprehensive data and insights into blockchain networks, crypto markets, and decentralized finance, empowering financial institutions to apply traditional finance methods to digital assets. Amber Data eliminates the infrastructure setup, integrated challenges, and maintenance headaches to access digital assets

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your parents are or whatever, there is a moral argument. There's an ethics argument that gets made that immediately is like, that's off limits. When you go back in history, a whole lot of different things that at the time had moral ethic kind of antithetical views or kind of were put in a category in society as taboo. Today, we accept this fact. And one of the craziest ones, like the earth is flat versus the earth is round. Like there literally was people who were like, you are an idiot. There are people who were killed for believing this. Now that's not necessarily a moral ethic thing explicitly, but like now literally there, you know, there's a professional basketball player who said the earth is flat and people ridiculed them. And they're like, you're

an idiot. They didn't kill him, but they were like, you're an idiot. They had like a, basically like a, a public shaming. Who said this? Kyrie Irving. Unknown whether he was being serious or not. He went to Duke. Uh, and so people, people, I'm a Duke fan. So it's like, Hey man, come on. Like, uh, well, I, I, it's unclear whether he was trying to antagonize people and kind of, you know, poke them a little bit and just see how dumb they thought he really was or, or he really believes it either way. He was ridiculed for it. And so you go over a couple of centuries, like literally we will kill you for believing this to like, now we will shame you for believing the thing that used to be accepted fact. Fascinating because that is, I don't know,

three, 400, 500 years. When you look at genetics today, it's like on the fringe and we're just now starting to understand some of this stuff. Like when you read this out, like you literally asked me about eye color and I think you're trying to ask me a trick question. Right. And it's like, hold on a second. Like we don't even know enough about this and I'm not even confident enough in the science to know where are some of these traits a hundred years, 200 years from now, are they going to look back at us and be like, these idiots knew certain traits or certain diseases, certain propensities, and they did nothing about it. Which again, I understand every single argument against the whole eugenics thing and everything. And I'm sympathetic to many

of them and believe that, uh, it is probably one of the scariest, like most, uh, a lack of understanding around like, what would the ramifications be? What are the ethics? Like, like, I don't know. I'm a complete moron when it comes to the nuances of it. And there's experts that are better at it than me, but it does feel like something where we're starting to learn enough. And if you follow kind of that direction of progress 200 years from now, before you're born, they're going to know everything. Yeah. And if they make decisions on it based on today's ethical and kind of societal framework, will it violate it? I don't know. It's like a fascinating question. Looking at judging the actions of tomorrow by the standards of today or the actions

of today by the standards of tomorrow are like really terrifying things. This is how someone like Kevin Hart can have a tweet brought up from 10 years ago where he uses a word, which back then nobody picked up on, but now is completely unsayable, right? And that's only 10 years. yes precisely um i think with crisper with genetic engineering you're going to see i mean we've already had that guy in china who uh engineered those two twins to be more resilient i think to hiv turns out there was a third one wasn't just two there was a third sister as a part of those girls like obviously the ccp just great with transparency and long term i don't know what what that's going to look like but what you see a lot of science doing especially when it comes to

stuff that humans do naturally is science tries to reinvent and re-explain what humans intuitively have already been able to do so let me explain um i throw a ball to you right over here that is going at whatever it is like 3.4 meters per second squared down in a parabolic line and this is the velocity and all the rest of it they've just about managed to be able to make robots that can move a bucket to catch the ball when you throw the ball at it if i threw a ball at a three-year-old it would be not far off being able to move the hand around to be able to catch it it's like hang on a second so humans have something inbuilt in them which allows them to understand how gravity works so that they can catch the ball appropriately right it also means that they can throw they can

judge distances they can judge depth all this shit and we're just about trying to re-engineer that into code so that that can actually be be done outside of the human system when it comes to looking at genetic traits, again, the same thing. Why is it that you are attracted to what you're attracted to? Symmetrical faces, for example. Symmetrical faces are more difficult to grow as a human than unsymmetrical faces, which is why we are attracted to symmetrical faces, because they suggest stronger genetics. If there are fewer breaks in the genetic code, kind of a little bit over my skis here, but if the genetic makeup of the person has fewer errors in you end up with a more symmetrical face is what i understand so if that's the case and when you

look at someone that is more symmetrical versus less symmetrical and you choose the more symmetrical one are you doing genet eugenics is that eugenics there well kind of any mate preferences uh the waist to hip ratio that women have that's a fertility cue women that have high waist to hip ratios seem on average to be more fertile they have more children okay so if you choose the girl with the hourglass physique over the girl with the non-hourglass physique that's eugenics mate selection is that

now the problem is when you take this and you use it to justify awful fucking policies when you start to talk about superiority when you start to talk about differences in group IQ to justify different things that's when you're going too far

but understanding the way that genetics influences what goes forward like Huntington's disease if two partners sorry if one partner has huntington's disease and the other partner also has that gene like the kids getting huntington's disease i'm i don't know if it's even elite is it illegal for two people with huntington's to to marry and have kids very well might be right like fucking why are brother and sister not allowed to marry and have kids like for the exact same reason they do in some states just kidding just kidding just kidding dude i'm from tech

just kidding um no but but i think what you're highlighting here is like we are much more comfortable uh with the implicit uh kind of aspect of it when it becomes explicit when it is uh called out and people then say because of x i am going to do y it's uncomfortable right and like i think even if you were to interview people who are like there's no problem with this like we should do it and you start asking them a lot of like super nuanced questions if they get in like some pretty gray area pretty quickly to the point where people are like ah this makes me feel uncomfortable dude if you if you stress test most of the people that have got pretty nasty ideas hard they end up falling to pieces quite quickly because a lot of the and this is the problem with

behavioral genetics with evolutionary psychology as well it can be weaponized by some pretty nasty groups in order to justify some pretty fucking heinous things and that that's something that you can really only watch out for if you know what to watch out for like putting your head in the sand doesn't really work but dude i mean rolling the clock forward and thinking about um what's going to happen with genetic engineering i was talking to this guy who's trying to re-engineer human dna to be able to survive space flight so one of the problems that we've got is that there's tons of fucking radiation as soon as you get outside of the atmosphere and then um is it the hyper belt what's the thing that protects the solar system there's something else that protects the solar

system against solar wind once you get outside of that it's just radiation all day so the human dna is going to break down so this guy is trying to re-engineer human dna to be uh more resistant to a bunch of these other things you want to talk about an interesting ethical question let's say that you can go on a generation ship that you and future generations will live on in order for us to get to the closest habitable planet that we can find but by you saying yes to going on it you commit your kids or your grandkids 10 future generations or 20 future generations for the next half millennia uh for being on there as well like is that a choice that you get to make it gets into um long-termism i don't know if you've looked at this william mccaskill all these

guys um i recently was reading uh the book what we are the future yes and um he started to outlay uh how many people have lived versus how many could live in the future dude we don't fucking matter. Like you start looking at it. And at one point he's like, you know, uh, okay. He has like these 10, um, I think I'm remembering this correctly, but he's got like 10, uh, kind of, uh, human figures. Right. And he's like, each one of these 10 is basically, uh, a billion people. He's like, okay, now I'm going to take that same figure and I'm going to color it in black. Now it's 10 billion people. And he goes, if the world lasts for whatever, 500 million years or whatever of it is, he's like, this is how many people are still yet to live in the future. And he fills

the whole first page, the whole second page, the whole third page, and about half of the fourth page. And he goes, by the way, I'm just going to stop now, but I could have filled 20,000 books with these black little figures because that's how many people we have yet to go. I hope that like me stopping the diagram gets the point across. And so his argument and kind of this whole argument of a long-termism is basically the decisions we make today do have an impact in the future and if we take it seriously like uh although we may not meet them we should uh care what world they live in etc you're extrapolating even further you're saying no no it's not just about like on earth it's like you may make a decision today like go on to a generational

spaceship that will take your entire family lineage on a on a intergalactic journey that they may not be excited about yep yeah and are you considering the ethical ramifications is there legal ramifications uh how about the grandparents how about the uncles and aunts that may not be able to interact with those people like dude condemning condemning people to be born live and die like that's your whole life you're never going to touch earth and this is going to be something that we're going to have to come up against unless we can wormhole our way or faster than light travel our way and it seems very likely that we're going to get to um interplanetary travel with sufficient protection in order to be able to make generation ships viable

before we managed to get to faster than light travel so this is a genuine question that's going to have to be asked is it ethical in order to condemn 20 future generations of your progeny to being born living and dying on a fucking in a tin box in the sky is it depressing that we're unlikely to live to see the interplanetary uh craziness like in some way we're too late for the roman empire and we're too early for the like intergalactic empire we just got dopamine hijacked from fucking tiktok yeah yeah i mean what's the defining what's the defining characteristic of this generation and it it i really really hope that it isn't um in 200 years that future humans look back and see what we're doing now

and go, can you believe what they were doing to attention and media and communication and interpersonal love and social cohesion with that technology? And they had these weird devices and they held them in their hands and they input it with their thumbs. Like that is, it wouldn't surprise me if that was the case.

What would be even more scary is if we still haven't transcended that in 200 years time, but something tells me that we will. yeah i think there's always a question of like would it be better to have been born later given that progress seems to be on average linearly improving uh would it be better to be born later maybe but the chance of you existing is so infinitesimally small like the only way that you can be here with your precise genetic makeup which is what makes that consciousness that's inside of you is if there was a complete unbroken lineage from the very first single-celled organism

all the way through everything and it couldn't have been a different sperm it couldn't have been a different egg it had to be your grandparents had to be at that time at that time of the month with that particular every single one of them all the way this unbroken chain that leads up to you so yes if you were to look forward and say how unfortunate is it that i'm not there to see the future that sucks but the fact that you're here at all is something i think that you should take a lot of solace in as we look forward there's evolution there is uh what we know today psychological development all of that we are going to introduce technology we already have to some degree um and i think about offense and defensive forces so offensive force could be uh we're going

to put a brain uh computer interface we're going to insert it into your brain you now have computational power oh my ancestors were morons they had phones i just think and shit happens right? Okay. That feels very much offensive, uh, in general. Yes, there are things around disease or, or, uh, disabilities that, that it'll impact, but mostly that's an offensive technology. Defensive changes is something where it kind of just happens almost like more passive. Maybe it's a better word to describe. Tech's neck is future generations all going to be hunched over, you know, because we're all hunched over our phones. Right. And so, you know, our grandkids, grandkids grandkids are just like god damn it you know three five twenty generations ago they

literally had these phones they were hunched over and now look at me i'm not born with a straight okay you're suggesting that because we're using our phones so much it would be advantageous to have long thumbs so in like a hundred generations we're gonna have long-thumbed children your eyes are bigger you're hunched over you have longer like there's all these little things and so some of it is like maybe like uh uh offensive and um explicit it is external right kind of uh uh uh optimizations and and uh trying to improve the human experience with technology from the outside some of it though is this passive stuff and so as evolution and psychology because you're also fucking with your brain right uh on tiktok or whatever all day um when we extrapolate

this out, are humans going to be better humans or worse humans 200, 400, 500 years from now? Like if we go back and we celebritize, you know, I don't know, uh, the ancient warriors or, uh, the Apache Indians, like, you know, they were these warlike, uh, uh, figures. They had a very simple lives. The Stoics had this clear way of thinking like, sure, that wasn't a hundred percent of the population but there are these examples of people who i think we aspire to be like or we adhere to 500 years from now is the human experience going to be better or worse i think the human experience will probably be better okay um i think one of the advantages you have of evolution is it works so slowly that it's really fucking hard to mess up really difficult to lock in bad evolutionary

change into a species especially like humans that takes 25 years to go through a generation in you know 10 generations nothing's changed and here's the interesting thing if your environment is changing unbelievably quickly any of the adaptations that you would have found during generation one that were advantageous would have been the situation is so different during generation 10 that that change is now no longer useful so all of this just comes out in the wash does that make sense that like let's say that now it's thumbs we want long thumb children but in five generation's time it's in your brain okay well the thumbs thing's now pointless and so is the neck thing and so is the posture thing now what does change much more quickly and i think what

you're referring to is culture it's like what is it that we can uphold as values that we care about what are the sort of things that we should praise in people should we have resiliency grit determination community those are the sorts of things that we look back to and feel are missing i think from the world now and yeah the more that you outsource this the uh rule making rule breaking rule enforcement support systems to any kind of superstructure whether that be um the bricks and mortars that are around us that are protecting us from the weather outside whether that's the aircon that's keeping us cool whether that's the police that keep us safe whether that's the internet that keeps us smart, right?

Or Wikipedia that keeps us informed. Like whatever it is, as soon as you start to outsource something, you'll atrophy whatever the muscle was, whether that be cultural, psychological, physical, that was previously supporting that system to work. You know what I mean? As we go down that path,

one of the questions then becomes like, why are we here? And yes, there's this evolutionary arc. There's a psychological one as well. But the belief of why we're here, seems to evolve as well. And if you go back, uh, I don't know, uh, use ancient Rome as a good example. If you were to ask people, why are you here? Why are you human? What is it to mean to be human? We, I think in one way in society, we say, Hey, that answer hasn't changed. Cause

if you look at the Stokes or whatever, be like, Oh, for thousands of years, like people knew this stuff, whatever. On the other hand, like it feels like there's way more people who are more ambitious or bolder. Right. And the way that I almost think of this is like, if you go back to ancient Rome, how many people thought that they could like conquer the earth? Maybe that was like the most ambitious thing. Like definitely some, they tried. Right. And so that was happening today. If you said how many people think that they can solve some incredibly hard problem that would have a material impact on a billion people or something like there are many more people who think they can do that today than the amount of people who thought they could conquer the world, which is

like a billion people back then. And so is that a changing of like what people think is possible? is that a changing of what they think it means to be human is that just a changing of like arrogance level like there's a lot of things that go into this but if that keeps multiplying eventually you're going to have like one in ten people who have some crazy ambitious you know thing and that feels like something that doesn't really fit into the evolutionary bucket doesn't really fit into psychology like it's maybe culture like it's kind of everything wrapped up together i don't know what do you think yeah i mean leverage is a hell of a drug right the ability to leverage your inputs into greater...

I mean, this is the industry that you come from, is the industry of leverage, right? Definitely, as humanity's capabilities increase, what you end up with are greater and greater goals, goal sizes that people go for. So, for instance, I don't think anybody would have looked at the Romans and said that it was their job to protect species and ensure that the future of humanity was safe, right?

their wisdom was ahead of their technological capability the problem that we have now is that our technological capability has overtaken our wisdom we have the ability to release viruses and cause damage interesting point it doesn't look like nuclear war

would be an existential threat it would kill tons of people it would not be good it would be a bad day if all the nukes went off bad day but it wouldn't be the end of humanity and that is a very good position to be in

I think that there is a good argument to be made that right now the job of humanity is to ensure the future of humanity because we are at a stage, the precipice, Toby Ord calls it, this particular point in time where we have a very narrow path that we're walking along.

And if we get through it, hopefully technological capability and wisdom should be so great that any challenges we encounter should be fine for us to get past. But at the moment, we have an awful lot of risks and not so many solutions. You know, we just got nailed by an illness for two years and we didn't have, we weren't able to do anything.

we weren't able to make masks quickly enough we weren't able to shut down travel we didn't have the cultural institutions the medical institutions we didn't have the the wisdom the communic any of that right none of it was sorted and that was like nothing that was absolutely nothing compared with what could be thrown at us whether it be a super volcano whether it be a solar flare from the sun that cuts out all of the electricity on the planet whether it's an asteroid that's coming towards us or another bioweapon or a natural pandemic or you know agi whatever whatever it is right tons and tons of things that could cause problems at the moment we have the ability to cause them but not really the ability to protect ourselves from them and that to me gives me a good

bit of pause that makes me think that a lot of our efforts should be placed on just getting through the next few hundred years like some of the smartest people that i know don't think that humanity is going to make it past 2100 some of the smartest people that i know think why what do they think is the biggest threat biggest threats agi so artificial general intelligence they think that in the next 80 or less years basically the computers will kill the humans the problem that you have is

as soon as you have recursive self-improvement a computer that can program itself to become a better computer you get what's called an intelligence explosion so the curve kind of goes like this and then it just takes off in the space of a weekend even if all you had was the same processing power as the brain

but it was running on the components of a computer which is significantly quicker the components of a computer run at the speed of light and I think that our brain moves way, way, way slower in terms of how it communicates you would come back after a weekend and had you have left it at human brain at the start it would have done the equivalent of 4 million years

of 8 PhDs working full time over a weekend so you come back and you are now by far the dumbest thing in the room, right? so if you roll the clock forward from there you have this potential where a algorithm a computer system is now by far the smartest thing it is able to outsmart you and all of your efforts to turn it off if it has any objectives it's going to make sure that in order to achieve the objective it can't be turned off you are someone that could turn it off you need to go away well hang on so could the guy next to you so could that technician

so he needs to go away and you end up with a runaway problem that is very difficult to stop so let's say that this intelligence explosion happens how do you go from uh threat identification to human dead is that clear yet it could happen in a million different ways i think um there's a an interesting thought experiment called the paperclip maximizer by nick bostrom so uh a company that makes paperclips wants to improve the efficiency of its paperclip production it decides that it's going to create an algorithm that can do that and by and large it ends up having this superstar coder

that creates a super intelligent algorithm to make paperclips now this super intelligent algorithm decides that in order for it to fulfill its one objective which is make as many paperclips as possible that's all it's given, single function well it realizes that all of the humans around it could turn it off and if it was turned off

then it wouldn't make as many paperclips so it decides to subdue them somehow might kill them, might do something else but then it realizes that it needs to be able to be powered for all of time in order to be able to do this so it then takes over the entire power grid then it realizes that the humans might wage a war on it in order to stop it

so it just kills all of the humans but then what it realizes is that all of the matter that the humans were made of would be better as paperclips because if the matter that the humans were they're dead decaying bodies in the earth well okay so I'll take their matter and I'll turn that into paperclips

and the same goes for the earth and the sun and the solar system and the rest of the galaxy and the universe and you end up with an entire universe of paper clips right from one single function and it's kind of a ridiculous example but it shows the problem when you have what's called misalignment so when the objective that you give a very powerful machine is not aligned with actually what you wanted it to do you end up with some very strange outcomes when you scale it up to super intelligent basically god-like creature right um how it would identify stuff basically once you get to the stage of it being super intelligent it's game over like you can't there's no putting it back in the bottle and this is the ai safety uh world and alignment theory is

is looking particularly at trying to get out ahead of this problem it wants there to be no agis no super intelligent AGIs up until this alignment problem's been fixed, because you can't put the toothpaste back in the tube once it's happened. This episode is brought to you by 8sleep. The holiday season is here, so give the never-ending gift of deeper sleep. About two years ago, I started to sleep on the 8sleep, and I sleep on it every single night. It quite literally changed my life. I get deeper and better sleep, but don't just listen to me. Clinical data shows that 8sleep users experience up to 34% more deep sleep. It is not a holiday miracle,

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Navigate the market with confidence with Masari Pro. How much is the problem engineers trying to build something shiny and cool, but not understanding the negative side effects versus actual malice? Is it ignorance or is it like some evil coder is sitting there and I'm going to build the super intelligence to take over the world? You know, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. I think very much the first one because the incentives generally in the market would support that.

Like the company that makes the first super intelligent AGI algorithm is the world's first gazillionaire, right? They own everything. They can make a better Amazon than Amazon. they can make a better Jeff Bezos than Bezos right they can do everything that anybody can do better than they can do it basically instantly and it means that anybody else that then comes in because you have that parabolic line anybody that's further down the curve is so far behind that it basically doesn't matter right the recursive self-improvement means that gains accrue so

quickly that anybody that starts even three weeks later is way behind and it basically doesn't matter so i think that well-meaning inquisitive curious competent coders are the most likely potential demise of all of civilization and that's a big concern how do we wrap our arms around them and say help us you know help build a better world not help build a world that you accidentally ruin. Is there certain things that you think are like crucial to solve that problem? Or is it no, the people who are working on the AI safety stuff, they just got to get, you know, kind of get it together and solve the alignment problem. And then we won't even have to really deal with the engineers because ultimately they'll just be given a framework and it's kind of like bring

the solution to the masses or we try to get the masses to create the solution. They'll work inside of hopefully an existing protective paradigm. So I don't know whether know the way that um tabletop genetic synthesizers work so it's kind of like um that was spanish to me kind of like a kind of like a 3d printer uh that does it can create genetic um like material okay so if you want it to sequence particular dna it'll do it for you and kind of like a 3d printer you plug in i want it to make a bouncy ball or whatever and then it creates a ball over time the way that all of these current desktop printers work are that they go up to the cloud

in order to get whatever sequence it is that you want and there are levels of security so there's like a green, an amber and a red the green, anybody can print it, doesn't matter, no one's concerned the amber you need to get clearance and the red it just won't print the reason for that is that the stuff that's in red is shit like smallpox and anthrax and stuff and then the SWAT team comes in and it alerts everybody

and bad stuff happens. What they've done is they've realized there is technology that has outstripped safety and they need to constrain the potential externalities of this happening and they do that in a smart way. What would be great would be to somehow have a similar sort of system in place for coding.

Now, it's going to be very different and difficult because coding is so distributed, it's so atomized, like one person could do it. It's probably going to be someone like Google DeepMind, I think, that comes up with this. But what would be great would be if all of the people that are working

on super intelligent AGIs had AI safety as their first priority. The problem is that the incentives don't necessarily align. If you decide to be 5% more safe than me and I just roll the dice and I get there before you, I win. And what you get here

is just an ever-decreasing level of safety down to no safety again. And then people just run as fast as they can. It's like deregulation, basically. Everyone wants a deregulated market so that then it's free competition, which sounds great. The only thing is that there's tradeoffs. Open AI is, I think, a $20 billion company now. Yeah, I'm pretty sure that's true.

And it feels like they just scratched the surface. So to your point about like whoever gets their first wins, but they don't just win like a market. They like win the world. To have built a company that pretty much just built like developer tools, right? I mean, again, I'm highly generalizing and in some way dumbing down what they do, but they've built a bunch of libraries and models that people can go and they could use and they can pay for. And already, I think it's had this explosion of interest and developers running wild with

it or whatever. But like, that's a $20 billion company. It's not easy to build a $20 billion company. And it kind of feels like they're just, again, just starting. And so is it going to be thousands of companies all worth billions of dollars? or is it going to be, you know, kind of the centralized Amazon has 50% of e-commerce in America. And so we're going to have one massive AI company that kind of dominates. And like, you kind of can see both potentially playing out. I don't know if really the dominant one is the

better world. Like you kind of want it to be as distributed as possible, but again, you need the safety. So like it, it has this like trade-off. I don't know. One of the problems that you have, if it's so distributed is that if all of these individual actors all have the ability to do godlike stuff you have to try and regulate all of them if you just have one

all of the resources all of the scrutiny everything goes on to that one now typically monopolies and even oligopolies aren't fantastic for the market because you get price fixing and you reduce customer experience and so forth

but in this I don't think you have a choice like the first company that does this is the only one that's it, there is only one winner when it comes to this you may end up with en route to that, a bunch of companies that are all 90% of the way to AGI let's say and they're all just kind of battling around

for whatever it might be to just push it over the edge but when the first one goes, I'm pretty sure that's just game over because of that recursive thing and that parabolic line The last thing I want to talk about the podcast, you've talked to many, many people, I think over 500 people now. And some of them are very different types of people. What is like maybe one or two common themes that you see through all of these different conversations, right? You talked to everyone from evolutionary psychologist, Jocko to Jordan Peterson, like it really is pretty diverse. What are the takeaways from so many conversations with just fellow humans? most of the people that I've spoken to that are successful are curious that's probably the single most common trend that I see they're led forward by a desire to find out about the world

and that seems to be a very robust way to motivate yourself to go forward I think you can work out whether you're having a good life because if you wake up in the morning and you're gassed about your day if you're excited when you wake up things are probably going well and these are the people that wake up and they're excited about what they get to learn.

That seems to be a really, really good marker and that's something that I see between most of the people that I speak to. You know, there's basic stuff like conscientiousness, hard work, motivation, sticking to promises that they made to themselves. But maybe one other thing is around success and happiness

and this isn't for everybody but certainly in the world of crypto and trading and business and stuff like that I think this would probably be a nice insight a lot of the time what people do when they try and achieve happiness through success is that they sacrifice the thing that they want for the thing that's supposed to get it

they sacrifice happiness in order to get success because success is supposed to make them happy you sacrifice the thing that you want for the thing that's supposed to get it and the older that the guests are that I speak to accrued a little bit more wisdom and the more comfortable and the less that they seem like they have to prove

the happier they seem to be and I think that a big part of that is this success and happiness balance that's going on I try and remind myself of that a lot if I put out an episode that I thought was amazing and it doesn't do very well or I get criticized online or I start to have self-doubt about my performance or what it is that I'm doing or whatever,

I really try to just remind myself, look, you're happy with what you're doing. The success is a byproduct of that, but it's not the determinant of it. The goal that you're working toward here is for you to be happy with what you do. And I think that if you are not the sort of person who has validation internally no amount of external validation is going to fix that

like if you tell people what you think they want to hear which is something i did for a long time right i was this club promoter standing on the front door of nightclubs and running this great company with my business partner that i absolutely adore um but i was playing a little bit of a role um in this world because you need to like people don't want to hear a conversation about whether fucking human dna can survive space flight they're on the front door of a nightclub right they want to see you smile they want to hear how many hot girls are inside they want a free drinks voucher and a vip band and they want you to fuck off right so i became the person that i needed to for the job that i did um but there's not really any amount of success or number of friends like

that or number of acquaintances or people that know you uh that will make you feel fulfilled in my experience and i'm i feel really thankful that i kind of got a taste of what happens if you try and climb up a very high ladder that's up against the wrong wall super young because coming out of that it's reminded me okay like it can be fun but ultimately is not as fulfilling as trying to do something that genuinely gives you a sense of self-worth and uh all of the validation in the world dude i did i did two reality tv shows ran the biggest events company pretty much in the north of the uk for a decade and a half met a million people stood on the front door of night clubs and still had something that was missing but i was successful with all of the metrics that

like society should tell a young guy that he was successful on like status and accolade and girls and like money and youth all of this together and it was like well i don't know this kind of is this all it is this really all it is is there nothing else to this and um yeah no amount of external validation is going to give you internally what it is that you need and if you compromise yourself even if you don't think that you're noticing each little white lie that you tell each time you compromise what you believe to tell the person that you're speaking with what you think they want to hear that will reflectively make you look good every time that you do that something is keeping note uh and the situation that i managed to get myself to about six years ago just before

i started the show was like i didn't know my own opinion i didn't know anything because what i'd done was i'd played the role that i thought people wanted me to be for a very long time and when it comes to all of the guests that i've had and all of the people that i've spoken to the ones that seem the most fulfilled and the most happy are the ones that are no longer concerned about playing that role they do what they want to do they understand who they are and why they're here and what it is that they're trying to achieve. They have boundaries that they won't cross. They have values that they're not going to compromise on. And that's it. That's the game. Atul Gawande wrote a book, uh, being mortal and in it, uh, the idea of happiness is basically, uh, expectations

minus reality. Right. And, uh, this is essentially what you're highlighting here of just like, if you think that, uh, you have to have the perfect life to be happy, reality is that no one has a perfect life. And so like, you're basically persistently going to be unhappy. Uh, if you think that you need nothing to be happy, reality is better than that. And so like, you will be persistently happy. Um, but also he talks about, uh, in somewhat of like a, an ode to like the Stoics and those types of individuals, old people, not, not like, Hey, I'm later in my career, like 85, 95 year olds are some of the happiest people in the world because they no longer are focused on the past and they no longer are focused on the future.

They're just happy to be there in that moment. And so his view of the world is like, by spending so much time with people who don't have a lot of time, it is clarifying how to spend your life and be happy because what you learn is that like all the bullshit disappears and you're just enjoying the moment.

And so like, whether you're a doctor who's used to dealing with people and in geriatrics and kind of end of life and like all of these like very complex things that society doesn't like to think about or you're the stoics who like now are being you know put on this pedestal it all comes down to the same thing it's like here and now not having high expectations but living a fulfilled life and like you can get to that happiness but to your point the things that you think may make you happy aren't really that smart to pursue if you're going to have to sacrifice happiness to get them yes well that's the problem

because one of the instincts that a lot of the people listening, like type A go-getter people that probably listen to this show will feel when you say have lower expectations is, well, no, fuck you. I want to be a winner. Like, I want to be a big hitter.

And you go, I'm not going to have lower expectations because that's going to lower my performance. Like, let's fucking face facts, man. A big chunk of the people listening to this podcast and me and you have achieved success because of a fear of insufficiency. Of course. Because we are terrified of not being wanted or needed by the world.

And what we're doing is we're filling that void with success, hoping that that is somehow going to make us feel whole again, right? If you get rid of the void, a lot of us are scared that you're going to get rid of the drive. Like that's the thing that made me into the killer that I am, right? Whether it's time or whether it's success, if you sacrifice the thing that you want, happiness, for the thing which is supposed to get it success or time right people make themselves miserable by

spending their time in order to be able to do something that can finally make themselves happy it's like if you fucking made an equation out of that and you just removed time from both sides of it you're left with happiness in the middle right like i i think that it is a very difficult balance in order to be a high achieving but well-balanced person and this is one of the reasons why as people get older they're happy with what they've achieved which allows them to to drop that away desire is the contract you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want, right? That's Naval. I think that he is a particularly interesting example because he's someone that's a very high achiever, but also seems to have found a good amount of peace with what it is that he does.

And I think that that's the goal that you try and get towards, like not from a place of insufficiency, not from a place of lack, just that life is more interesting if I achieve well and if I fulfill my capabilities. So that's why I'm going to perform. And a byproduct of that will be happiness hopefully such a no-brainer where can we send people to find the podcast and maybe give them a little bit of a understanding of the types of guests that you have and kind of what the the focus of the conversations are yeah so modern wisdom uh it's on spotify and apple podcasts as modern wisdom and then chris williamson on youtube episodes that i think your guys would like uh andrew huberman i had him on we filmed the whole thing in 6k in austin it's beautiful

uh that was a really really great episode some great science-based tools for productivity for morning cycles and getting to bed and supplementation and training. Dr. Sarah Hill, that was the lady that did the hormonal birth control thing. She just blew my face off. She was fantastic. And then I did a really great episode with Jordan Peterson at the start of this year. So there's three, Huberman, Sarah Hill, and Jordan Peterson. And if you just put Chris Williamson, Andrew Huberman in or whatever, or Modern Wisdom on Spotify, it'll come up. And I appreciate you, man. I've been looking forward to speaking to you for ages. It's fucking dope to finally get to meet you. Thank you for having me.

Yeah, I've really enjoyed it. We'll definitely do it again in the future. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. I really hope you enjoyed this one. Make sure you're subscribed on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast player. And if you're looking to transition into a brand new job in the Bitcoin or crypto industry, we've got you covered. Head over to thecryptoacademy.io. My team and I have been working with the top HR teams in the industry to develop an intensive three-week training program with over 50 live events. We teach you exactly what you need to know to break into the industry, including live interview prep and resume review. Our students have been hired at over 75 of the world's best Bitcoin and crypto

companies. Go to thecryptoacademy.io to learn more. Again, that's thecryptoacademy.io. If you enjoyed today's episode, make sure you share it with your friends and I'll see you all for the next episode.