Marc Andreessen: How Risk Taking, Innovation & Artificial Intelligence Transform Human Experience
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Welcome to the huberman lab podcast, where we discuss science and science space tools for everyday life. I'm and huberman and am a professor neurobiology and optimal gy at stanford school of medicine. Today, my guest is mark and dyson.

Mark and jesson is a software engineer and an investor in technology companies. He cofounded and developed mosaic c, which was one of the first widely used web rousers. He also cofounded and developed netscape, which was one of the earliest widespread used web browsers.

And he cofounded and is a general partner at, in recent hard words, one of the most successful silicon valley venture capital firms. All of that is to say that mark and reason is one of the most successful innovators and investors ever. I was extremely excited to record this episode with mark for several reasons.

First of all, he himself is an incredible innovator. Second of all, he is an uncle. ny. Ability to spot the innovators of the future. And third mark, shown over and over again, the ability to understand how technology is not yet even developed are going to impact the way that humans interact at large. Our conversation starts off by discussing what makes for an exceptional innovator as well as what sorts of environmental conditions make for exceptio innovation and creativity more generally.

In that context, we talk about risk taking, not just in terms of rise taking in one's profession, but about how some people, not all, but how some people who are risk takers and innovators in the context of their work, also seem to take a lot of risks in their personal life and some of the consequences that can bring. Then we discuss some of the most transformative technologies that are now emerging, such as novel approaches to developing clean energy as well as A I or artificial intelligence. With respect to A I, mark shares his views as to why A I is likely to greatly improve human experience.

And we discussed the multiple rules that A I is very likely to have in all of our lives in the near future. Market explains how not to long from now, all of us are very likely to have A I assistance, for instance, assistance that give us highly informed health advice, highly informed psychological advice. Indeed, IT is very likely that all of us will soon have A I assistance that govern most, if not all, of our daily decisions and market explains how, if done correctly, this can be a tremendously positive addition to our life.

Doing so, mark provides a stark counter argument for those that argue that A I is going to diminish human experience. So if you're hearing about and we're concerned about the ways that A I is likely to destroy us today, you are going to hear about the many different ways that AI technologies now in development are likely to enhance our human experience at every level. What you will soon fine is that while today's discussion does center around technology and technology development, IT is really a discussion about human beings and human psychology.

So whether you have an interest in technology development and or A I, i'm certain that you'll find today's discussion to be an important and highly losted view into what will soon be the future that we all live in. Before we begin, i'd like emphasize at this podcast is separate from my teaching and researchers at stanford. IT is, however, part of my desired effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public.

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Again, that drink element element t dot com slash huberman. Today's episode is also brought to us by waking up, waking up as a meditation APP that includes hundreds of meditation programs, mindfulness trainings, yoga eda, recessions and nsd r non sleep depressed protocols. I started using the waking up up a few years ago because even though i've been doing regular meditation since my teens and I start doing yoga eja about a decade ago, my dad mentioned to me that he had found an APP, turned out to be the waking up APP, which could teach you meditations of different durations.

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If you'd like to try the waking up up, you can go to waking up that com slash huberman and access a free thirty day trial. Again, that's waking up that com slash huberman to access a free thirty day trial. And now for my discussion with mark. And mark, welcome.

hey. Thank you.

Deliver to have you here and have so many questions for you about innovation AI your view of the landscape of take humanity in general. I want to start off by talking about innovation from three different perspectives. There's the inner game, so to speak, or the psychology of the innovator or innovators, things like they are, propensity for engaging in conflict or not, their propensity for having a dreamer or a vision, and in particular, their innovation, as IT relates to some psychological trait or expression, will get to that at the moment.

The second component that i'm curious about is the outer landscape around innovators who they place themselves with, the sort of choices that they make, and also this sorts of personal relationships that they might have or not have. And then the last component is this notion of the larger landscape that they happen to find themselves. In what time in history? What's the geography bear in new york, dubai set up. So to start off, is there a commentate of innovators that you think is absolutely essential as a seed, uh, to creating things that are really impactful?

Yeah so not a psychologist, but i've picked up some of the concepts and some of the some of the terms. And so I great moment to light my life. And I learned about the big five personality traits because like a there's a way that I actually describe answered this question and reason scientific terms um and so I think what you're looking for when you're when you're talking about real innovators, like people who actually do really creative bricks or work, I think you're talking about a couple things.

So one is very high and was called trade openness which is one of one of the big five um which is basically just like flat out open a new ideas um and of course the the nature of trade openness is trade openness means you're not just open a new ideas and one category, you're open to many different kinds of new ideas. So we might talk about the fact that a lot of innovators also are very creative people in other aspects of their lives, right, even outside of a the specific creative domain. So that's important.

But of course, just being open is not sufficient because if you've just open, you could just be curious, explore right, and spend your entire life reading and doing, you know, talking to people and never actually create something. So you also need a couple things. You need a high level of culture interests ness, just another one of the big five. You need somebody he's really willing to apply themselves in our world, typically over a period of many years, right to be able to to to a couple of something great. They typically work very hard um that often gets scared because the stories that are getting told about these people, you know just like this this kid and he just had this idea that was like a stock genius and I was like a moment in time and know it's just like all he was so lucky and it's like, no like for most these people it's years and years and years of applied effort. And so you need somebody with like an extreme basic willingness to defer gratification and really apply themselves to a specific thing for a long time of and of course, this is why there are are many these people as there aren't many people who are high open as and high and cassini's ness because just certainly there they're post right trades.

And so you need videos both of those third is you need somebody high and disagreeable ness, which is the third of the big five um so you need somebody who is just like basically ordinary uh right because if they're not honoring, then they're be talked out of their ideas by people who will be like all because the reaction of people have new ideas that's um and so somebody who's too agreeable will be easily dissuaded to to not pursue, you know do not pull in the threats anymore, need somebody highly disagreable again, the nature disagreeable that is they tend to be disagreable disagreeable about everything, right? So they tend to be this very sort of mechanic clastic of any of characters. Um and then there is just the tables takes component, which is they just also need to be high I Q.

They just they just need to be really smart is just it's hard to innovate any category if you can set the size large month of information quickly. Um and so those are four like basically like high Spikes in very rare traits that basically have to have to come together. Um you could probably also say they probably at some point you to be relatively low and autism.

Which is another the big five because they're true neurotics, there's probably can end of the stress, right? So so it's kind of this style. And there, of course, if you if if you're like the sort of science of five, basically, these are all people who are wrong, like the far outline kind of point on the on the Normal distribution across all these traits. And then that just gets you too, I think the the sort of hardest topic of all around this, this this all concept, just just there are very few of these people.

Do you think they are born with these traits?

Yeah, also they are born with the traits. And then and then of course, the traits are not, you know, do you do not just me. So the trades are not deterministic in the sense of that just because they have those personality traits doesn't mean there librate creativity, but like they need to have those properties because othe wise are just not either gonna able to do the work or not can enjoy IT, right?

I mean, look, a lot of these people are highly people, component people. You know IT is very easy for them to get like hyping jobs in traditional institutions and you know get lots of you know traditional awards and you know end up with big paychecks. There's a lot of people know big institutions that know I know well and I do with any of these, where people get paid a lot of money and they get a lot of respect and they go for twenty years and it's great and they never create any anything new.

There's administrators, a lot, a lot mini jobs and that's fine. That's good. The world needs you.

The world needs that also, right? The the innovators can run everything is everything know the rate of change would be too high. Society I think probably won't able to handle IT.

So you need some people who are on the other side who are going to kind of keep the lights on and keep things running. But but there is this decision that people have to make, which is okay. If I have the sort of late capabilities to do this.

Is this actually what I want to spend my life doing? And do I want to go through the and the pain of the trauma, right? Of the anxiety, right? In the risk of failure, right? And so do I really want to, once in a while, you to somebody who's just like.

can't do IT any other way.

like they just have to, who's in example I want apple of our time and he and I bring him up in part because he's such an obvious example but in part because he's talked about this um in interviews where he bases he says he's like I can't turn that off like the ideas come. I have to pursue them, right? That's why he's like running time companies at the same time and like wearing on a sixth right um just like 以前 成 的的。

You know there's a lot of other people who are probably had the capable to do IT who ended up talking themselves into or you whatever events conspired to put them in a position where they did something else. Um you know obviously there are people who try to be creative who just don't have the the the capability. And so there are some band diagram.

There are of determinism through trades, but also choices in life. And then also, of course, the situation in which they are born, the context within which they grow up. Culture right with their parents expected them.

And and so far. And so you have to know, you can get all the way through this. You have to threat all, all these middles kind of at the same time.

Do you think there are folks out there that meet these criteria who are disagreeable, but that can fain agreeable ness? You know, they can, for those just listen much, just raised his right hand, in other words, that can sort of phrase that comes to mind maybe because I can relate to a little bit. They speak up through the system, meaning they behave ethically as IT relates to the requirements of the system. They're not breaking laws or breaking rules. In fact, quite the opposite there, paying attention to the rules and following the rules until they get to a place where being disagreeable feels less threatening to the overall sense of security.

We looked that really highly component. People don't have to break laws, right? Like it's it's the there was this, there was this, there was this myth, you know, happened around the movie the godfather and then there was this curry tomorrow, lanky, you know, who is like grand basically the movie, you know, fifty sixty seven years ago and there is was a great line of all my land only like applied himself to any gentle mode you of all time.

It's like, no, not really right. Like the people who are like greater one of the big companies, they don't have to, they don't have to be my bosses. They don't have to like break laws. They can they they can they can work their smart and sophisticated enough to be able to work inside the system. You know they don't need to take easy out.

So I don't think there's any implication that they have to they have to have to make cloth so they have to break norms, right? And and it's specifically the thing this is probably the thing that gets missed the most because the process of the process of innovating, the process of creating something new, like once IT works, like the stories get right on um as they say um in the books so the story's been adapted to us like IT was inevitable all long. You know, everybody always knew that this was a good idea.

Know the person has won all these award. Society, embrace them. And if invariably, if you if you were with them when that was when they actually doing the work, or if you actually get a couple drinks into them and dark and about IT to be like, no, that's not how to help at all.

They faced a wall of skeptic tics. M just like a wall of basically social. You essentially denial.

No, this is not gna work. No, i'm not going to join your lab. No, i'm not going to come work for your company.

No, i'm not going to buy your product, right? No, i'm not going to meet with you. And so they they get just like tremendous social resistance.

So they are not getting positive feedback from from, from their social network, the way that more grable people need to have, right? This is why, this is why greatness is a problem for innovation. If if you agreeable you, even the people around you, you're going to tell you that new ideas are stupid, right? End of story.

You you're not onna proceed. Um and so I would put IT more on like they need to be able to deal with and be able to deal with social discomfort to the level of austria. M um or at some point they're going to get shaken out and they just gonna.

Do you think that people that meet these criteria do best by banding with others that meet these criteria early? Or is IT important that they form this deep sense of self, like the ability to cry one self to sleep at night? Or you line in the feedle position, worrying that things aren't going to work out and then still get up the next morning and get right back out there, right?

So Shawn Parker has the best line, by the way, on, on, on this, he says, uh, you know, being being an entrepreneur, being a creator is like, uh, you know, getting pushed the face like over and over again. He said, eventually you start to like the taste of blood. And I love that line because that makes everybody like massively uncomfortable, right? But that gives you a sense of like how basically painful the process.

If you talk any entrepreneurs been through about like you, that's exactly that's exactly what it's like. So so so there is this there is a big individual component to IT. But but look, I can be very lonely right um and especially very hard I think to do this if if nobody around you is trying to do anything even more be similar right if you're getting just universe negative responses like very few I think very few people have ego strength to able to survive that for years.

So I do think there is a huge advantage and and the way you do see clusters is huge advantage clustering, right? And so you and you throughout history you've had this clustering effect, right? You have you know clustering of the artists and sculptors and renaissance FLorence.

You know you have the clustering of the physics agrees, you have the clustering of tech people in silla, you have the clustering of creative you arts movie TV people in los Angeles, right and so forth and so on. You know for you know there's always a scene, right? There's there's always like a nexus in a place where where people come together um you for these kinds of things.

So generally speaking, like if somebody wants to work taking of IT in tech, they're to be much Better off being around a lot of people who trying to do that kind of thing that they are in a place where nobody else is doing IT. Having said that, the clustering has you can have downsides, they can have side effects. And you put any group of people together and you do start to get group think, even among people who are individually very disagreeable um and so the same clusters where you get these very idiosyncratic c people, they do have fats and trans just like every place else, right.

And so they they get wrapped up in their own social dynamics. No good is is the social dynamic in those places is usually very forward looking, right um and so it's usually usually like I don't like like I heard of iconic class looking for the next big thing, right? So kind of class looking for a nice big thing that's good.

The heard part, if you ve got to be careful of. So even when you're in one of these environs, you have to be careful if you're not getting sucked into the group. Think too much.

We see group thing to mean excessive friction due to pressure, testing each other's ideas to the point where things just don't move forward. Or are you're talking about group think where people to start a former consensus or the self belief that gosh, we are so strong because we are so different um what he can we Better to find group think .

it's actually less is one of those things both happen. Those are good. Those are good at the party.

Group I am talking about is just like all we all basically zero, and we just end up serving out on the same ideas right? In hollywood, there's a classic thing. It's like there are years where there are those.

There's like a lot of volcanoes movies. Think where are there at least volcano movies and it's just like, I don't there was just something in the just all right, there was just something in the air. You know, look, something value has there are moments in time you you'll have these.

It's like the old thing, I whats the difference of fat and the trench right you know the fat fat is the track that does n't last right um and so you know so like valley is subject to fats and both fats and trans, just like any place else right? Others, as you take smart disagreable people closed together, they will act like a heard right. They will end up taking the same things unless they try very hard not to.

You've talked about these personality traits of great innovators before, and we're talking about them now. You invest in innovators, you try to identify them and you are on so you can recognize these traits here are making the presumption that you have these traits indeed you do um will just get that out of the way.

Have you observed people trying to fame these traits? Um and are there any specific questions or behaviors that are give away um that they're pretending to be the Young Steve jobs or that they're pretending to be the the Young Henry ford? Pick your list of other other names that qualify as authentic, legitimate innovators.

We want the name names of people have tried to disguise themselves as true innovators. But what are some of the the limits test? And I realized here that we don't want you to give these away to the point where they lose their potency. But if you could share a few of those .

actually pretty open book on this so um so yeah so so first of all, yes so there are people who definitely tried to like command and basically present as being something they're not and they write of the books they will have listen this interview, know they study everything and they they construct a the sad um and they come and to present to something they are not about to say the amount of that varies exactly correlated to the master, right?

And so when stock crisis are super low, like you actually get the opposite, when start crisis are super low, people get too demoralized and people who should be doing IT basically give up because they just think that whatever whatever the industry over the trend is over, whatever is all um and so you get this fishing things nobody ever shows up at a start market though, right and says like and the new and the new and the new next big thing uh and doesn't really wanted do IT because because there are higher status kinds of people who do the things are doing about, they're undamned tal oriented for social status. They're y're trying to get the social status without actually without actually substance, and there are always other places to go get social status. So so after two thousand the joke was um so when I got to silk valley in the ninety three and ninety four, the valley was dead we about that by ninety eight IT was worrying and you had a lot of these people showing up who were your basic basically had a lot of a lot of people shaking up with kind of stories.

Two thousand amErica rash by two thousand and one the joke was that um there were these terms B2C and B2B and in one th ousa nd nine h undre d and ei ghty eight they m eant B2C an d busin ess consumer and B2B a nd b usiness to business whi ch just t he two diff eren t ki nds of bus iness mod els inter net com panies by two thous and and one a to be to b e mad e b ack to bank ing, be to see a meet back to consulting right, which is the high status people who the people oriented to status who showed up to be in tech, or like score IT like this is over. Stick a fork. I'm going to go back to, go back, go back to, can know where I can I, where I can be hyste us.

And so you you give this flushing kind of effect that happens in a downturn um that's on on on in a big up swing up. You get you get a lot of you get a lot of people showing up with with a lot of you know with a lot of um you know say public persons without the substance to back up. Um so the way we stress that going actually say exactly how we test for this, which because the test exactly dresses the issue in a way that is impossible to fake and at the same my trying to find out if you if you if if you actually like you're innocent, rather you kill somebody.

It's the same it's the same tactic um which is you you ask increasingly detailed questions um right and so you know the way how my psychic does this is, you know what what are you doing last night? You know H I was said a movie, which movie you know that uh which the other you know okay, which they did. You sit and you know, okay, what was the end of the movie? right? Right, right? You ask increasingly detailed questions. And people have possible, at some point, people have trouble making up and things just fuzz and just kind of obvious policy. And basically thick founders basically have the same problem.

They have a they are able to really a conceptual theory of what they're doing that they've kind of engineered um but as the kind of the details IT just IT just pushes out or as the the true people that you want to back that can do IT, basically what you find is they're spent five or ten or twenty years obsessing on the details of whatever is they're about to do and there so deep in the details that they know so much more about that than you ever will and in fact that the best possible reaction is when they get mad right um which is also what how to say say right what you actually want, you actually want, you really want the emotional response of like I can't believe that you are asking me questions. This detailed and specific and picky, and they kind of figure out what you're doing and then they get upset like that's good. That's perfect, right? But but they have but then they have to approve in themselves and in the sense of life, they have to be able answer the questions in great detail.

Do you think that people that are able to answer those questions in great detail have actually taken the time to systematically think through the if ends of all the possible implications of what they are going to do? And they have a specific vision in mind of how things need to turn out or will turn out. Or do you think that um they have A A vision and it's a no matter what IT will work out because the world bend around IT.

I mean in other do you think that they place their vision in context or they simply have a vision and they have the tunnel vision of that thing? And that can be IT? Let's use you, for example, with nescafe. I mean, that's how I first came to know your name when you were conceiving netscape. Did you think, okay, there's this search engine and this browser and and it's going to be this thing that looks this way and works this way and feels this way. Um did you think that and also think about that, there was going to be a gallery of other search engines and IT would fit into the landscape of other search engines or are you just projecting your vision of this thing as this unique um and special um brainchild? I will give the general answer .

and then we can talk about the specific because so the general answer is to the entrepreneurship, creativity, innovation is what economies called decision making under uncertainty. And both parts are important decision making. Like you're going to make a ton of decisions because you have ve decided what to do, what not to do. And the uncertainty, which is like the world's a complicated place, right in the mathematical terms, the worlds a complicated active system with feedback loops and and like it's really, I mean, it's it's extreme as a gas m mothy you. In his novels, he rote about this field called psychological right, which is the idea that there's like a supercomputer that can predict the future like fairs.

right and it's we to .

that later recently don't have yeah um and so you're just dealing you know military um commander's office, the flog of war, right? You you're just dealing with situation where the number variables are just off the charts. It's all these other people, right, who are inherently unpredictable, making all these decisions in different directions. And then the whole system is coming toria, which sees people are colliding with each other, influence in the decisions.

And so I mean, look, the most state forward kind of way to think about this is, is just, it's amazing anybody believes an economic planning and blows my mind because I IT should like, try opening a restaurant, like try just opening a restaurant on the quarter down here, and like fifty fifty odds that restaurants gonna. And like all you have to do to around a restaurant is like have a thing. And so food and like and it's like most restaurants fail, right? And so in restaurants, people in restaurants are like prety smart, like they usually think about these things very hard.

They all want to succeed um and IT is hard to do that. And so to start a tech company or to start an artistic movement or two or to fight a war like you're just going into this like basically about conceptual background or military turns, real background where there's just like incredible levels of complexity, branching, future path ths. And so there's nothing there's nothing predict table.

So what we will force basically the the sort of drop the really good innovators, they've got a drive to basically be able to cope with that and deal with that. And they they basically do that two steps. So one, as they try to prepare as much as they possibly and and and we call that the process of navigating, we all the idea maze, right? And so the idea maze, basically, i've got this general idea that might be the internet going to work or search or whatever.

And then it's like, okay, in their head they have thought through of like OK, I do with this way, that way. The third way, here's what will happen. Then I have to do that.

Then I have to do this. Then I have to bring somebody to do that. Here's the and they ve ve in on their heads as best anybody could. They're y've got a complete a sort of a map of possible future so they could possibly have.

And this is where I say when you ask some increasing detailed questions, that's what you're trying to kind of get them to kind of charge out is okay. how. ahead.

Have you thought and how much are you anticipating all of the different twist in terms that, that's gna take? okay. So then they start on day one. And then of course, what happens is they're in the log war. Now that idea is is maybe not practically, but now they're going to be basically constructing on on the fly day by day as they're aren't discovering new things and as the world changes around them. And of course, it's a feedback loop because they're onna change.

You know if their things starts to work, it's going to change the world and the fact the world is changing is going to cause their planned to you know to change well um and so yeah the great the great ones basically they they course correct the the great once course correct every single day know they take stock of what theyve learned uh you know they modified the plan um the great one ten to think in terms of hypotheses right like a scientific sort of mentality which is they tend to think, okay, i'm going to try this. I'm going to go into the world. I'm in annals doing this for sure.

Like i'm going to say like this is my plan. I'm going to tell all my employees that I tell all my investors that i'm going to put a stake around my plan. Try right.

And even though I sounds like I have complete certainty, I know that I need to test to find out whether there is gonna. And if it's not that I have to go back to all those same people. I have to say, well, actually we're not going love or going right and they have to run that thousands of times right in the head, you know, to get through the other side.

And this LED the decoration of this great term pivot, which has been very helpful in our industry because the word when I was, when I was word we used was fuck up to IT. Like, sounds like so much Better, sounds like so much more professional. But yeah, you like, make mistakes is just too complicated.

understand? You course correct. You adjust, you evolve. Often these things, at least in business, the businesses that end up working really well, tend to be different than the original plan. But that's that's part of the process of a really smart founder basically work and they're through reality, right? As as as the execute in their plan.

The way you're describing this has parallels to a lot of models in biology and the practice of science, you know, random walks, but that aren't truly random, super random walks in biology, IT said. But one thing that is becoming clear from the way you're describing this is that I could imagine a great risk to early success.

So for instance, somebody develops a product, people are excited by IT, they start implement that product, then the landscape changes and they don't learn how to pip IT to use the less brain version of IT. They don't learn how to do that. In other words, the and I think of everything these days um almost everything in terms of reward schedules and dopamine reward schedules because that is the universal currency of reward.

And so when you talk about the show, Parker quote of um learning to enjoy the taste of one's own own blood that is very different than learning to enjoy the taste of success, right? It's about internalizing success as a process of being self determined and less agreeable at seven. In other words, ds, building up of those five trades becomes the source of dopa mine, perhaps in a way that's highly adaptive. On the outside, we just see the product to the end product, the iphone in the macbook, the netscape and sea. But I have to presume, and i'm not a psychologist, but I have done the of physiology, and I ve studied the doping system, enough to know that what being rewarded in the context of what you're describing sounds to be a reinforcement of those five traits rather than, oh, it's going to be this particular product or the companies going to look this where the logo is gonna this or that that all seems like the preferable to um what's really going on. That great innovators are really in the process of of establishing neural circuit that is all about reinforcing the me in the process of being me.

yeah. So this this goes to this is like extrinsic versus intrinsic motivation.

So Steve jobs, kind of in version of this writer, this sort of happy version of this was the journey is the reward, right? Told told his employees, that is like, looks like, you know, everybody thinks in terms of these big public markers, like the stock Price of I P O or the product launcher, whatever is like now, it's is actually the process itself is the point, right? If you do your point, if you have that mentality, and that's that's an intrinsic motivation.

Now next, transit motivation. And so that's the kind of intricate motivation that can keep you going for a long time. Another way to think about IT is competing against yourself, right? It's like can I get Better at doing this right? And can I prove to myself that I can get Better? Um there's also a big social component to this and this is one of the reasons why.

So I can punch IT so so far about ve its weight as a place um there is a psychological component which is also go to the comparison set um so a phenomenon that we have deserved over time is the leading uh tech company in any city. Uh well inspire to be as large as the previous living to a company in that city, but often not larger, right? Because they start to have a model of success.

And as long as they beat that level of success, they've you know check the box like they've made IT and and and then but then in contrast, you and so looking valley and you look around and it's just like facebook, disco and oracle and you know to the packet ard and gay yeah and you just like looking at these you know giants and and you know many them are still you know our work, but still you know going to work every day and like trying to to do you know and so like these people are like a like a life. They are like right there, right? And it's so clear like how much Better they are and how much bigger their accomplishments are.

And so what what we find is Young founders in that environment have much greater aspirations, right? Because they just again, maybe that point, maybe as the social status, maybe there there's extract c component to that but or may be IT helps calibrate that internal system to basically say, actually, you know know the opportunity here is not to build a local which may cause local maximum form a success. Let's build to a global maximum form of success, which is which is something as big as we possibly can.

Um ultimately, the great ones are probably driven more externally than externally when IT comes down to IT. And bed is really get this phenomenon. You get people who are extremely successful, extremely wealthy easily can punch out and move to fiji and just call IT. And they're still working sixteen nowadays, right? Obviously, something explains that, that has nothing to do with external rewards, and I think it's an internal thing.

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I've heard you talk a lot about the inner landscape, the inner psychology of the spokesman. I appreciate that we're going to even deeper into that today, and we will talk about the the landscape around they're not silicon value in new york, whether not there are specific cities that are ideal for certain types of pursuit. I think there was an article written by program some years ago about um the conversations that you over hear in a city will tell you everything you need to know about whether not you belong there are in terms of your a professional pursuits um some of that changed over time and now we should ably add Austin to the mixes um because IT was written some time ago um in any event, I want to return to that but I want to focus on an aspect of this intrinsic versus extensive motivators in terms of something that's a bit more cryptic.

C, which is one's personal relationships, if I think about the catalogue of innovators. And so icon valley, some of them, like Steve jobs, had complicated personal lives, romantic personal lives really on and that sounds like he worked IT out, I don't know, and I wasn't there a couple's therapy, but you know he when he died, he was in a marriage that for all the world seemed like a happy marriage. Um you also have examples of innovators who have had many partners, many children with other partners.

Elon comes to mind, you know don't think i'm disclosing anything that isn't already obvious. Those could have been happy relationships and just had many of them. But the reason i'm asking this is you can imagine that for the innovator, the person with these traits, who is trying to build up this, this thing, whatever IT, is that having someone or several people, in some cases, 嗯， who just truly believe in you when the rest of the world may not believe in you yet or at all, could be immensely powerful.

And we have examples from cults that um embody this. We have examples from politics. We have examples from tech innovation and science.

And i've always been fascinated by this because I feel like it's the more cyp tic and yet very potent form of allowing someone to build themselves up. It's a combination of inner psychology and extracted motivation because obviously, if that person were to die or leave them or. Cheat on them or you know, pair up with some other innovator, which we've seen several times recently, end in the past. IT can be devastating to that person. But what are your thoughts on the role of personal and in particular romantic relationship as IT relates to people having an idea and they're feeling that they can really bring that idea to fruition in the world.

So it's a real mixed bag. You have lots of examples in all directions. I and I think it's something like, it's something like, something like following. So first is we talk about the person ality trace of these people. They tend to be highly disagreeable.

doesn't Foster a good .

romantic relationship. I had heard .

of that once. Or just a friend may give me example.

Yeah, right now, maybe you just need to find the right person who like help us that and is willing to there's a lot of relationship like you always this question about relationship, right, which is, do you want to have the same nationality grow profile, the same behavioral traits basically as your partner, or do you actually want to have is an of opposing and you know, like, sure, you seen this. There are relationships.

We will have somebody who's highly disagreeable, who's pair with somebody who's highly agreable and actually was like, great because one person just get to be on their soup like self the time. Another person just like, okay, right, it's fine. Right it's fine, it's good.

Um you know you put two disagreable people together, you know maybe Sparks fly and they have great conversations all the time and maybe they come hate each other, right um so um so anyway so these people, if you're going to be with one of these people, you're fishing out of the disagreeable end of the pond. And anyway, when I say disagreeable, I don't make these are these are Normal distribution. I don't mean like sixty percent disagree about, eighty percent disagree about the people were talking about ninety nine point nine nine percent disagreable, right?

So these are honor or are people so so so part of this that um and then of course they have the other personality traits right there you know super county interests, their super driven consequent. They tend to work really hard. They tend to not have a lot of time for you know amalia ation. Other things know they they don't enjoy them if they're first take on them. And so again, that kind of think and free IT in a relationship. So so there's so there's a fair money in there that's loaded like somebody is in a partner with one of these people needs to be signed up for the ride um and that's a hard thing you it's hard thing to do or or you need a true partner ship to do this, which is also hard to do.

So I think as part of IT um and then look, I think a big part of IT is you know people achieve a certain level of success um and you know either in their own minds or publicly um and then they start to be able to get away with things right um and they start to be able to like, well, okay, you know now we're rich and successful and famous and now i've deserve you and and this where you going to I have you this now in the role of personal choice right you in this thing where people start to think that they deserve things um and so they started behaving very bad ways and then they blow up their personal world as a consequence and maybe they've regret IT later and maybe they don't right always always a question. Um so yeah so I think there is that um and then I don't know like yeah some people just need maybe other part of IT. Some people just need more emotional support than others and I don't know that that's a big I don't know that is either way like I know I know some of these people who have like great loving relationships and seem to draw very much on having this kind of firm foundation to rely upon and then I know other people who are just like their personalities are just to continue a train, right? And IT doesn't m doesn't seem to matter like professionally, they just keep doing what they are doing. And and and maybe there is maybe we can talking about like whatever is the personnel you trade for, risk king, right? Some people are so incredibly risk grown that they need to take a risk of all ice picks to their lives at all times and and if if if part of their life gets stable, they find a way to blow up um and that some some of these people you could describe in those terms .

also yeah let's talk about that um because I think um risk taking and sensation seeking is something that fascinates me um for my own reasons and in my observations of others, does IT da tail with these five traits in a way that can really innovation in ways that can benefit everybody. The reason I say to benefit everybody is because there is a view of how painting the picture of the innovator is this like really cruel person. Um but often times what we're talking about, our innovations that make the world far Better for billions of people and .

also by the way, where everything were talking about also is not just in tack or science cor or in business, it's also everything also talking about two of the arts right and you the history of like artistic expression .

of people with the kinds of regular turns of lovers and partners. And he was very open about the fact that he was one of the sources of his productivity slash creativity. He wasn't shy about that. I propose a today judge different.

Or that was his story for behaving in a pattern that was very awful for the people around him. And he didn't care.

Right, right maybe they left .

him yeah I know who know right so so you know puts and takes all this um but um but okay so I have a theory so here's a theory. This is one of these I keep list of things that will get me a dinner um topic point do you .

read before you go in?

Yeah I just like I we call so that I can I can get out of these things but um so here here's the thing. They get me kicked out in pretty um especially these days um so uh think of the kind of person where is like very clear that they are like super high two point this is somebody is super high output whatever to mean there and they done things are like fundamentally like change the world.

They brought new, whether as businesses or technologies are worth of art um you know entire schools of of creative expression, in some cases to the world and then at a certain point they blow themselves to smithies right? And they do that either through like a massive like financial scandal. They do that through a massive personal you know breakdown.

They do through some sort of public expression because of them a huge amount problems you they say they say the wrong thing maybe at once but several hundred times and block themselves as milrays um and and and there's this this this kind of arc. There's moral art that people kind of to apply like acris you know the you know flying too close to the sun and know he had IT coming and he needed to keep his ego under control and you get of this you know of this judgment that applies um so I have a different theory on this. So the term I used to describe these people and a lot of and by the way, a lot of of the people who don't actually blow themselves up but get close to IT um just the one other set of people, uh I call the martis to civilizational progress right so so you know we're backward civilizational progress.

So look, the only way civilization gets move forward is when people like this do something new, right? Because civilization as a whole do new things, right? Groups of people do not do new things, right? These these things don't happen automatically, like by default, nothing changes.

The only way that alizai change on any of these actions ever happens is because one of these people stands up and says, no, no, i'm going to do something different than when everybody else has ever done before. So this is this is progress, like this is actually how to happens. Sometimes they get line after rewarded, sometimes they get crucified. Sometimes the crucible ation is literal.

Sometimes it's just, you know, symbol lic, but like, you know, they are those kinds of people and and then murder, like when when they go down in flames like they have and and again, this is where I really screws the people's moral judgments because everybody wants to have this sort of super clear story of, like, okay, he did a bad thing and he was punished and I am like, no, no, no, no, no, no. He was the kind of person who was going to do great things and also was going to take on a level of risk and take on a level of sort of extreme behavior, such that he was going to expose himself to flying to close the sun, wings melt, crashed the ground. But but it's a package deal.

The reason you have the because of the bet VS and all these people is because they are willing to take these extreme level risks. They are that creative and original, not just in their art or their business, but in everything else that they do, that they will set themselves up to be able to fail psychologic. You know, psychologists would probably, psychiatrists probably say, you know, maybe you know what extent they actually I have a death way do? Do they actually know at some point, do they want to point them, want to fail that? I don't know.

But you see this, they deliberately move themselves to close the sun. And and you you can see IT when is happening because like if they get too far from the sun, they deliberately move back towards IT, right? No, they come right back and they want the risk.

Uh, and so, anyway, like, yeah. So Martin, to civilization, progress like this is how progress happens when these people crash and burn. The national al, no inclination is to judge the morally.

I tend to think we should basically say, look, and I only enough. This means like giving them immoral, passed or whatever. But it's like, look like this is how cil civilization progresses. And we need to at least understand that there's a self sacrificial aspect of this that may be tragic and often is tragic but IT is IT is quite literally self sacrificing.

Are there are any examples of great innovators who um were able to compartmentalise their risk taking to such a degree that they had what seemed to be immorally impeached life in every domain except in their business versus yeah, that's right.

So some people are very some people are very highly controlled like that. Some people are able to like very nearly and I I I don't really want to set myself an example of a lot of this. But I will tell you like as an example, like I I will never use that in business.

Number one. You know, number two, like I have the most plastic persons life you can imagine. Number three, and the last personal world is every do an extreme sport IT. I mean, i'm not even onna go on the song on the ice bath like i'm not i'm .

not .

doing anything like I don't .

know and .

not how I don't like golf. I don't I I I have no interest any of this stuff, right? And so like there are and I know people like this, right, there are very high achievement is just like that.

They're completely segmented, their extreme mistake ers and business, they're completely button on the personal side, they're completely button. You know financially, the script less with following every room in law you can possible mention. But but they're still fantastic c innovators.

And then I know many others who are just like life is on fire all the time in every possible way and whenever IT looks like the fire is turning in embers, they figure out a way to like reach the fire, right um and they just really want to live on the edge. And so I think that maybe I think that's an independent variable. And again, I would apply the same thing I think the same thing applies to the arts.

Um you know classical music an example like I think that was as an example of all time, had just completely say personal life, you know never had any other behavior at all in personal life. Family man, tsi kids, apparently builder the community, right? And so like if bock could be bock and yet not like burn his way through you know three hundred mesters ses or whatever, well, maybe you can do .

so in thinking about these two different categories of innovators, those that take on tremendous risk and all the mains of their life, and those that take on tremendous is going to very compart mentalizing way. I don't know what the percentages are but after. Wonder if in this modern age of the public, being far less forgivable when i'm referring to his cancel culture, do you think that we are limiting the number of innovations in total, like by just simply frightening or eliminating a normous category of innovators because they don't have the confidence or the means or the strategies in place to regulate. So they're just either bowing out or they're getting crossed off, getting cancelled one by one.

So do you think the public is less time than used to be more tolerant?

Well, the systems that I am not going to be careful here. I think the um the large institution systems are not tolerant of what the public tells them they shouldn't be tolerant of. Um and so if there's enough noise, there's enough noise in the mob.

I think institutions raw out and here i'm referred not just to univer, they essentially say, okay, that let the cancellation proceed or they and maybe there maybe they're the gavel that comes down, but but they're not believer that they got the thing going. And not just think about universities are also thinking about advertisers. I'm thinking about um the big movie houses that cancel a film that a given actor might be in because they had something in their personal life that still getting worked out. Thinking about people who um are in a legal process is not yet resolved, but the public is decided they're bad person at Sarah.

My question is that we really talking about the public and I agree with your question and I I might come back to IT, but I am an example one part of your question which is this really the public are talking about and and I would just say exhibit a is who is the current front runner up for the republican amino um today the public we stone one side of the political isle seems very on board right um number two like look uh you know there is a certain musician who would like you know flew to close the sun bloom mbs of this meter and is still hiding all time hires on music streams every month.

The public seems fine like I think the public might H I I would argue the public is actually more open to these things than IT actually maybe ever. That's the case. I think it's it's a differentiation and this is your question seeming up, but it's a differentiation between public and the elite. And so so so I my view is everything you just describe as a leaf, i'm on on um and actually the public is very much not on board of IT .

this and and so what's actually .

happening as the division what what's happened is the public and release of gapped out the the public is more forgiving of of of what previously might have been considered kind of every an extreme behavior um right scope this general there are no second x american lies IT turns out completely wrong is that there are second acts that s forth as you a little number of acts the public is .

actually up for IT yeah I mean I think of somebody like mike tyson, right? I feel like he's every you know his life example fies. Um everything that's amazing and great and also terrible about america.

If we took like times to dinner tonight at any restaurant anywhere in the next states, what would happen? He would be loved. H he would be like door.

He would be the outpouring of enthusiasm, passion and love would be incredible like IT would be unbelievable is this is a great example like it's just like and I get i'm going to going to job, i'm going to say agree with that or disagree that just like we all intuitively know the public is just like one hundred percent like, absolutely like he's a legend like he's a legend. He's a living legend. love. He's like a cultural touchdown absolutely.

And you see, when he shows up movies, right? He shows, I remember that I mean, the big way through. I figured this out with respect to him because I don't really follow sports, but when he showed up in that he was the first hank of a movie, and he shows up and know was I was in theater and like the, but none is crazy, they're so excited to see him.

Yeah, he evoked delight. I always say that my test is the only person i'm aware that can wear a shirt with his own name on IT and IT somehow doesn't seem wrong. In fact, I just kind of of makes you like him more. His ego feels very countered in a way that he knows who he is and who he was and yet there's a there's a humble ness woven in in maybe as a consequence of all that he's been through. I don't know um but yeah people love mike.

I closer now exactly now you know he shows up to like like harvard right like I probably .

reaction I don't know I don't know me David Simon you guy who wrote the wire a talk at harvard and um and IT sounded to me based on his report of that um which is very interesting in fact um that people adore um people who are connected to everybody in that way like I feel like everybody loves me from from above his atas the sides lowest status he just he he occupied this this halo of love and attention OK no um yeah the other side of this .

easily and you are evaluated this of the institutions so so basically it's like the people who are not only because they yeah I want to make sure .

we define elite. So you're not necessary talking about people who are wealth. You're talking about people who have authority within institution.

So the ultimate finishing who can get who fired right? Like that's the the ultimate ta who can get who fired, boycott, blacklisted, austro size, like when he pushed, prosecuted, jailed like when push comes to shove, right? I think that's always the question.

Who can destroy whose career? And course, you'll notice the fed is heavily as metric when these fights play out like there is very clear we're I can get the other the other side fire where site we're I can um and so yeah so look, I think we live in a period of time or the else have gotten to be extreme in a number of dimensions and tried by, for sure extreme group think extreme psycho y um extreme you know moral you know I said dion um you know extreme know this this weird sort of modern paranis m um and then an extreme sort of morality of like punishment, terror. Um I guess they perceived anomalies um but but I wanted to I wanted go through that because I actually think, actually think this a very different phenomenon.

I think what's happening this is very different than what's happening in the population at large. And then of course, I I think there's a feedback loop in there, which is I think the population at large is not on board with that program, right? I think the etes are aware that the population is not a board of that program.

I think they judge the population negatively as a consequence that causes the else to harden their own positions, that caused them to be even more alienating to the population. And so there you know there in sort of an opposition negative feedback loop um and yeah it's gonna and you know but again, as a sort of question, okay, who can get who fired and so you IT leads are really good um at getting more more people fired a asta sized beds. You hit pieces in the press like whenever um you know for Normal people to get a etes fired I have to really light back together, right? Really mount a serious chAllenge, which mostly doesn't happen, but might be starting to happen in some ways.

Do you think this power the of the elites over stemmed from social media? So going against its original purpose, I mean, what do you think social media think you're giving each and every person their own reality T V, show their own voice. And yet um we've seen a dramatic uptake in the number of cancellations and firings related to immoral behavior based on things that we're either done or amplified on social media. It's almost as if the public is holding the wrong end of the knife yeah .

so the way you describe IT, so so I so I use these two terms and there are someone interchangeable, but the IT leads an institutions and there is something changeable because runs the institutions. The relates, right? So it's a sort of a reinforcing thing um any institutions of all kinds, institutions that everything from you know the government, bureaucracies, companies, nonprofits fdic's know that companies, you people who are people who are in charge of big complex and that he Carry a lot of basically power and influence and capability and money as a consequence of their position, authority.

So you know, the head of a giant foundation may never have done anything in their life that would to have a happy of them as a person, but they're in charge of this giant multiple or complex and have all this power results. So that's just to define terms at least institutions um so is actually interesting uh gala um that has been doing polls on the following on the question of of trust in institutions which is sort of a therefore proxy for trust in a uh basically sense the only nine hundred and seventies um and what you find and and they do this across all the categories of big institutions you know basically everyone I just talked about a bunch of others big business, business banks, newspapers, broadcast television, um the military police. They've like thirty categories or something and basic what you see is almost all the categories basically started in the early seventies at like sixty seventy percent trust.

And now they've basic almost across the board. Theyve just done had a complete basically liniers slide down for fifty years, basically my my whole life. Um you know they're now bottom ing out you know congress and journalists bottom out of like ten percent like the two group's everybody hates are like congress and journalists um and then it's like a lot of other big institutions are like in the twenty thirties, forties actually big business actually scores fairly.

High tech actually scores quite high. The military scores is quite high, but basically everything else has really caved in. And so so this is sort of my fundamental chAllenge.

Everybody who basically says, and you didn't do this, but you hear the simple form of this, which is social media caused the current trouble, and it's all this example, collapse in faith, in institutions and in the weeds. Let's call that part of the current trouble. Um IT as I got social media cause that I was, I got no social media.

Social media is new right in the last no social media effectively new, practically speaking sense and twenty twelve when I really took off. Um and so if the trend started in the early one thousand nine and seventies right and has been continuous, then we're dealing with something broader. And and Martin gary h wrote, I think the best book, and there is called the revolt of the public, where he goes to this in detail.

And he he does, he does say that social media had a lot to do with what's happened last decade. But he says this, if you go back, you look further IT was basically two things coinciding. One was just a general change in the media environments in particular the one nine hundred and seventy is when you started to especially the ninety eighties is when you started to get um specifically talk radio, which was a new outlet.

Um and then you also start, you also got cable television um and then you also, by the way, actually interesting in the nineteen sixties you have paper back books which was another one of these which was outlet. So you you like a fracturing of the media landscape in the fifty three eighties. And then of course, they are not like White open.

Having said that, if the Ellena institutions were a fantastic, you would not. More than ever, this information is marked as possible. And so the other thing that he says, and I agree with is the the public is not being tricked, ed, in the thinking, the at least institutions are bad.

They're learning that they are bad, right in the mystery. And therefore, the mystery of the gallup poll is why those numbers aren't all just a zero, right? Which is arguing a lot of cases where there should be I .

think one reason that by the way.

he thinks this is bad. So he can I have a different view. So here's or here I disagree. He thinks this is bad. So he basically says you, you can't replace IT leads with nothing. You can't replace institutions with nothing if if what you're just left with is just going to be right and you're going to laugh with this completely basically no atomized a control society that has no ability to martial. You know, any sort of activity in direction is just going to be a dog dog awful in a world um I have a very different view .

on that which we talk yeah love i'd love to hear your views on that that the quick question I was going to asked before we go there is I think that one reason that I am many other people sort reflexively assume that social media caused the the demise of our faith and institutions um is well first well I wasn't aware of this um lack of correlation between the the decline and faith and institutions and and the rise of social media but secondarily that we've seen some movements that have essentially rooted themselves in tweet, in comments, in posts. They get amplified and those tweet and comments in post come from everyday people in fact, I can't name one person who initiated A A given cancellation or movement because IT was the sort of dog piling or mob adding on to some person that was essentially anonymous. So I think that for many of us, we have we have the bottom to use neuroscience line, which is a sort of a bottom up and a perspective.

Oh no, someone sees something um in their daily life or experiences something in their daily life and they tweet about IT or they comment about IT, they post about IT and then enough people dark pile on the accused that IT picks up force and then the elites feel compelled obligated to cancel somebody um that tends to be the narrative and so I think the logical conclusion is so you know social media allows for this to happen where as Normally someone would just be standing on the corner shouting or calling lawyers that don't have faith in them and you know you get the like the end rock of each model of um you know that turns into a movie but that's a rare case of this lunan woman who's got this idea in mind about how big institution is is doing wrong or somebody is doing wrong in the world and then can leverage big institution excuse me but the way that you describe IT is that the elites are um are leading this or this shift so so what is the role of the public in IT? I mean I mean just to give you a concrete example, if, for instance, no one um witted or commented on me too, or no one tweet or commented about um some ill behavior of some no universe faculty member or business person, would the elite have come down on them anyway? Oh yeah.

so what happening? So based on what i've seen over the years um is is there there is so much astra turfing right now there there are entire category of people who are paid to do this um some of them we call journalists, um some of them we call activists, some of them we call N G O. You now profit, some of them we call university professors, some of them we call resident dents, like whatever they are paid to do this.

I know if you don't relected to the misinformation, uh, industry complex, there is a so universe of basically these funded groups that basically do quote on information and and they are constantly mounting these kinds of attacks. They are costly, trying to gym up this kind of basically panic t because ability get fired. Like IT was not a grassroots.

The opposite grass is no, almost always try these back. IT was, IT was a journalist, IT was but IT was a IT was a IT was a public figure of some kind um these are entrepreneurs these entrepreneurs you know sort of a weird way like they're basically they paid their job mission calling. It's all wrapped together like there are true believers but are also getting paid to do IT.

And there is a giant funding, there is a very large funding complex for this coming from a certain profile. People who put a huge month of money into this is well known. yes.

Well, so I mean, this is my world. So this is what the social media companies have been on the receiving end of for the last decade um is it's basically a political media activism complex with very deposits behind IT. And you've got people who basically little people who said all day and watch the TV network on the other side and watch the twitter for the other side and they wait.

They they basically wait. It's like what every politician is been the case for one time now. Every every politician who goes out of stuck beaches, you'll see there's always somebody in the crowd of the courter now with the phone recording them, and that somebody from the other campaign who's paid somebody to just be there and like, record every single thing the politicians an says so so that went, met, says whatever the forty seven percent thing theyve got up on tape.

And then they clip IT and they try to make a viral. So this stuff is and again, like look like these people believe what they're doing. I'm not saying it's even dishonest like these people believe they're doing.

They think they're fighting a holy war. They think they're protecting democracy. They think they're protecting civilization, they think they're protecting whatever IT they're protecting.

Um but but they and then they know how to use the tools and so they know how they know how to try to change up the outrage. And then by the way, sometimes that works as in social cascajo times that works. Sometimes that doesn't.

Sometimes they can case, sometimes they don't. But if you follow these people on twitter, this is what they do everyday. They're can't they trying to like life is fire, right?

I assume that was really bottom up, but that sounds like a sort of the middlemen and then IT captures the elite, and then the thing takes on a life of its zone. By the way.

IT also intersects with the trust and safety groups at the social media firms, right, are growing out who is promote and who is banned right across this. And you'll notice one large social media company has recently changed hands and has invented a different kind of of trust and safety, and always said any different kind of boycott vee.

Has all of the student started to work that was not working before that? And in another kind of boycott, vee is not working as well anymore. And so there's like for sure there's an intermediation happening like the stuff is happening in the world today is being media and through social media and social media is the defining media of our time.

Um but there are people who know how to do this and do this relieving so so no I very much view this as A I feel very much the like cancellation wave like this whole thing is a lead phenomenon um and when he appears to be a grassroots thing, it's either grass roots among the elites which is possible because there you know fairly large number people who are I like signed up for that that particularly the. Um but there's also a lot of astra from this taking place inside that. The question is, okay, what point is the population at large IT pulled into this? And and maybe maybe there are movements at certain points in time where they do get pull in and then maybe later they get the solution.

And so then there's some question there. And then there's another question of like, well, if the population at large is going to decide what these movements are, are they going to be the same movements as the the at least one, you know, the how are the least going to react on the population? Actually, litel ly expresses itself right. And so and like I said, there's a feedback loop between these where the more extreme else get, they tend to push the population of more extreme views on other side advice first so IT pink back and for us and so yeah this yeah this is our world.

This explains a lot um I want to make sure that .

the matter be a bunch of these guys. You've done a lot of work if you just looking called the this information industrial complex, you'll find a network of money and power that is really quite amazing.

I've seen um more and more shelling berger showing up right um and .

he like he on this stuff there little is just like tracking money. I is just like this is very clear how the money flows in, including like a remarkable money of money out of the government, you know, which is, of course, like in theory, very concerning, very interesting. Government should not be funding programs that take away people of constitutional rights. And yet somehow that's what's been happening.

Very interesting. Yes, I want to make sure I hear your ideas about why the decline in confidence in institutions and is not necessarily problematic. Is this going to be a total destruction burning down to the forest that will lead to new life? Is that your view?

Yeah, well, so this this is the thing and and like there's a question of here, there's a couple of questions in here, which is like how how bad is IT really like how bad are they, right? And I I you know I think they are pretty bad. A lot of them are prety actually bad um and so so so so that's one big question.

And then the other the question is like, okay, if the institution has gone bad or group of people gone bad, like is this wonderful word reform, right? Can they be reform? And everybody was nice to reform everything and yet somehow like nothing ever White ever gets reformed right um and so people trying to reform you know housing policy area for decades and you know we're not building building for your houses in every before.

So somehow reform movement seemed to lead more just more about stuff. But anyway, yeah, so if you have an existing institution cannot be reformed, can to be fixed from the inside. You like what what's happening.

Universities like there's a lot of their professors that stanford is an example who very much think that they can fix danford. Like I don't know what you think IT doesn't seem like it's going and production directions right now. Well.

I mean, there are many things about stand for that function extremely well, and it's a big institution. It's certainly got this issues like any other place. They're also my employer Marks giving me some interesting looks.

He wants me to get a little more vocal here. No, no, no. I mean, I think that yeah, I mean, one of the things about being a researcher of big institution like stanford is, well, first of all, IT means the criteria scribed.

Before you know, you look to the left, you look to the right, or anywhere above, below you, and you have excEllence, right? I have a nobel prize when below me, whose daddy also want a nobel prize, and there is scientific of spring, is likely to win. I mean, IT IT inspires you to do bigger things then then one ordinarily what no matter what.

So there's that and that's great. And that process um there's all the bureaucratic red tape about trying to get things done and how to implement decisions is very hard. And there are a lot of reasons for that.

And then of course, there are the things that um you know many people are wherever there are a public accusations about people positions of great leadership and that's getting played out and the whole thing becomes kind of overwhelming and a little bit of cake when you're just trying to run your lab or live your life. And so I think one of the reasons for this lack of reform that you're referring to as because um there's no position of reformer, right? So deans are dealing with a lot of issues.

Progress are dealing with a lot of issues. President are dealing with a lot of issues and and then some in some cases and so um you we don't have a dedicated role of reformer somebody to go in and say, listen, there's just a lot of fat on this and we need to try MIT or we need to create this or do that there. There just isn't a system to do that. Um and that I think in part because um universities are are built on old systems and you know it's build it's like the new york subway still it's amazing IT still works as well as IT does and yet it's got a tonic problems also. Well.

so the point the point to the the the university specifically, but the point is like, look, if you do think as usually a good bad and then you have to make number one, you have to figure if you think as usually grant bad, the population largely does think that. And at the very least, the people who run institutions that I really think .

hard about what that means. But people still strive to go to these places. And I still hear from people who like, for instance, did not go to college, are talking about how a university degree is useless. They'll tell you how proud they are that their son, daughter is going to stanford, or is going to U, C, L, A, or is going to ban ish champagne I mean it's almost like to me that's always the most um you know shocking contradiction is like yeah like these institutions don't matter. But then when people want to hold up a car that says why their kid is great, it's it's not about how many push PS they can do are that they started their own business most of the time they're going to this university. And I think, well.

what's going on here? So do you think the median voter in .

the states can have a no, no, no.

no medium water? The days could have a kid to stanford, even with perfect I T.

嗯， no, no. In this din age, the competition is so fear that IT requires more. Yeah.

so like, so first of all, again, were dealing here. Yes, were dealing here. There are a small number of very institutions. People may admire them or not um most people have no connection vy to them once.

However, in the statistics in the polling, universities are not doing well but the population at all yeah they may have fantasies about kick a stanford but like the reality of IT is a very, very a collapsing to do these institutions um so sorry way actually goes straight to the question of alternatives and right which is like, okay, if you believe that there is collapsing faith in the institutions, if you believe that IT is married, at least in some ways, if you believe that reform is effective, impossible, then you are faced and we can debate each of those but like the population large seems to believe a lot of that um then there is a question of like okay like can can not be replaced and if so, like are you Better off replacing these things basically while the old things still exist? Or do you actually need to basically clear the field to be able to have a new thing exist? The university is a great case study of this because of the because of his student loans work.

Right in the way student loans work is to be able to be to be to be an actual competitive universe and compete. You need to have access to the federal student lending because if you don't, everybody has to pay out of pocket and it's completely out to reach for anybody other you know a certain class either extremely richer or foreign our students. Um so you need access federal student on facility.

To get access to federal student on facility, you need to be at a credit university. Guess who runs the creditors council? I don't know the existing universities, right. So it's it's it's a self london machine like they decide to the new universities.

I guess how many new universities get a credit right to be able zero zero right? Um and so as long as that system is in place and as long as they have the government wired the way that they do and as long as they control who gets up to federal student moon funding, like of course, there's not gonna any competition, right? Of course, there can be a new institution that's going to be able to get to scale like is not possible.

And so if you actually wanted to create a new system that was Better in the, I would argue, dozen of hundreds of way as I could obvious ously be Better if you were starting today. Um IT probably can't be done as long as existing tus are actually tact and this my counter to Martin wishes like yeah we look if you're onna tear down the old there may be appeared to discuss, forget to the new but we're never going to get to the new. We don't take on the old.

When you say country to money you tell .

me about the author revote says is said basically what Martin says Martin says this is follow the elites deserve contempt um but the only thing worse than these elites that is their contempt would be no elites at all right um because any basically says on the other side, on the other side of the destruction of the etes and the institutions, nail m, you're basic left with nothing. And then by the way, there is an analyst tic streak.

I think there is an analytics streak. And in the culture, in the politics today, there are people who basically we just say, just turn the whole system down without any particular plan for for what follows. And so you you I think he makes a good point and that you want to be careful that you actually have a point on other side that you think is actually achievable.

But but but again, the counter argument to that is if you're not willing to actually care on the old, you're not going to get to the new. Now our generation, of course, is this is what happens every day in business, right? So like the entire way, like how do you know that the capital system works the way that you know is that the old companies, when they're no longer like the best of what they do, they get torn down and then they ultimately die and they get replaced by other companies yeah having.

Series in a while exactly. And we know so interesting as we know in in capitalism, in the market economy, we know that that's the sign of health. That's the sign of how the system is working properly, right?

In fact, we get actually judge by antitrust authorities in the government on that basis, right? It's like the best defense inst and I trust charges is no people are like come to kill us. They're doing like a really good job of like that's how we know we're doing our job.

And in fact, in business, we're are specifically IT is specifically illegal for companies in the same ministry to get together and plot and can inspire and plan and have things like these accrediting girls like we would get if I created the equivalent in my companies of the kind of credible before the university I have, I get straight to the and a trust violation, sure to expert to prison. People have been sent to prison for that. So in the business world, we know that you want everything subject to market competition.

We know that you want creative destruction. We know that you want replacement of the old with with the superior new. It's just once we get outside of business for like, oh, we don't want any that we we want basic stagnation and log rolling, right? And and you know and basically know know I know tanglement flicks evening as far as I can and then I was surprised .

by the results. So let's play IT out as a bit of thought experiment. So let's say that one small bending together of people who wants to start a new university where free exchange of open ideas um where unless somebody has you know a greater behavior, violent behavior, truly sexually an appropriate behavior against somebody know that committing a crime, right they're allowed to be there.

They're allowed to be a student, faculty member um administrator and let's just say this accrediting bureau allowed student loans for this one particular university or let's say that there was an independent source of funding for that university such that students could just supply there. They didn't need to be part of this this a little accredited group which is sounds movie like Frankly not certain violent but certainly cores in and in the way that IT walls people out um let's say that then they were twenty or thirty of those or forty of those. Do you think that over time that model would overtake the the existing model?

Interesting that those .

don't .

exist may be not sure. I home the dog I didn't barkin .

IT is interesting.

That is right. So there's two possibilities. One is like nobody wants that which I don't believe um and then the other is like the system is wired in a way that what is simply not allow IT, right? You did a yamada in which the system would allow IT. My response that is of course the system allow that .

or the people that ban togethers you know have enough money or or or get enough resources to say, look, we can um we can afford to give loans to you know ten thousand students prior you know ten thousand is an a trivial number one thinking about the size of a university and um and you know they most of them hopeful ly will graduate in four years and they'll be A A tunnel and do you think that the great future innovators would tend to orient toward that model um more than they currently do IT toward the traditional model? I know what i'm trying to get back to years. How do you think that the current model towards innovation um as well as maybe some ways that is still supports innovation um certainly cancellation and that the risk of cancellation from the way that we framed IT earlier is going to um discourage risk takers um of the category of takers that take risk in every the every domain that really like to fly close to the sun and sometimes into the sun or are .

doing research that is just not politically right here .

looking into issues that right that that you know we can't even talk about on this part cast probably without without causing a distraction of what we're actually trying to talk about. So the you know I keep a file and it's a written file, because I am afraid to put IT into electronics form of all the things that i'm afraid to talk about publicly, because I come from the lineage of advisers. Were all three died Young.

And I figure if nothing else, i'll die. And then, you know, making into the world and know when i'll take five, ten years, twenty years. And if not, you know, I know we certainly going to die at some point. Then what will see where all those issues stand in any .

event that was getting longer?

Oh, it's jeffy getting longer. interesting. Yeah, it's getting much longer. I mean, there are just so many issues that I would love to explore on this podcast with experts and um that I can't explore just because even if I had a panel of them because of the way that things get sound bited and segmented out and taken out of context, like the whole conversation is lost and so unfortunately there in immense number of equally interesting conversations that i'm .

excited have but IT .

IT is a little .

diurbanu remember? Sm uh no h so so famous um so .

that sounds familiar.

The guy he did uh he did communist to genetics um because the field of genetics, the soviet did not approve the field genetics because of course they believed in the increase of the new man and totally quality and genetics did not and support that.

Um and so if you were doing like traditional genetics, you were at the very least fired if if not killed um and so this guy I think stood up and said i've got markers genetics right? I've got like a whole new field of genetics that basically is politically compliant and then they actually implemented that in the agricultural system of the sophie union. And it's is the origin of one of the big reasons that the sophie union actually fell, which was they ultimately couldn't see themselves.

So create a new notion of biology as IT, really societics biology.

And so only created IT. They taught IT. They, they Mandate, they required, and then they implemented IT in agriculture. So I never understood there. A lot of things in history I never understood until last decade.

That's one of them. Well, I sensor myself at the level of deleting certain things, but I don't concert what I do talk about. So I tend to like to play on lush, open fields. Just makes my life.

this goes to the rot. This goes to the rot. Come back to your question, but like this goes to the rot in the existing system, which no different. I'm just like you. I'm come from not to like myself on fire either, but like that the road in the existing system mean by system, mean the institutions in the elite. The road is that the set of things that are no longer allow that mean that vest is like office expanding over time um and like that's a real like historically speaking, that doesn't end in good places.

Is this group of a particular generation that we can look forward to the time when they eventually die off.

It's there of the bus is plus s so good, good ice is weird, right? I'm jeanice is weird because we we are slip in the DDL. We were kind of the I don't like know how to describe, but we were the kind of on political generation kind of sandwich between women and the moonites gene.

Is that very, H, I think, open question right now, which way they go? I could imagine them being actually much, much more intense than than one else. All these issues. I can also imagine them .

reacting .

to the milanello .

and being farmer.

Open minded.

don't know, might be different groups where the the jocks and the hypes and the puns and the IT were all divided they were all segmented but then IT all sort of mishmash together a few years later. Um and I think that had a lot to do with what you said to sort of a political aspect of our generation.

If we just new, we the just knew the bars not right all the I mean, this is the onic one of the great site comes of of the era with family ties with the character Michael picky and he was just like, this guy is just like that. My mom, happy parents are crazy like i'm just going to like going to business and like actually do something productive.

Like there was something like iconic about character and in our culture and know people like me were like, obviously going to business, you know, to like political activities. And then it's just like, man that came with the background with the next generation. So just a touch, a quick on university thing.

So look, there are people trying to do, and i'm actually going to do a thing this afternoon with the university of boston, which is which is which is which is one of these and so there are people trying to do new universities um you know I like I say it's certain ly possible. I hope they succeed. I'm pulling for them and I think would be great. I think would be great if there were a lot .

more of them who found in this university.

This is a whole group of people. I don't, I don't know.

U.

T Austin, yes, not. U T Austin is called universe auto. They call IT. I think it's U A T is U A T X um and so um there is a lot of very short people to sit with IT um and um they're y're going to try to very, very much exactly what you described and to do a new one.

I would just tell you, like the wall of opposition that they are up against is profound, right? Um and part of IT is economic, which is can they ever get access to federal student lending? And I hope that I and now IT seems nearly I can see eva all the way the system is rick today. Um and then you know the other is just like they're going to they already have come under. I mean any any anybody anybody who publications this with them who is intraductory like A D M immediately gets let on fire, right? And there's like no cancer tion campaigns, like there are against a wall of social assistance, um there are against a wall of press attacks, um there are up against a wall of um you know people just like doing the thing passing on any anytime anybody says anything, they going to try to the place down.

This reminds me like like Jerry springer episodes and harder river episodes where like if a team listen to um you know like dance ague or marine manson type music or metallic that they were considered a devil worship right now we just will laugh. We're like that's crazy, right? People listen to music with all sorts of lyrics and ideas and looks and and that's crazy.

But you know, there were people legitimately sent to prison, I think, with the west man for three, right, these kids. In west months that look different, act to different, were accused of murder that eventually was made clear that clearly didn't commit, but they were imprisons because of the music they listen to. I mean, this sounds very similar to that. And I remember seeing bomber gars free the west months three and I thought this was some crazy thing. You look into IT and this isn't it's a little bit niche but um I mean this there were real lives and there was a active uh which hunt for people that look different and act different in yet now we're sort of in this inverted world where on the one hand, we're all told that we can express ourselves however we want but another other hand, you can't get a bit of people together to take classes where they learn biology and sociology and icon in texas wild.

yes. Also, you know the simple explanation is pretty ism, right? So this is the original american pet anim that just like works itself out through the system in different ways, different times.

You know, there's phenomenon is a religious enamel on amErica called the the weakenings there there there be these periods, american history, where there is basically religiosity fades and then there will be the snapback of fact, we have this basically the frenzy basically of religion in the old days IT would about you know tent revivals and people speaking in tongues and all this stuff um and then in the modern world it's it's the form that been through right now um and so yeah just basically these ways sort of american religious and you remember like religion in our time. Religious impulses in our time don't get export because because we live in, we live in more advanced times, right? We live in sciences c inform time.

And so religious emphasis in our time don't show up as over religious. They showed in a second ized form, right? Which of course conveniently is is, is there for, are not object to the first moment separation church and state, right? As long as a church circular it's no problem, right? And so but but we're acting out these kind of religious scripts so we're over again and were in middle another religious frenzy.

There is a phrase that I hear a lot and um I don't necessarily believe IT but I want your thoughts on that which is the pendulum always swings back .

yeah well .

so that's how I feel too because you know I take any number of things that we've talked about and um you know I should so crazy you know the the way things have gone with institutions or it's so crazy things gone with social media, so crazy filling in the blank and people say, well, the Angel money swinging back like like like it's the stock market or something. You after every crash, we'll be an eventual boom and Marks.

We have, of course, survival. But it's all survival, everything. So it's all everything of survival, right? So if you look globally, most stock markets over time crash and burn in a recover. The american stock market isn't always recover.

right? I was referred to the american .

start right globally, but the reason everybody refers american side market because is the one that doesn't do that. The other two hundred or whatever, the crash and burn in every recover. Let's go check the argentine art market right now.

like my father is immigrate to the U. S in the one thousand nine hundred and sixty .

so he would definitely agree with yeah press, they don't come back. Um so and then you like sancho hsm like this, you never recovered from my sancho's. M I never came back IT LED of the end of the country, literally the things that took down the self union or oil and and weed the weed thing, you can trace the crisis back to life choisy. Um and so um yeah no, look, I have almost things back is to only in the cases for things back, everybody just conveniently forgets the other circumstances where that doesn't happen. One of the things people you see this in business also people have a really hard time confronting really bad news.

I don't know if you notice ed, that um and every doctor is listened right out like I know that, but like like there are situations have you see business? There are situations that is start track over start track the copia u uh simulator, right? So the big lesson to become a start track after you have to go through the simulation called the copy as in the point was there's no winter, it's no winds scene, right? And and then I turned out captain current was the only person never win this area on the way that he did IT was he? He went and had a time and hack the simulate, right? IT was the only way to actually get through and then there was a debate whether the fire hammer making him a captain so they made him a captain.

Um and like you know the problem is in real life, like you do get the kobe asian rule on a regular basis, like there are actual known situation that you can't work you out of and as a leader you can't ever cop to that right? Because you have to like Carry things forward and you have to look for every every possible choice you can but like every once a while you do in this situation is really not recoverable. And at least I found people just like cannot cope with that. And so and so what happens as they basically then they actually just like excluded from their memory that had ever happened.

I'm glad that you brought up simulators because I want to make sure that we talk about the new and emerging landscape of ai artificial intelligence um and I could try and smooth our conversation of a moment to go up with the this one by creating some clever side way.

But i'm not going to except i'm going to ask, is there a possibility that A I is going to remedy some of what we're talking about? Let's make sure that we remarked that for discussion a little bit later. But first off, because some of the listeners of this podcast might not be as familiar with A I as perhaps they should be, we've heard about artificial intelligence.

People who are about machine learning is set up. But um IT be great if you could define for us what A I is. People almost immediately hear A I and think, okay, robots taking over.

I'm going to wake up and i'm going to be no strapped to the bed and my organ's reaming pull atomies. The robots are going to be in my bank account. They can killing all my children. And um this topic um for most um clearly that's not the way it's gonna. Um if you believe that machines can augment human intelligence and human intelligence is a good thing, so um tells us what A I is and um where you think IT can take us both good and bad yeah so so so there is .

a big debate when the computer was first invented, which is in the one hundred thirty one thousand nine hundred and eight people like turning and join these people and the big debate of the time um was because they knew they want to to build computers, that they have the basic idea um and there had been like calculating machines before that and there had been like there have been these loops that you basically program with match cards.

And so there was like there was a prehistory of computers that have to do with building sort of increasingly complex calculating machines. So they were kind of on attract, but they knew they were going to be able to build, they call a general purpose computer that could basically, you could program in the way you program computers today. But they had a big debate early on, which is to the fundamental architecture of the computer, be based on either a like calculating machines, like cash registers and looms and right and and other things like that, or should they be based on a model of the human brain um and they actually had this idea of computers model in the human brain back then.

Um and this was this concept to so called neural networks um and is actually fairly astonishing from from a research standpoint. Original paper on their own networks actually was publishing, making forty three, right. So so so they didn't have our level of neuroscience but like they actually knew about the neuron and they actually had a theory of like neurons and connecting and synapses and information processing in the brain even back um and a lot of people of time basically said, you know what, we should basically have the computer from the startup model after the human brain is like if we if the computer can do everything that the human brain can do like that would be the best possible general propose computer.

And then you could have to do jobs and you could have, you know aren't you can never do all kinds of things like humans can do um IT turns out that didn't happen um in our world. What happened instead was the industry went in the other direction. IT went basically in the model of the calculate machine of the cash register.

And I I think practically speaking, that kind of had to be the case because that was actually the technology that was was practical at the time. Um but but that's the path. So we all have experiences with up to including the iphone in our pocket is computers built on that calculating machine model, very model.

And so what that means is as computers, as we have come to understand them that you know they are basically like you mathematical savants you at best, right? So they are like they're really good at like you know doing less of mathematical calculations, they're really good executing is extremely detailed computer programs. They're hyper literal.

Um one of the things you learn early when you're a programmer is as a program, as the human programmer, you have to get every single instruction with the computer correct because I will do exactly what you can tell him to do. And and bugs in computer programs are always a mistake on the part of the programme r interest. You never bend the computer.

you always buy the program because that's the nature .

of things that are dealing with the um and we talked any program we'll degree with that would be like out if there is a problem is my fall I did. I can't blame the computer. The computer has no judgment and has no ability to interpret, synthesize and just developing independent understanding of anything.

It's literally just doing what I do step by step. So so for eighty years we've had this just you know, this very kind of hyper literal of model computers. These are called a, technically, this, what are called vanny ment machines based after the mathematician one they run in that way.

They've been very successful and very important in our world to spend shape with them. But there was always this other idea out there, which is okay. How about a completely different approach, which is the bed much more on how the human brain Operates or or at least are our kind of best. Understanding of how the human brain Operates, right? Just those aren't the same thing um IT basically says, okay, what what if you could have a computer you have been hyper literal.

What if you could haven't actually be conceptual right um and creative and able to synthesize information right and able to draw judgments and able to you know uh uh behave in um you know in ways that are not deterministic but are rather um you know but creative right and so and and the applications for this, of course, are endless. And so, for example, of this self driving car, the only way that you can make a, you can not program a computer with rules to make a self driving car, you have to do what tesla arn away on these other companies have done. Now you have to use A I right, you have to use this other architecture, uh, and you have to basically teach them how to recognize objects in images at high speeds, the same way, basically the same way the human brain doesn't.

So are those are so all the networks running side. So essentially let the machine Operate based on prior, you know, we almost clipped a uh a bother going up this particular drive. And so therefore this shape that previously the machine didn't recognize as a older and now introduced to its catalogue of .

borders is that good example make even even starker for a self driving car? There's something in the road. Is that a small child or a plastic shopping back being blown by the wind? Very important difference. If it's a shopping bag, you you definitely want to go straight through IT. Because if you deviate, of course, you might know know you're going to make a fast you know the same as the same time we have an word driving like you don't want a sword to vote shopping back because you might have something that you didn't see on the side it's a small child for sure you want to work right um and so but it's very .

but like in in that moment and you know small children .

come in different like shape and descriptions wa bi they might be halloween mask right the face might not have a recognized the human face might be a kid with you know one leg right? If I wanted not hit those right right? So you can't this what we we figured out. You can apply the rule based approach of annoyed machine to basically real life, and expect the computer to be in any way understanding a resilient change to basically things happening real life. And this is why there's always been such a stark divide betwen what the machine can do and what and what the human can do um and so basic what happens in the last decade that second type of computer, the neural network based computer has started to actually work IT started to work actually first and interesting in vision recognizing of just images.

which is why it's driving car. I started in to work face recognition and I was started off via s original home um in neuroscience, the idea that a computer or camera to face recognition Better than a human was like a very low probability event um based on the technology we had at the time, based on the understanding of the face recognition cells in the use of form gives now you be smart to put all your money on the machine.

You know, you want to find bases in airport, even with masks on and me at profile vers a straight on machines can do IT far Better than most all people. I mean, those these super recognizers, but even they can't match the best machines. Now ten years ago.

what I just said was the exact of right to faces, handwriting um right uh and then voice right being able to understand voice um if you use just as a user, if you use google dogs, that IT has a built in voice transcription, sort of the best industry leading voice transcription. If you use a voice transformation in google dogs, it's breath taking. Like good just speak and do IT and I just like types you're saying.

well, that's good because in my phone and everyone what I say, I need to go pick up a few things and I will say I need to pick up a few fones and so apple needs to get on board whatever the voice recognition is that google using.

Maybe he knows you Better than you think.

So that was not the topic that was avoiding disgusting.

you know so st um so um so there's actually there's a reason actually why you so good and apple is not right now at that kind of thing and actually goes to actually the exactly the logical thing of all of all things um uh apple does not permit pooling of data uh for any purpose including training A I or as google does um and and apples just like stake their brand on privacy and among that is sort of pledge that they don't like pull your data um and so all of apple's AI is like A I that has to happen like locally on your phone um or as google A I can happen in the cloud right that can happen across all by the way, some people think that that's bad. But but that's an example of this shift is happening the industry right now, which is you have the separation between the people who are embracing the new way of training A S and the people who basically.

for whatever reason or not, you excuse me um you say that some people think it's bad because of privacy issues that they think is bad because of reduced functionality of that ai oh no.

So you you're definitely going to get so so um so there are three reasons. A I I started to work. One of them is just simply larger day, a larger amounts of data.

So so so specifically the reason why objects in images are now the reason machines are now Better than humans at recognizing objects, images are recognizing faces, is because modern facial recognition AI are trained to, across all photos, the internet of people, billions and billions and billions of photos, right? A limited number of photos of people on there um attempts to train facial recognition stems ten or twenty years ago. They should be trained on you know thousands of tens of thousands of photos.

So the input data simply much more than much larger.

If this is a reason, take you to the conclusion on this is the reason why ChatGPT were so well as chagall t one of the reasons chat P T were so well as it's trained on the entire internet text and the entire internet of text was not something that was available for you to train the air on until IT came to actually exist itself. Which is knew in the last actually that .

so in the case of face recognition, I could see how having a much larger input data set would be beneficial if the goal is to recognize market and present face, because you are looking for signal to noise against everything else, right? But in the case of ChatGPT, when you're pulling all text on the internet and you ask ChatGPT to say constructor paragraph h about um a mark and reason's prediction of the future of human beings over the next ten years um and the um likely to be most successful industries give ChatGPT that if it's pulling across all text, how does IT know what is authentically market drivers text because in the case of face recognition, you have a um you've got a standard to work from A A verified image versus everything else um in the case of text um you have to make sure that what you're starting with is verified text from your mouth. So um which makes sense of it's coming from video but then if that video is deep fake of a sudden what true your valid mark and reason is of question and then everything ChatGPT is producing that is that of question.

right? So I would say there's a before and after thing here. There is like a before. There's like a before jeg P T. And after GPT question, existence of GPT itself changes changes the answer so before ChatGPT.

So the reason the version is on today is trained on data until september twenty twenty one cut training set until september twenty one. Almost all taxi internet was written by a human being um and then most of that was written by people under their own names. Some of that wasn't a but a lot of IT was why you know for me because I was published in magazine under my name or it's a podcast transcription, it's under my name. And and generally speaking, if you just did a search on like what are things mark and business is written and said ninety plus percent of that would be would be correct and somebody might have written a fake, you know, parity article or something like that. But like not that many people were spending that much time writing like .

fake are so many people can exactly right?

And so generally speak, you you can kind of get your arms around the idea there's a core pose of material with me or by the way, something with you. There's a core pose of youtube transcripts and other academic papers and talks you given. You can kind of get your hands around.

And that's that's how these systems are trained. They take all that day of clock. They they put IT in there. And and that's why that works as well.

That does and that's why if you asked ChatGPT to speak or right like me or like you or like somebody else will actually generally do a really good job because IT IT has IT has all of our text in its training data um that's from here on out. This gets harder. And of course, the reason this gets harder as because now we have A I think create text, have A I that can create text. And industrial scale is .

IT watermark as A I generated text. No, how hard would you be to do that?

I think it's impossible um I think is impossible. There are people who are trying to do that. This is a hot topic in the classroom. I was talking a friend is got like a fourteen old kid in in the class and there's like these recurring scandals is like every kid in the class is using chat potato like right essays or to help them write their essays um and then the um um the teacher is using one of there's a tool you can use that the reports to be able to tell you whether is something was written by ChatGPT.

But it's like only right like sixty percent of the time and so there was this case where the student run in esa, where their parents SAT and watch them essay, and then they submitted, and this tool got the conclusion and correct. And then the student feels outrage because he gotten fairly cheated. But the teacher is like, what you are all using the tool and IT turns out there's another tool that basically you feed in tax and actually um it's sort of uh uh they call IT a summarize what IT really as this is the cheating mechanism to basically um just a huffle the words around enough so that IT shed whatever.

Characteristics associated with A I. So there's like an arm's race going on in educational settings right now around this exact question. I don't I don't think it's possible to do. There are people working on the water marking.

I don't think it's possible with the water marking, and I think it's just kind of obvious why it's not possible to do that, which is you can just read the output for yourself. It's it's really good. How are you actually gone to tell the difference between that and something that a role person wrote? And then by the way, you can also ask check GPT to right in different styles, right?

So you can tell IT like, you know write in the style of the fifteen old, right? You can tell her to write them the style you know and not native english speaker, right? Or if you're a not native english speaker, you can tell her to write the style of english speaker, a native english speaker, right? And so the tool itself help you evade.

So I I don't think that I think there's a lot of people who are going to want to distinguish, right? Put rovers is fake. I think .

those days .

I think those days are over. This doesn't matter. My world of view of how we use this technology anyway, which which we can come back to.

Um so there's that. So so so is that. And then there's the problem, therefore, of like the so called deep fake problem. So then there's the problem like deliberate, basically manipulation. And that's like you, one of of your many enemies, of your increasingly populist enemies, White mine, who basically is like, wow, I know i'm going to get him right. I'm i'm i'm going to create i'm going i'm going to use IT to create something that looks like a human transcript I mean.

joe were deep in a video um I don't want to flag people to IT I so I won't talk about what I was about but um where IT for all the world look like a conversation that we were having and we never had that specific conversation.

That's right. So that's going to happen for sure. And so this so what there's going to need to be as to be basically registries where basically you you in like in your case, you will you will submit your legitimate content into a registry under your unique photographic key, right? And then basically there there will be a way to check against that registry to see whether that was the real thing. And I think this needs to be done for for sure, for public figures and you to be down, for politicians need to be done for your music.

What about taking what's already out there and being able to authenticated or not in the same way that many times per week? I get asked, is this your account about some a direct message that somebody got on instagram and I always tell them, look, I only have the one account, this one verified account though now with the advent of paid to play verification makes IT a little less pote as a you know security blank IT for um knowing if it's not this account you know then it's not me but in any case these accounts pop all the time pretending to be me and know relatively low on the on the scale not low but relatively low on the scale to say like um you know like a beyonce or something like that who has know hundreds of millions of followers so um is there a system in mind where people can go in and and verify text you know click y yes or know this is me this is not mean even there, there's the opportunity for people to fudge, to eliminate things about themselves that they don't want to out there by saying .

no that I mean, I wasn't I didn't as SHE said, that I create that yes, no. That's right and got public y together y which is the basis for how curtoys phy information is secured in the world today. And and so basic what you would do, the implementation for me, this would be you would like you would take whatever is your most trusted channel and let's say, let's say, your youtube channel and example, where is everybody just knows that I see you on your youtube channel because you've been doing IT for ten years or whatever is just obvious and you just published like and they about me page on youtube.

You just publish your your public photographic y that's unique to you, right? And then anytime anybody wants to check to see whether any piece of content is actually you, they go to the registry in the problem somewhere and they basically submitted. They basically say, okay, is this him? And then they can basically to see whether somebody with your public key, you had actually certified that this was something that you made.

Um now who runs that registry is interesting question um if that registry is run by the government, we will call that the ministry of truth. I think that's probably a bad idea. Um if that registry is run by a company, um we would know call that basically the quilling of like a credit beer or something like that.

Maybe that's how what happens. The problem with that is that company now becomes hacking target number one right of every that person on earth, right? Because you can know anybody brace in that company, they can fake all kinds of thing yeah they .

own the truth right they own .

the truth right and and the inside that also their employees can monkey with her, right? So you have to really trust that company. Um the third way to do is with a blockchain, right and so whether the cropt a blockchain technology, you could have a distributed system, this dish bited database uh in the cloud that is run through a box chain and then implements this photography in the certification.

What about quantum internet? Is that another way to encroach these things? I know most of our problem, not familiar quantum internet but um put simply, it's a way to um secure communications on the internet.

Let's just leave IT at that. It's sophisticated and the the whole epo de about this at some point but maybe you have the same way of describing quantum internet that would be Better. And if so, please please offer IT up. But is quantum internet going to be a one way to secure these kinds of um data and resources you maybe .

in in in the future years in the future we don't you have working quana computers. And so it's not that currently something you could do, but maybe maybe in a decade or two.

Um tell me i'm onna, take a stab at defining point. Internet one send IT is a way in which if anyone want to try in period on a conversation on the internet, essentially um would be futile because of the way that um uh quanto internet h changes the way that the communication is happening so fast and so many times in any one conversation is actually changing the translation of the language so fast that there's just no way to keep up with that. Is that .

more less active?

So going back AI, most people hear about A I are afraid of A I and I. Well, I think most who are .

not inform. This goes back to our mass.

interesting. Well, I heard you say that um you know um and this is from A A really wonderful tweet thread that we will link in the shown out captions that that you put out not long ago and then i've read now several times and that everyone really should take the time to read IT probit takes about um twenty years to read IT carefully and to think about each piece and it's a highly recommended but you said um and i'm quoting here, let's address the fifth the one thing I actually agree with which is A I will make IT easier for bad people to do bad things so yeah well so .

so yes so um so so so yeah so so first, well, there is a general free out happening around A I think it's primarily it's one of these. Again, it's in a little driven freak out. I don't think the man in the street now knows, cares or feels one or the other because is not a relevant concept, is probably just sounds exercise fiction um so there I think there there's an a even freak this happening right now.

I think that elite driven freak out has many aspects. Do IT that? I think you're incorrect. Just not surprising.

I would think that given that I think the of these are incorrectly, a lot of things, but I think they're very wrong about a number of things they are saying about ai, but that I look, this is a very powerful new technology, right? This is like a new general purpose, like thinking technology, right? So like, what if machines could think, right? And what if you could use machines that think? And what if you could have them think for you? There is obviously a lot of good that could come from that.

Um but also people know what criminals could use them to plan Better crimes. Um you know terrorists use them to plan Better territory, tacks and so forth. And so these are going to be tools that bad people can use to do bad things for sure.

Um I can think of some ways that I could be leverage to do fantastic things like in the realm of medicine um in A I pathologist perhaps can scan ten thousand slides of histology and find the one micro tumor seller abortion that would turn into four long timer where as the um even mild lifted gue or well arrested human pathologists as great as they come might miss that right and perhaps the best solution is for both of them to do IT and then for the human to verify what the A I is found and rice first. And that's just one example. I think I can come up with thousands of examples where this would be .

wonderful and the result, which is good, important. The other is like the machines are to be much Better beside, or I mean much Better dealing with patient. And we already know there's already been to study this, already been to study on. There is already study done this uh where um uh there is A A study team scrape thousands of medical questions, often for internet forum, and then they had real doctors answer the questions and then they had visit GPT for answer the questions and then they had another panel of doctor score the responses, right? So there were no patients experimented on here. This is a test contain within the within the medical role of the judges, the anal of the judges scored the answers in both factual accra y um and on a beside manner um on empathy um and the GPT four was um was um was equal or Better on most of the factual questions analytically already um and is not even a specifically trained medical AI um but IT was overwhelmingly Better um on aac y amazing right and so and you know I don't think yeah I don't you trip patient do treat patient actly and you work you don't 亚瑟。

We do we run clinical trials, right um but I don't I don't do any direct clinical.

So from the surgeons I from such like you talk to surgeons or you talk to people who train surgeons, what theyll tell you is like surgeons need to have an emotional remove from their patients in order to do good job with the surgery. The side effect of that, and by the way, look at a hell of a job to have to go in and tell somebody gna die. They have so never gonna recover.

They never going to walk again whatever IT is. And so there's there's something inherent in that job where they need to keep an emotional reserve from the patient, the right to be able to do the job. But as expected of them as professionals, the machine has no such limitation like the machine can be as sympathetic as you wanted to be for as long as you wanted to be IT can be infinitely simplify.

That is happy to talk to you for in the morning. It's happy to simplify with you. And by the way, it's not just sympathising you in the way that, oh, it's just like, you know just making up board. It's so light to you to make you feel good. You can also sympathy with you in terms of helping you through all the things that you can actually do to improve your situation, right? And so you boy like, if you know, can you keep a patient actually on track with a physical therapy program?

Can you keep a patient on track with the nutritional program? Can you keep a patient off the drugs or alcohol, right? And if they have a machine medical companion that's with them all the time, they're talking to all the time is infinitely patient, infinitely wise, right, infinitely loving, right? It's just going to be there all the time and it's going to be encouraging and it's going to be saying, you know, you do such a great job yesterday.

I know you can do this again today. Constructive behavioral therapy as an obvious fit here. These things are going to be great at S, C, P.

T. And that's that's already starting. You can already use the tragi t, as as as A C, B, T. Therapy if you want, it's actually quite good at IT. Um and so so there is a universe here that's IT goes to what you said, there's a universe here that's opening up, which is what what I believe is is is its partnership between men and machine, right? It's it's a syriac relationship, not in every several relationship.

And so exactly the doctor is going to pair with A I to do all the things you described with the patient is also going to pair with the AI. And and I think it's good. I think I think this this partnership is going to emerge is going to lead, among other things, to actually much Better health outcomes.

Mean i've relied for so much of my life on excEllent mentors from a very Young age and still now um in order to make best decisions possible with the information I had IT and rarely were they available for in the morning sometimes but not on a frequent basis. And they fatigue like anybody else and they have their own stuff like anybody else bagge events in life. Um what you're describing is a sort of a culture therapist of sorts that hopefully would learn to identify our best self and encourage us to be our best self.

And when I say best self, I don't mean that any kind of part psychology way mean I could imagine A I very easily knowing you know how well I sleep the night before and what types of good or bad decisions I tend to make IT to o'clock in the after, when I ve only had five hours of sleep, or maybe just less room sleep the night before. I might encourage me to take a little more time to think about something. My game, al, tap on the rest through a device that no one else would detect to. Um you refrain from something.

never going to judge you never going to be resentful. It's never going to be upset. You didn't listen IT right? It's never gonna unification. It's going to be there for you like I think is the way people are going to live. It's going to start with kids and then over time is going to be at all.

The way people are going to live is they're to have exactly friend, thorpe's, companion, mentor, coach, teacher, right, a system and that that that that or or by the way, maybe multiple of those may be about six, like different person's interacting, which is the possibility, but they're committed yeah actually different person made by the way, when there are difficult decision we made your life, maybe you to hear the argument among the different personas um and so you're just gona you're just going to grow up. You're just going to have this in your life and you're gonna be able to talk to IT and always be able to learn from IT and always be able to help you, make you. And like it's just it's going to it's be a sympathetic relationship. It's going I think it's be a much Better way to live. I think we're going to get a .

lot out of what modalities will IT include. So I can imagine my phone has this engine in IT, this AI companion and i'm listening in headphones as I walked to work and it's giving me some um not just encouragement, some warning, some um thoughts that things that I might ask mark and reason today that I might not thought of and so on. Um I could also imagine IT having a more human form I could imagine at being uh tactile, having some haptics.

So tapping to remind me so that it's not going to enter our our company version in a way that that in interference or distracts you. But I would be aware, oh right um you know things of that sort. I mean, how many different modalities are we going to allow these AI coaches to approach us with? And is anyone actually thinking about the hardware piece right now? Because i'm hearing a lot about the software peace ah what is the hardware piece look like?

Yeah so the entrepreneurs I is onna kick, and so the entrepreneur community is gonna all of those, right? The the big companies try all those. And so obviously, there's big companies that are working.

The big companies are talking about a variety of these, including no head up displays, A R V R, no kinds of things um know there's lots of people doing voice. The voice thing is voice is a real possibility. IT may just be erp.

Um there is a new startup that just unveils uh, a new thing um where is actually they actually project so you'll have like pendent, you were unlike the next place and actually like projects like literally like project images, like on your hand, like on the table around the wall in front of you. So like maybe that's how IT shows up. Um yeah there are people working on so called haptic ck or touch based uh kinds of things.

There are people working on actually picking up uh their signals like out of your ARM um right to be able to uh to be able to um there people there, you know there are some science for being able to do basically like a organza. Um so maybe you could pick up um you could pick up that way, don't conduction you know um so yeah these are all going to be tried. So so so that's one question is the physical formation.

And then I think the other question is the sofa version of that, which is like, okay, what's the level of abstraction that you want to deal with these things in? Like you right right now, it's like a question and answer a paradiso called chat bott, like ask question and answer, ask question and answer what you want that to go for sure to more of a fluid conversation. And you wanted to build up more knowledge of who you are, and you don't want to have to explain yourself a second time and so forth. And then you want to be able to tell you things like would remind me this battle, you know, be sure to tell me when x um but then maybe over time, more and more you want IT actually deciding when it's gonna k to you, right? Um and when he thinks that has something to say it's isn't otherwise that .

stays silent and and Normally at least in my head, unless I make a concerted effort to do otherwise, I don't thinking complete sences um so presuming these A I um these machines could learn my style of fragmented internal dialogue and maybe have in your piece and i'm walking in and and I start hearing something, but it's some you know advice at sara, encouragement, discouragement.

But at some point those sounds that I hear in an earphone are very different than seeing something. You're hearing something in the room. We know that based on the neuroscience of musical perception and language perception, hearing something in your head is very different.

And I could imagine at some point that the A I will cross the precipice where if IT has in line wiring to actually control neural activity in specific brain areas. And I don't mean very precisely, even just stimulating a little more prefrontal cortical activity, for instance, through the erp. You know little ultra sound wave now can stimulate prefrontal cortex in a non invasive way.

It's being used clinically and experimentally. Um that the A I could decide that I need to be a little bit more context aware, right? This is something that is very beneficial for those listening that are trying to figure out how to navigate through life.

It's like, you know know the context you're in and know the catalog of behavioral and words that are appropriate for that situation and not others. And um you know this would go along with agreeably ness perhaps, but strategic agreement ness, right? Context is important. Um there's nothing diablo about that context is important. But I could imagine E A I recognizing our we're entering a particular environment. I'm now actually going to ramp up activity and promptly cortex a little bit in a certain way that allows you to be more situations, ally aware of yourself and others, which is great unless I can't necessarily short circuit that influence because you know, at some point the AI is actually then controlling my brain activity and my decision making in my speech. I think that's what people fear, that once we call that recipes, that we are giving up control to the artificial versions of our human intelligence.

And look, I think we have to decide. And we we like with individuals, I think, have to decide, actually do that. And this is the big thing that I believe about, just a much more I article view of the world than a lot of the panic that you hear.

Just like these are machines. They are able to do things that increasingly are like the things that people can do in some circumstances. But these are machines.

We build the machines. We decide how to use the machines. When he watches turned on, they are turned on and we want to and turn off, they're turned off. Um and so yeah so I I think that's absolutely the kind of thing that the individual person should always be.

I mean, everyone was and I have to imagine some people are still afraid of crisper of gene editing. The gene editing stands to revolutionize our treatment of all sorts of diseases. Inserting and deleting particular genes in adulthood right to recombine in the woman a new a new organism is an immensely powerful tool um and yet the chinese scientists who did crisp a on humans, this has been done, actually did his postdoc at stanford.

We ve quake than to china. The cries on babies mutated something that I believe I was the HIV, one of the HIV receptors i'm told IT was with the intention of augmenting human memory IT had very little to do, in fact with limiting except ability to HIV percy to do with way that that receptor is involved in human memory. Um the world demonized to that person.

We actually don't know what happened to them whether not they have a laboratory now or they're sitting in jail. It's s not clear. But in china and elsewhere, people are doing Christopher on humans.

We know this. Um it's not legal in the U. S. And other countries, but it's happening. Do you think it's a mistake for us to fear these technologies so much that we back away from them and end up ten, twenty years behind other countries that could use IT for both benevolent or leveller reasons?

Yeah there is always you know the the details matter. So IT IT is technology by technology. But also there there's two things that you always have to think in these questions I think of as an opportunity cost, right. And so so Christopher, an interesting when Christopher humanities late, the human genome nature may place the human .

and big spouse child with you are .

quite possible. And you know if you're gg, can you know you're determined in the future? You know the humanity, right? I like like, yeah nature I may like mutations like so this is the this is the old question of like basically said, you know this state of nature, state of race, like we are basically is nature good and then therefore artifical things are bad um you know which is going to shot.

A lot of people have like ethical views like that. Um I I am I the view that like nature of bitch wants us dead, like nature out to get us man, like nature wants to kill us, right um like mature wants to like involve all kinds, like horrible viruses, nature was to be plagues. Nature wants to like do you whether nature was to all kinds of stuff, I mean like the real nature, religion was original religion right? Like that was original thing, people worshipped.

And the reason was because nature was the thing that was out to get you right um before you had scientific and technological methods to be able to be able to deal with. So so so the idea of not doing these things to me is just saying, oh, we're just going to turn over the future of everything to nature. And I don't think of that. There's no reasonably that, that leads in a particularly good direction or that's not a valuable decision.

Um and then the related thing that concern that is this always this question around was called the precautionary principle um which shows up in all these conversations on the things like riser er um which basically is this this principle that basically says the inventors of a new technology you should be required to prove not had no effects before they roll IT out um this of course is a very new idea. This is actually a new idea in thousand nine hundred and seventies, um actually invented by the german Greens in eighteen seventies. Um before that people didn't think in those terms, people just invented things uh and roll the mouth and we got all of modern civilization by people inventing things and roll in the mount. The german Greens came up with the precautionary of principle for one specific purpose .

up that you .

can guess what IT is but uh IT was to prevent diamond nuclear power. IT was shut down at time to do civilian nuclear power.

Um and if you fast for fifty years later, you're like, well, that was a big mistake right um so what they set of the time was you have to province react, not going to melt down and cause what kind of of problems and of course, as an engineer, can you prove that will ever happen like you can't like you you can't rule out like things that might happen in the future um and so that that philosophy was used to stop nuclear power, by the way, not just in europe, but also in the U. S. Around much of the rest of the world.

If you're somebody who's concerned about carbon emissions, of course, this is the worst thing that happened in the last fifty years. In terms of energy. We actually have the solver ballet answer to unlimited energy with their carbon emissions, nuclear power.

We, we choose not to do IT. Not only way we, we choose not to do IT. Where are SHE shutting down the plants that we have now right in california, we just shut down the big plant.

Germany just shut down their plants. Germany is the middle of energy war with russia, right? That we are informed as existential for the .

future of europe. But unless the risk of nuclear power plant meltdown has increased and I have imagine it's gone the other way, um what is the rational behind .

shutting down these points?

Sound.

yeah, yeah. I go nuclear. Clear on postal officers and you here.

go postal.

So what have so nuclear technology arrived on planet growth as a weapon, right? So that arrived in the first. First thing I did the ddd were two. The first thing I did was they dropped japan and then they were all the debates followed around nuclear weapons. And this there's a whole conversation to be had, by the way, about that because the different things you could out on that and then isn't like fifties and sixties where they started to roll out civilian nuclear power and then they were were out there were access there was like no three mile island meltdown down and never melt IT down and and then even recently, know him melt IT down um and so you know, there have meltdown one and so I think he was a combination of is a weapon um is sort of icky this scientist sometimes of the effector um right uh it's sort of radioactive glows Green you know Better way IT becomes you know becomes like a methyl tional thing and so you have all these movies of like orrible you supervillain powerful nuclear energy and all this other stuff.

What the insure of the sympson right is the nuclear power plane in the three eyed fish in the you know of all the negative implications of the nuclear power plant run by um at least in the sims idiots um and that is the you know um the disturbia where people .

are unaware of just how bad IT is and the right are blaming mac growing for the demise of a particular .

really didn't help didn't .

right but it's literally amazing thing. Or if you're just like thinking if you're just inking like rationally, scientifically, you were like, okay, we wanted to carbon this is the his way to do IT so so okay fun fact return next.

Um uh two two things that really matter on this so one is he defined in one thousand nine hundred seventy one and they all project independence, which was to create a thousand new state of the art nuclear plants, civilian nuclear plants in the us. By eighty and to get the U. S.

Completely off the oil and cut the entire U. S. Energy grade over to nuclear power.

Electricity cut over to electric car is the whole thing like detached from carbon. Um you'll notice that didn't happen. Um why did that not happen? Because he also created the E P.

A in the nuclear regulation commission, which that prevent to that from happening, right? And the nuclear regulatory commission did not authorized a new nuclear plant in the U. S.

For forty years. Why would he him string himself like that?

No, he got distracted by, yeah, what you yeah. I think elsberg .

just died recently. Guy released pending on page.

so placated exactly thing. He left off the later after he didn't have time to, you know, fully figured this out. I don't know whether he would have figured that out or not.

You know, look forward, could have figured that out. Carter could have figured out right, and could figured that out. Any of these guys could have figured that out. It's like the most of you, knowing what we know today is the most obvious thing in the world.

The russia thing is, the amazing thing is, like europe is literally funding russian invitation of ukraine by paying them for oil, right? And they can't shut off the oil because they won't cut over to nuclear, right? And then, of course, what happens OK.

So then here's the other kicker, what happens, right? Which is they won't do nuclear, but they want to do renewables, right? Sustainable energy. And so what they do as they do, uh, solar and wind, solar wind are not reliable because sometimes kids dark out and sometimes the wind doesn't boil. And so then what happens is they fire up the coal plants, right? And so the actual consequence of the precautionary principle for the purpose IT was invented as a massive Spike and use a call taking .

us back over hundred years. Yes, correct.

That is the consequence of the process of principle, like that's the consequence of that mentality. And so it's a failure of a principle on its own merits for the thing that was designed for. And then, you know, there there is a whole movement of people who want to apply to every new thing. And and and this is the hot topic on a right in washington, which is like, oh my god, these people have to prove that this can never get used.

thanks. Sorry, i'm hanging up on this nuclear thing. And and I wonder, can I just be renewed? I mean, seriously, I mean, there is something about the naming of things.

We know this in biology, right? I mean, 6 marky and evolution and think there are these are bad words and biology。 But we had a guest on this podcast, did russia vie who's over an israel is shown inherit traits. But if you talk about his lemark and IT has all sorts of negative implications, but he's the his discoveries have important implications for everything from inherited trauma to treatment of disease.

I mean, there's all sorts of positives that await us if we are able to reframe our thinking around something that yes indeed could be used for evil um but that has enormous potential and that is an agreement with nature right this fundamental truth that um least to my knowledge, no one is revising in any significant way anytime soon. So what if IT we're called something else because nuclear it's called you know sustainable, right? I mean it's amazing how marketing can can shift our perspective of.

Robots for instance. So or um a week I am sure you can come up with Better examples than I can but oh is very a good solid P R. A firm working from the nuclear side.

Thank you. So that was in .

favor of yeah which the way .

she's not SHE SHE said hundred percent yeah based on based on .

large in .

principle .

it's prevail ing prevAiling at environmental .

fifty years as the nuclear is all like they won't consider IT. There are, by the way, certain environmentals who disagree with this. And so I start, brand is the one that spent the most public, and he has impacted .

credentials in the space.

And he wrote the guy and and he's in a home bunch of really resting book sense. And he was a recent book that goes through in detail is like, obviously environmental thing to do is nuclear power. Um and we be we should be implementing project independence.

We should be building a thousand. We specifically we didn't say this is what I say. We should hear Charles coke. We should have a industries right and they should build us a lot of nuclear power plants, right? And then we should give him the presentin mental freedom for saving the environment.

And that would put us independent of our reliance on oil.

Yeah that we're done. The oil like to think about what happens. We're one of the oil zero emissions.

We're done with the ddd east. We're we're done. We were not drilling. We're drilling on american land anymore. We're not drilling on foreign lambs like we have no military entanglements. When in places we're drilling, we're not you despoiling alaska, we're not nothing no of sure, riggs.

Nothing we're done and you basically just you build state of the art planes engineering properly, you have just completely contain when those nuclear waste you just didn't tom, the waste right in concrete so IT just sits there you know forever um it's a very small you know what you know kind of thing um and you just and so this is like the to me it's like scientifically, technologically, this is just like the most obvious thing in the world. Um it's a massive tell on the part of the people who claim to be pro environment. They're not favorite.

And if I were to say, tweet that i'm pro nuclear power because it's the more sustainable former powers, if I hypothetically did that today, what would .

happen to me in this? Rt, people confuse you, master.

there are you. I'm unlikely to run that experiment. I what we all the different we do we were .

looking forever at that your turtle him being and now now we know IT right this is a great example of of um I I gave under a book on the way and here is my favorite new book as the title left when reason goes on holiday um this is a great example of IT is the people who are the people who simultaneous ly say their environments and say they are at a nuclear power like the position simply dari but that doesn't bother them like at all so let be clear I predict none of this will happen.

amazing. I need to learn more about nuclear power long a long .

call because you .

think we're just gna rever.

It's the energy source in the .

future because I can't .

be solar and when because they're not reliable. So you need something, it's not nuclear. It's going to be either like oil, natural s or call .

and you're unwilling to say bet on nuclear because you don't think that um the socio political leaders trends that are driving gets nuclear likely to dissipate anytime soon.

Not 这样。 I can't imagine IT would be great if they did. But the that that they are the powers that be are very locked on this as a position. I look, they have been signed this for fifty years, and so they have to reverse themselves off of bad position. I've after fifty years, and people really don't like to do that.

One thing that's good about this and other part test, is that Young people listen and they eventually will take over.

By the way, I will say a nuclear entrepreneurs um so there are a but there are a bunch bunch of Young entrepreneurs who we are basically not taking over for an answer um and they are trying to develop IT in, particularly as people trying to develop new very small farm factor um nuclear power um plants um with a variety of possible use kisses um so you know look maybe you know maybe they showed up the Better house trap and people take a second look but just rename IT.

So my understanding is that you think we should go all in on A I with the constraints that we discover we need in order to rain in safety and things that are not unlike social media, not unlike the internet.

I don't like what we should have. Take your power.

And in terms of the near infinite number of ways that A I can be envision to harm us, how do you think we should cope with that? Um psychologically you know because I imagine a lot of people is in this conversation think, okay, that all sounds great, but there are just too many what ifs that are terrible, right what if the machines take over? What if you silly example I gave earlier but um you know what if one day I logged into my um you know harder and bank account and its all gone, you know the diversion of myself like ran off with someone else and with all my money right my AI coach abandoned me for somebody else after I learned all the stuff that I taught IT IT took off with somebody else stranded you know and IT has of my bank account .

numbers like this kind of thing right?

Well we can throw in but an example as um to counter IT but kind of fun to think about where the human mind goes so right right yeah.

So first I want to separate the real problems and defect problems. So there's a lot a lot of fiction areas. I think you're just not real and the ones you just apple not just going to happen, and I can explain when that's not what happen.

So you you there's a set set of fake and the fake is are are ones or ones that just and I think technological, grounded, rational, it's the going to like wake up and decide to kill us all. It's going to like it's going to develop the kind of agency where is going to steal money, everything else our kids um like that's just that's not how works. Um and then there's also all these concerns of destruction of society concerns and this is this information hits speech defects like all that stuff um which I I don't think is a real as a is actually a real problem.

Um and then there's a bunch of bunch of economic concerns around um you know going to take all the jobs, all of those kinds of things we could talk about. I don't think those those those I don't think that's actually the thing that happens. But then there are two actual real concerns that I actually do very much agree with.

And one of them is is what you said, which is um bad people doing bad things. And there's there's a whole set of things to be done inside there. The big one is we should use AI to build defenses against all the bad things, right? And so for for example, that there's a concern as can make IT easier for for bad people to build pathogens, right?

Design pathogens in laws which you know bad people, bad scientists can do today. But this is going to make IT easier, easier. Well, obviously, we should have the equivalent of an Operation, warp speed Operating you know in perpetually unity anyway right? But then we should use A I to build much Better biodefense right?

And we should be using A I today to design like, for example, full spec of vaccines against every possible from my pathogen, right? And so so defensive mechanism um hacking, you can use A I to build Better defense tools, right? And so you should you should have a whole new kind of security sweet rap around you, wrapped around your data, rap around your money, where you're having A I A repel uh attacks. Uh this information, his speech, deep fakes, all that stuff. You should have an a filter when you use the internet where you know you shouldn't have to figure out whether it's really mere, whether it's it's a made up thing.

You should have an A I assistance banners and clock that you see on social. This has been deemed misinformation. You know, if you're me, you always click because you like what's behind the screen and then um or this is that I don't always look at that the this images is grew some type things, sometimes I just pass on that. But if it's something that um seems debatable, of course you look well and you .

you should have an AI assistant with you and you should be able to tell that assistant what you want, right? So yes, I want the full I want the full experience to show me everything um I want IT from a different point of view and I don't want to hear from these other people who I don't like, by the way, in my eight year old is using this.

I don't want anything that's going to cause a problem and I want everything filtered and AI base filters like that. The u program and control are going to work much Better and and be much more onest and strait forward and clear so far than than what we have today. So so anyway, so so basically what I want people to do is think every time, think of like a risk of how can be used.

Just think like, okay, we can use that to build a counter measure. And the great thing about the counter measures is they can not only offset A I risks, they can offset other risks, right? Because we already live in a world our pathogen are our problem, right?

Um we are to have Better vaccines um anyway, right? We already live in a world where the cyprus cking and cyber terrorism, they're already live in a world where there is back content on they are not. And we have the ability now to build much Better A I power to to be of other things.

I also love the idea of the A I physicians. You know, getting decent health care in this country is so difficult, even for people who have means or insurance. I mean, the number of phone calls and weights that you have to go through to get a to see a specialist.

I mean, it's absurd. Like, I mean, the process is absurd. I mean, IT makes one partially or Frankly ill just to go through the process of how to do all that. I don't know how anyone does IT um and grand I don't have um the higher degree of patients but i'm pretty patient and IT drives me insane even just get a remedial care.

But um so I can think of a lot of um the newlin uses of A I and i'm grateful that you're bringing this up and uh here and that you've tweet about IT in that thread again will refer people to that and that you're thinking about this. I have to imagine that in your role as investor nowadays that you're also thinking about A I quite often in terms of all these rules. And so does that mean that there are a lot of a Young people who are really bullish on A I and are going for IT? Yes, okay.

this is here to stay. yes. okay. yeah.

Unlike crisp r, which is sort of in this liminal place where biotech companies aren't sure if they shouted invest or not in in, in crisp r because it's unclear whether or not the governing bodies are going to allow gene editing. Just like IT was unclear fifteen years ago, they were going allow gene therapy, but now we know they do a lougee therapy and therapy OK.

So there is a fight now having said that, there is a fight a fight happening in washington right now over exactly what should be legal or not legal um and there's quite a Better risk, I think that should that fight right now because there are some people there that are being fit telling a very effective story to try to get people either outlaw A I or specifically limited to a small number big companies, which I think potentially is astra. Um by the way, the E U also is like super negative. You know the E U has turned super negative on basic all new technology they are moving to try.

But that's like saying you the internet, I don't see how you can .

stop this train Frankly, net either. So like, I think they regret the u has a very, especially the E U bearcroft. The people who run E U. In brussels have a very negative view on a lot of modernity.

But what i'm hearing here, you know, calls to mind things that i've heard people like David gog and say, which is there are so many um lazy, undisciplined people out there that now is it's easier and easier to become exceptional. I item say something to the extent IT almost sounds like there are so many countries that are just backing off of a particular technologies is because IT just sounds bad from the P. R. perspective. Um that you know it's creating great low hanging free opportunities for people to barge forward and countries to barge forward if they're willing to embrace this stuff.

IT is you number one, you have to have a country that wants to do that um and and exist in their countries like that um but and then the other is look that they need to be able to withstand the attack from a stronger countries that don't want them to do IT right. So like E U like the E U has nominal control over like what whatever IT is, twenty seven or whatever member countries.

So like even if you are like whatever the germans get all fired up about, whatever, like russels can still, in a lot of cases, just like flat out, basically control them and tell them not to do that, right? And then the U. S, I mean, look, we have we have a lot of control over a lot of the world.

but unlike we sit somewhere sort of in between, like right now, people are developing AI technologies in U. S. Companies, right? So IT is happening here.

Today is happening but like that there is a set of people who are very focused in the washroom right now about trying to either ban IT alright um or trying to, as I said, limit to a small number of big companies um and then look, china is got a whole china is got a whole different can take on this right that we do and so there of course going to allow IT for sure but they're going to low IT in the ways that the their system was to happen right is much more for population control um and implemented thorarin ism um and then of course they are going to spread their technology and their vision of house society should run across the world right so we're we're back and I called word dynamic like youth is so a union where there are two different systems that have fundamentally different views on on you can still like freedom and individual choice and free of peace so on um and you know we know where the chinese stand.

We're still figure out where we stand there. A lot of i'm having a lot of schizophrenia ving specifically a lot of schizophrenia sation of people in dc right now where if I talk to them and china IT doesn't come up, they just like hate tech. They hate american tech companies.

They hate AI. They hate social media. They hate that. They hate that the hate clipt hate everything and they just want to like punish ing, like ban and like they're just like very, very negative.

But then if we have a conversation half hour later, we talk about china. Then if the conversation totally different now, we need a partnership between the U. S. Government and companies to defeat china like the exact opposite discussion.

Is that fear competitive .

ess on china .

specific on in terms of the U. S. Response in washington? When you know you bring up these technologies like, you know, i'll lump crisper and there things like crisper nuclear power, AI and all sounds very cold, very distinct into a lot of people.

And yet there are all these everyone uses, as we've been talking about. And then you say you raise the issue of china, and then that sound like dark cloud emerging. And the only know if we need to get organized and develop these technologies to counter their effort. So is IT fear of them or is IT competitive ess or both .

or so without them in the picture? Um you just have this basically is there's no Better. When was saying as uh ah me guess my brother me my brother gets my cause me my brother, my cousin against you know the world right like so so is that is actually evolution and action.

If I think think about IT is there's no external threat, then the conflict turns. Um and then and that point, there's a big fight between specifically tech and then I was to say generally politics and and my interpretation that fight as it's a fight for status, it's undamned tly fight for status and for power uh which is like a different politics. You like you like this state school of how power and set us work in our society.

You don't want these new technologies to show up and change things because change is bad, right? change. Change threatens your position and threatens you, you know, the respect that people have for you and your controller over things.

So I think it's primarily a satisfied we can talk about um but the china thing is just like a straight up geopolitical as first as them, like I said as I could called war scenario. And twenty years ago the prevAiling be in washington was we need to be friends of china, right? And we're going to be trading partners to china.

And yes, there are to the talith an dictor ship. But like if we trade with them over time, the'd become more democratic in the last five, ten years has become more and more clear that that's just not true. Um and now there's a lot of people in both political parties in dc who very much regret that and want to change too much more of a lot of a cold work footing.

Are you willing to comment on tiktok and technologies that emerged from china that are widespread use within the U. S. Like how much you trust them or don't trust them? I can gone record myself by saying that early on, when tiktok was released, we were told the stanford faculty that we should not and could not have tiktok accounts nor we chat accounts.

So started with there are a lot of really bright chinese tech entrepreneurs and engineers. So we're trying to do good things. I'm totally positive.

So I think many the people that mean mean very well, but the chinese have a specific system, and this system is very clear and unambiguous, and the system is, everything in china is one by the party that is even even know by the state zone, by the party zone, by the chinese communist party. So the chinese communist party owned everything and they control everything. By the way, it's actually illegal to this day, it's illegal foreign ign investors by equity in the chinese company.

There's all these like basically legal make machinations that people do to try to do something that's like economic to that, but is actually still illegal to do that. The chinese have no tention. The chinese communist party has no intention of letting foreign own any of china, like zero intention about, and they regularly move to make sure that doesn't happen. So so so, so, so they know everything, they control everything.

So I was started control due. But people in china can invest in american companies. Well.

they can subject to U. S. Government constraints. There is there is A U S. Government system that attempts to mediate that called specific um and there are more and more, there are more and more limitations being put on that.

But if you can get through that approval process and legally you can do that or as the same is not true respect to china um and so um so so they just have a system and so if you if you're the C E O of a chinese company is not even if you're the C E O by dance or A C E O and is not up relationship, the chinese communist party is not optional. It's required and was required as you are a unit of the party and you and your company do what the party says. And when the party says, we get for x us all user data america, you say yes.

When the party says you change the algorithm to optimize to certain social result, you say yes, right? So so it's just it's whatever is whatever is whatever huge champagne and his party codes decide and that's what's gets implemented if you're A C U of a chinese tech company. There is a political officer assigned to you who has office down the hall um and any given time he can come down the hall, he can grab you out of your staff meeting or board meeting and he can take you on the hall and he can make you set for hours and study marxism and SHE damping thought and quiz you on IT, test you on IT and you Better pass the test right? So it's so it's like a straight political control thing. And then by the way, if you get rosse with them like you know.

so when we see tech founders getting called up to congress for know what looks like interrogation, but it's pretty, pretty light interrogation compared to what happens in other countries.

Yes, state stay power. They just they have this view of the down power, and they view the their system, and they view that is necessary for a lots of historical and moral reasons theyve defined, and that's how they run. And then theyve got a view that says how they want to proper ate their vision outside the country.

And they have these programs like golden road, right um that basically are intended to propagate of their vision, word's de um and so they are who they are. But I will say that they don't lie about IT very straight ward. They give speeches, they write books. You can buy SHE drink pink speeches. He goes through the whole thing, have tech twenty twenty five plan like ten years ago, whole I agenda all there .

and is their goal that you know, in two hundred years, three hundred years, that china is the superpower .

controlling twenty thirty years yeah I don't know. There is a little bit like this, I guess but yeah, if you they want to win. Well.

the crisp er in humans s example that I gave earlier was interesting me because first, while the neuroscientist and they could have um edited any genes, but they chose to edit the genes involved in um the attempt to create super memory babies which currently growing to supreme memory adults and whether or not they succeeded that isn't clear. Those babies are alive and presumedly by now.

Walking, talking as much as I know, whether not that supersedes ies isn't clear, but china is clearly unafraid to argument biology in that way. And I believe that that's inevitable. That's gonna en elsewhere, probably first for the treatment of disease. But at some point I assume people are going to augment biology to make smarter kids, make people um not always but um often will select mates based on the trades they would like their children to inherit.

So this happens far more frequently than could be deemed a bad because either that or people are bad because people do this all the time selecting mates that have physical and psychological and cognitive traits that you would like osprey to have crisp as a more targeted approach. Of course you the reason I can giving this example an examples like IT is that I feel like so much of the way that um governments and and the public reactive technologies is to just you take that first glimpse and IT just feels scary. Um think about the old apple ad of the know one thousand nine hundred eighty four ad.

I think there was one very scary version of the personal computer and computers and robots taking over and everyone like autom tones. And then there was the apple version, where it's all about creativity, love and peace. And I had the sudsy chidiac, california thing going for IT. Again, great marketing seems to convert people thinking about technology such that what was once viewed as very scary and dangerous and destroy an is like an oasis of opportunity. So why are people so afraid of new technologies?

So this is the thing i've tried to understand for a long time because the history is so clear um and the the history basically is every new technology is greeted by what's called a moral panic um and so it's basically this like historical freak out of some kind of courses. People are basically predict end of the world and you go back in time and actually historical of effect IT IT happens even things.

Now we just look back and ludo and so you mentioned earlier of the settings panic of of the eighties and the concern run like having medical music right before that there was like a freak ta on comic books. You know in the fifties there was a freak out around jaws music and the twenty and thirties step music um you know there was a freak out, the rival bicycles caused some moral panic and the like, eighteen, sixty bicycles, bicycles yeah so there was the thing at the time. So bicycles were the first um they were the first easy to use personal transportation thing that basically let kids travel between towns.

Um know quickly um without any overhead you know to take take to just stuff back and go um and so if there was a historical pending specifically around of the time Young women um who for the first time were able to venture outside the confines of the town maybe my friend, another town um and so the magazines of the time only stories on this phenomenon, medical phenomenon called bicycle face in the idea cycle face was the exertion caused by peddling a bicycle would cause your face, you your face with gram us and then if you run the bicycle for too long, your face with lock in the place you would be you would be unattractive therefore of course unable to them you know get married. Um cars there was a moral panic around car red flag laws. There are all these laws that great of the automobile tomomi people out. So there all these laws, if in the early as the automobiles um in a lot of places you have to um you would take a right automobile and automobile they brought down all the time.

So only rich people had automobile to be you and your mechanic in the car right when I broke down and then you had to hire another guy um to walk two hundred yards in front of the car with a red flag um and he had a way the red flag and so you can only drive as fast as he could walk as the red flag was to warn people that the the car was coming and and and and and pennsylania they had the most iconium version which was uh they were very worried about the car scare in the horses um and so there was a law that said if you saw a horse coming um you need to stop the car, you have to disassemble the car and you had to hide the pieces of the car behind the nearly bill way for the horse to go back and and then you could put your car back together anyway, this example is electorate lighting. There was a panic around like whether it's going to like completely ruin, it's going to completely ruin like the romance of the dark and IT was going to cause know a whole new kind of like terrible civilization where everything is always right tly IT. So there's just, I got all these examples and so py, okay, what on earth is happening that this is always what happens?

So I finally found this book that I think, as has a good model for IT, a book has called men, machines and modern times and it's written by the M I T. Professor like sixty years ago. So IT IT creates the internet um but IT uses a lot of historical saplings and what he says, but he says there's actually a three stage response.

There's a three stage societal response technology is very predictable, he said stage one is basically just denial, just ignore like we just like don't pay in test this and what he takes seriously, we just like just a on the whole topic um he said stage uh that stage one stage two is rational counter argument um so stage two is where you line up different reasons why this can't possibly work IT can't possibly ever get you know cheaper know this that no not fast enough for or whatever the thing is and then he said stage three he says is when the name calling begins um so he says stage three is like right right so when they fail, ignore IT and they failed to argue society out of IT, they move to the name calling right? And what's the name calling? The name calling is this is evil, is the more panic.

This is evil, this is terrible, this is awful. This is onna destroy everything like, don't you understand? Like, you know, just like this is this horny IT and you you know the person working on or being recklessly evil and stuff, and you must be stopped and and he said, the reason for that is because basically, fundamentally what these things are there are war over status um it's it's a war of the status and there for a war of power, of course ultimately money is huge man status is the thing.

And so because what he says is what what is the societal impact of a new technology? The societal impact of a new technology is a reorder status in society. So the people who are a specialist in that technology become high status, and the people who are a specialist in the previous way of doing things become low status.

And generally, people don't adapt, right? Generally, if you're the kind of person who is high status because you you're an evolved adaptation to an existing technology, you're probably not the kind of persons is going to enthusing enthusiastically trying to reply yourself on a new technology. And so and so this is like every politician who's just like a complete and ic about social media, like are they out about social media? Because they all know that the whole nature market politics change. Entire battery of techniques used to get elected before social media are now obsolete. Obviously, the best new politicians in the future are going to be hundred percent creations.

social media and podcast cast. We're seeing this now as we had towards the next presidential election. That podcast clearly are going to be featured very heavily in the next election because .

long form content is a whole different landscape. So this is exactly this is a whole .

is recently, and that's .

create a lot of but my understanding, he's invited everybody he've .

d to ask him. I mean, I think that every pod casters has their own ethos around who they invite on and why and how. So I certainly can't speak for. But but I have to imagine that any opportunities have true long form discourse that would allow people to really understand people's positions on things. I have to imagine that he would .

be in favor of that, or somebody else know that, right? And so so there's a if, at my point, exactly told groth you. But my point is if if you're a politician, if if you're say a legacy politician, right, you have the option of embrace in the new technology you can do anytime you want, right? But you you don't.

They're not. They won't. They won't do IT. And why won't they do IT? Well, okay. So first of all, they want to ignore IT or IT. They want to pretend that things aren't changing, you know.

Second is they want like have rational count arguments for like why the existing campaigns stem works the way that does and this in the existing media reports. And like you are you like the things and here's I give and here's the closely wear in the tie. And the thing in the pocket where and I you get size, is how you succeeded.

IT was coming up to that system. So you get your arguments as to why they will not work anymore. And then, and then we've now proceeded the name calling face, which is now is evil right now, is evil for somebody to show up and you know on a on on a stream, got for bid for three hours and actually say what they think, right it's going to destroy society, right it's exactly right.

It's like it's it's a classic example of this pattern and anyway it's more more than is in the book. Um basically this is the forever pattern like this will never change this. This is one of those things where you can learn about IT and still nothing if the entire world to learn about this and still nothing changes because at the end of the day, it's not IT has it's not the attacked. That's the question. It's it's the reordering of status.

Um have a lot of thoughts about the podcast component. I'll just say this because I want to get back to the topic of innovation of technology um but on a long form podcast, there's no safe zone, you know the person can get up and walk out. But if the person interviewing them, and certainly joe is um the best of the very best, if not the most skilled pogis ter in tire universe at continuing to press people on specific topics.

When there you try to bob and we live in rigger really loud, he'll just keep you know either drilling or alter the question somewhat in a way that forces them to finally come up with an answer of some sort. And I think that probably puts certain people's courters all levels through the roof um such that they just would never go on there. Think there's another .

deeply question also another question on with that, which is how many people actually have something to .

say all so right ah like how many people can actually .

talk a way that's actually interest anybody else for any long time like come my substance is there really and like a lot of historical politics was to be able to manufacturer of assad where you honestly, as far as like you can tell, like how how deef thoughts aren't like even if they have deep thoughts like kept away from you, they would really .

never got what's going to be an interesting next. What is IT about? Know, twenty months or so looking into .

the next selection.

the me calling, I, I, I, I. This list of three things, denial, know, the counter argument and name calling seems like with AI, it's already just jump to numbers two and three. We're already two and three and it's kind of leaning three. Yeah yeah.

that's great. So is unusual just because um IT has so take new technology to take off. They almost always have a prehistory.

They almost always have a thirty forty year history where people try and fail to get them to work before they took off. A I has an eighty year prehistory. So IT has a very long um and then IT just in all sudden started to work dramatically well, like seemingly overnight.

And so IT went from basically IT as far as most people were concerned, IT went from IT doesn't work at all to IT works incredibly well in one step. And that almost never happens. I saw I actually think that's exactly what's happening.

I think it's actually speed running this progressions just just because if you use major ney or you use GPT or any of these things for five minutes, just like, wow, like obviously this thing is going to be like, obviously in my life is going to be the best thing ever like this is amazing. There's all these ways that I can use that and then and then therefore immediately you're like, oh my god, this is going to transfer m everything. Therefore, step three .

right straight to the name calling in the face of all this, there are innovators out there. Maybe they are where they are innovators ah maybe they are already starting companies or maybe a they are just uh Young or older person who has these five trades in abundance or doesn't, but know somebody who does and is partnering with them in some sort of idea.

And you have an amazing track record to identifying these people, I think in part because you have those same trades yourself. I've heard you say the following are, the world is a very valuable place. If you know what you want and you go for IT with maximum energy and drive and passion, the world will often reconfigure itself around you much more quickly and easily than you would think.

That's a remarkable quote because IT says at least two things to me. One is that um you have a very clear understanding of the inner workings of these great innovators. We talk a little bit about that earlier, these five traits that set but that also you have an intense understanding of the world landscape.

And the way that we've been talking about IT for the last hour or so is that IT is a really intense and kind of impressive landscape. You've got countries and organizations, and you eat journalist, you know, that are trying to not to study, trying but are suppressing the innovation process. I mean, that's the picture that i'm getting.

So you it's like you were trying to innovate inside of advice that's getting progressively tighter. And yet this quote argues that IT is the the person, the boy or girl, men or woman, who says, well, you know what, that all might be true, but my view of the world is the way the worlds gonna bend. Or i'm going to create denin, that vice that allows me to exist, the way that I want.

Or you know what, i'm actually gonna curl device, the other direction and so um I met once picking up a sort of pessimistic glass half empty view of the world as well as a glass half view. And so tell me about that and and if you would, could you tell us about that from the perspective of someone listening who is thinking, you know i've got an idea and I know it's a really good one because I just know I might not have the confidence of extrinsic reward yet, but I just know there's a seed of something. What does IT take to Foster that? And um how do we Foster real innovation in the landscape that we're talking about?

Yeah part is I think you just then one of the ways to square I think you use the innovator need to be signed up to fight to fight right? So and again, this is well like the fiction of portrayals of start up. I think to take people, of course, scientist, what I rework is when there was great success stories, they get kind of pretious ed uh after the fact um when they get made to be like cute fun and like no like if you dig anybody who actually did any these things like now there was like these things are just like brutally is and just like sharing power in fighting and fighting fighting forces that are trying to get you so um so so hard as you just you have to be signed up to the fight and this kind of goes to the conscientiousness thing we're talking about.

We also my partner band uses the term courage a lot right which is some combination of like just stop us but coupled with like a willingness to take pain um and not stop um and you know how people think very bad things of you for a long time um until IT turns out you know you hopefully for your yourself correct um and so you have wanted do that like it's it's a this is the context port like it's these are easy roads, right it's the context port. So you have to be signed up uh for the fight the advantage that you have is an innovator um if is the is at the end of the day the truth actually matters um and all the arguments in the world, classic features, hugo quote, is there's nothing more powerful in the world. An idea whose time has come right, like if it's real right, and is so just pure substance if the thing is real, if the idea is real and if it's a legitimate good scientific discovery about how nature works, if it's a new invention um if it's a new work of art and if it's real, you know then you you you do at the end of the day, you have that on your side um and all of the people who are fighting you and arguing with you and telling you know they don't have that on their side, right?

It's not they're showing up with some other thing and they're like my thing is Better than your thing. Like that's not the main problem, right? The main problem is like I have a thing.

I'm convinced, ed, everybody else is telling me it's stupid, wrong, IT should be illegal, whatever the thing is. But at the end of the day, I still have the thing right. And so so, so at the end of the day, like you, the truth really matters.

The substance really matters. If it's real, it's really give an example. It's really hard historical to find an example of a new technology that came into the world that was then pulled back. And you and we know nuclear, maybe maybe an example of that.

But even still, there are still, you know nuclear there are still nuclear planes like running today um you that still exists um you know I ve said the same thing of scientific is like at least I always do this. I don't know, I don't know any scientific cover that was made and then people like at, I know, I know their areas of science that are not politically correct to talk about today. But every scientist knows the truth, right? Like the truth is still the truth. I mean, even the geneticists in the viet union who were forced to buy in a sanish, like knew the whole time that IT was wrong like that i'm completely.

yeah they couldn't include themselves, especially because that basic training the one gets in any field, establish the some court truth upon which even the crazy ideas have to rest. And if they don't, as you pointed out, things, all the pieces, I would say that even the technologies that did not hang out, and in some cases were disastrous, but that were great ideas at the beginning, are starting to pan out.

So the example I give is that most people are aware of the ElizabEthan mes theos the buckle to put IT lightly. You know, analyzing a what's in a single drop of blood is a way to analyzed hormones and disease and antibodies. That said, A, I mean, that's a great idea.

I mean, it's a terrific idea that was having a flin bottom is coming to your house or you have to go and get tapped with, you know the pulling vials in the whole thing. There's now compi um born out of stanford that is doing exactly what he sought to do except that at least the courts ruled that um SHE fudged the thing. And is that why she's in jail right now? Um but the idea getting a wide ray of markers from a single drop of blood is an absolutely spectacular idea. The biggest chAllenge that company is going to confront is the idea that is just the next s but if they ve got the thing and they're not judging IT as IT apparently theron's s was, I think everything will work out on a vitor .

hugo yeah and yeah because who was to go back if if they gets the work, if it's real, going to be this is the thing the opponents, the opponents, they're not bringing their own ideas like they're not bringing their own my ideas Better than neural I guess not what's happening. They are bringing the silence or counter argument right or anything.

This is why I think um people who need to be loved probably stand the um reduce chance of success um and maybe that's also why having people close to you that do love you and allowing that to be sufficient can be very beneficial. This gets back to the idea, partnership and family around innovators um because if you feel filled up by those people local to you you know in your home, then you don't need people on the internet saying nice things about you are your ideas because you're good and you can force forward.

Um another question about innovation is the teams that you assemble around you and you've talked before about um the sort of small squad and model David and goliath examples as well where you know a small group of individuals can um create a technology that Frankly out does what A A giant like facebook might be doing or what any other large company might be doing. There are a lot of theories as to why that would happen, but I know you have some unique theories. Um why do you think small groups can defeat large organizations?

So the conventional explanation is I think correct is just that um large organizations have a lot of advantages, but they just have a very hard time um actually executing anything because of all the overhead. So large organza have combinatorial communication overhead, right? The number of people who have to be consulted that who have to agree on things gets to be staggering.

The amount of time IT takes to schedule the meeting to be staggering. You know, you get these really big companies and they have some issue they are dealing with. And IT takes like a month to schedule the crew meeting, to like plan for the meeting, which is going to happen two months later, which is going to result in a post meeting, which then result in report presentation, which will then. Planning outside I thought I .

could amy was babble what you're describing, you giving me high coffee .

was coffee was a documented here like this is yeah so it's just like these these are I really like you have these organizations at a hundred thousand people are more like you're you're more of an nations I have accompany um and you've got all these competing internal you know the Better one thing I think before you got this internal like at most big companies, your internal enemies are like a way more dangerous .

to you than anybody in the outside .

aborted or yeah big, big at a big company, the big competition is for for the next promotion, right? And in the enemy for the next promotion is the next executive over in your company like that, your enemy.

The other is the competition on outside is like an abstraction like maybe that matter someday whatever I got ta be that guy, it's like my own company right um and so that the internal warfare is at least is intense, the external warfare um and so yes, it's just examine just all big, big acrylic how they functions. So if a bigger cracking ever does anything productive, I think it's like a macal. It's like a macal to the point where there should be like a celebration, there should be parties, there should be like ticker take parades for like big glaring organizations that I actually do things like that.

That's great because it's like so it's so rare IT doesn't have a very often. So anyway, so that's the conventional explanation where small companies, small teams, you know, there's a lot if they can't do because they can't they are not of bring a scale. They don't have global coverage, all of these, they don't have the resources so forth, at least they can move quickly, right?

They can organize fast. They can have me know there is an issue today. They can have a minute today.

They can solve the issue today, right? Everybody, they need to solve the issues in the room today and so they can just move a lot faster. Um I think that's part of that. But I think there's another deeper thing I to need.

Ads that people really don't like to talk about takes spector ll circle to where we started, which is just the sher number of people in the world who are capable of doing the things is just a very small set of people um and so you're not gonna have a hundred of them in a company or thousand or ten thousand. You're gonna have three, eight or ten. Maybe some of them are flying too .

close to the sun.

Some of them were are blowing themselves up. So I B M actually first learn that I was my first special job job was that I B M when I was, when I B M was still on top of the world right before IT caved in, and the really nineties.

And so when I was there, I was four hundred and forty thousand employees, which is again, if you inflation adjust, like today for that same size of business inflation adJusting market size adjust that IT would be the equivalent today of like a two or three million persons organza IT was IT was the nation state. Uh, there were six thousand people in my division. You know, we were next door to another building that had another six thousand people in another division.

So you just you could work there for years and never meet anybody who didn't work for IBM. The first half of every meeting was just IBM was introduce themselves to each other like just my boggling and the level of complexity but they were so powerful um that they had uh h four years ago I got three hundred ninety five. There were eighty percent of the market application of the entire tech industry, right? So so they were at a level of dominance that even you know google apple today is not even close to right at the time.

That's how powerful they were. And so they had a system, and IT works really well for like fifty years. They had a system which was if most of the employees in the company were expected to basically rigid, follow rules. So they just the same after the same, they did everything out of the playbooks. They were trained very specifically um but they had this category people they call wild ducks um and this is an idea that the fountain is watts to come up with wild ducks.

And the wild ducks were they often have the formal title of an IBM fellow and they were the people who could make new things and there were eight of them and they got to break all the rules and they got to invent new products. They got to go off and work on something new that in every report back, um they got to pull people of other projects to work with them. Um they got budget when they needed.

They reported directly to the C E. O. They got whatever they needed. He supported them in doing that. And they were glass brokers and you know they showed the one in Austin of the time was a guy, andy haler, and he would show up and you know genes and cover boots and you know what, gst, an ocean of men, you know, blue suits with ties um and put this copy, move up on the table.

And IT was fine for any health to do that, and I was not fine for you to do that. right? And so they are very specifically identified.

We have we have like like almost like a ristich rac class within our our company. They gets to play by different rules. Now the exploration is they deliver, right? Their job is to invest next free through product.

But we are be a management know that the six thousand person individual is not going to buy the next product. We know it's going to be a crazy handy hello and his in its cover boots. So I was always like very import and get like ultimately IBM had its issues. But like that model worked for fifty years, right like working incredible well.

And I I think that's basically the model that works um and so but it's a paradox, right, which is like how do you have a large biocon tic regimented organization, whether it's academia or governments or business or anything that has all these real followers and and all these people who were jealous of their status and don't want things to change but then still have that Spark of of creativity, I would say, mostly as impossible, mostly IT just doesn't happen. Those people get driven out, right? Any tech. What happens is those people get driven out because we will fund them.

people we do. I say that you are in the business of finding and funding the word.

And actually this is actually close, close the loop. This is actually, I think, a simple explanation for I M ultimately caved hp sort of eighties also. Okay, you know, I may should be kind of our model.

There are these incredible model ethic, incredible companies for forty or fifty years, then they kind of both keep them in the eighties and nineties. And I and actually think IT was the emergence of metro capital. IT was the emergence of a parallel funding system where the wild dogs, or in hp case there, their super start article, people could actually leave and start their own companies. And again, we goes back to university, discuss or having is like, this is what doesn't exist at the university level. This certainly does not exist at the government level.

And until recently, in media, IT didn't exist until there is a thing .

that we call podcast clearly .

have picked up some, some momentum. And I I would hope that these other wild duck models will will move quickly.

Yeah but the one thing you know you know like the one thing you know .

is the people on the other side are going to be yeah they're going to well I think um their past denial um the counter .

arguments continue yeah the name yes well, mark.

we've covered a lot of topics, but as with every time I talk to you, I learned so very much.

So i'm so grateful for you taking the time at your schedule talk about all of these topics in depth with us you know i'd be remissions ed and say that IT is clear to me now that you are hyper realistic about the landscape um but you are also intensely optimistic about the existence of wild ducks and those around them that support them that are necessary for the implementation of their ideas at some point and that also you have um a real rebel inside you. So that is also welcome on this podcast and it's also needed in these times and every time. So behalf of myself and the rest of us here at the poggin, especially the listeners.

thank you so much. Thanks for having me thank .

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