The Pomp Podcast - #1230 Christian Keil on What is Effective Accelerationism or e/acc?

Episode Date: August 1, 2023

Christian Keil is the Chief of Staff at Astranis. In this conversation we talk about effective accelerationalism, what is it, why is it important, and why have so many people in tech industry grabbed onto it? Technology can be a force for good, and the world can improve, that is ultimately what affective accelerationalism is all about, and Christian does a good job of breaking it down.  ======================= Backed by world-class investors, including Google's AI Fund, Range has redesigned wealth management from the ground up. Range delivers a tech-first experience that provides fast, high-quality, transparent wealth management services making it simple to optimize and grow your wealth.With Range, you get comprehensive services like tax optimization, investment management, and estate planning with no hidden fees. That means no AUM fees.Get started today with code POMP15 for 15% off any quarterly plan for your first year at ⁠⁠⁠range.com/pomp⁠⁠⁠ ======================= Pomp writes a daily letter to over 250,000+ investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://pomp.substack.com/

What's up everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Many of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, which is my effort to find the most interesting people in the world and sit with them for hours while I ask questions in an effort to learn. So it would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to the show on your favorite audio platform, watch episodes on YouTube, and tell your friends and family about the podcast. My goal is to help millions learn from the world's most interesting people. So let's get into today's episode. Christian Kyle is the chief of staff at Astronis. In this conversation, we talk about effective accelerationism. What is it? Why is it important? Why have so many people in the tech

industry gotten a hold of this movement and decided that they want to accelerate? Technology can be a force for good, and the world can improve. That's ultimately what effective accelerationism is all about, and Christian does a great job breaking it down. I really hope that you take a second to listen to this episode and digest all of the information here. The world can be better, and each one of you has the individual agency to be able to contribute. Here is my conversation with Christian Kyle. This episode is brought to you by Range. Are you day trading, a crypto enthusiast, or a tech worker? Or are you just an overall investing enthusiast? Listen up, you need Range. Backed by some of the world-class investors, including Google's AI fund,

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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 Christian here with me.

Today's entire conversation is around effective accelerationism. And it's this brand new movement that's kind of taking the tech world by storm. There's lots of people who are supporters, lots of people who are critics. And I thought Christian had a bunch of content that he put out online

that really kind of laid out what is it why is it important and why should people uh think about supporting kind of this entire movement so christian maybe we could just start with like what is effective accelerationism absolutely yeah thanks for having me on so effective accelerationism is a lot of different things that are combined into one which i think is sort of inevitable with this sort of internet meme that has taken on a life of its own i think you saw if you looked at it in the very early days it was sort of a response to effective altruism which was this belief that you could take about the money and you could allocate it correctly to make the things that you want to happen in the world happen um the eac movement started as saying well if you take that

logic and apply it to ai then we're going to you know be very very uh directed we're going to be very controlled in terms of what we want to do we're going to take it slow we're going to take the right steps at the right times but eac is the opposite of that they say just let a thousand flowers bloom let's try everything let's see what works and see what doesn't and uh and therefore where it's the techno capital machine will take care of it for you. It'll just, you know, we'll gradient descend our way into the right outcomes

as opposed to predetermining them ahead of time. So that was the beginning was sort of this movement that was focused on AI and it was focused on, you know, let's let AI go and not try to control it. I think that recently you've seen it take on more of a kind of all encompassing role within the Twitter world where it's kind of a banner for accelerationism as a whole. So rather than it being just a specific AI thing, just a specific, you know, utilitarianism thing, it's about how do we accelerate technology? How do we make it so that, you know, we create the world that we want to create? Well, we do that by letting the reins loose and letting people take it wherever they want to go.

One of the pieces that cracked me up early on is it just seems like it's free market, right? Like at the end of the day, accelerationism is like let people do what they want to do and allow them to figure out how to solve people's problems. And it seems like the folks who are anti-free market, anti kind of competition, they tend to be the doomers, right? They're the ones who are like, wait, everyone slow down. Like the world is going to get worse or there's some huge problem that looms on the horizon. whereas this whole like effective accelerationism is just basically taking the idea of a free market and now saying like let's bring it to the tech world put it on steroids and like let's roll yeah i mean uh this has happened for hundreds of years i mean like i think uh your audience

would know this like back in the uh this is a classic example used by folks that are folks proponents of crypto uh the red flag laws you ever heard of that where back at the creation the automobile like they were afraid of the automobiles rolling through town and like hitting kids or something and so the strategy was they can't go any faster than a horse whenever any automobile goes through town it has to have this red flag that's waved out in front of it says watch out an automobile's coming like that's one way to make sure that people are safe from automobiles another way is to invent your way out of it to invent seat belts to invent you know road lines to invent stop signs to invent traffic enforcement so um i think that i mean this has

been happening forever it is interesting that the this specific movement eac has broadened the way it has i think uh that's sort of a symptom of when you get a ton of different people contributing to a movement that kind of dilutes it down to just its core elements. And so I think that that is one of the reasons why my post about EAC went so well is because I sort of identified what are those core elements. And to me, it's really three things. It is a belief that things can get better over time. Not that they will, but that they can. The second one is that technology can make things better. So technology has a force for making the world the way we want to make it. And then the final one, which I think is actually maybe the most important, is individual agency. So just

the belief that you personally could have a say in making this world come about. And if you personally do something, then things can happen. That's like that is the Silicon Valley ethos at its most central. And so that's why I think people like Marc Andreessen, like Gary Tan, these very seminal figures in Silicon Valley have latched on to EF so hard because it's just the perfect like hacker. I can do this. Let's change the world mindset. So the three things you just said don't sound that crazy individually, but obviously there are controversy and critics around kind of this effective accelerationism. And so let's just take the first one of like things can get better. Is there evidence that that hasn't happened in history? Like, have there been things

where sure, on maybe a small vertical or one piece of life? Yes, it didn't get better over some period of time. But overall, humans live at the safest, most prosperous time in human history. And like, the best time to be born is literally today. The next best time to be born would be like yesterday, right? So yeah, it's just kind of like, uh, yeah, of course you want to be born as far into the future as possible because the world's only going to, uh, seems to be only getting better. What is so controversial about that idea of like the world could get better? I think, um, so if you were, if you were truly trying to like steal madness and trying to make the case against like, how could the world get worse? I think there's sort of two arguments to

it. Um, the first argument is really simple, which is, we just don't know, like we have no idea what the future will hold. So it could go this way and it could go that way. It could be great. It could be horrible. If we're unleashing a new power out into the world, which is kind of how people think of AI now, it's this new thing, didn't exist before, has immense capability. Who knows what it's going to do? If it's more intelligent than us, if it's this artificial general intelligence that's super intelligent, who are we to say what it's going to do? It's smarter than us by definition. So that's sort of one argument, which is just an argument from uncertainty. I think the historical argument that people would point to is that there have been times in the

past where we've like lost knowledge or we've lost order i think like the simplest example of that is the dark ages like we went from whatever roman empire glorious golden age to this this era where basically like nothing was written down like historians don't even know what was happening in the dark ages because civilization kind of went into this uh you know this lower state this worse state than it was that there was that before so i think that um there are arguments that could say we could get worse but i agree with you 100 that you know this is the best time to be alive we have the general trajectory of the universe has been towards things being great um and so yeah especially you know over the past 100 years over the past 50 years over the past 10 years

we've been seeing this exponential increase in the amount of technology that's being built and um i think it all just builds on each other obviously now that we've discovered you know glass we can make iphone touch screens now that we've discovered electricity we can create however many types of new things these innovations build on each other and i think the the EAC argument would be that AI is this new building block that is going to unlock an unfathomable amount of new innovation that we've never seen before. So going to technology can make the world a better place or kind of help us build the world we want to be. Not even necessarily a better place, which I think now is kind of this like

terminology that people laugh at, but also there's like a hint of truth in it. Again, it seems like history would suggest that that is exactly what happens over and over and over again is technology. And again, technology could literally be like shoes on your feet, right? Like I always go back to this idea of people think technology has to be AI or it has to be, you know, some amazing quantum computer or, you know, some genomic sequencing. Like, yes, that is technology. But also we are talking about literally basic things like a belt to hold your pants up, right? The shoes on your feet to not, you know, kind of ruin your feet. And when you walk around, like these things are all technologies that we grew up,

they were just a part of life. And we don't really put that much kind of value on them today, but man there's a lot of people around the world that wear shoes and belts right and so kind of talk a little bit it's like what is the counter argument or like why is that controversial yeah i mean i think so um you tell me how far down this rabbit hole you want to go to the bottom long time man to the bottom okay great so um in my mind technology goes way way way more basic than even that so yeah like belts or whatever it doesn't have electronics in it but it's still technology i think ideas are also technology and if you think about it like the furthest back that you can go, the first way that we ever, like we meaning like life or we meaning kind of the

universe, the first way that the universe ever made sense of what was around it was genetic material. So genes, you could argue, were the first technology. It was the first way that the world captured information and was able to store it and pass it down in kind of its own finite bunch. So that was captured, of course, in DNA, in a replicator, in a replicating molecule that took in information from the environment and then passed it down to the next generation. Some of that information was really helpful. So if you're a proto-DNA whatever, maybe you encode the information into your DNA that, hey, there are seeds out here in the environment. Maybe you encode the information, hey, there's nothing out there. There's no food. We're doomed.

We're dead. There's nothing we can do. Which of those two genes do you think was more likely to survive in the future? The one that gave true, helpful information to the next generation. So that was the first technology that allowed growth to happen, that allowed information to get passed down from one generation to the next, which then accelerated over time to create these super elaborate creatures, these amazing civilizations and communities, and then ultimately humans. and that was the emergence of what we think of as technology which is you know deliberately passing down those lessons or those uh pieces of knowledge down to the next generation so i mean what is what is that technology what is a belt belt is an idea a belt is an idea that says if you take a strip of something and you tie it around your waist then you can you know hold up your pants like uh what are shoes shoes is the idea that if you strap something to your feet

then you're not going to get hurt as much and maybe you're going to live longer and maybe you travel further. So the first wave was genes. The second wave was memes. Memes are just ideas that replicate. They're ideas that are passed down from generation to generation. And really, it's much faster than that. A gene only replicates once per somebody having a baby. A meme replicates today's speed, like how fast. There's been multiple different movements in the past week in our part of Twitter that we've been talking about. These superconductors we've been talking about uh you know uh yeah everything so memes replicate much faster than genes and that's the new kind of technology that is you know propelling us forward so as we look at this like you know

take something like facebook i worked there uh in the early 2010s and one of the uh big kind of debates was like is facebook good for the world or not right and at the time like i think most people would say yes and then it kind of changed over time and i just always laughed at myself i'm like wait a minute hold on a second like there's definitely downsides like people will use tools to do bad things right there's guns that can save lives there's guns that can kill people and so like uh the tool sometimes can be used for good or bad and doesn't necessarily mean the tool itself is good or bad but something like a facebook uh i used to just crack up because i'm like wait we've connected billions literally facebook today has two billion daily active users that are able to

communicate with friends and family and learn and do you know message each other and like do all this stuff and what we do is we almost like go as a society we look for like what's the one bad negative thing. And then just like blow that up. Like, see, I told you it's bad. And like, again, that doesn't mean that that bad thing is should like not be called out or not be critiqued, but it's looking at things on a totality. And we almost take the good stuff for granted because it's like, you know, I'm complaining on Twitter about this thing that Twitter is doing. And you're like, Hey, genius, like pay attention. Right. And so is that just human nature or is that something that is unique to maybe like the tech industry today where like the proponents

and the critics have almost like lost the idea of like tech enables the conversation and the debate, which is actually a key piece of it. No, I mean, you see that in like politics and everything too. Like the famous quote of like, what is conservatism is people standing a thwart history and yelling stop. You know what I mean? Like that, like there's that sort of energy everywhere. And I think honestly, it's sort of healthy. It's like, you know, you want some people to be restraining. You want other people to be pushing forward. If we went pure unadulterated chaos mode, like we wouldn't ever build order. And that's ultimately the goal of what technology is. It's order that we're passing down from generation to generation. So yes, we need to try like a

million different things, but then ultimately we need to find some that are good to pass on to the next generation. I mean, I 100% agree with you about the people picking out the small parts of technology and using that as a, you know, trying to defeat the whole thing. The example that really is personal to me is the internet. My company builds internet satellites. And so we're helping bring internet to people all over the world you know one satellite and one country at a time and i've actually had friends come to me and they like they are sort of joking but they're sort of not they're like do we want to bring the internet like is it better for people to be on the internet or are they just going to get you know exposed all the the uh the internet mobs or

whatever like the the downsides of the internet um and to me it's just so obvious it's like well sure maybe if you're super inundated like oversaturated with internet if you take anything to its extreme too much of anything is always too much like you know what i mean but um these people that are first getting on the internet and using it for the first time they're not using it to like you know yell at their neighbors on next door or whatever like whatever on these on these apps they're using it to get access to health care they're using it to get access to uh education like the basics are incredibly important and ignore and saying people shouldn't have the basics because eventually someday really far down the line someone could use too much of this

this technology that is making sense to me. So the first point is like the world can get better. The second is that technology can be a great vessel for that improvement, that innovation. The third though is individual agency. And this one, I mean, we have two completely different populations in this world today. We have people who literally think that the government is going to come save them and they don't need to do anything. And then we've got a portion of the population who's like, literally everyone get out of my way and I will take kind of the ball and all run with it uh individual agency is a key component and we need it for uh effective accelerationism or is it something that like it's a nice to have as part of the movement

um so i think you would find two different camps of people that would argue both sides of that within the movement which is which is again great it makes the movement better everybody has their own idea of it that's their their kind of a meta movement that says you should figure out your own thing um but i would say there are two arguments so the first argument is yes individual people matter we like we're the only people that can bring about the change like we have to go invent everything like the individual agency that kind of is core to silicon valley um but i think you would probably also find people on the other side of that argument which would basically say as long as people are allowed to go experiment no individual person is necessary to the success

of the machine and that that really um is an important point to them to the eac folks they believe that the machine takes care of itself they don't think it's like my job or pomp's job or whatever to decide how we move the machine how you know the this the arm can go up in this way and the leg can move that way like they don't think that it's any one person's job to actually like operate the entire machine that is capitalism that is you know all of us creating new ideas together um they believe that the machine does that itself so i think it's sort of you ask the question right at the border of where you know yes each individual person has to go out and experiment and do their own thing and figure out the way forward but no individual person should

control the whole machine because they just don't, there's nobody that knows that much. No one's going to make good decisions for a hundred years or 200 years or a thousand years in the future. So when you mentioned machine, uh, I think a lot of people have heard the terminology techno capital machine. Uh, it scares the shit out of some of them and it gets them some others really, really excited. What is the techno capital machine? It's transformers. It's just optimist prime. It's just, no, it's a, so the technical capital machine is basically a word, um, for how does the economy and society as a whole allocate stuff? How do we allocate our time? How do we allocate our resources? Um, and how do we, you know, come up with new ideas to

solve new problems? That's, that's all it is. It's like this, um, it's sort of like this meta organism, like this thing, this, like, uh, this combination of all the different people that are all acting on their own individual agency. So, um, I think it's funny because a lot of these people that work at or like that think about eac work at like open ai and these other ai companies that are debatably literally trying to create that optimist prime like uh meta-organism thing but uh no they're just talking about society it's like a fancy word for society you also said that eac is kind of the fight against entropy right and what i think is so interesting about that is um are the doomers or the like de-growthers like are they literally we should just pause like just

freeze the earth today don't develop new technology don't solve problems like uh we're too scared i almost think of it like helicopter parents right like i'm too scared to let my kid go outside because they may possibly fall and scrape their knee versus the parents who are literally kicking their kids out of the house during the summer and like locking the door like come back for dinner uh it like what is the end goal for the degrowth or the like the doomer type movement um i think the the doomer argument is let's wait until we figure it out like let's not let's not unleash a power we don't understand i think the the problem with that is that you know first of all we almost never understand things before we invent them i think

this is that's actually like a definition of invention if you ask me like if you knew what it was before you invented it then you already invented it that's like it's one of my favorite authors of all time is alistair mcintyre and he writes about that he says like i think he was actually quoting carl popper who who originally said or something but anyways the example is of a wheel it's like if me and you are sitting in the stone age and we're trying to just like come up cool stuff around the campfire and i'm like dude i have to i think that there's this idea uh about like i don't know it's like a circle and then if we attach to a cart then maybe we could like roll the cart easier and you're like you say what is it and i say oh like i don't know yet it hasn't been

invented like that doesn't exist like the like the very act of describing the thing is inventing it so if we fully understood like what these future systems would be then we would have to already have made them like we're not going to be able to predict what's kind of coming up in the future so it sort of is self-defeating. It says we have to lock in exactly where we are today because that's all we can understand. Let's fully get there before we can move forward. But I don't think that's how the world works. I don't think that, you know, I don't think your kid's going to grow up to be a great kid if you just like strapped indoor, like, you know, strapped to a chair indoors all day because that's like the safest place you can possibly be. I think the word

entropy basically means the intrinsic direction of something. So, and everything is trending towards disorder. That's how everything works in the world. You unplug your fridge, it's not getting any new energy anymore. So all of a sudden it just becomes room temperature. Everything is evening out. Stars are burning out over time. The pot on your stove stops boiling if you turn off the gas. Everything evens out. Everything goes to inert uniform nothingness over time. That's what entropy means. But what that implies is that if you just stop, if you stop making progress, If you stop accelerating, if you just go constantly in the future, you're going to you're going to disintegrate into dark ages like that's how dark ages happen is you stop making progress. You try to stay even you try to stay even keeled.

That's that's how you end up letting entropy take over. It's just slowly degrades everything as you're just sitting there trying to maintain. How important is it to have a movement that people feel a part of? Like one of the things that we've seen through centuries and centuries is the importance of religion as an example. uh then if you look at things like in the bitcoin and crypto community there's like this tribalism and everyone kind of wants like a flagged wave right in sports we see like your team uh i recently read a thing that uh ben affleck who uh affleck who's a um a huge boston red sox fan in a movie they wanted him to wear a new york yankees hat and he refused and they literally

had to shut down uh uh filming and they're like um uh kind of uh you know conclusion was we'll meet halfway, I'll wear a Mets hat, but I'm not putting on the Yankees hat. And so people have this identity, right? They get tied into this stuff. In the tech industry, maybe there really hasn't been one other than like, hey, I'm part of Silicon Valley, whatever that meant. But is this really the first major movement where people are saying, let's put the flag up and just go take on the world with technology, problem-solving skills, and entrepreneurship, and we think we can build this better world. I think that it's interesting. I think you're finding that this is an example of us getting

better and better technology over time. Like this, the EAC movement in my mind is the current pinnacle, but there'll be something else. Like there's going to be another better way for us to figure out how to describe technology, describe what we're doing. But we're improving. We're improving our technology at the same time that we're improving the meme, which is how do we describe Silicon Valley and try to encapsulate what we're doing? I mean, I moved to Silicon Valley, I guess it was like seven or eight years ago now. And when I joined, there wasn't all that much to find in terms of like resources that would explain how Silicon Valley works and what is Silicon Valley and what's like the mantra and the mindset and everything like that. I eventually

found my way to Y Combinator and Y Combinator has these great like startup, like how to build a startup lectures. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI actually was a person who put that on his personal website um later became the president of y combinator and it's now the ceo he's now um the ceo of open ai he's in open ai and world coin and a bunch of other projects that your listeners would probably know about um and there but when i was there that like that was sort of the only resource like there wasn't a lot that i could latch on to and figure out i knew there was something out in silicon valley but i didn't really know what um and over time over the years that i've been here i've learned that or i've seen we're getting much better as silicon valley about

talking about ourselves and explaining what it is that silicon valley does i mean i i spent you know the last two years or something doing this newsletter called silicon valley outsider which is basically this idea like how do you take this uh this thing silicon valley and explain it to someone who's outside of it who's never heard of any of this tech stuff maybe they only know it from instagram and snapchat on a phone um so we've gotten better at eac i think is the current pinnacle of like what is silicon valley like silicon valley to me is that individual optimism that technology can do anything attitude, uh, and all of that. And, you know, um, it comes with a lot of thermodynamics and like other kinds of crazy stuff too, uh, which is really fun and like

super cool to think about, but, um, we're going to have other movements that encapsulate Silicon Valley. Our memes are going to improve over time too. I've always thought that, uh, the tech industry in general, uh, one of the things that they've done very well is solve problems, right? You know, if you look at Uber, like for all of the kind of shit that Uber got over the years, uh at the end of the day like you press a button on your phone and a car shows up sure you can complain about the price you can complain about what the car is you can complain about uh how the company is structured the price the profitability you can complain about the driver treatment like there's a whole bunch of stuff that they probably could improve but at the end of the day the core

idea of like press a button on your phone a car shows up that's fucking cool right and it's solved the problem and so like how you know to me the tech industry has always just been like people who are trying to solve problems. And you mentioned Y Combinator, like literally like that's almost like the motto, right? It's just like build shit that people want. And if you do that, like you can build a company. And so is that the story that needs to be told?

It's like, just like, hey, this is a group of people who just want to solve these problems. And by the way, a way to do it is this like free market, you know, kind of structure of, you know, accelerate. Just like everyone go faster and go bigger and just push these technologies to the limit and we will discover ways to solve it. And yes, some of it won't work,

but like, that's okay. Yeah, exactly. I mean, I, the thing that originally got me interested in all this stuff that led me to EAC, that led me to all this accelerationism was the idea of asymmetries. And I think that Silicon Valley is built on one extremely key asymmetry, which is limited downside, unlimited upside. It's the idea that you can put in, you know, a year of your time or four years of your time, you can put in however many millions of dollars from outside investors. And the worst that can happen, the absolute worst is that it's worth $0 and you sort of, know you wasted your time you didn't get any more than just your salary when you went out there to work um but the upside of these technologies is like changing the world like uh you yeah you joke

or we all joke that you know even it was in the silicon valley tv show like we're building like back-end ml models that'll change the world or whatever but uh i think it's i think like a lot of the recent technology that you've seen all these like hardware projects and all this like ai stuff like these things really do have the potential to make a huge impact on everyday life around the world. And it's cool. I think it's I think it's very cool that you see that you see that like kind of progression taking place over time. You mentioned earlier that the tech industry is getting better at the memes. And I think, you know, obviously, with Twitter, we've seen that happen in things kind of going viral. But now what we're starting to see is almost that it used to be

like, our work will speak for itself. But that isn't how the world works. Like if you don't tell your story than someone else will. And so is effective accelerationism, is that really a response to the doomers? Or is that more of us saying, look, let's just come up with something that can describe a point of view of the world, put a banner on it, and then just put it out there so that when people ask, well, what are those people trying to do? It kind of comes in a more tidy package. Or is it literally just like doomers think that AI is going to ruin the world. So like we got to come up with something to push back on them. I don't think it was that deliberate. I think it was much more emergent than it was deliberate. It was people that were, I mean,

it started with anonymous dudes on Twitter who just, you know, they're posting behind these pictures, like their profile pictures, like an Eagle. And then like, they have some name that's like, uh, like, you know, Jeff Bezos, but Beth Jesus, like it's these guys that were anonymous on Twitter and working with these really cool companies like open AI and like super ridiculously smart, but just wanted to, you know, shoot the shit with their friends on Twitter spaces. And so they started doing these things and they started talking more and more and they got more and more of a little audience that was going. And then over time, this, this like emergent thing came out of it, which was EAC, which was like, we're not going to be effective, uh, you know,

altruists. We're going to be effective accelerationists. We don't think that we can just determine what's right ahead of time. We're going to figure it out as we go along. So, um, I don't think like the, the council of Twitter and ons like sat down and, you know, had the one meeting where they decided like, Hey, yeah, that's the answer. But it just kind of happened over time as the, as the meme took off, the meme took on a life of its own. So as these people are posting more and more becoming more popular i think people are figuring out who they are and i know the identities of some of them and like they're super legit people right these are not like for all the shit posting that's going on and i think at first people were like you know who is this person just

kind of shit posting on twitter now all of a sudden like wait a minute like i know who that person is and i see the shit posting and like man there's a lot of validity to what they're saying but the fact that it didn't come with the baggage of who they were either positive or negative made people focus on the idea not the person right and so that that really allowed the idea to kind of spread now you mentioned earlier um we have mark andreessen we have gary tan kind of a whole host of people who are kind of breathing you know uh life into this movement it was already alive but it's almost like pouring gas on the fire like like kind of blowing up a balloon right where people are like okay if they're interested in it maybe i should pay even more attention

how important is it for these movements to get you know kind of i'll call like silicon valley leadership whatever the fuck that means at this point but like to get them involved and excited and tweeting about it, putting it in their bios, all that type of stuff? No, I think it's all part of legitimizing and broadening. I think you start off, like any meme, any idea starts off super, super concentrated, small group of people who really believe it, and it's deepest core essence or whatever. It's the most concentrated. And then over time, it gets to a wider audience.

And as it does, you hope that it maintains those core elements instead of just purely diffusing. Like I think that if EAC becomes purely just accelerationism, if it becomes purely just tech is good, like if that's the ultimate takeaway from EAC, that is like full dilution, like full diffusion. Like we didn't actually retain the core elements of what it was in the very beginning. And so it's really it's important to have these people that kind of not only, you know, sign on their name. Like in this case, it's literally in their Twitter names, you know, Mark Andreessen, EAC or whatever, but also kind of give it that reacceleration and that reinvigoration to keep it close to its core as it grows.

I mean, like I'm a company builder, like what I do for, I'm a chief of staff at a startup. Like my job is to make sure that as we scale and as we get more programs going for different satellites around the world, as we add more people to our team, that we retain the awesome DNA that we had in the early days and the, you know, the core of, you know, what it is of what is the bet and what are we like and how hard do we work and all that sort of stuff. Naturally, things diffuse. Entropy takes over. Things fade out into nothingness over time. So you need these people to not only sign their name and kind of give it legitimacy, but also to help reinvigorate it and keep it close to that core essence.

So when you think about EAC for AI, what is the end result here? Because literally, when I wrote a piece recently, I was telling you before we started recording that I've been talking about a lot of these topics for a long time just around like we can build our way out like gdp growth like one of my favorites it's like everyone talks about debt to gdp and they only focus on the debt side like if we just jacked up gdp growth like 20 a year which seems you know unfathomable at this point but if we did that like we could grow our way out of the problem um and so like maybe we can't get to 20 but could we get to like five or six like maybe right and so uh i wrote the piece and i explained kind of the eac movement all the stuff and all of the critics

were like the eac folks want to replace humans with machines like fuck those guys what is that true i guess like the most bluntly is that true there are some guys there are some anonymous uh eagle uh dudes out there or whatever that that like the the end point of the argument for them is like uh you know hey we need to expand the reach of consciousness as far as we can um it's really hard to put a human in a spaceship and send it all the way away from the sun so let's put like a computer in there a conscious computer that we can send really far away from earth like i don't think i go that far i don't think i don't think that's like the the mainstream eac or whatever i think that um why you hear that is because the eac folks are the people that are

working at these super awesome ai companies that are trying to build general intelligence which some people argue like whatever some google engineer already like fell in love with one of these things like they're some some folks think that these things are conscious and think that that they're, you know, human or a human enough or something. Uh, and I don't know. I think that's, that's why you hear it. I don't think it's the, I don't think that's the part that'll stick when this thing goes mainstream. I don't think it'll stick. Well, I take the Google engineer, for example, like, is that a machine problem or is that a person problem? Like we got people doing weird shit all over the place. Right. And like, uh, you got to imagine that people fall in love

with all sorts of other people, but things too, like what is the difference between loving a person loving a dog right what's the next thing like like you can kind of look at it and you're like you're getting closer and closer yeah yeah and and again i'm not saying that like loving your dog and loving the machine is the same thing or even that it's close on that spectrum but it's very obvious to see like there's probably a group of people who are like hey human is human okay got it then eventually it was like human to animal now you could argue that there are people who absolutely love inanimate objects like talk to a sports memorabilia collector yeah about their car or like the baseball bat that mickey man will use to hit a home like people are people are nuts so

like in some weird way loving the baseball bat or loving the like quote-unquote intelligent machine like actually maybe the intelligent machine is like closer to the human than the uh than the baseball let me let me throw this at you then so this is this isn't quite like love but i think that there's a decent argument to be made that ai is sort of like the next thing with intelligence creation so we talked about it before it's like genes and then it's memes and then like what's next? Like, I think there's an argument to be made and the EAC dudes would surely make this argument, which is that AI is a new way of categorizing information and a new way of gaining information and basically a new way to pass it on. So today in our like meme world or

whatever, like in order for me to teach a lesson to my kid, I have to like say the words to them or like give them a book that has it written down or whatever, probably one of those two things. Um, but in the future, when we have open AI at scale or whatever, we have like chat GPT seven or like whatever, uh, we don't have to deliberately go find that information and pass it down anymore. The computers will basically pass it down for us. So today I go on Google and I search, uh, you know, how to, uh, you know, how to, um, create a fusion reactor or whatever.

Like I have to go through all those links. There's probably a lot of links on Google. If I'm actually going to figure out how to make a fusion reactor. But in the future, when we have these AI systems that have seen the entire internet, they've seen the entire scope of everything humans have ever written or posted, it can go click on all the links for me. It can go to page, like I max out at maybe like page two of Google. Like if you find me on page three, how long have I been there? Like hours. But this thing can go all the way down, as many O's as there are on Google, can like go and click on all the links and learn all the things.

And then it just spits out to me this nice little summary that says, step one, go find a big magnet. Step number two, like whatever. So I think that arguably the AI is like the third wave of that intelligence creation. So maybe not all the way to love. Maybe it's not fully conscious, but it certainly can be a much better way of like passing down lessons to our kids or, you know, helping us figure out how we're going to like interact with the world. So one of the pieces also that I always kind of point to is like everyone loves a binary situation. They're like, OK, humans or machines like we get one or the other. And if you want to replace the humans with machines, then like you're a bad person. Right. OK. Maybe, maybe not. But like there is this like middle ground of like, what if we have humans augmented by machines? Right. Which right now you and I are augmenting our conversation by being able to use technology by being in two different places. Like I think there's a lot of people who are like, that's pretty cool. That's good. Right. I Google, but like, what is the difference between me being able to just think and get the answer versus having to physically type it out? It's inefficient for me to type out the question on Google or hit these AI models or whatever. And so is that maybe kind of the actual end, you know, kind of game, if you will, of EAC is like, it's not about replacing humans. It ends up actually just being like this huge augmentation that would make us much more efficient, much better, probably would make us happier in many cases, and also more productive, which then has all these, you know, great benefits to society. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the core EA, the core EAC thing is like, let's capture more energy and use more energy. So, you know, right now, humanity isn't that great at consuming energy from the sun. Like, I think it's like 77% of our energy comes from oil and gas and like natural gas and coal. So those are three things that also got their energy from the sun. They were plants or animals

or whatever that decomposed and turned into oil and coal eventually. But it captured that energy from the sun like billions of years ago. So today we only get maybe like whatever, 20% of our energy from the sun as it lands on earth. Some of that comes from solar cells. Some of that comes from wind. Some of that comes from, you know, like water or like in the water cycle and rivers and stuff. Um, but it's only 20% of our energy today. And that as a whole, it's like some, some tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of the total energy that's output by the sun. And so if you think about it, our entire world, everything we've built up around us, like this entire planet is contingent is like is based on being able to use energy like if we couldn't use any more energy

anymore none of this exists we like can't do anything anymore so the eac argument is what if ai helps us capture more energy if it helps us figure out new ways to do better solar cells if it helps us find ways to you know do fusion power whatever like it'll help extend the the scope and scale of human consciousness to use that you know elon musk phrase um the scope of scale of human consciousness will increase if we get better at capturing energy. Um, and they want to go even further. They want to like capture stars and they want to, you know, build like Dyson spheres around stars, which allows us to take in more of the sun's energy, whatever. Uh, but, uh, the, the simplest answer is they want to expand the amount of time that we can do all this. So it's even more

than just making us happy in the moment or, you know, making sure that, you know, we have better belts and shoes, but it's like, let's make sure that 10,000 years from now, we have enough energy to still survive once all the coal and oil and whatever are gone. So I'm going to give you an example um a company i invested in uh is varda right so uh similar to kind of space stuff that you guys are doing just in a different way and when delian first told me he was like yeah we should like send up uh manufacturing uh facilities up to space i was like haha like that's funny let's go to dinner and then he was like no dude i think we should fucking do it and i literally was like whatever man like i'm i'm in just because you're my friend and like that sounds awesome uh but like

i'm this is a write-off right like we're like we're definitely losing all this money this isn't yeah like i mean just like like maybe we'll like figure something out along the way or like there's like some launch technology or you know like whatever uh as most of these things go but like i do think that there's like i don't know spacex and like each couple of years there's been a couple of these companies right where people are like wait a second that was an insane idea three or four years ago like we have a thing in space right now that is manufacturing a drug and then we're going to bring it back down to earth like what the fuck is going on humans are awesome right like that to me is almost like the perfect example but it's not controversial and for some reason

ai is so controversial compared to like hey wouldn't it be awesome if we like sent things up to space manufactured and brought them back down uh to earth like that's an insane idea too but for some reason people are like excited and cool with that and almost like uh i want to learn more versus this ai thing just seems to scare the shit out of people and it's like why do you think it's ai specifically is it the the doomers have done a great job of like kind of reaching the mass audiences and like warning them or is it just like it's something they don't understand and can't wrap their head around i wonder i wonder how much of it is even just like you know we see the doomers on twitter but are they even really out there in the real world like i think

if i went to my parents right now and i was like what do you think of ai they'd be like i don't know like is that behind google or something like i think most people are probably not thinking about it and so but of the people thinking about it of people thinking about a ai i think most of the people that use AI or interact with AI probably have a positive experience with it. There are people like, I don't know, there was this company that was just sold to Thomson Reuters that's basically like a legal assistant. And it can look through all the different texts of all the different court cases and all the different relevant stuff and just give you stuff to help you be a better lawyer. There's very simple applications of AI that people don't think of

as this crazy going to replace humans future AGI thing. And they interact with those all the time and we're using it, even though we don't know it right now, like in this video call, like it's cleaning up my voice or something, like who knows. And I don't know. I think most people probably aren't doomers. I think probably the doomers are the people who they think that everyone else is going into this blind. They think like, I've seen the future. I know how this is going to go and it's not going to go well. The EAC argument is the opposite of that. They say, I don't know how this is going to go. Nobody knows how this is going to go. How could we possibly, Like, I can't predict that they were going to create, like, Varda was going to create these space factories before they thought it up.

Like, or I would have done it. You know what I mean? Like, we can't predict the future, but we can trust that we have the ability to solve, to save things. Like, if this space factory goes way wrong, like, you know, we can fix it for the second version, that kind of thing. So, I don't know. The one argument is I know the future and it's going to be bad. The other argument is nobody knows the future. Let's make it better together.

I think I'm on that side. I do wonder how much of the doomer like psychology is just like this is a way for me to make noise and like get attention. And so it's like, I want to be famous versus if they sat down and they said, Hey, look, I want to share some thoughts with you. And no one will ever know that I'm like the doomer, right? Would they still have those same thoughts? Like if you took away the ability to gain attention and fame, how many people would still believe it? There will be some right for 100% for sure. There's some that are not doing it for attention and fame. but sometimes you see the arguments that people are making or the things they're saying and doing and you're like man i don't know if you really believe what you're saying as much as like you really are trying to go viral and like get the attention um and and same i guess could be true on the ex side as well but but it just feels like um the the game of the internet right and like of the attention economy has created the incentives for people to have more and more extremist views. And so the doomer extreme view of like, we're going to replace all the people

and that's horrible, like somehow now has life and people actually like take it seriously. This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales using automation, analytics, and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more at Accenture.com slash Spotify. Yeah, it is interesting. I'm not sure if it's asymmetric. I think that it probably works in both directions where you have like the people who are like, everything is perfect and there's

no risk in anything ever. And they're rewarded for that because it's a more extreme view, something like that. And I actually think this is really interesting in terms of the whole like entropy thing that the, uh, that the EAC people bring up in general, you know, most things in the world kind of fade into nothingness and fade into, you know, disorder. It seems like social media is doing this thing with memes where it's making them more extreme and more pronounced and more concrete. And I wonder, like, I think that that's, that's part of it that people don't usually appreciate, which is that we are, we are creating new ideas and these new ideas are gaining more, you know, staying power because we can interact with each other in this different way.

Me and you probably never would have found each other to talk with each other if it wasn't for Twitter, if it wasn't for the internet. And 100 years ago, we never would have talked. But now we're talking about these ideas and we're able to explore them together. So I don't know. I think it's an innate feature of the internet. I don't think it's something that has to do with either just the doomers or the accelerationists, but we're definitely getting more extreme. That's for sure. Somebody has listened or watched this and they're like, cool, this effective accelerationism something sounds awesome. I'm in. What should they do? Like, what is the call to action? Like, what is the thing that the EAC movement, you know, kind of wants it to manifest the ideas into like

action in reality? Yeah, it depends. It depends when you have the, like, which levers you have the ability to pull. But if you're an investor, go invest in projects that are trying to create, you know, new energy production or new, you know, new cool, like pushing the boundaries forward in whatever way they want. If you're an entrepreneur or a person who wants to be an entrepreneur, move to Silicon Valley, come out here, come interact with these people and start your own company. I mean, I think that the calls to action are just, you know, accelerate. It's to let's put the foot on the gas. Let's try out of many different experiments. I actually had someone on Twitter message me after I made that post about EAC and said, hey, I think this is really cool.

Can I join? It's not really how it works, man. Like, I'm not in charge. Like, I don't know. uh just if you want to do it do it uh and i think that's kind of the whole the whole thing the move the whole thing of the the whole idea the idea isn't that you have to get someone's permission it's just go for it if people are already acting that way it's like uh back in like 2017 or 2018 this guy was arrested in like i think it was like the bronx or brooklyn or something and he was selling physical bitcoins like like chucky g's coins and he was like selling them out of like a baggie right and so like of course like the internet you know took it viral and uh i mean you could definitely see there's going to be some moron who's like oh yeah i'm going to create the

association it's 20 a month you know whatever which is the exact opposite to your point of like of what the movement is like you don't have to actually even know anyone else to participate and it is really just like accelerate in your own local community your own life whatever and you are contributing uh even if no one knows about it yeah exactly i mean it's the very it's the very like it's actually kind of a tough movement to describe and to capture because the whole idea of the movement is like there is no one answer there is no one set thing that we all have to commit to it's like let's just try it let a million flowers bloom if uh people want to find out more uh i'm gonna send them to your tweet which like we can call it a tweet i think

now it also might be yeah it's in the middle of like a or it could be a blog or it could be a blog post like i don't know i put it on i put it on substack to begin but then like twitter and substack are not getting along these days and so it got like i posted it like five hours later it had like 20 views and i was like all right i guess you can't put subset links in tweets anymore turns out uh i posted i hope one day that they play nice elon should have a sub stack i think that elon would do just fine yeah or or as a shareholder in sub stack maybe twitter should buy sub stack and then we could all play nice together that'd be even better there we go all right where can we send people to find you on the internet if uh if they want to follow up

learn more uh or find uh or find the tweet that you did yeah sure so i have two things that i would send you to the first one is uh just twitter come come find me on twitter christian kyle uh pronounced underscore Kyle, K Y L E. Uh, or you can go, yeah. I saw when I saw it, I was like, man, he really is going to make sure people know how to pronounce his last name. It improved and improved pronunciation of like a hundred percent. Most people say keel and I'm like, fine, whatever. I don't care. But I just made pronounced Kyle.com and then it worked. Uh,

so there's that one way. And then the other way is I'm starting a new, um, a sub stack on this actually. So I just did it recently. It's called against the dying of the light, uh, for that classic rage rage against the dying of the light. I think that's the ethos of fighting against entropy. So find it at dyinglight.substack.com. Awesome. I'm going to go sign up right now.

I appreciate your time today. I learned a lot. We got a couple of good laughs in. If anyone wants to find out more about effective accelerationism, just remember one word, accelerate, accelerate, accelerate. Christian, I appreciate it. We'll do it again in the future. All right.

See you, man.