This Week in Startups - Tim Urban on the path to AGI and trends in tech history | E1779

Episode Date: July 18, 2023

This Week in Startups is brought to you by… Lemon.io - Hire pre-vetted remote developers, get 15% off your first 4 weeks of developer time at https://Lemon.io/twist MasterClass. Learn from the world’s best minds - anytime, anywhere, and at your own pace. Get 15% off an annual membership to MasterClass at https://masterclass.com/startups Superside. Design and creative are crucial for growth. Tech companies like Shopify, Amazon, and Meta have found the perfect solution: Superside. Get $2000 off with Superside's Startup Accelerator package https://www.superside.com/twist * Today’s show: Tim Urban joins Jason to break down the road to AGI(15:38), people's trust in organizations(57:31), trends in tech throughout history(25:36), and so much more! * Time stamps: (00:00) The creator of Wait But Why, Tim Urban joins Jason (1:49) Movies and social media creating dopamine addicts (11:16) Lemon.io - Get 15% off your first 4 weeks of developer time at https://Lemon.io/twist (12:36) Tim’s “Procrastination” Ted Talk and talks on AI (15:38) Tim’s book and his outlook on framing human history (22:16) MasterClass - Get 15% off an annual membership at https://masterclass.com/startups (25:36) Trends in tech history and the road to AGI (33:29) The dark paths of AI (37:31) Superside - Go to https://superside.com/twist to get $2000 off with Superside's Startup Accelerator package (41:16) The exciting potential of AI (42:10) Breaking down the human operating system: What happens when there is no longer work? (46:56) The exponential growth of computing (50:26) Why it is difficult to predict the outcome of AI tech (52:35) Gains in AI and expanding our understanding of the universe (57:31) The history of trust in organizations (01:06:21) How to find the truth and how misinformation is spread * Check out Wait But Why: https://waitbutwhy.com/ Check out Tim’s Book: https://waitbutwhy.com/whatsourproblem Follow Tim: https://twitter.com/waitbutwhy * Read LAUNCH Fund 4 Deal Memo: https://www.launch.co/four Apply for Funding: https://www.launch.co/apply Buy ANGEL: https://www.angelthebook.com Great recent interviews: Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarland, PrayingForExits, Jenny Lefcourt Check out Jason’s suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanis * Follow Jason: Twitter: https://twitter.com/jason Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jason LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis * Follow TWiST: Substack: https://twistartups.substack.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartups YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekin * Subscribe to the Founder University Podcast: https://www.founder.university/podcast

1994 and 1995, my friend was like, you have to come over. We were all going over to this one guy's house because he had, you know, he quote, had AOL, whatever that means. Yes. He was like, I had the, I have, he wasn't even called AOL. Yeah. He's like, I have America online. I was, I didn't even know what he was saying. And then we'd go over.

I mean, all huddle around the computer. And, you know, for, it was, it cost money per hour. And, you know, it was $3 to $5 an hour in the beginning. People don't forget. People forget that. Yeah. And these, like, legendary chat rooms we would go on, um, that, that are now, now they're legendary. It's like the first thing. And it was just randos and you're just there in these chat

rooms. And it was so new. And I remember even, I just remember even the concept that are like a techie friend of mine when I was like, I don't know, 13, 14 was like showing me how you could send in like some primitive version of email. And I thought I blew my mind that he could type something on his computer across the town. And it would appear on my computer. It seems so obvious now. But that was like totally mind-blowing technology to me. Yes. This week in startup. is brought to you by lemon.io. Need to speed up your product development without draining your budget? Hire vetted engineers from Europe at lemon.io.

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SuperSide. Get $2,000 off with SuperSide's startup accelerator package at Superside.com slash twist. Let me ask you, what's your favorite couple of films of all time? A couple of films that you love. Movies, yeah, cinema, films, movies, picture shows. I mean, I love Back to the Future. It's a classic.

Like the best movie ever. I love Shutter Island. Oh, that's a good pull. A good Scorsese pull. Very good film. I love a movie where... I think my favorite genre of movie is the kind of movie that when you finish it,

you immediately want to go watch the whole thing again now that you know what's going on. Yes. I love that kind of movie. Memento. Yeah, exactly. And the inception. Less, yeah, those are all good examples.

Less famous is the Handmaiden, which is a Korean film, which is like, I couldn't believe how good a movie this was. It's like, I watched it and it finished and I was like, I'm immediately watching that whole thing again. So this is an important topic for us to discuss because you nailed it. I literally, you split the arrow. I shot the arrow and then you shot your arrow and then I hit the bullseye and you split my bullseye. the examples you gave are you patiently watch a story unfold and you earn through that patience this incredible plot twist or you know cathartic moment in the film and that experience of being patient and letting it evolve and then getting the reward delayed response makes that reward

it's so much better. And then a film like, you know, Transformers comes out. And it's all incredibly crazy insane moments. I don't know if you saw The Flash yet or the New Indiana Jones. But I got, you know, older kids than you. And, you know, we go see these. I still like to go to theirs. These films now are a series of every single one of those shocking events.

So Indiana Jones, which always had a couple of great adventure scenes, it's one giant car chase. literally the film is one giant chase. It does not stop. So no characters get developed. And then the Flash was a really interesting character who was dealing with the pain of his parents, dying and all this stuff.

And Batman is as well. There's no room for the film to breathe, for the story to unfold for the characters to develop. And it's really lost. It's something like the TikTok of movies. It's the same trend. It's going for pure dopamine hits, constant, you know, at the expense of anything that can make the movie actually good.

Just like, you know, TikTok is like, you know, it's, again, an audio book is less dopamine hit E and less addictive, but it's, again, an audio, good audio book changes your life. You'll talk about it 10 years from now. And, but yeah, so it is a tradeoff. Yeah, and so now I just think we have a generation of young people. This is what I think about. who because they grew up with smartphones and TikTok, social media, you know, writ large,

never didn't know the internet, their brains are fried. They've just gotten these crazy 30-second dopamine hits. They've never actually experienced watching a film like Momento to completion without touching their phone. And my kids have a hard time. I've had to like retrain them to watch a film, you know, and to just be present in that moment.

I think this is like a major experiment we're doing on a generation. And I think it's a deadly one. I think this is why we're seeing so much use of like SRIs. And I don't want to get all like conspiracy theory here. But I think like people are trying to build defense mechanisms, antibodies against what's happening to their brain and the dopamine being burnt out. And so everybody's anxious. Everybody's depressed.

Well, if you don't sleep and you get too many dopamine hits too constantly, you're going to be fried. It's too much. It's like being an ambulance. driver. What's like your rule for kid ages for when they can have a phone or social media or? Yeah. So no social media

I think until they're 16 or 17. I don't think there's anything good that comes out of it. We told our 13 year old that you'll get a phone when she's 15 or 16 and I'm going to give her the Apple watch this year. So at least I have location and we can SMS and that kind of stuff because you can get one with a cell phone in it.

And then everybody has iPads and they can use them. I like to generally use them in open spaces so I can see what's going on. And then I try to check what they're using because with my 13-year-old, I remember when she was five or six, she was really into Disney Princess.

She went through the Disney Princess Industrial Complex phase, which you'll go through at some point. Wait, you have a boy or a girl? Girl. Okay, yeah. So you're going to go through the the Princess Industrial Complex where, yeah, it's pretty intense.

But... Which I'm fine with, by the... It's like, if there's one... I do like those movies. The nice thing about them is they're musical. So there's some great songs in there. Great, yeah. And they've followed an arc now if you get really meta.

We're now, like, Frozen, they're like, yeah, they're two girls and, you know... There's no bad guys anymore. Yeah, they have, like, some bad guys, and, you know, everybody's a little bit sympathetic, and there's a lot of more diversity, and maybe this character's gay or... you know, like Gaston. You remember Beauty and the Beast? Of course. And you know,

Gaston had this like guy who was his like butler or his, you know, his man served. Literally, in the live action version of it, they make him gay. And I think he, I don't know if he kisses a guy or he just has like goo-goo eyes with a guy.

And of course, this made Ron DeSantis, Texas, everybody lose their minds. And the biggest concern right now with the bench of Piro crowd is they really got freaked out that the Little Mermaid was black. That broke their brains. But then there is this kind of like, it may turn out in Frozen that Elsa or one of them is not straight when she grows up and that's going to blow the doors off of. And I'm like, can I ask you a

question? In all sincerity, like, you're listening to musicals. Who do you think makes these? Right. It's pretty gay around here. I mean, it could be. a bunch of straight guys. Right. You know, but any good music, a lot of the best actors, playwrights. All the beauty of the lyrics were written by a gay man. Power Nasson.

Okay. I didn't know, but I hate to, you know, um, stereotype anybody, but I mean, I lived in New York. Oh, yeah. And I hung out with theater, the actor kids. And they would go hang out after, um, in these like bars that had a piano. And they would sing show tunes. So if you go to the west side of Manhattan,

just like, maybe on 9th to 10th Avenue House Kitchen area. A lot of the theater people live there. And a lot of there's these places where they go that are like underground after work. And then you see these like people get up and they start belting out show tunes. And it's awesome. But it's majority gay. Yeah.

So shocker to the people. I was in a, I was in a musical theater writing workshop because I was a composer. And there's like 30 guys total. And I, there was three. I was one of the three straight guys in the... Okay, sure. So, to the extent you like amazing musicals, you might need to get comfortable with gay people.

Yeah, yeah. Not a big deal. Right, anyway, our guest today on this week's start is Tim Irving. And we just had to get started because Tim and I are good friends. And I think we're good friends. We have like a bromance going. We got to know each other the last couple years. And anytime we're at a party or hanging out together, we talk for hours.

Tim is just one of the smartest, most considered people I know, great writer. And he's a bad illustrator, but the illustrations, your self-described bad illustrator. Oh, yeah. But the illustrations really helped learning. And I love having you on the pod. You spoke at Owlin Summit last year. Thank you for doing that. Thank you for waiving your quarter million dollar speaking fee that we could never have afforded.

That was great, too. You get a lot of those speaking fees? It's not a quarter million, but I get, I guess. get paid for all talks except for Ted and all in. The one that has the most profits is the one that doesn't pay you. And Summit. Summit doesn't pay. And then it's like small like a friend, you know,

if I ask you or small company, I won't do that. But like everywhere else pays. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's okay. It's a limit.

The Summit guys ask you to pay for your room to. Or did they at least pick your room? I think the first thing was, yeah, and I pushed back. They did that with me. Yeah. They were like, can you keynote this and then do this, like, and have a dinner. And they're like, and we have this perfect trailer for you. I'm like, I'm sorry, a trailer?

We're just this thing being held. They're like, oh, it's being held at this like, we bought a mountain. And I'm like, okay, this is getting weirder. And then they start hugging everybody. And they're like, yeah, it's $25,000. I'm like, wait a second. I just told you, I'm waving my speaking fee. Now you want me to send you $25,000.

And they're like, well, we're going to give you the VIP trailer. I'm like, here's an idea. I'm a speaker. Give me the VIP trailer because I'm not charging you. I'm like, oh, we don't work that way. I'm like, but you just said you bought a mountain with Sean Parker's money. So which is it? Okay, listen, you got an idea for a tech startup.

Great. You think you want to change the world. You think you got this. This is the one. Well, you've got that same problem that we all do. You don't have an engineer or you don't have enough engineers to make this happen. And you need product velocity. You need to go fast.

And how are you going to go fast? And how are you going to control your burn rate? If you got no engineers, well, what if you had a partner who could provide you with more than a thousand on-demand developers. And those developers were all vetted, experience, result-oriented, and passionate about startups and building great products. Well, what if they also charge competitive

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And Twist listeners get 15% off the first for a week. I want you to stop burning money. I want you to hire developers smarter and faster. Visit lemon.com slash twist and give it a shot. When's the last time you spoke at TED? I only spoke once at TED in 2016. Oh, right, procrastination talk. Crastination, and I'm a one and done guy, because that was a terrible experience.

Oh. Wait a second. It's the number two TED talk in history, I believe. Yeah, but prepping for was one of the most stressful, awful experience. It's not, okay, a talk is to an audience. It's to a live group of people. And if it doesn't go well, you know, you're never going to see those people again. And it's done.

if your TED Talk, your TED Talk is a widely distributed short fill starring you only and you get one take and it's sick. It's a sick amount of pressure that no one should be under. And if you say a line wrong in your TED Talk, it is wrong forever. I could never watch that TED Talk now because anything that I didn't do right in now when I'm going to be miserable about. And so yeah, I'm happy to have done one, but no, no more. Interesting.

How, you were going to ask me a question about Summit. I interrupted you. Oh, I was just going to ask about whether you paid free room. I just wanted the end of the story there. No, I just, I was so frustrated with him. I was like, you know what, I'm out. I got a lot of other things I got working on. So I just, I bowed on doing it.

I said maybe another time, you know. And so I have the same philosophy with you, which is I will do a friend's event. So like, Rafat Ali runs a company, skiff.com. He worked for me. He did great work for me. I'm an investor in his company. He does this like travel. He's got like a B2B travel magazine.

It's great online site. And they do their travel. summit every year. And I was like, sure, I'll come interview somebody. You want to bring in the big guns? Sure. I'll come in. I'll fly them. I'll pay my way. All good. I'll do it for a friend. And other than that, if it's, you know, I don't know if it's a college thing, I'll do it for a maybe. But, you know, I do like four corporate ones a year, maybe. And it's quite nice. And, you know, get paid a pretty penny for it. And that's quite nice. I like doing it. I told them the speakers, I have like three different people who book speaking things for me. I just said, book me

ones that are near skiing. And they're like, Japan, Salt Lake City. I'm like, yes. Okay, here you go. One thing I like about talks is that it kicks my ass to stay fresh. Like, I do a lot of talks on AI, and that topic changes so quickly. So I have to stay up to date. And sometimes I'm not, and then I cram before the talk to get up to date. So it just keeps me, you know, up to date with those things.

And it helps also just, you know, writing about something. helps you articulate it better, helps you just clarifies it in your head, but doing a talk same way. You have to be organized. You know, you have to, so it's kind of a good, it's just productive as well for me to do that.

It's a forcing function. I literally did a talk on AI for Rick Caruso. He ran from mayor of L.A. last time, and he owns, like, if you know the Grove in L.A., he's a major real estate magnet. And I just spoke to it was like 150 top executives and they're offsite. And I did a talk on AI.

and it was very helpful. Speaking of AI, you know, you and I are the last generation. Do you remember when there wasn't an internet? You remember dial-up? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I remember 1994, 1995,

my friend was like, you have to come over, like we were all going over to this one guy's house because he had, you know, he quote, had AOL, whatever that means. Yes. He was like, I had the, he wasn't even called AOL, yeah.

He's like, I have America online. I didn't even know what he was saying. And then we'd go over. I mean, all huddled. around the computer and, you know, for it was, it cost money per hour. And, you know, it was three to five dollars an hour in the beginning. People don't forget. People forget that. Yeah. And these, like, legendary chat rooms we would go on, um, that are now, now they're legendary. It's like, the first thing, it was like, it was like, you're, and it was just randos and you're just there in

these chat rooms. And it was so new. And I remember even, I just remember even the concept that are like a techie friend of mine when I was like, I don't know, 13, 14 was like showing me how you could send in like some primitive version of email. And I thought I blew my mind that he could type something on his computer across the town. And it would appear on my computer, which seems so obvious now. But that was like totally mind-blowing technology to me. Yeah. When I saw it in 19, I was doing dial-up in 1983-84 with BBSs.

Those were the precursors who dial up into one computer. And then I remember seeing the internet in the form of Bitnet at Fordham University. I saw people chatting across the world from different colleges and universities. This guy had a girlfriend in Brazil or something and chatting with her. He never met her, but they were going to plan on meeting each other. I was like, I don't understand. Like, you guys can talk and chat for free. And we were trying to build a mental model for it.

And the best I could figure out, it's like, this is kind of like CB because you hold the button down on a CB and you can't hear anything. You're broadcasting. Nobody else can broadcast. You're stepping on each other. You say something over. You let go. And kind of the next person goes.

That was kind of how we looked at it or tried to frame it. But the reason I bring this up is the acceleration of change. And our generation, specifically Gen Xers, we're the generation that understood the world or lived some percentage of our lives without internet, without smartphones, and then with them. And I think AI is a similar one. So I'm curious if your take on a generational basis, if you were to compare other generations, boomers, I guess,

and the greatest generation, maybe what they saw, compared to what we've seen. And then we can go forward to what the next group of people is going to see and how insane the world is, because in your amazing new book, you talk about this.

History, the entire existence of human history, you talk about being a thousand page book, I think. And I'm pretty sure this is your unique idea, or was it somebody else's idea? I mean, that's my idea. I'm sure someone else has done the exact same thing. No, I mean, I was like, I think your ability to frame stuff is like your superpower.

So let's start there with your framing of all of human history and the 99 pages versus the 1,000. Yeah. So, I mean, there, there's like multiple tiers of craziness that lead into our current time. So like, the human history, you know, we can say it's 250,000 years old. Some people will say 300,000 or 200,000, whatever. And so I said, okay, let's just, let's just say 250. And then if it's a thousand page book, if you wrote all of human history into a thousand page book, each page covering 250 years, then, you know, what does that look like?

And the answer is that almost the whole 950 pages of that book is hunter-gatherers everywhere. Just that, really boring book. And then around page 950, you start to have really early cities in agriculture, you know, you have the agricultural revolution picking up in the 1950s and 960s throughout the world, very slow. And then around page 975 is the beginning of recorded history because that's when writing started taking hold.

And so when we actually just talk about prehistoric times, that's the first 975 pages of the book. So history is only 25 pages. You don't get to AD until page 993. So it's like the little epilogue. of the book is AD. Right? So it's just,

you realize, it just puts in perspective that all these things we consider like incredibly ancient, you know, Buddha, you know, he's like page 990 or something like that. Right.

And so it's like, you know, all this stuff is the very tail end of the human history story so far. And, but the thing that's most interesting is when you look at it this way,

you realize that, so if you took someone from any page in the book and you transported them one page into the future, it wouldn't, most of the book, it would be the same kind of hunter

gathering by style. Nothing much has changed. as you get later and later in the book, going forward one page becomes a bigger and bigger deal. Until you get to page 99, you take baby George Washington, or you take 20-year-old George Washington, you bring him 250 years forward to today.

And he would get out of the time machine and just be in a dream in an alien planet. Like, it just nothing would make any sense at all. He didn't know about, you know, the transportation was just horses in his day, sailboats, right? We're going to the space station and submarines and trains and cars and airplanes. And communication was just, you know, he'd write a letter or he would talk to someone and that's about it.

And of course, we have the internet today and we have everything else. We have TV and telephones. And like, so forget even the internet. Just like the basic things from 1950 would completely blow his mind. And then, you know, he also just did. There was no general relativity. There was nothing even know about atoms that that. recently, like the size of the universe, like, there's all these things that we take for granted,

just basic knowledge that one page ago we didn't know. So this page is an anomaly in every possible way, which is a way of kind of like, I think we often like assume that if we think that we're living in a special time, that must be naive because everyone thinks that, you know, but actually we are. And yeah. And then what you just talked about is, you know, our parents and or grandparents or whatever. That's all within page 1000. So page 1,000 already itself is just, that's, you know,

really started with the Industrial Revolution, and it has just been complete madness, just accelerating paradigm shifts all over the place. Each sentence would represent 10 or 20 years. Yeah, depending on the formatting of the book. The whole world is different. We all have self-doubt. I can promise you,

if there's 100 people in a room, a hundred people have some level of insecurity. You can't have any self-doubt. doubt about your commitment and conviction to do this. You might have self-doubt about your ability to succeed, to raise the money, to attract the right people. Those are two different issues. The voice you just heard is one of my personal favorite CEOs of all time. Howard Schultz, yes, the CEO of Starbucks. And it's from his new class. It's amazing. He has a class on business leadership and you need to watch it right now, right after this episode.

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So then you get, even within page 1000, you know, I say again, from most of human history, You know, someone's grandparents, their wisdom was, their advice was wise. Listen to it, you know, they've been around. Now, you get wise for a world that's not hearing him. Like, it's like, you know, each generation has a really hard time understanding that the tools and technology of the next generation of the two generations later, like trying to get, you know, imagine trying to get my grandmother to try to, you know, she's 97 to try to get to her to, you know, leverage GPT4 for, you know, it's a joke, right?

She doesn't, if she minimizes her browser window, she thinks the machine is broken and I have to come over and fix it because she doesn't know what happened. Because it ate the page. It ate the page. Right. Shout out to Graham on 97. Oh, keep going.

Let's break 100. Right. Yeah. I'm incredible. I'm happy with her. It's super amazing about sort of your perspective on this is that as fast as it's going, we now face a moment where technologists, uh, which, you know, we have a lot in our circle, uh, who have been,

watching AI since, you know, 60s, 70s, 80s, a lot of talk about it, pop culture, you know, Michael Crichton, Westworld, just tons of examples of people thinking about autonomous beings and sentient life, Blade Runner, Star Wars, whatever, droids, pick your metaphor. And now here we are. And you talk to chat GPT or any of the contemporaries, you're starting to feel like you're talking to C3PO. And, you know, that to me was when I realized like, yeah, C3 had a lot of value as part of the squad in the Star Wars series because you can tell you the odds of navigating this asteroid field or, you know, give you some strategy or whatever. Now, you wouldn't want to have him face Darth Vader.

But I guess talking about how your mind as somebody who studies trends, and I think like you're a trend spotter or a context giver. I don't know how to describe your gift, but, you know, futurist maybe, but your ability right around the corner, did you see and anticipate this level of exponential progress? And let's be honest, it's kind of like the last year has made everything seem really silly. So take me into your mind and how you're dealing with this. I wrote in 2015, it was really late 2014. I started reading, you know, Nick Bostrom's book Super Intelligence, and I got into Raid Kurzweil and I read I got basically a stack of six or seven books on AI

because stoked by Nick Bostroms and I was just like wide-eyed I had no idea. So I wrote about it and it turns out a lot of other people had no idea because that post was really I think opened a lot of eyes and my readers were just as blown away as I was. And one of the questions and the big questions after I was like this is such a huge deal is going to change everything

is first this is going to be good or bad that's a big one but also when is this going to happen you know artificial narrow intelligence is everywhere which is you know AI that's good at a task that's every year

there's a thousand chess your anti-lock brake system on your car I mean your GPA every single thing that you're doing in your life has A&I at this point but the big question was like okay artificial general intelligence

which is when it's AI that's smart like a human is smart. It's broadly, generally smart. It can just use reasoning and logic to solve any problem, to learn anything new. And it can,

it doesn't have to, it doesn't, you know, it can just break out of any specialty. Which, you know, it sounds obvious to humans. It's like,

well, yeah, that's just what, it's like, that's a pretty magical ability we have. Yeah. This ability to have this generalized,

intelligent tool in our head. And, and of course, the threat with AI is that, in, with narrow intelligence, when it's better than us at something,

It's way, way better. Way better. It doesn't even... Cass bra is like, it's over. Forget, right? And then go more recently and lots of other things. Poker, Texas Hold' now is a kind of falling in there. Literally, like, once it passes us, it's just a whole different species.

So the scary thing is when you do have a GI, so something that is smart the way broadly the way we are, but it's way better at being generally smart than we are like, wow, like that, what's going to happen? That's, like, it's just such a weird concept. We've never had that on the planet. We've always been the smartest animal on the planet. Yes. And so the big question is, yeah, it was like, when? When is this, you know, when is this going to happen?

You know, it's going to take different jobs when. So it's interesting just comparing a little bit what I thought in 2015 and what I thought was. Here's the illustration. I mean, this is the illustration that I believe made you famous. Yeah, that's the general idea here. that like... So, waitbut why.com, and here you see the chart,

human progress on the left axis, time on the bottom axis. Yeah. And you can describe from there. Yeah. I mean, it's like, it's, you know, as I said, it seems naive to think, well, well, of course, everyone thinks their time is special and you're right on the cusp and everything. But actually, like, if you look at the page 1000, how things are going, like, we are.

We are in an absolutely unique and wild time. So it was like... Is it comparable to any other moment in history? Is it comparable? to mathematics, science, the world is round, language, spoken language, air travel, nuclear power, nuclear weapons.

Is it comparable in any way to you, or does this dwarf all of those put together? So, like, I always think it must have been crazy for someone who was born in, like, 1850. Because if you were born in 1850, you were 15, you know, in the mid-60s,

but you were also still alive maybe in like 1930. And the 50 years between like 1865 and 1905 was crazy. It saw the advent first of telegraph, which was insane technology. So Europe and the U.S. could communicate instantly.

Do you know how magical that? Through an ocean instantly. Before it was, you know, weeks for any letter to go back and forth. So there's the telegraph, then comes the telephone, then comes the voice. Corridor.

Marconi going to Newfoundland. Yeah. And just, and then electricity, this is, you know, Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse. Electricity just goes from, electricity was like an internet. It was like the internet. It goes from nothing to every year to just in doing every like A&I, I was saying today, is everywhere. Like suddenly electricity is in every home.

And you know, we think we take it for granted. Electricity is insane. It takes a burning fire, coal fire somewhere. And it converts that raging uncontrollable energy into this little magical butler like that you just flip on with a switch and it's waiting for you and you flip it on and it can freeze food and it can heat food. The fire, you know, it's just, it's very cool,

electricity. It's like generalized energy, you know, for anything. So then you also had the car comes around, right? In the car and the, the motion picture, all of those were in those 50 years. That's wild. And then that's, you know, and then that person, so that person saw all of that.

And, and then if you stayed around a little longer, you quickly start to see the airplane and the TV. So, there is a, I think that must have felt a little like this. And then it's like the whole world's changing. Everything is getting, everything's magical. And like, you need to keep up and all the industries, you better adapt or you're going to die.

So it must have felt a little like that. But this to me feels, I just think it's just this on that on steroids. It's happening quicker. It's more confusing. And it's more powerful. Like, it's scarier because I feel like, you know, the ability for us to just off ourselves as a species as just, it's just higher than it was. We didn't have existential threats in 1900.

There was nothing that was going to kill the whole species. Pandemic. Maybe. Maybe. Maybe. But because you didn't have air travel yet, or wide scale, you didn't have air travel, basically. Right. So, you know, if there was a pandemic, they're not letting people off the boats at Ellis Island

for a year or two. Right. We shut borders. So it'd be contained. And that's, you know, that's a natural disaster that could, you're right. Air travel did maybe make a pandemic more existential. But, like, nukes was like the first time that it was this concept that was, like World War III, if it happens, might be the end.

Like, that's new. That's, which is, by the way, why it's, it's why technology is scary because the 20th century was the best ever by basically most any metric, you know, GDP per capita, life span, people in poverty, disease, life expectancy, everything. And it was also the ones with the biggest wars, the biggest genocides, the worst, the scariest weapons, the beginning of existential threat, you know, the climate change. We didn't have the power to actually change the climate. But now we have so much power as a species.

We have our effect is bigger on everything. So anyway, I think there are examples like this for sure. But like, yeah. Well, I think we counted like three. Right. You know, like a pandemic, which is a naturally occurring thing that we exacerbated, nuclear, which we woke that demon up. And then, you know, climate, we kind of slowly boiled the planet. So three really human-created.

existential threats. It's not like it's a, you know, a meteorite hitting Earth and we have another, you know, frozen era. This is stuff we created.

And, but you believe AI has this. AI could just, you know, AI has a range. It could, of course, like in the nightmare scenarios, it,

you know, some AI gets out of hand and starts doing some process, some industrial process. It was programmed to do an action and kills everyone in the process. Okay, so there's obviously those scenarios. But there's also just,

know, our civilization, you know, living in an industrialized modern democracy, you think of it as it's just how it is. That's our, you know, 10 generations, it's just been stable. And it's an artificial human invention. And like, it's only stable because, like, a bunch of people act a certain way and hold a certain set of values and information flows in a certain predictable way and there's institutions that people trust. And what's scary about AI is just how quickly it could just shake that civilization to its foundation. You know, and just totally like flood the airwaves with total, you know, misinformation of all.

Like to the point where no one has any idea what's true to do. No one knows that the big. Taking down power grids overloading the internet. Exactly. Imagine if taking down the internet, I always think is just like, would be. And it would be a complete disaster. Yeah. The power grids, the internet plus everything else, right?

So it's like now you'd want to be one of those hoarders, not those hoarders, those, you know, those Tuesday preppers. Yeah. Yeah. Which, you know, it's not the craziest thing to just go be a crazy. I mean, I have put, I'm getting generators on both houses, because here in California, we have this issue with the grid. And I have, you know, Starlink and the regular internet connection. And I'm actually thinking about water and having some of the, amount of water storage.

Like, I'm literally looking at water tanks. So I am in your camp that we may have unleashed a demon. I think if you look at, we have the Oppenheimer film coming out this summer. I can't wait. That looks incredible. You're a Nolan fan. I take it. Yeah, yeah.

I'm dying to watch. Yeah. You know, if we look at that moment, and I'm just thinking out loud here with history, it seemed like you needed a crazy sociopathic person, Hitler, whoever, to turn the world on its head, right? You just need one lunatic to really do some deranged behavior, and that would be the catalyst. But then you, science unlocks, you know, nuclear power and nuclear bombs. And then it turns out the U.S. is the one that does it, because we're like, this war's got to end. Now we take that same analogy and you look at Osama bin Laden.

Yeah, 19 people cause a massive world-changing event spurs two or three wars. Just 19 people. with a couple planes caused, what, two decades of chaos on the world? Like the Joker, I think it's one person now. You know, we went from like the Third Reich, Hitler and his incredible army and Japan causing chaos on a globe to 19 people causing chaos on the globe and all the stuff. I think it's one person now can cause chaos on the globe. I mean, Nick Bostrom uses the example of like, what if instead of having to enrich uranium, you could create a nuclear bomb by microwaving sand. You know, we'd be in the Stone Age because

it was just, even if it's one in a million people wants to bring down the whole species and create the apocalypse, there's 7 billion, 8 billion people. So that's 8,000 people have a chance to microwave sand and get things going. So, that's, that, you can't microwave sand

to create a nuke. So that one isn't, but how about bio-weapons and how they're going to become easier to create, you know, to manufacture a pandemic or just to take down the power grid. As soon as it becomes easier and easier where one person can get in there and create an advanced AI

that starts just, you know, doing something that even they don't anticipate. It's scary, yeah. The problem is like it doesn't take bad people. It takes a very tiny fraction of people who want to do that. If you are listening to this podcast, you care about innovation. You're listening to Twist, this weekend startups, and the startup sector changes constantly.

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a couple of generations that didn't have to go to war. we have a volunteer army. We've abstracted the concept of going to war to a volunteer, you know, paid army. And, you know, it's, we, I don't think we understand exactly what it means to go to war. And so we just think, well, everything's going to be safe. Everything's always been safe. It always works out. But yeah, I mean, what are the chances, if you think about COVID and their gain of function research, which they're clearly doing.

And you don't have to be a conspiracy there. This isn't that Alex Jones territory? They were doing gain of function research, obviously. And I don't know if I feel like gain of function research should be disallowed. It might be actually very important to do. I don't exactly have an answer on that. I'm curious what you think. But what are the chances they were actually using AI because it's a narrow AI problem.

I would be surprised if the COVID labs in Wuhan or other places and ones in the United States of doing this kind of research, I'd be shocked if they weren't using narrow AI. So given the gains we have now, pretty clear you could have chat GPT. make something that, oh, let's have something that takes 20 days before you show symptoms. Try that. Let's find something that kills babies and young people. Teach us how to do it. Teach me how to. I want to end the world and you make your, you know, you make your own, you leverage, you know, some of these larger foundational, you know, AI models and you, but you make one with your own rules.

And it doesn't have anything to prohibiting it from helping you figure out how to create an apocalypse. and I had to talk to someone from the Pentagon for a while, and, you know, he said that, you know, this notion that, oh,

there, you know, we don't go to, you know, the U.S. isn't, you know, we're not,

we're not at war very often. It's like, actually, we're always constantly at war right now. It's informational. It's, you know, and,

and, and it's just when, when things move slowly, you know, nukes, as much as they came on quickly, there were, you know,

a couple decades. to start to figure out what are the rules how should we handle this you know this was the one thing to focus on and you know what should diplomacy be like and given this but when things move so quickly we just don't have a time we don't have time to uh to like figure out safeguards and to adjust um and so uh you know but this is you know you can get swallowed in like the negativity it's also really exciting the positivity like the tools that are coming around if we don't kill ourselves off, will, I think,

create a world that would seem like a utopia to people today, just like our world would seem like utopia to George Washington, you know, where, where, like, there's no such thing as dying of old age. You just,

you, you just can easily rejuvenate yourself. You can, you know, and you can live as long as you want to, where, where, where,

things like climate change, we don't have to worry about that. We can continue, we have, we have the power to make, to control things on a macro level. and, you know, every problem, you can imagine, you know, poverty and disease, all of that is just easy, easy to solve. And everyone has what they need.

There's no, you know, there's no more scarcity. Yeah. And then you have the idle mind problem, you know, that comes up. Like, what happens when a human had no work to do? Do you mention this as well? Our operating system. And you go into a lot of tribalism in the book, which is a really interesting part. And I guess also kind of brave of you, given the woe.

mob. So I'm interested in double-clicking on that, but we'll get to it in a second. And for people who don't know the book, if you just type Tim Urban into Amazon is, what's our problem, a self-help book for societies. It's about a 13 or 14-hour list, and I think. It's a long book. A lot of good drawings and pictures in it. But, you know, you talk about our operating system and what we, as a biological creature, how slowly we evolve. So now our speed of evolution and the speed of the smartphones growth, just as but one example. These things are out of sync.

Our brains are not designed to consume TikTok all night and stay up all night or to be in front of the screen. And maybe we shouldn't have every horrible instance recorded on screen and then traumatize us over and over and over again with car crashes on whatever social network is your preferred one. So maybe talk a little bit about our biology running into the pace of technology and obviously the pace of AI specifically. Yeah, I mean, it's like, you know, we can look at our hand and be like, that's a tool that was developed for a certain purpose by evolution over

long periods of time. And our eyes, you know, used to be the eyes that saw underwater. Our great, our super far back ancestors were fish. And those eyes have slowly, you know, evolved and developed until eyes that saw on land. So our brains are different. They're two. tools that were developed optimized for what, for certain, you know, for certain, basically they were optimized to help our ancestors survive and reproduce in 50,000 BC. That is what they are. That's what our brains are. And that is, so now, and so all the things that helped, you know, the optimal, the, the, the,

the brains that were best suited for that particular purpose, pass their genes on. and so that of course was a lot of probably in-group and out-group tribal sense and maybe believing what the herd believed not asking too many questions was maybe a good survival thing tribalism writ large

yeah yeah and focusing more in your short-term kind of immediate needs and being kind of obsessed with sexual reproduction all these things that were that happened to be what led to survival and reproduction then

so now you take that piece of software and you transport it to an alien planet, which is today here in this advanced civilization. It was not made to be in an advanced civilization. And you also, instead of having these little tribes of 150, which is meant to be a, you know,

a hundredth of a little unit, now you have it be with hundreds of millions of people in these things. And of course, it's going to be a mess. It's going to misfire now. One of the things that's amazing about the human brain is it's plastic enough that we can build

this civilization and we actually can function and we can make rules like the Constitution and, you know, laws and norms that actually allow us to kind of override so many of the operating systems mismatches. And actually, like, we can kind of pull it off, but we're not good at it. We're all, we're the underdog here. Like, we're, it's, it's like, we're up kicking our coverage here trying to do this. And so now when you have things change really quickly, you know, social media comes around and journalistic integrity goes out the window because the business model changes for media and things like that. And you're going to have a bunch of things that we built safeguards for and we built, not just laws, but like societal ethics. Sorry, etiquette.

Like, you know, etiquette, social etiquette. We built all this very carefully over a long periods of time. We developed it. Suddenly, it's just all out the window and we just go into rampant tribalism and witch burning and public shaming. What you're seeing is you're seeing that old software for 50,000 BC, which definitely outgroped a certain person in the tribe. And they would gossip about them and they would, you know, know, and publicly shame them. in this little group. Now that's firing on this in this totally unexpected set of ways.

With a billion people and has Justine landed yet. She makes some joke on Twitter about, I hope I don't get AIDS when I'm in South Africa. You can look up, has Justine landed yet? And she gets on to a 12-hour flight. And then when she gets on the side of flight, the entire world and every news network on a global basis has reported on her joke about which the intent of was

we really don't care enough about people in Africa. We need to change that. And her life is ruined by a gocker journalist. who decided I'm going to destroy her life. Very interesting subplot here is our ability to the sort of growth of CPUs in relation to our brains. And so I love this chart, the exponential growth of computing.

Maybe you could squirtscast us describe it to people who are listening. And then what conclusions you draw from this? So this is a chart that I think Ray Kurzweil put in his book. And it's this is, as you can see, I think he put it in the book to show how accurate kind of the predictions had been with, so this was back in 2000, you know, people were clotting the, you know,

one metric you can use to assess computing power. And the growth of it is, you know, calculations per second per $1,000. So basically per something you can, a computer that anyone can, you know, buy and own, how much can it do? And the trend was that, you know, it's working its way up very quickly to where it can do,

a computer in your pocket can do what a human brain can do, which is a lot. That's trillions of calculations per second, but it doesn't take long after that before the computer in your pocket can do, or maybe that's embedded in your brain with neuralink, can do what all the whole species, that kind of computing power. And it's this concept of accelerating rate of change.

It's instead of diminishing returns, which we often have in other industries, accelerating returns of technology because the more advanced species makes progress faster than a less advanced species and the more progress we make the faster it goes.

And the idea of the exponential progress is not intuitive to us. Again, 50,000 BC, there wasn't exponential anything. It was just linear. Time moved linearly and the animal you were hunting ran in the straight line

and, you know, it was not a world where, you know, our brain, that tool, it does not happen to be, you know, just like our hand is not good at touching fire our brain is not good at understanding compound growth of any kind, which is why we're bad at investing. And it's also why we always underestimate the future.

Bill Gates has a good quote that says, you know, we tend to overestimate the change that's going to happen in the next two years and underestimate the change that's going to happen in the next 10 years. Because we fall for the, you know, the hype cycle goes overboard. So we think, okay, everything is, you know, GPT is going to be taking all of our jobs by 2024. It won't. But by 2034, the world's going to change in ways that we would be blown away. way by. Yeah. And that's, I think a very important, I think there's some other points here around our perception of the acceleration of change. So when we look at that acceleration of change, we, we, we're used to looking at graphs and we know what a hockey stick graph looks like,

right? And even your graph of like, hey, you're here and it's going to do this hockey stick, it's possible that that hockey stick is just straight to infinity and that it may not be a chart that we've seen before. We really don't understand that. And so maybe we talk a little bit about the AI or multiple AI instances with, you know, certain pieces of software now, baby GBT, LangChane is how a lot of people do it. You can kind of put together a sequence, hey, this AI, generate me an image. Hey, this AI, describe the image.

Hey, this AI, write me a story about the description of that image. Hey, take all of that and write me a, make me a movie. And by the way, just do that based on the current events that are happening here and just make me a new black mirror season every day based on whatever's happening with. And these kind of things start compounding. So is it possible that this timeline is just something we can't understand? Yeah, I mean, when something's unprecedented, it's going to be really hard to predict when it's brand new. It's just not something we can use. our usual rubric is like basing this on experience,

our old life experience or on history. And I think there's probably an element of the future that will map on to patterns we've seen and then other elements that will be completely new. Again, building something that is more intelligent than humans is incredibly unprecedented. It is, there's just,

anything we try to do to imagine what it will be like is like a chimp trying to imagine what a human, can build. Like they just can't, the chimp would be stuck saying, oh, they'll, they'll have endless bananas. That would be amazing. Yes. More bananas. They'll be able to climb a tree even, they'll be able to climb a tree even faster than me. It's like, no, no, no, no, we're, we're going to the space station. You don't understand anything. We're doing, we're learning about, you know, subatomic particles. Like, it's just a, it's so beyond them. And so it's the same thing. Like, trying to understand the future is, uh, it's trying to

predict it, it becomes harder and harder, the faster things go. When you talk about, like, infinity, you know, one objection. to that could be well, like, the species has to stay stable. The societies have to stay stable enough to keep building, you know, and it seems like instead of getting to infinity, they would collapse unless you've built self-sustaining AI, in which case, even if are we collapsed or even go extinct, the AI can keep building. And then, yeah, then this leads to like a little bit of a question, which is, well, okay, if that seems to be the way things are going and it seems likely you're going to have this

massively intelligent AI that can go and, you know, colonize the universe of it wants. Why don't we see any other alien species AI out there doing that? Yeah. And then that leads to a bunch of other interesting questions. Maybe we're first. Maybe we're really early. Maybe we're some of the first species that got to this level. Maybe we're alone. Or maybe this doesn't happen the way we think. Maybe that's not something that AI ever does when it gets smarter. It has no interest in doing something big. It goes and retreats within itself. Yeah, just shuts itself off. It's like, yeah, this is all meaningless. It's all big nothing. Unplugged me. But the Fermi paradox quickly comes out because when you make these kind of gains,

one would think, hey, with AI, you're going to understand the nature of the universe. And in fact, Elon, our mutual friend, launched XAI just today

with the mission, I don't know if you saw it, but the mission statement isn't to make a lot of money or to create general AI. It's to understand the true nature of the universe. And I know I'm a subscriber

to your Twitter. So I think I'm one of your, I don't know, we've got a couple thousand people over there. Is it public on the Twitter? How many you have? Does it show? More of, I think, under a thousand.

Oh, okay. So it's brand new, but I haven't used it very much. No, but I want to subscribe to it and I'm paying you three bucks a month or whatever for like two tweets. And I'm pretty happy about it because it's an intelligent thread with intelligent people on it. And you were just talking about how you're having a hard time getting your head around, like the, I believe, kind of the Big Bang and what came before it, which is always how I stump every physicist is I just say, what came before the Big Bang?

And they're like, that's an interesting question. What's outside the universe? they're like, we don't know. We don't know what came before the Big Bang. There are some really interesting theories. Let's go. Well, I mean... Is it a series of Big Bangs that just keeps replaying itself?

I mean... So I didn't... I always thought, until I started researching more deeply on this, that the Big Bang was, the idea was that everything was all matter was condensed into an infinitely small point, like a singularity, and this was the beginning of everything, time, space, and expanded from there. And that's kind of actually an old theory. And the newer theory is this theory of inflation pioneered by Alan Goode, who's still

like alive and not that old. And it's kind of cool that someone who, it feels like, you know, he's weird that he's just still doing this thing. But basically, it's that there was potentially like in an extremely small place, much smaller than a proton, there was like a gram of matter only. And then there's this weird process where he doubles and doubles and doubles and doubles until it's all the matter in the current universe and energy. condensed into something like maybe the size of a grapefruit,

which is also crazy. None of this makes any sense. And that it expanded out from there. But what's interesting about it is it doesn't necessarily suggest anymore that that was the beginning of everything. It suggested that this was the beginning of the universe that we know, or maybe the part of the universe that we know. It might have been the latest in the long sequence of events.

And there really are, Max Ted Mark's book, Our Mathematical Universe is really, digs into a lot of this stuff in a really interesting way. Like, he talks about, you know, the, the idea that this is just, that what we can see this observable universe is the universe, and that's everything. It's just there's not any good, that's he, he sounds to him like people thinking the earth is the center of everything before they realize. Yeah, it's completely narcissistic. It's like flat earth theory or like, yeah, this is the end of the world because we can't go past here.

Yeah. So he talks about like, there's, it's really interesting. There could be tiers of multivers. So you could have a lot of other universes just like ours. where they have a different history, they have the same physics. So their physics class is the same, but their history classes are different

because they're in a different universe. Then there's a different, maybe another tier, which is actually like the laws of physics are different in those universes that all maybe came from that same little point. So anyway, I am not good enough at articulating this yet

because I'm still learning about it. You're down the rabbit hole, yeah, yeah. It's one of these things where it's, you know, classic kind of like, you know, the Dunning Kruger where I was pretty sure. I was like, no, no, I understand what the modern thinking is on this stuff. And then you start reading about it and you realize that I didn't at all.

I was like, there's just a lot of new theories. But, but yeah, what seems. And then, of course, there's the much even more meta question, which is, is this an actual physical universe or is it a simulation? And that's interesting because that could explain the Fermi paradox, which is, you know, maybe the reason we don't see any evidence of alien life, which seems to make no sense. Maybe it's just just like a rendered, you know, universe, like a new board in, you know, in poly, you know, whatever. Yeah, this is just like, yeah.

It's just like they render a universe, like a city universe. You don't need to know about other universes. We're just going to reset it at some point anyway. Yeah, and then why would they put other aliens in it? That's too much, you know, computing power. They just put us to observe us. So anyway, this is, I can go on a lot of these topics for a long time, but it's like, and then you come back to Earth and you're like, you go on Twitter and a

screaming about a policy and you're like, oh my God. Like, it is like it's, it's, it, we're all here. Whatever it is, whatever's going on, like we are all happened to be here at the same time on this little planet. Like, it really is, uh, it does put things in perspective. It's cheesy, but it like, it really is good. Reading about the universe is good. It makes you a better person, I think.

Yeah, when you look at what's happening with tribalism in the United States, um, what do you think the end game is here? Um, do you think this is a passing fad? Trump broke everybody's brains. or now we have, hey, who can we trust? We found out like, yeah, the World Health Organization, maybe they got an agenda, maybe there was a cover-up about what happened at Wuhan.

You know, we spend a lot of money on advertising, you know, drugs and, you know, these conspiracy theories, you know, what was a conspiracy theory 20, 30, 40 years ago, all of a sudden becomes like, oh, yeah, that's a Nobel Peace Prize for the Catholic Church is the largest child abuse ring in the world. who knew. But that was like a conspiracy theorist.

That was a conspiracy when Cheneito O'Connor ripped up the Polk's poster, a picture on Saturday Night Live, if you remember that. So where do you stand at this moment in time? And people's brains being broken here specifically in the United States and then the trust in organizations or just trust in general. Yeah.

I think it's, on one hand, what we're doing now looks a whole lot like a lot of things we've done before. This dissent into kind of primitive behavior. Tribalism, in-group, out-group, you know, believing lies if they fit with our, you know, with our movement and, you know, coercive movements that kind of are illiberal,

then break the kind of liberal laws, liberal norms and are just kind of like old school, like, you know, I would call like power games movements that it's just like, if you have the power to silence something or the power to conquer this institution, doesn't matter if it's like right or if it's within order, just you can do it because you have the power to. So there's all, we were descending into that in a way that looks a lot like the red scare. It looks a lot like what happened in China during the Maoist, you know, those early Maoist years.

And it looks like what happened in Nazi Germany. Again, not all the same. And what happened down to Germany was more intense, but it's the same, you know, and then again, if you look back to farther back history, you see this again and again and again, you know, the Salem, which,

you know, which burnings and, um, the French revolution. And it's just this thing that humans do, which is, you know, you descend into our most kind of primitive cells when you dehumanize the outgroup and,

um, and everything becomes about conformity. And, um, and if you don't conform, you will be like shamed or in some cases, you know, you know,

you know, at prison or in, you know, murdered for it. So, so the, the question is, is this, you know, in some cases in history, like the Red Scare, um, this is, uh, blit. It happens. Yeah. Then society kind of comes to its senses and a bunch of people are embarrassed for how they

behaved and it's a shameful period in history and it's over and we come out of it. Yeah, it's a lesson learned, right? Yeah. Other times, it's the French revolution and it, you know, it, it, is completely upends the society and, and forever. And so the question is, even if we're just looking at history, you know, which one of those is it? But also, it's the fact that maybe this is not like history because history didn't have social media. History didn't have all the existential threats we talked about and the fear that comes along with it.

And but so what I see is I see the same overarching kind of trend that I think gives rise to you know, like woke mobs and woke mob behavior and to the rise of an old school demagogue in Trump, you know, classic demagogue. And it's like, you know, there's always demagogues who want to, you know, take over the country. And there's always, there's always radical groups that want to bully their way into power over it and change the, you know, leadership and institution after institution that, you know, to fit with their ideology. And usually they don't have the power to. Yeah.

right now something's up, right? Like what it's in and and it's Trump getting that power? Oh, right, a reality show. Oh, social media. His Twitter account. Like that combination gave him a platform and then the discontent and his, I mean, I think he's a savant. I mean, when it comes to communication and, and he's hilarious.

He's a classic demigod. Demigard is, they're not stupid. They're talented people. They know exactly how to manipulate and pull strings. But it has to be at a time when, you know, he could just lie and he wouldn't have any penalty for that. Yeah. You know, I, I think if he tried to.

do this in the 90s or even, you know, in the 2000s, I think that the lying wouldn't have gone over as well. I think it wouldn't have worked as much. And the kind of, you know, really kind of tribal, you know, language, rhetoric, as opposed to Reagan, you know, Reagan is the exact opposite in his rhetoric. It was common humanity, you know, it was high-minded. It was all Americans, you know, we were all, you know, big tech. And Trump was the opposite. So something has changed in that, like the guy, a guy like Trump is now the most appealing candidate, as opposed to a guy like Reagan. So I think if we don't address and fix the underlying trend,

even if Trump doesn't win in 24 or even after he's president again or whatever, he's gone, there'll be another demagogue. Maybe it's on the left this time. Who knows? Even if the woke movement and people finally get sick enough of it and start actually speaking out and saying, this is not social justice,

this is not progressive, this is the opposite of those things, and this thing is bad. And it's bad for the causes that it's supposed to represent. there'll be another, you know, it's a demagogic movement, wokeness. It's a movement that also lies, that also phrase on people's, you know, kind of, you know, worst instincts. Zenophobia. Yeah, in some cases. They're going to take our jobs.

Or at some cases, it praise on people's empathy, you know, and actually, like, you know, it prays on empathetic people and makes them think being a good person is, you know, being part of this movement. There'll be another one of these movements. Another move, whether it's a radical or hardcore reactionary movement, we'll get a huge amount of steam and we'll start conquering institutions. So I think we have to look at why these things have risen up and not just the things themselves. And I think it has to do with like structural changes to like the media and social media and also, you know, the rapid change. The fact that things are changing so quickly.

And that creates chaos. And demagogues and mobs take advantage of chaos. Yeah, it's kind of like the Joker, right? It's like, yeah, you need a Gotham City for the Joker to emerge, right? like a drover didn't create Gotham City. Gotham City was kind of created the Joker, right? It gave him the platform that his unique skills could be realized in. And I think it is a very interesting moment in time.

I feel like watching authoritarians around the world continue to shoot themselves on the foot. Shisheng Peng, Putin, North Korea, you know, pick your dictator. They can never keep it together. They can never keep their society advancing. They always, that, you know, unlimited. power always corrupts. And then you look at the United States. It's like, well, Trump's got 70, you know, felony counts. There's three more cases. Like, he can only serve two terms. Like, what's the chances he's going to, like, change the term limits? He's going to be dead soon anyway. Is there some, like, successor to him that is like a natural one? I don't think so. But there is something going on where people feel they've been manipulated by the system and lied to. And this trust in people you were supposed to believe in. Like, if you look at trust in media, trust in politicians, trust in teachers,

trust in clergy, whatever. They do these, like Pew Institute does all those trust service. I mean, it is plummeting

to the point of which people have more trust in like Jeff Bezos or Amazon. They trust Amazon more than they trust Biden or Trump or any political politician or the New York Times or CNN or Fox. Why on earth would you trust Fox? Why on earth would you trust in New York Times

if they've chosen to pander to either extreme? So that's the one I'm trying to get my head around. And it's front of mind because we I got some criticism and blowback for platforming RFK Jr. on All In. And we had this interview interview and if you saw it, but it's okay if you didn't. But, you know, it was like probably his first big podcast appearance. And I thought it was very interesting that, you know, when I said, when I described his theories as like, well, he's got some kind of conspiracy there is around these vaccines. We're like, he's not a conspiracy there.

So I'm like, okay, but he does think things that are against the science. He's like, well, what if the science is wrong? And I'm like, yeah, that's possible. So the best thing I can think of is, yeah, do the debate. Debate the guy who's pro-vaccine, have the, and maybe more speech, maybe more long-form conversations. I feel like that the antidote for what's happening right now is experts on long-form podcasts. I know that's a bit narcissistic since I have two podcasts. But there's something about these long-form discussions amongst experts that I think is allowing some group of people to navigate this manipulation.

What are your thoughts on people who are trying to find the truth? process you should use. We take for granted how much our society's stability is based on shared trust in kind of truth-making institutions like academia, you know, and academic papers and, you know, statistics and FBI, you know, and yeah, and, and then the media. And then the trust that what the government says is true. And so that creates a shared reality when people can all kind of trust the same sources. And it's like an anchor that the whole society can kind of at least hold on to it.

Not the whole, there's always going to people who don't trust those things. But the percentage that says, you know, Rush Limbaugh used to say, you know, there's like the four pillars of deception. the country and it was something like the things I just said. It was academia, you know, science, media and the government or something like that. And, you know, there's, you know, I don't know, maybe 10, 20 percent would agree with that. Today, that percentage is way higher. And it's partially, it's coming from two ends. It's partially higher because the people like Rush Limbaugh saying that are, there's a lot of them now. And there's a lot of people who believe them. Also, the institutions have become less trustworthy. Journalistic.

ethics and and has really, you know, if you look at the, you know, it's, I'm just reading this new book, the outrage machine by Tobias Rose Stockwell, a really good book. And he, you know, talks about there used to be, there, there's hearsay and rulers and, and the things you hear. And then there's this funnel, this funnel of verification and there's this process of, that, that's, you know, a well-trodden process, professional journalism. And that's a funnel. And by the time it comes out, you can trust it. It's been verified. That funnel's just gone. It's just, you know, first of all, a lot of people get in their info right from social media from people who don't even pretend to have any, they don't even know what journalistic process is. But the professional

journalists aren't professional anymore. So many of them are just, you know, throwing out, you know, clipbait headlines that are totally biased, that are totally, um, they have a political agenda. They're not balanced and they, and they will lie in the limit facts. And so it's just a, that's a really bad thing for society to have these truth-making things lose trust. And so, when you're back to your point, long-form podcast, I think that what people do turn to is podcasters and individual voices that they do trust.

And I think that in the absence of being able to trust CNN or whatever, I think that people will turn to long-form podcast type stuff and letting an expert go on for a while, not these bite-sized kick-bait things. I think it is like maybe one of the best ways to actually kind of continue an honest discourse that's actually informed and that can, you know, move, that can kind of create an actual consensus down the road. So yeah, I think that is a good thing.

And I like that the society, you know, the internet allows us to adapt. Maybe new things will spring up or maybe it'll be like the red scare and some of this craziness will pass and these institutions will start acting a little bit more professional again. my favorite example, which I try to bring up with Sacks, who's, you know, one of my best friends, but we obviously have difference of opinions. And, you know, he's, you know, he's very anti-war, as am I.

But I do think fighting against dictators invading other countries, probably a noble pursuit. Obviously, you want to avoid it. But he frequently gives me news stories. And, you know, hey, maybe we should talk about this on the podcast. Sure, we all work on the docket? And they're from sources. And I'm like, do you know, like,

Is Zero Hedge like a Russian source? And who's running Zero Hedge? Who's running this, you know, newspaper? Who's running this substack? And he keeps giving him this like Kohana the Great or something like substack. And this person, I guess, blends, you know, fragments of news together. And I think this is the technique that the KGB perfected. And I think William Blatty and The Exorcist said, you know, the devil mixes lies with truth.

That's how they get with you. That's how he gets you kind of situation. and Elron Hubbard this as well. He was a stage hypnotist. Most people don't know that's founder of Scientology. And he would do this rabbit hole technique. Fact, fact, indisputable fact, common knowledge, and then implanting an idea. Fact, fact, fact.

And it's like this rabbit hole hypnotist technique. And they did this operation infection. And people can look that up. I-N-F-E-K-T-I-O-N. And the KGB in the 80s ran a disinformation campaign. That worked to get people. most people, this might be before many people's times, to get people to think that the United States created AIDS in a laboratory. And you know how they did it? The entire technique,

in this effection or whatever, was to plant a story in a pro-Soviet Indian newspaper called Patriot. And they got this anonymous letter to be printed there. And then they got, eventually, they flipped newspaper to newspaper to all the way to the point of Dan Rather reporting on the CBS evening news. and that has that little KGB technique is the technique of journalists Gawker was kind of like

one of the first hey Tim Cook is gay Anderson Cooper's gay and I knew Nick Denton very well at the time because we were competing and he was like yeah it's hypocrisy we're going to out Tim Cook

we're going to out famously Peter Thiel right who ultimately is demise and they use that tip line as a way to justify it and they were like it's in the tip line and if people are talking about it at the bar, we're going to run with it.

And then after a certain number of Gawker and whatever other blogs or social media covered it, then the New York Times, or let's say something in between like Business Insider or something like not as noteworthy as CNN or New York Times, they would run it. And then you had the story became,

well, there's a story about this. And sometimes it was the Harvey Weinstein story, and rightfully so, Glocker gets a lot of credit for running with that whenever the people were scared. Other times it was false information, right? was just uncouth and unfair to out a gay man who was running a public company who wouldn't be allowed to run a public company, maybe at that era. Or people might boycott iPhones if they knew Tim Cook was gay, whenever, when he was in the

closet. So I just think that's like what's happened with press is that this unnamed sources and flipping in this publication, an unnamed source said this. And if you get enough of those, it's indisputable, right? And there's two, there's two, you know, kind of disasters there. One is, you know, certain just actually completely incorrect information gets spread. And when it does come out that this source was, this brand that you trust was really wrong about this and this, you stop, you stop listening to it. You stop trusting it.

So even when it has the boy who cried wolf problem. Yes. And, yeah, it's, you know, I mean, part of it is it's the structure right now. like in news is not, media is just, it used to be in this, you know, 60,

70s, 80s, if NBC was notably wrong, more often than ABC and CBS, people would make, NBC would become a laughing stock and no one would want to watch it. Yeah. And,

or if it were biased, if one of them were, you know, politically left or right biased, it would be, again, it would lose viewers today. Kind of like Fox did.

Yeah. Now it's like, boom. Yeah, well, both Fox and then, you know, a bunch of others,

MSM, pioneered the, the pioneered this new model and said, wait a second. You know, and with cable, actually, if you really like ramp up kind of tribalism towards, if you just cater towards one tribe and tell them what they want to hear and you do it quickly, that gets you money. Accuracy doesn't do very much for you. It doesn't really matter.

You know, you can't like, you totally. No subs. Exactly. So it's just basic incentive structures, just basic, you know, business. It's like they became that the money, direction of money just turned. And so there has to be some, you know, some mechanism to start holding, you know, to start penalizing inaccuracy and, and, and also, you know, bias. Just, and maybe that's, you know, some AIA, maybe AI can help. Maybe there's some kind of algorithmic system that, AI, you know, even the little thing on Twitter, which says, you know, readers thought you people might want to.

know and it gives you like some additional. I think that thing is great. Like again, maybe that thing gets corrupted. But right now I'm like, I love that thing. And it's, and I'm like,

what if that's the very beginning of like, you know, something like GPT that is scanning all new sources in the world. It gets pretty good at like, you know, it shows, it develops a very good track record. Yeah.

That's, you know, and in hindsight say, wow, that thing is right. Most of the time, that can come in and say, the bottom of an article.

You can have a Chrome extension that says this article is 60% accurate or this journalist gets five stars because it tends to be always tends to be accurate. That could change everything because now there's an incentive system again. Yeah. I think that's the really interesting process and not to speak out of school here because Elon's talked about it publicly, but in the early days of when he bought Twitter and I happened to be in the building for the discussions around Community Notes.

And I think Community Notes was like on the like the previous administration's like kill this like, yeah, we don't need this. You know, we're going to lay off a third of the people. previous regime was going to do a layoff. And I think Community Notes was part of that. And I just remember Elon being in the room when somebody explained it to Elon and I watched him like, okay, explain it again, explain it again. Okay, one more time.

And he just asked really good questions. And it was like, oh, wait a second. This thing actually works because you have people on both sides and then you're tracking. And this person did like a really amazing paper about it. And you can look up the Community Notes paper of which people were considered trustworthy in previous notes and then which people, you know, it's almost like a page rank algorithm.

And there's a very sophisticated algorithm and trust system where if you tried to do something, you would, you know, if you tried to game it, it wouldn't work, basically. The gaming would be, you know, eventually found out. Listen, Tim, I can talk to you for hours. And I have, been over an hour. If you haven't bought Tim Urban's book, do me a favor. Buy the audiobook, buy two copies of the print book. and then when you're done, give them as presence

because it's going to blow people's mind, it's going to make them think about the world differently, and you could be the person who introduces your friends, people outside of the tech and media space. Tim Urban, one of the greatest thinkers and writers, and he's okay as an illustrator of our time.

Tim, you're awesome. Maybe you come back in a year and we'll chop it up again. We'll do. Thank you, Jason. All right. Congratulations on the baby.