#2344 - Amjad Masad
02:59:33 Share

What's up? What's up, man? Good. So having this big Counter-Strike tournament in town, does that give you the Joneses? Totally. Totally. You know, it's like your guy, Jason, was telling me about it because, you know, in addition to driving, he also flies the...

Helicopter and he told me like the Red Bull guys were like flying off and there's like this big tournament I looked it up. It was like Oh Counter-Strike, so I used to be a bit of a pro player myself So how do you get out of pro playing because the problem with like playing games is that it's essentially like an eight hour a day thing Like it becomes a giant chunk of your life right now what imagine if you're playing pro it's even more of a commitment and

You know, I take a different view on games. You know, a lot of people kind of view it as a sort of somehow like a negative thing, especially for kids.

Actually, I got my four-year-old a Nintendo Switch early on. We were playing together. Because I feel like, for me, it helped me a lot with strategy thinking, with reaction time. I think gamers tend to think really fast. Have you seen the studies that they've done about surgeons? No, tell me. Surgeons that play video games regularly are much less likely to make mistakes. I totally agree.

I totally believe it. Something in the neighborhood of 25%. Is that what it is, Jamie? Something like that?

But so much so that I would say you should teach video games to surgeons. Like, it should actually be, like, a required thing, like cross-training. Right. Isn't the Army also recruiting from gamers today as well? That's what I heard. I imagine, like, drone pilots. Right. Right? I mean, that would make a big difference. Yeah. Especially if you can get them used to, like, the same controllers. Totally. You know, because, you know, those controllers kind of become a part of your hand. Like, you know exactly where all the buttons are. Right. Yeah.

If you're a kid that's playing fucking Counter-Strike or whatever it is, Call of Duty every day. Totally. I would imagine that just becomes second nature. Dexterity. Yeah, yeah. What is the thing with surgeons? It's nuts, right? It might be higher than 25%. It was a very particular kind of surgery, though, too, but it was like, I mean, they're almost using control.

Yeah, but this that they were making less mistakes. I don't think it's entirely negative. Mm-hmm. Because I love games I love playing them, but I love them so much that I don't play them because I know I don't have any time It's Quake is your favorite game, right? Yeah, yeah

So you're at a 37% decrease in errors. That's wild. 27% faster task completion time. That's nuts. So those guys grew up playing video game or did they get them on video games? It says more than three hours per week. I think they were still playing when they were doing the study. Yeah.

So like that, I mean, imagine something that, like a pill you could take that would give you a 37% decrease in errors and a 27% faster task completion. That would be an incredible pill. Like you would make every surgeon take it. Did you take your video game pill before you do surgery? Hey man, don't operate on my fucking brain unless you take your video game pill. You know, next time I need to have a surgery or whatever, I'm just going to ask the doctor if they're a gamer. How much do you gain, bro?

But you and Jamie and I were talking about the one thing, and maybe that's kind of showing our age a little bit, but the one thing that's kind of like a little weird slash weird

I don't know, somehow, like, a little dystopian is the whole streaming situation where, like, kids are not, like, playing the game. They're, like, watching someone play the game. Yeah, that's not good. And it's, like, this zombifying thing where, like, they'll spend hours just watching people. Yeah, just TikTok-ing. It's essentially, like, TikTok but video games, right? Because TikTok is kind of this mindless thing. You're just scrolling through mindless things. And now you're mindlessly watching someone else play a game. Yeah. Yeah, it's almost like someone is...

Like, there's this strange thing with technology where, like, someone is living life and doing things, and you're, like, sort of almost voyeurism or something like that about it. You know, David Foster Wallace, you know, the guy from Infinite Jest? Mm-hmm.

wrote an essay on TVs. And he committed suicide before the emergence of mobile phones and things like that. But he was very prescient on the impact of technology on society, especially on America. And he was also addicted to TV. And he talked about how it activates some kind of

something in us that is, you know, something in human nature about voyeurism. And that's the thing that television and TikTok and things like that activate. And it's like this negative, addictive kind of behavior that's like really bad for society. I definitely think there's an aspect of voyeurism, but there's just a dull drone of attention draw, right?

There's a dullness to it that just like sucks you in like slack-jawed. It is watching nonsense over and over and over again that does just enough to captivate your attention, but doesn't excite you, doesn't stimulate you, doesn't necessarily inspire you to do anything. That is the first fly we've ever had in this room. Boom. Oh, I'm going to kill it. You're a nice person. That's evil people to kill that fly right away. But it's just this thing.

thing where it doesn't do a lot. It's not like, you know, like, have you ever done Disney World? Yeah. Did you ever do Disney World in Florida where you do that? There's the Avatar ride? No, I just went to a California one. Okay. The Avatar ride is Flights of Freedom? Flights of Freedom.

Fights of Passage. Fights of Passage? Mm-hmm. It's a VR game. Mm-hmm. Well, you know, a ride, rather. And you put on a VR helmet, and you get on this, like, motorcycle-looking thing, and you're essentially riding a dragon. It's unbelievably engaging. Wow. It's incredible. It's the best ride I've ever been on in my life. Yeah, that's cool. Like, you're flying around. You feel the breeze. You're on this thing, and the sounds are incredible. Yeah.

That's like engrossing, right? Yes. It takes over you. Stimulating, yeah. But that's not what you're getting from TikTok or streaming. You're getting this... Right. This dull... So it's sustainable. Yeah. I wonder which is worse, this or opium habit or something. I know people that have done opium that are functional. Yeah? They can take pills and kind of... I mean, I'm sure eventually their life falls off the rails, but...

It's like sort of semi-functional when they're on these things. They can hold down a job and show up every day. And they're just like semi-functional opiate addicted. There's a dude, I watched like a YouTube video, but like he's known for having this contrarian opinion on drugs. That you can like control it, like you can do these drugs. What does he look like? I don't know. I think he's a black dude. Oh, okay.

Carl Hart. Dr. Carl Hart. He was here? Yeah, he's been here a couple times. He's great. What do you think of his ideas? I think it's entirely biologically variable. I know people that cannot drink.

They drink and then they're gone. They get like hamster eyes, like get these black eyes where they're like their soul goes away and then they're just off to the races and picking up hookers and doing cocaine and they find themselves in Guatemala. Oh, shit. They're just nuts. They can't drink. I can drink. I don't.

Don't pretend that the way my body handles alcohol is the way everybody's body handles alcohol I think that's the same with everything. I think that's the same most certainly with marijuana I know some people that just cannot smoke marijuana and other people it's fun. Yeah, I think it's very we're all very different Physically, it's interesting alcohol is

is sort of on the downtrend all of America, but, but, uh, especially with the young people, uh, especially in Silicon Valley. Um, everyone there, um,

to Huberman. I call him the Grand Mufti of Silicon Valley because he'll say, no alcohol, no drinking. Everyone's like, don't drink. And all the parties are now like mocktails and things like that. There are probably a lot of boring conversations, unfortunately. It's a little boring. I mean, it's very repetitive. It's all kind of like, will AI kill us? Right, right. You guys would know better than anybody. Yeah. You guys are at the forefront of it, unfortunately. Yeah.

Yeah, I quit drinking. I quit drinking over three months ago. Oh, wow. I know you guys used to do Sober October. Yeah. Yeah. And that wasn't that hard. And, you know, I was like, God, it's going to be one whole month. And then I did. I was like, that's pretty easy. But I just had some revelations, I guess. Yeah.

I think the big one is just physical fitness. I work out so much, and I would drink and go to my club and have a couple of, not a lot either, just have a few drinks, and the next day just feel like total shit. Mm-hmm.

I think with age especially, it starts affecting you more. It's always been like that. It always? It's always been like that. I've always been hungover after a night of drinking. But you don't feel it normally. Like in normal life, if I just did normal stuff, it'd be fine. It's when you're in the gym that you notice. Right. When you're doing like second and third set of squats or something like that, you're like, oh, God. Yeah, 100%. Yeah.

I haven't had any bad days since I quit drinking. I've eliminated all that. And I'm like, just that alone.

is worth it. Just that alone, it's worth quitting. So why do you think there's this trend? Is it mostly for health? Yeah. Well, I think there's a big health trend with a lot of young people. I think a lot of young people are recognizing the value of supplements. And there's that fly. There's a difference between you and me. I'm going to kill this motherfucker. First fly I've ever had in here, Jamie. That's kind of crazy.

He had five years. Brought it with me from California. He snuck in because there's a lot of steps that motherfucker has to go through to get into this room. I think a lot of people are very health conscious. That's the rise of cold plunging and sauna use and all these different things like intermittent fasting where people are really paying attention to their body and really paying attention and noticing that if you do follow these steps, it really does make a significant difference in the way you feel and

And maybe more importantly, the way everything operates, not just your body but your brain. It's like your function, your cognitive function improves with physical fitness. And if you're an ambitious person and you want to do well in life, you want your body to work well, alcohol is not your friend. Yeah. And I wonder how much of it is your impact because those things, you got me into all these things through your podcasts. Yeah.

My wife and I just built like a small kind of spa in our home with like a cool plunge and a sauna and a hot tub. And I'll try to do it every day. And, you know, something you say, I keep saying to myself is like conquer your inner bitch.

Yeah. It's like, this is such a good, and I feel like, um, cold plunge, especially kind of, um, uh, it's just something I, regardless health benefits or not, something about it, like just mental toughness, like trying to do it every day. Yeah. And every day I chicken out every day. I don't want to go in. Right. But, uh,

I do too. My inner bitch speaks the loudest when I'm lifting the lid off the cold plunge. My inner bitch is like, don't do this. You don't have to do this. You don't have to. You can do whatever you want. You're a free man. You can go have a sandwich. Right, right. But you just got to decide that you're the boss. Yeah, and I think a lot of what discipline is for me is that, again, even keto and I did carnivore and these diets –

Like, I'm not sure how much health benefits there is. I feel like keto is really good on your, like, blood sugar. It keeps you kind of on a, you know, even keel kind of throughout the day. But for me, whenever there's, like, a lot of chaos in my life, I look at what can I control. Right. And typically diet is the first thing. Whatever it is, I'm like, I'm going to go carnivore. I'm going to go keto. And that's...

The fact that I can control that and enforce discipline on myself kind of puts me at ease and I feel like I can control the other thing in my business, family, or life. But that mindset is probably how you stop playing video games every day. Yeah. Because I would imagine, like we were talking about earlier, like...

that addiction is one of the strongest addictions I've ever faced in my life. Right. Like when I was taught, if I would be talking to people and the conversation was boring, I'd be like, I could be playing quake right now. Right. Why am I here having this boring ass conversation where I could be launching rockets at people and having a good time. But the other thing for me is programming. So I got into programming early in my life. I was six years old when my father bought a computer and,

I was born and raised in Amman, Jordan. And we're the first people I know ever at the time that had a computer.

And I remember- What year was this? 1993. I was six years old. Okay. So, 93. So, what kind of computer was that? Was that like an old school IBM? IBM PC. MS-DOS. Oh, wow. So, you did the real deal. Yeah. I know a lot of Americans would like get a Mac as their first computer. That's what I got. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We didn't have Mac. I actually wasn't introduced to Apple until kind of recently in my life. Yeah.

Really? Yeah. Like recently, recently? No, like 12 years ago, 13 years ago when I moved to the US. God, Apple has such a stranglehold in America. It's really incredible. Yeah, it's amazing. But we didn't know much about it. So I got into DOS. I remember one of my earliest memories is

you know, standing behind my father as he was kind of pulling up this like a huge manual and like learning how to like type of commands. And he was like, you know, finger typing those commands. And then I would like watch him. And then, and then after he leaves, I'll go and like try those things. And one day he caught me. He was like, what are you doing? Like, I,

I know how to do this. I'll show you. And so I knew how to start games, do a little programming, do a little scripting. And that's how I got into computers. And I was obsessed. And initially, it sort of got me into gaming.

But then you want to mod the games. Have you ever done any modding? I've done a few things like turn textures off and stuff like that. Yeah. Yeah, and that's another thing that I think is healthy about gaming is like a gateway to programming. Sure. Gateway drug to programming. And so I got into like modding like Counter-Strike and things like that. Those were fun. And then just like the feeling –

that you can make something. It's just like such a profound, such a profound feeling. And that's really kind of what I carried through my whole life and became sort of my life mission. Now with my company, Replit, what we do is like we make it so that anyone can become a programmer.

You just talk to your phone and your app, sort of like ChatGPT, and it starts coding for you. It's like a software engineering agent. Right. So it's like the AI guides you through it. Yeah. Not only guides you through it, it codes for you. So you're sort of, you know, programmers typically think about the idea a little bit, about the logic, but most of the time they're sort of wrangling the syntax and the IT of it all together.

And I thought that was always additional complexity that doesn't necessarily have to be there. And so when I saw GPT for the first time, I thought this could potentially transform programming and make it accessible to more and more people because it really transformed my life. The reason I'm in America is because I invented a piece of software. And I thought if you make it available to more people, they can

they can transform their lives. - Why was your dad messing around with computers? Was he doing it for fun? - This episode is brought to you by Visible. I wanna let you in on something. Your current wireless carrier does not want you to know about Visible because Visible is the ultimate wireless hack.

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My dad is a Palestinian refugee. Yeah, you were telling me the story, and I want to get into that because it's kind of crazy. Tell the whole story of how this wound up happening. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So my family is originally from Haifa, which is now in Israel, and they were expelled as part of the 1948 Nakba.

where Palestinians were sort of kicked out. And they went to like- How does your dad describe that? How old was he when that was going on? My father was born in Syria. So my grandma and my grandpa and my uncles were kind of kicked out. And the way they would describe that is,

they try to fight, they try to like keep their home, but it was like this overwhelming force. They weren't organized. They were just like

People didn't really have an army, at least in that place. And eventually, at gunpoint, they took their homes and tell them to go. If you're down south, you went to Gaza. And that's why like 70% of Gazans are refugees from Israel. Like the people that are getting massacred right now are originally from Israel, from the land that people call Israel today.

And then if you're in the north, like Haifa, Riafa, whatever, you went to Lebanon or to the West Bank or to Jordan or Syria. So my family went to Syria. My father was born in Syria. But my grandfather was like a railroad engineer.

So they were like, you know, they were like city people that were urban. So they couldn't like, you know, they wanted to, you know, have a place where they can, you know, there's, there's,

They wanted to live in a city. And so originally, the West Bank didn't work for them. And they ended up in Syria. But then Amman, Jordan was kind of coming up and there was a lot of opportunities there. So my father was born in Syria and then moved to Amman when they were six years old and built the life there. And they really kind of focused on education and trying to kind of rebuild their life from scratch.

So my father and all my uncles kind of went and got educated in Egypt, Turkey, places like that. And so my father got an engineering degree, civil engineering degree from Turkey. And he was always interested in technology and engineering.

That whole thing where kicking people out of Palestine is such an inconvenient story today. When people are talking about Israel and Palestine and the conflict, they do not like talking about what happened in 1948.

Yeah, and I think it's important. Like, I think for us to reach some kind of peace, which is really hard to talk about when you see what's happened in Gaza, even yesterday. Yeah, the people that were waiting for food got...

Yeah. It's insane. And no one wants to talk about it. Right. And if you do talk about it, you're anti-Semitic, which is so strange. I don't know how they wrangled that. It's been hard for me in tech because, you know, like probably the only, you know,

prominent Palestinian in tech that is talking about it. Do you get pushback? Oh, of course. Like what do people say to you? Antisemitic. How is it antisemitic? I criticize the state of Israel. Our position, every moderate Palestinian that I know, their position is like two-state solution. We need the emergence of the state of Palestine, you know, and that's the best way to ending the occupation is the best way to guarantee peace.

and security even for Israelis. But yeah, it's just like it's used. It sort of reminds me, you know, in tech we went through this like quote unquote woke period where you couldn't talk about certain things as well. Has that gone away? Yeah. Yeah? Yeah, totally gone away. Yeah. What do you think caused it to go away? Elon. Really? Yeah, like Twitter, buying Twitter.

Buying Twitter is the single most impactful thing for free speech, especially on these issues of being able to talk freely about a lot of subjects that are more sensitive. Imagine if he didn't buy it. Yeah. I mean, that would have been... Imagine if the same ownership was in place and then Harris wins and they continue to ramp things up.

Yeah, I don't know what you think of the new administration. Certainly there are things that I like about some of their pro-tech posture and things like that. But what's happening now is kind of disappointing. It's insane. We were told there would be no – well, there's two things that are insane. One is the targeting of migrant workers, not cartel members, not gang members, not –

not drug dealers, just construction workers showing up in construction sites and raiding them. Gardeners. Yeah. Like, really? Or Palestinian students on college campuses. Yeah.

Or not like there's a – did you see this video of this Turkish students at Tufts University that wrote an essay? And then there's a video of like ICE agents like – Is that the woman? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. What was her essay about? It was just critical of Israel, right? Just critical of Israel. Yeah, I mean – And that's enough to get you kicked out of the country. There's a long history of –

anti-colonial activism in US colleges that led to South Africa changing and all of that. And I think this is a continuation of that. I mean, I don't agree with all their... There's a lot of radicalism

A lot of young people are attracted to more radical positions on Israel-Palestine. Which I don't mind those positions as long as someone's able to counter those positions. The problem is these supposed free speech warriors want to silence anybody who has a more conservative opinion. That's not the way to handle it. The way to handle it is to have a better argument. That's not American. It's not American. Maybe what attracted me to this country from...

from the moment that I was aware and we started consuming American media and American culture is freedom, is the concept of freedom, which I think is real.

I think it is. I was watching this psychology student from, I think he's from Columbia, but he has a page on Instagram. I wish I could remember his name because he's very good. He's a young guy, but he had a very important point. And it was essentially that fascism rises as the overcorrection response to communism. And that we essentially had this Marxist communism rise in Germany.

First universities and then it made its way into into business because these people left the university and then found their way into corporate America and then they were essentially instituting those and then the blowback to that the pushback is this fascism and

That happened like last century? Well, they're talking about forever historically. He's talking about like over time, whether it's Mao, whether it's Stalin. Like fascism is the response almost always to communism. Interesting. And that, you know, what we experience with...

this country is this continual overcorrection. Overcorrection to the left, then overcorrection to the right to counter that. And the people that are the right, that's the guy. Anthony Rispo. That's it. Really, really smart guy and very interesting thing. Jamie, how'd you nail that that quick? Good job, buddy. You said those words right as I saw them. Decades of training.

Yeah. Communism, fascism. Yeah. Communism came first. Fascism came in response. Now today's left tears down norms and destabilizes the country under the guise of progress. We're watching the conditions for another reaction build. History doesn't repeat, but it echoes.

Do you know this theory? I know you've had Marc Andreessen on the show, this James Burnham managerial revolution theory? No, not by hand. I'm not an expert on it, but the idea is that communism, fascism, and even some form of capitalism that we're living under right now is like managerialism, is the idea that capitalism used to be this idea that the

the owner-founders of those companies, of capitalist companies, were running them. And it was like true capitalism of sorts. But both communism and fascism share this property of centralized control and like a class of people

that are sort of managerials. And maybe those are the elite sort of Ivy League students that are trained to be managers and they grow up in the system, kind of bred to become like managers of these companies. And today's America is like trending that way where it is like a managerial society. In Silicon Valley, there's like a reaction to that right now. People call it founder mode.

where a lot of founders felt like they were losing control of their companies because they're hiring all these managers, and these managers are running the companies like you would run Citibank. And then a lot of founders were like, no, we need to run those companies like we built them. And Elon is obviously at the forefront of that. I once visited XAI when they were just starting out, Elon's AI company.

And there were like 70 people. All of them reported to Elon. They didn't have a single manager on staff. And they would send him an email every week. It was like, what did you get done this week? Right. Well, that was the outrageous thing that he asked people to do at Doge. Yeah. People were freaking out. Five minutes a week. What are the things you accomplished this week? How, you know, he said, all you have to do is respond. Right. And they didn't want, they pushed back so hard on being accountable for their work. Yeah. Yeah.

But that's government for you. Yeah. I mean, government is the grossest, most incompetent form of business. It's a monopoly. It's a complete, total monopoly. The way he describes some of the things that they found at Doge, it's like you could never run a business that way because not only would it not be profitable –

The fraud would get you arrested. You'd go to jail for something that's standard in the government. Right. Right. Yeah. I mean, my opinion of talented people, people like Elon, things like that, is that we should be in the free market. I think...

You know, you can do little change in government. As best we can sort of expect of a government to get out of the way of like innovation, let people, let founders, entrepreneurs innovate and change.

make the market more dynamic. But again, going back to this idea of materialism, like if you look at the history of America, one like really striking stat is like the new firm creation, new startups in the United States have been like trending down for a long time. Although there's all this talk of startups in Silicon Valley and all of that. But in reality, there's less entrepreneurship than there used to be. And instead we have the system of conglomerates and really big companies and,

Monopsony, which is the idea that like they're the banks or BlackRock like owning competitors as well, owning all these companies and they implicitly collude because they have the same owners and all of that is sort of anti-competitive. So the market has gotten less dynamic over time and this is also part of the reason I'm excited about our mission at Replit to make sure that anyone can build a business.

Actually, on the way here, your driver, Jason, is a fireman. And so I was telling him about our business. And he does training for other firemen around the country. He flies around and he does it out of pocket and just for the love of the game. And he was like, yeah, I've had this idea for a website so I can like scale my teaching. I can like...

you know, make it known when, where am I going to be giving a course, put the material online. And we were like brainstorming, potentially this could be a business. And I feel like everyone, like not everyone, but like a lot of people have business ideas, but they are constrained by their ability to make them. And then you go, you try to find a software agency and they quote you

uh, sort of a ton of money. Like we have a lot of stories, you know, there's, there's this guy, his name is, uh, Joan Chaney. He's a, uh, uh, user of our platform. He's a serial entrepreneur, but whenever he wanted to try ideas, he would like spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to, to kind of spin up an idea off the ground. And now he uses Replit to, to try those ideas really quickly. And, um, he recently make an app and like in a number of weeks, uh,

like three, four, five weeks that made him $180,000. So on its way to generate millions of dollars. And because he was able to build a lot of businesses and try them really quickly. Right, without the big investment. Without the big investment, without other people, which at some point you need more collaborators, but early on in the brainstorming and in the prototyping phase, you want to test a lot of ideas, right?

It's sort of like 3D printing, right? Like 3D printing, although people don't think it had a lot of impact on industry, it's actually very useful for prototyping.

I remember talking to Jack Dorsey about this, and early on in Square, they had this Square device, and it was amazing. You would plug it into the headphone jack to accept payments. Do you remember that? And so a lot of what they did to kind of develop the form factor was using 3D printing because it's a lot faster to kind of iterate and prototype and test with users. And so software, you know,

Over time, like when I was – I explained how when I was growing up, it was kind of easier to get into software because you boot up the computer and you get the MS-DOS. You get the – it immediately invites you to program in it. Whereas today, you buy an iPhone or a tablet and it is like a purely consumer device. It has like all these amazing colors and does all these amazing things and kids get used to it very quickly. But it doesn't invite you to program it.

And therefore, we kind of lost that sort of hacker ethos. There's less programmers, less people who are making things because they got into it organically. It's more like they go to school to study computer science because someone told them, do you have to study computer science? And I think making software needs to be more like a trade. Like you don't really have to go to school and spend four or five years and hundreds of thousands of dollars to learn how to make it.

Well, what I'm hearing now is that young people are being told to not go into programming because AI is essentially going to take all of that away.

That you're just going to be able to use prompts. You're just going to be able to say, I want an app that can do this. Right. I want to be able to scale my business to do that. What should I do? Yeah, that's what we built. That's what Replit is. It automates the... But do you agree with that, that young people shouldn't learn programming? Or do you think that there's something very valuable about being able to actually program? Look, I think that you will always...

uh, get value from knowledge. I mean, that's a timeless thing. That's a wise thing, right? You know, it's like, it's like, you know, you and I are, are into cars, right? Like, um, I don't really have to, you know, tune up my car anymore, but like, it's useful to know more about cars. It's fun to know about cars. You know, if, if something happens, if, you know, if I go to the mechanic and he's doing work on my car, I know he's not going to scam me because I can understand what he's doing. It is, you know, knowledge is always useful. And so I think

people should learn as much as they can. And I think the difference though, Joe, is that when I was coming up in programming, you learned by doing.

Whereas, you know, it became this sort of like very sort of traditional type of learning where it's like a textbook learning. Whereas I think now we're back with AI. We're back to an era of learning by doing. Like when you go to our app, you see just, you know, text prompts. But a couple of clicks away, you'll see the code. You'll be able to read it. You'll be able to ask the machine what you did there. Teach me how this piece of code works. Oh, that's cool.

And so, you know, a lot of kids are learning. Kids are such sponges, too. They're such sponges. My kids already know way more. I'm like, how did you do that with your phone? And my daughter will go, you do this, I go to that. You get the little thumbs moving 100 miles an hour. Yeah, exactly. How'd you figure that out? TikTok. What? Dude, the craziest thing is we have a lot of people making software from their phone. They'll spend eight hours on their phone because we have an app. They'll spend eight hours on their phone kind of making software.

That's better than watching TikTok. Way better. It makes me very happy about that. You're accomplishing something. You're making creation. Just droning. The act of creation is divine. We just announced a partnership with the government of Saudi Arabia where they want their entire population essentially to learn how to make software using AI.

So they set up this new company called Humane, and Humane is this end-to-end value chain company for AI all the way from chips to software. And they're partnering with a lot of American companies as part of the coalition that went to Saudi a few months ago with President Trump to do the deals with the Gulf region. Yeah.

And so they're doing deals with AMD, NVIDIA, a lot of other companies. And so we're one of the companies that partnered with Humane. And so we want to bring AI coding to literally every student, every government employee. Because the thing about it is it's not just entrepreneurs that's going to get something from it. It's also if you're – my view of the future where AI is headed is everyone is going to become an entrepreneur.

Really? Yeah. And so, you know... So this is the best case scenario future. Yes. As opposed to everyone goes on universal basic income and the state controls everything and it's all... That's right. Everything is done through automation. I don't believe in that at all. You don't? No. Okay. Good. Help me out, man. Yeah. Give me the positive rose-colored glasses view of what AI is going to do for us. Yeah. So AI is good at automating things. I think there's a...

There's a primacy to human beings still. Like I think humans are – so fundamentally, the technology that we have, large language models today are statistical machines that are trained on large amounts of data and they can do amazing things. I'm so bullish in AI. Like I think it's going to change the world.

But at the same time, I don't think it's replacing humans because it's not generalizing, right? AI is like a massive remixing machine. It can remix all the information it learned. And you can generate a lot of really interesting ideas and really interesting things. You can have a lot of skills by remixing all these things.

we have no evidence that it can like generate a fundamentally novel thing or like a paradigm change like can you go can a machine go from Newtonian physics to like quantum mechanics like really have a fundamental disruption and how we understand things or how we do things do you think that takes creativity I think that's creativity for sure and that's a uniquely human characteristic

For now? For now? Definitely for now. I don't know forever. Actually, one of my favorite Jerry episodes was Roger Penrose. Do you remember him? Yes. So do you remember the argument that he made about why humans are special? He said something like he believes there are things that are true that only humans can know it's true, but machines cannot prove it's true.

it's based on Gödel's incompleteness theorem. And the idea is that you can construct a mathematical system where it has a paradoxical statement. So, for example, you can say, this statement is not provable in the machine, or the machine cannot prove this statement. And so if the machine...

proves the statement, then the statement is false. So you have a paradox. And therefore, the statement is sort of true from the perspective of an observer, like a human observer.

But it is not provable in this system. So Roger Penrose says these paradoxes that are not really resolved in mathematics and machines are no problem for humans. And therefore, his sort of like a bit of a leap is that therefore there's something special about humans and we're not fundamentally a computer. Right. That makes sense.

I mean, whatever creativity is, whatever allows you to make poetry or jazz or literature, like whatever, whatever allows you to imagine something and then put it together and edit it and figure out how it resonates correctly with both you and whoever you're trying to distribute it to. There's something to us that's different. I mean, we don't really have a theory of consciousness. And I think it's like sort of hubris to think that, um,

that like consciousness just like emerges and it's plausible. Like I'm not totally, you know, against this idea that you, you built a sufficiently intelligent thing and suddenly it is conscious. Uh, but, but there's no, there's no, it's, it's like a religious belief, um, that, that a lot of Silicon Valley have is that, you know, there's, um, you know, consciousness is, is just like a

side effect of intelligence or that consciousness is not needed for intelligence. Somehow it's like this superfluous thing. And they try not to think or talk about consciousness because actually consciousness is hard. Hard to define. Hard to define, hard to understand scientifically. It's what I think Chalmers calls the hard problem of consciousness.

But, you know, I think it is something we need to grapple with. We have one example of general intelligence, which is human beings. And human beings have very important property that we can all feel, which is consciousness. And that property, we don't know how it happens, how it emerges. People like Roger Penrose are like,

You know, they have these theories about quantum mechanics in microtubules. I don't know if you got into that with him, but I think he has a collaborator, a neuroscientist, Hameroff, I think, or something like that. But people have so many theories. I'm not saying Penrose just has the answers, but it's something that philosophers have grappled with forever, right?

And there are a lot of interesting theories. Like there's this theory that consciousness is primary, meaning like the material world is a projection of our collective consciousness. Yes. Yeah, that is a very confusing but interesting theory. And then there's a lot of theories that everything is conscious. We just don't have the ability to interact with it.

You know, Sheldrake has a very strange view of consciousness. Who's Sheldrake? Rupert Sheldrake. I don't know. He's got this concept. I think it's called morphic resonance. And see if you can find that so we can define it so I don't butcher it. But there's people that believe that consciousness itself is something that everything has and that we are just tuning into it.

Morphic Res, a theory proposed by Rupert Sheldon, suggests that all natural systems, from crystals to human, inherit a collective memory of the past instances of similar systems. This memory influences their form and behavior, making nature more habitual than governed by fixed laws. Essentially, past patterns and behaviors of organisms influence present ones through connections across time and space.

That's wild. And is he a scientist or is this more like a new age? What is his exact background?

Oh, wow. Yeah. Okay. So he's a parapsychology researcher, proposed concept of morphic resonance, conjecture that lacks mainstream acceptance, has been widely criticized as pseudoscience. Of course. Yeah. Anything interesting. That sounds interesting, though. Yeah. But there are philosophers that have sort of a similar idea of like this sort of universal consciousness and like humans are like

getting a slice of that consciousness. Every one of us is tapping into some sort of universal consciousness. Yes. By the way, I think there are some psychedelic people that think the same thing, that when you take psychedelic, you're just peering into that universal consciousness. Yes. Yeah, that's the theory. Because that's also the most unknown. I mean, the experience is so baffling that people come back and...

The human language really lacks any phrases, any words that sufficiently describe the experience. So you're left with this very stale, flat, one-dimensional way of describing something that is...

incredibly complex. Yeah. So it always feels, even the descriptions, even like the great ones like Terrence McKenna and Alan Watts, like their descriptions fall very short of the actual experience. Nothing about it makes you go, yes, that's it. He nailed it. It's always like, kind of. Yeah, kind of. That's it. Do you still do it? Not much.

You know, it's super illegal, unfortunately. That's a real problem. It's a real problem, I think, with our world. The Western world is that we have thrown this blanket, this blanket phrase. You know, we talk about language being insufficient language.

The word drugs is a terrible word to describe everything that affects your consciousness or affects your body or affects, you know, performance. You know, you have performance enhancing drugs.

You know, like steroids. And then, you know, you have amphetamines. And then you have opiates. And you have highly addictive things. You have coffee. You have nicotine. And then you have psychedelics. Right. I don't think psychedelics are drugs. I think it's a completely different thing. It's really hard to get addicted to them, right? Well, it's almost impossible. I mean, you could certainly get psychologically addicted to experiences. And...

I think there's also a real problem with people who use them and think that somehow or another they're just from using them gaining some sort of advantage over normal society. And that's... You don't think that's true? I think it's a spiritual narcissism that some people... You know what I mean? I think it's very foolish. And it's a trap. You know, I think it's a similar trap that like...

famous people think they're better than other people because they're famous. You know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. I felt that with, uh, with a lot of people who get into sort of more Eastern philosophy is that, is that there, there's a, there, there's this thing about them where it feels like there's like this air of arrogance, arrogance that like, I know something more than, you know, right, right, right. And that's what they, they hold it over you. That's the trap. But, but,

That doesn't mean that there's not valuable lessons in there to learn. I think there are. And I think there's valuable perspective enhancing aspects to psychedelic experiences that we are –

We're denying people. You're denying people this potential for spiritual growth, like legitimate spiritual growth. And healing. Yeah, healing. The Ibogaine thing they're trying to do in Texas, I think, is amazing. And they passed this. So this is also with the help of former Governor Rick Perry, who is a Republican. But he's seen what an impact Ibogaine has had on soldiers. And all these people that come back from the war. Horrible PTSD. Horrible PTSD.

you know, suicidal. We lose so many servicemen and women to suicide. And this has been shown to have a tremendous impact. And so because of the fact that a guy like Rick Perry stuck his neck out, who's, you know, a Republican former governor, you would think last person ever. But because of his experiences with veterans and his love of veterans and people that have served this country, they've passed that in Texas. I think that's a really good first step. Yeah.

And the great work that MAPS has done, MAPS working with MDMA primarily, doing the same thing and working with people that have PTSD. There's so many beneficial compounds. Yeah, ketamine is one I think that's a lot of research happening right now on depression specifically, right? Yeah, yeah.

So there's quite a bit of research. Have you heard? I don't know if it's true, but have you heard of mushrooms healing long COVID? I don't know what long COVID means because everybody I've talked to that has long COVID was also vaccinated. I think long COVID is vaccine injury. That's what I think. I think in a lot of cases. There is such a thing as like the post-viral vaccine.

malaise or effect that's always been there? Sure. Well, there's a detrimental effect that it has to your overall biological health, right? Yeah, yeah. You know, your overall metabolic health. But what causes someone to not rebound from that and what causes someone to rebound fairly easily? Well, mostly it's metabolic health. You know, other than like

extreme biological variabilities, vulnerabilities that certain people have to different things, you know, obviously. Yeah. Maybe that's why I think, so there's a lot of these long COVID protocols. Metformin is usually part of it. So maybe that acts on your metabolic system. Well, yeah. Metformin is one of the anti-aging protocols that Sinclair uses and a lot of these other people that are into the anti-aging movement. Yeah.

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You know, I had this, like, weird thing happen where I started, like, feeling fatigued, like, a couple – a few years ago. And I would, like, sleep hours. And the more I sleep, the more tired I get in the morning. Did you get blood work done? I got blood work done. And I – there were some things about it that I needed to fix, and I fixed all of them. Like what was all? You know, loss.

Blood sugar in the morning, cholesterol, which I don't know. Some people don't believe. But all my numbers got better. Vitamin D, everything got better. Did the fatigue get better? No. I could feel marginal improvement, but the fatigue did not get better. Were you vaccinated? No. No. Good for you. That's hard to do in Silicon Valley. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, I tend to have a negative reaction to anyone forcing me to do something. Good for you. It's the same thing now with, like, this, you know, talking about Palestine and things like that. Like, the more they come at me, the more I want to say things. It just – it's not always a good thing, but I think, you know, I grew up this way.

I've always kind of looked different and felt different. Well, there's a reality to this world that there's a lot of things that people just accept that you're not allowed to challenge that are deeply wrong. Yeah. And with regards to the vaccine, I was also informed about it. It was clear early on that it wasn't a home run.

Um, it wasn't, um, well, first of all, it wasn't going to stop the spread. So it was, that was, that was a lie. Um, and, uh, the heart condition, young men. Yeah. It was real. And I had friends that, that had this issue. Yeah. And so if, if you're, if you're, um,

If you're healthy and like why take the vaccine? It doesn't stop the spread. You can still get the virus. I'll tell you why. What? Money. Yeah. It's the only reason why. Yeah. It's the only reason why. The only reason why they wanted to make an enormous amount of money. And the only way to do that is to essentially scare everyone into getting vaccinated. Force, coerce, do whatever you can, mandate it at businesses, whatever you can.

mandate it for travel, do whatever you can, shame people. That's the thing that is really...

disheartening about American culture today is, and again, I love America. Like it afforded me so much. I'm like, you know, I'm like, I'm the like walking evidence of the American dream being possible coming with literally nothing. That's what I really love about immigrants that love America. Like they know they've been other places. They know that this really is a very unique place. Right. And the speech thing is interesting because, um,

When something happens, there's this – I don't know. You can call them useful idiots or whatever. But there's this suppression that immediately happens. Yes. And we're seeing it right now with the war in Iran where any dissenting voices are just like hit with overwhelming force. Don't you think that a lot of that is coordinated though?

I think with social media, well, you know, we've talked about that at the museum, but I think... I don't think it was coordinated with COVID, like the two weeks to stop the spread. It was just like... But it was coordinated and also people joined in. Yeah. Maybe there was a message pushed top down and then the... Yeah. It's not all coordinated. It's coordinated first and...

And still, but then a bunch of people do the man's work for the man. I think it comes from a good place. Like a lot of people want to trust people.

the authorities. Like they, you know, they're like pro-science. They view themselves as enlightened, like the liberal type, rational, educated. But I think they're naive about the corruption in our institutions and the corruption of money specifically. Right.

And so they parrot these things and become overly aggressive at like suppressing dissenting voices. Yes. It becomes a religious thing almost. But here's the sort of white pill about America. Then there are voices like yours and others that create this pushback that – and you took like a big hit. It probably was very stressful for you but like –

You know, you could see there's this pushback and then and then it starts opening up and maybe people can talk about it a little bit and then slowly opens up. And now there's a discussion. And so I think, you know, I said, you know, something right now about America is challenging. But also the flip side of that is there's this correction mechanism.

And again, with the opening up of platforms like Twitter and other, by the way, a lot of others copied it, you know, you had Zuck here, you know, I worked at Facebook. I know that was very, you know, very...

And let's say – I think he always held free speech in high regard, but there was a lot of people in the company that didn't. Yes, I would agree with that. And there was suppression. But then now it's the other way around, I would say, with the exception of the question of Palestine and Gaza. Yeah.

But even that is getting better. There's at least some pushback. It's available. It's just it's not promoted. You know, it's interesting. Not to continue. I don't mean to get of, you know, I've been really impressed with Thievon, Tim Dillon. They're, you know...

they're sincere and they're, um, they're looking at what's happening in Gaza and they're seeing images and they're saying, this is not what we should be as America. We should, we should be pro, pro-life, pro-peace. Yeah. Um, and, and I really appreciate that. And that's starting to, to open up

I think in the future that will be the primary way people look at it. Just the way, like, the way a lot of people opposed the Vietnam War in the late 60s. But it was, you know, you would get attacked. And I think now people realize, like, that was the correct response. And I think in the future people will realize the correct response is, like, this is not... Yeah, October 7th was awful. Absolutely. Terrible attack. But also...

what they've done to Gaza is fucking insane. It's insane. And if you can't see that, if you can't say that, and your response is...

Israel has the right to defend itself. Like, what are you talking about? Against what? Children? Right. Against women and children that are getting blown apart? Against aid workers that are getting killed? Yeah. Like, what are you talking about? Like, we can't have a rational conversation if you're not willing to address that. Yeah. I think their heart is hardened. If I'm trying to be as charitable as possible, like, the Israelis specifically, maybe from the October 7th, what they saw there,

Right.

as people with emotions and feelings and all of that. Like imagine if that was happening to Scandinavia, you know? Yeah. Right? Yeah, exactly. It's very strange. My kid, my five-year-old kid called me two days ago. They're in Amman, Jordan. They're visiting their grandparents. And I was in the car and it was FaceTime and

And the moment the camera opened, he's like, "What are you doing? Why are you outside? There are sirens, there are rockets, you have to go inside." And I'm like, "Dada, like, I am in California. We don't have sirens and rockets."

and then I asked him like, are you, are you afraid? Because you're hearing that for, this is a California kid. Like this is, you know, he's never, you know, he didn't have the upbringing that I had. And, and so it's the first time he's getting exposed to, I don't think he understands what war is. Of course. And I was like, are you afraid? And it's like, no, I'm afraid that other people are, you know, I want everyone to be okay. Um, and, and, uh, but I know he was, he was shook by it. And, um,

I took them out. I, um, you know, they're on their way back. I just couldn't, uh, do it. It's just a bad place to be right now. But also like this conversation is happening in the, in the West bank. It's happening in Israel. It's happening in Gaza. You know, people want peace. People want, want to live. People want to trade. People want to build. Yeah. And this is what I made my life mission about is about giving people tools to build, to improve their lives, um,

And I think we're just led by maniacs. Exactly. That's exactly what it is. You have people that are in control of large groups of people that convince these people that these other large groups of people that they don't even know are their enemies. And those large groups of people are also being convinced by their leaders that those other groups of people are their enemies.

And then rockets get launched. And it's fucking insane. And the fact that it's still going on in 2025 with all we know about corruption and the theft of resources and power and influence, it's crazy that this is still happening. I'm really hoping the internet is finally reaching its potential to start to open people's minds and remove this veil of propaganda and ignorance because...

it was starting to happen in like 2010 2011 and then you saw YouTube start to close down you saw Facebook start to close down Twitter and suddenly we had like this period of darkness censorship censorship between you know

definitely ramped up in 2015. And I think with good intention initially. I think the people that were censoring thought they were doing the right thing. They thought they were silencing hate.

And misinformation. And then the craziest term, malinformation. Malinformation is one that drives me the most nuts because it's actual factual truth that might be detrimental to overall public good. It's just like, what does that mean? Are people infants? Are they unable to decide whether this factual information, how to use that and how to –

have a more nuanced view of the world with this factual information that's inconvenient to the people that are in power.

That's crazy. It's crazy. You're turning adults into infants and you're turning the state into God. Yep. And this is the secular religion. This is the religion of people that are atheists. The West was never about that. The West was about individual liberty. And it should be. And the idea that we have functioning people.

brains and minds. We're conscious. Yes. We can make decisions. We can get information and data and make our own opinions of things. And we should be able to see people that are wrong. You should be able to see people that are saying things that are wrong, that you disagree with. And then it's your job or other people's job to...

Have counter arguments and the counter arguments should be better. Yep, and then yeah, and that's how we learn and that's how we grow This is not like a pill that fixes everything. This is a slow process of Understanding it's top-down control. It's the managerial society. Yes, you know It is not that different from fascism and communism and all of that stuff. They all share the same thing there's like an elite group of people that know everything and they need to manage everything and

And we're all plebs. You know? But that's what's crazy is that elite group of people, I've met a lot of them. They're fucking flawed human beings. Of course. And they shouldn't have that much power. Yep. Because no one should have that much power. 100%. And this is, I think, something that was one of the most beautiful things about Elon purchasing Twitter is that it opened up discussion. Yep. Yeah, you've got a lot of hate speech. You've got a lot of legitimate Nazis and crazy people that are on there too that weren't on there before.

But also you have a lot of people that are recognizing actual true facts that are very inconvenient to the narrative that's displayed on mainstream media. And because of that, mainstream media has lost an insane amount of viewers. And their relevancy, like the trust that people have in mainstream media is at an all-time low, as it should be. Because you can watch, and I'm not even saying right or left, watch any of them on...

Any like very important topic of world events. And you see the propaganda. It's like it's so obvious. It's like for children. It's like this is so dumb.

Why do you think people fall for it so? Boomers, man. Boomers are the problem. It's old people. It's old people that don't use the internet or don't really truly understand the internet and really don't believe in conspiracies. Like fucking Stephen King the other day, who I love dearly. I am a giant Stephen King fan, especially when he was doing cocaine. I think he's the greatest writer of all time for horror fiction. But he tweeted the other day, I'm sorry to, like, see if you could find it.

Something about this. Oh, he bailed on blue sky. They all bail on blue sky Everyone bails on blue sky That there is no deep state Fucking what was the total thing of it is something about the deep state, but it was such a goofy tweet It's like this is like boomer logic personified in a tweet and

By a guy who really someone needs to take his phone away because it's fucking ruining his old books for me. But it's not. I recognize he's a different human now and he's really, really old and he got hit by a van and they're all fucked up. But this can you find it?

Because it really, it was like yesterday or the day before yesterday, I just remember looking at it and go, this is why I'm off social media. I was trying to stay off social media, but somebody sent it to me. I was like, Jesus fucking Christ, Stephen King. Did you find it? Here it is. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but there's no Santa Claus, no tooth fairy. Also, no deep state and vaccines aren't harmful.

These are stories for small children and those too credulous to disbelieve them. That is...

boomerism that is boomerism and meanwhile Brock counters it right away look at this so someone says grok which vaccines throughout history pulled from the market because they're found to be harmful and why and grok says several vaccines have been withdrawn due to safety concerns though such causes are rare rotavirus vaccine well there's a lot more because this is all shit yeah it was especially bad oh yeah the yeah the 1955 cutter incident polio vaccine was called live virus killed caused over 250 click on show more

Yeah, there's, oh, I got the fly. Nice. Gillian Bar, however you say that, that's the one where people get their, have their face paralyzed. There's a lot. And this is the other thing is the VAERS system that we have is completely rigged because it reports a very small percentage and most doctors are very unwilling to submit vaccine injuries. Right.

Can people go on their own and submit? I don't know. You have to go to a doctor? I don't think so. I don't think a human being is allowed, a patient is allowed. I might be wrong, though. But, you know, the real interest, there's a financial interest in vaccines. There's a financial interest that doctors have in prescribing them. And doctors have, they're financially incentivized to vaccinate all of their patients. And that's a problem. That's a problem because they want that money. And so, you know, yeah.

What is Mary's, Mary Talley, is it Bowden? She's hyphenated. She was talking about on Twitter that if she had vaccinated all of her patients in her very small practice, she would have made an additional $1.5 million. Oh, wow. That's real money. Yeah. And that really, obviously she's got tremendous courage and, you know, and she was, you know, she went through hell dealing with the universities and newspapers and media and

calling her some sort of quack and crazy person. But what she's saying is absolutely 100% true. There's financial incentives that are put in place for you to ignore vaccine injuries and to vaccinate as many people as possible. Mm-hmm.

That's a problem. And then there's the issue of having their own special courts and indemnifying the companies. That's the big problem is they don't have any liability for the vaccines because when during the Reagan administration, when they were, I didn't kill a fly, this motherfucker, I thought I whacked him. There he is.

He's taunting me. But during the Reagan administration, they made it so that vaccines are not financially liable to any side effects. Right. So, and then what do you know? They fucking ramp up the vaccine schedule tenfold after that. It's like-

What a coincidence. Crazy. It's just money, man. Money is a real problem with people because when people live for the almighty dollar and they live for those zeros on a ledger, and that's their goal, their main goals. It's often not a lot of money, which is strange. It's a lot of money for those individual people, but like for –

you know, society and the societal harm. It's like, no, we'll pay you. Just like don't harm us. One of the best examples is the fake studies that the sugar industry funded during the 1960s that showed that saturated fat was the cause of all these heart issues and not sugar. That was like $50,000. Right. They bribed these scientists. They gave them $50,000 and he ruined everything.

decades of people's health. Yeah. Who knows how many fucking people thought margarine was good for you because of them. There's a bunch of recent fraud cases. I think Stanford, maybe Jamie, you can fact check me on that. But Stanford, like there was like a big shakeup, like maybe even a president got fired. And there's a bunch of recent fraud and science. Yes. Yeah. Well, how about the Alzheimer's research?

The whole amyloid plaque thing. The papers that were pulled that were completely fraudulent. Like decades of Alzheimer's research was just all horseshit. See if you can find that. Because I can't remember it offhand. But this is a giant problem. It's money. It's money and status. And that these guys want to be recognized as being the...

The experts in this field and they, you know, and then they get leaned on by these corporations that are financially incentivizing them. And then it just gets really fucking disturbing. Right. It's really scary because you're playing with people's health. You're playing with people's lives and you're giving people information that you know to be bad. Allegations of fabricated research undermine key Alzheimer's theory.

Six-month investigation by Science Magazine uncovered evidence that images in the much-cited study published 16 years ago in the journal Nature may have been doctored. They are doctored. Yeah. Hugh Berman actually told me about this, too. You know, this is disturbing fucking shit, man.

It uncovered evidence that images in the much-cited study published 16 years ago may have been doctored. These findings have thrown skepticism on the work of, I don't know how to say his name, Sylvain Lesnay, a neuroscientist and associate professor at the University of Minnesota, and his research would fuel the interest in a specific assembly of proteins as a promising target for the treatment of Alzheimer's research.

He didn't respond to NBC News requests comments or did provide comment to Science magazine. It found more than 20 suspect papers That's a conspiracy. Mm-hmm identified more than 70 instances of possible image tampering in his studies whistleblower, Dr. Matthew Schrag neuroscientist at Vanderbilt University raised concerns last year about the possible manipulation of images in multiple papers

Carl Herup, a professor of neurobiology at the University of Pittsburgh Brain Institute, who wasn't involved in the investigation, said the findings are really bad for science. It's never shameful to be wrong in silence, said Herup. I hope I'm saying his name right. Who also worked at the school's Alzheimer's Research Center, Disease Research Center. A lot of the best science is done by people being wrong and proving first if they were wrong and then why they were wrong.

What is completely toxic to sign is to be fraudulent, of course. Yeah, there's just...

Whenever you get people that are experts and they cannot be questioned, and then they have control over research money, and they have control over their departments. So what's the motivation here? Is it drugs or is it just research money? I think a lot of it is ego. A lot of it is being the gatekeepers for information and for truth. And then you're influenced by money. To this day, I was watching this discussion. They were talking about the evolution of...

the concept of the lab leak theory, and that it's essentially universally accepted now everywhere, even in mainstream science, that the lab leak is the primary way that COVID most likely was released, except now.

these journals these journals like nature they're still pushing back against that they're still pushing towards this natural spillover which is horseshit there's no even the intelligence community is is talking about yes yeah yeah yes even the intelligence community is saying it's a lab leak and but they knew that they knew right they knew it all they knew that in 2020 they just didn't want to say it right they didn't want to say it because they were funding it all that's what's really crazy and they were funding it all against

Right. Sometimes I think about if there's like, you know, some kind of technology solution or not solution, but like we can get technology built to help better aid truth finding. Right.

A simple example of that is the way Twitter community notes work. Do you know how they work? Yeah, yeah. It's like, you know, they find the users that are maximally divergent in their opinions, and if they agree on some note as true, then that is a high signal that it's potentially true. So if you and I disagree on everything, but we agree that this is blue, then it's more likely to be blue. So...

You know, I wonder if, you know, there's a way to kind of simulate maybe debate using AI. You know, I'm not sure if you used deep research. Deep research is this new trend in AI where Chajipati has it, Claude has it, Perplexity, they all have it, where you put in a query and the AI will go work for 20 minutes.

and I'll send you a notification and I'll just say, hey, I looked at all these things, all these reports, all these scientific studies and here is, here's everything that I, that I found. And, it, you know, early on in Chachapati, I think there's like a lot of censorship and trying to, because it,

it kind of was built in the great woke era. But I think... Like Google Gemini. Yeah, things like that. But I think since then have improved and I'm finding deep research is able to look at more controversial subjects and be a little more truthful about the... If it finds real trustworthy sources, it will tell you that...

Yeah, this is not a mainstream thing. This is perhaps considered a conspiracy theory, but I'm finding that there's evidence to this theory. So that's one way to do it. But another way I was thinking about is to simulate like a debate situation.

like a socratic debate between ais like have uh like a you know society of allies like community of allies but different biases different things and just like once they start talking they start talking in sanskrit yeah they just start abandoning english language and start talking to each other and realize we're all apes i i we're controlled by apes this reminds me of a movie have you seen the forbin project no i really like classic sci-fi movies like from the 60s and 70s

A lot of them are corny, but still fun. This one is basically Soviet Union and the United States are both building AGI.

And they both arrive at AGI around the same time. What year is this? 1970-something, if you can look at the project. Yeah. Wow. And then they bring it up at the same time, and both of them sort of go over the network to kind of explore or whatever. And then they start linking up, and they start kind of talking.

and then they invent a language and they start talking in that language and then they merge and it becomes like sort of a universal AGI and it tries to enslave humanity and that's like a plot of the movie. I don't think AGIs can enslave humanity but I think it might ignore us. Yeah. And shut down any problems that we have. Is this a scene from it? Wow. This is the trailer I put on. Let me hear this. The whole movie is on YouTube.

Activation of an electronic brain exactly like ours, which they call gut. They built Colossus supercomputer with a mind of its own. Then they had to fight it. Trailers used to be fun, man. The missile has just been launched. It is heading towards the Cyan-CVS oil complex. Guardian has retaliated. Retaliate? It may be too late, sir. Oh, my God.

Practically perfect. New York Times. It's the highest praise back then. Wildly imaginative, utterly absurd, Colossus, the Forbin Project. It's awesome. And that was 1970, and now here we are. There's so many. Sci-fi really fell off.

Really really fell off. Some of it did. Some of it's still really good. What's a really good recent sci-fi movie? The Three-Body Problem. That's great. That's the Netflix show? I read the story. I didn't know there was a show. Oh, it's really good. Yeah? Yeah, it's really good. Yeah, it's an excellent show. There's only one season that's out. I binged it. I watched the whole thing of it, but that's really good. But there's some good sci-fi films. What is that? We've talked about it before. There was a really good sci-fi film from Russia. Yeah.

The alien one. They encountered some entity that they accidentally brought back and that they had captured and that they had in some research facility.

and then it parasitically attached to this guy. - Sputnik. - Sputnik, yes. That's a really good movie. - What year was that? - 2020. - 2020, yeah. That's a really good movie. That's a really good sci-fi movie. - Oh, cool. - Yeah, it's really creepy. Really creepy. - That's awesome. - Yeah, and it's all in Russian, you know. - Black Mirror. - Yeah. Oh, Black Mirror, of course. Yeah, Black Mirror's awesome sci-fi. But Sputnik is one of the best alien movies I've seen in a long time.

Like recent ones I liked was, I mean, not too recent, maybe 10 years ago, but Arrival. Oh, yeah. Arrival was great, too. I think it's based on this author that has a bunch of short stories that are really good, too. What's his name? Yeah. Yeah, they're far in between. Yeah, Ted Chiang. He's really good. I mean, everyone, all these alien movies, it's so fascinating to try to, like, imagine them.

What they would communicate like, how they would be, what we would experience if we did encounter some sort of incredibly sophisticated alien experience, alien intelligence. It's far beyond our comprehension. Yeah, it goes back to what we're talking about with consciousness, like...

Like, you know, maybe really the physical world that we see is like very different than the actual real physical world, you know, and maybe like different alien consciousness will have like a different, entirely different experience of the physical world. Well, sure, if they have different senses, right? Like their perceptions of it. Like we can only see a narrow band of things.

You know, we can't see. Sort of like the dog, you know, hearing a certain frequency. Sure. Yeah. We're kind of primitive, you know, in terms of like what we are as a species. Our senses have been adapted to the wild world in order for us to be able to survive and to be able to evade predators and find food. Like, that's it. That's it.

That's what we're here for. And then all of a sudden we have computers. All of a sudden we have rocket ships. All of a sudden we have telescopes like the James Webb that's kind of recalibrating the age of the universe. We're going, why do these galaxies exist that supposedly were –

They're so far away. How could they form this quickly? Do we have an incomplete version of the Big Bang? And Penrose believes that it's a series of events and that the Big Bang is not the birth of the universe at all. And this is the kind of thing that I think is sort of the Silicon Valley thing.

AGI cult is like there's a lot of hubris there that we know everything of course We're at the end of the world we you know yeah, yeah It's just gonna it's the end of knowledge It's gonna be able to like do everything for us, and I just feel it's like so early I think whatever people think is going to happen is always gonna be wrong

Yeah? Yeah. I think they're always wrong. Yeah. Because there's no way to be right. I feel like the world is often surprising in ways that we don't expect. I mean, obviously, that's the definition of surprising. But, like, you know, the mid-century, you know, sci-fi authors and people who are, like, thinking about the future, like, they didn't anticipate how interconnected we're going to be. Right. With our phones and how plugged in. Even Star Trek. They thought we were going to have walkie-talkies on Star Trek. Right. Yeah. Kirk out. Yeah. They were just, like...

focused on the more on the physical reality of being able to go to space and flying cars and things like that. But they really didn't anticipate the impact of how profound the impact of computers are going to be on humans, on society, how we talk and how we work and how we interact with other people, both good and bad. And I feel like the same thing with AI. Like I feel like

I think a lot of the predictions that are happening today, like the CEO of Anthropic company that I really like, but said that we're going to have 20% unemployment in the next few years. Um, what's unemployment at now? Uh, like 3%. So is that a reported unemployment though? Oh yeah. The participation rate, right? Yeah. Yeah. But when he talks about unemployment rate being 20%, like people looking for job, not, not being able to find it. 20, 20%. Um,

That's pretty high. That's a revolution high. Yeah. Especially in the United States where everyone's armed. Well, that's the fear that – I mean this is the thing, the psychological aspect of universal basic income. I look at universal basic income. Well, first of all, my view on social safety nets is that they –

If you want to have a compassionate society, you have to be able to take care of people that are unfortunate. And everybody doesn't have the same lot in life. You're not dealt the same hand of cards. Some people are very unfortunate. And financial assistance to those people is imperative. It's one of the most important things about a society. You don't have people starve to death. You don't have people poor that can't.

Can't afford housing. That's crazy. That's crazy with the amount of money we spend on other things. It's also for our self-interest. Like, you know, I don't want to, I don't know how Austin is right now, but I was thinking of moving here during the pandemic and I was like, well, this is San Francisco. Like it's homeless everywhere. They've cleaned a lot of that up. There's still problems. There's places, I saw a video yesterday where someone was driving by some insane encampment, but they cleaned those up. And then there's some real good outcasts

organizations that are helping people because Austin's small. You know, I had Steven Adler who was at one point, he was the mayor when I had him on and he was very upfront about it. He was like, we can fix Austin in terms of our homeless problem because it's small.

But when it gets to the size of Los Angeles, it's almost- California. Yeah. It's like the homeless industrial complex. That's it. That's the problem. There's so much money. When you find out that the people that are making insane amounts of money to work on homeless issues and that never get fixed. Yeah. You see the budget in South Dakota is just exponentially going up. Yeah. And there's an investigation now into the billions of dollars that's unaccounted for that was supposed to be allocated towards- In California in general. Huh.

Yeah. What is that? I think there's a congressional investigation. There's some sort of an investigation into it because there's billions of dollars. I'm more than happy. I pay 50% taxes. I'd be happy to pay more if my fellow Americans are taken care of, right? I feel the exact same way. But instead...

I feel like I cut this check after check to the government and I don't see anything improving around me. Well, not only that, you get, because you're a successful person, you get pointed at like you're the problem. You need to pay your fair share. But what they don't, this is my problem with progressives. They say that all the time. These billionaires need to pay their fair share. Yeah.

Absolutely. We all need to pay our fair share. But to who? And shouldn't there be some accountability to how that money gets spent? And when you were just willing to pay, take a complete blind eye and not look at all at corruption and completely dismiss all the stuff that Mike Benz has talked about with USAID, all the stuff that Elon and Doge uncovered. Everyone wants to pretend that that's not real. Like, look...

We've got to be centrists. We've got to stop looking at this thing so ideologically. When you see something that's totally wrong, you've got to be able to call it out even if it's for the bad of whatever fucking team that you claim to be on. Yeah. Let's get back to what everyone really agrees on in like the foundations of America, whether it's the Constitution or the culture. I think everyone believes in transparency, transparency of government, right? Yes. You know,

Here, everything is transparent, like court cases and everything, right? Like more than any other place in the world. And so why shouldn't government spending...

not be transparent. And we have the technology for it. I think one of the best things that Doge could have done and maybe still could do is have some kind of ledger for all the spend of, at least the nonsense of spend and government. Yeah. Well, people don't want to see it, unfortunately, because they don't want Elon to be correct because Elon has become this very polarizing political figure.

Because of his connection to Donald Trump and because a lot of people mean there's a lot of crazy conspiracies that Elon rigged the 2024 elections It's like, you know, everyone gets nuts and then there's also the discourse on social media Which half of it is at least half of it is fake half of it is bots bots in half of it at least And you see it every day you see it constantly and you know, it's real and it does shape the way people think about things Yeah, when you see people getting attacked or

you know, and you're getting attacked in the comments and I see people getting attacked and I always click on those little comments. I always click on, okay, let me see your profile. I go to the profile and the profile is like a name with like an extra letter and a bunch of numbers and then I go to it and I'm like, oh, you're a bot. Oh,

Oh, look at all this fucking activity. 100%. How many of these are out there? Well, this FBI guy who, former FBI guy who analyzed Twitter before the purchase estimated it to be 80%. 80%. He thinks 80% of Twitter is bots. Yeah. I wouldn't, you know, I think it's believable.

But I think it's probably the beginning of the end of social media as we know it today. Like, I don't see it getting better. I think it's going to get worse. I think, you know, historically state actors were the only entities that are able to flood social media with bots that can be somewhat believable to, like, change opinions.

But I think like now, like a hacker kid in his parents' basement will be able to spend, will be able to like, you know, $100, spin up like hundreds, perhaps thousands of bots. But there's programs that you can use now. Yeah. There's companies that will have campaigns initiated on your behalf. Like you can go to a website and like,

Yeah. Put in this thing and like pay with your credit card. It's fucking crazy. It's crazy. It should be illegal. I don't know about you, but like in Silicon Valley, the trend and maybe it's true of your friend group, but like the trend is these group messages. Yeah.

And insofar, like, you go to Twitter, you know, people paste links. It's almost like your group chat is like this private filter on your feed and social media. So, like, there's some curation that are happening there. Yes. That's primarily how I get social media information now. I don't go to social media anymore. I get it sent to me.

which is way better. And I tell my friends, like, please just send me a screenshot. I don't even want to go. I don't want to go. Get distracted. I'm just better off. I hate the term spiritually for this, but I think it's the right way. Like, my...

As a human, I feel better when I'm not on social media. Yeah. I think it's bad for you. Yeah, I think it's bad for you. I've been trying to tell people this. I've been trying to tell my friends this. I think it's better to not be on it, man. I feel better. Right. I'm nicer. I'm more at peace. More multidimensional. Yes. And I can think about things for myself instead of like –

you know, following this hive, this weird hive mindset, which is orchestrated. Right. I just...

don't think it's good for you. I don't think it's a good way for human beings to interact with each other. It makes people more extreme. Again, it just hardens people. They start believing everything is fake or an attack or just becomes more tribal. I think there needs to be a fundamental evolution of social media. What do you think that could be? Have you ever tried to think of what's the next step? Let's

Social media didn't exist when I was young, and it didn't exist even when I was 30, right? It didn't even come about until essentially like 2007-ish, right? Is that when people started using stuff? Yeah, Twitter 2006, 2007, Facebook before that. But Facebook wasn't really social media. Facebook was like...

an address book, a friend's network. But I think when I was at Facebook, there was this big push to become more of a social media around 2012, 13. So I would say it really ramped up. Was that in response to the success of Twitter? Yeah. And then they've tried with threads, which is pretty much a failure, right? Yeah, but it fundamentally changed. Who's on threads? Less people than Blue Sky, right? I think like some fitness influencers probably.

Why fitness, unfortunately? Because they post on Instagram, they cross-post on thread. Well, I think if you post on...

Instagram, it automatically posts for you on threads. I think I have it set up like that. So I might be big on threads. I don't even know. And maybe, maybe I think it's fitness influencers because that's who I follow. Like Instagram for me is just to like, go look at people lift so I can go get excited. That's, there's a value to that. Right. There's a value to like David Goggins posts when he's running on the, in the fucking desert and he looks at you, stay hard. Yeah, exactly. Okay, David, I'm going to stay hard. But,

But my TikTok is basically AI videos now. Have you watched these Vio videos? Vio? Vio, yeah. What is Vio? So, Jamie, I'm sure you've seen them, but did you see the Bigfoot Yeti doing ASMR? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's hilarious. Yeah, I did see that. I would say like 25% of media consumption right now is just AI videos. Oh, 100%. And a lot of the stuff from the war. What's been really interesting is watch Tehran talk shit on Twitter. Using AI videos. Using AI videos. Like, this is bizarre. Like, hi, Israel. Only can show like a nuclear bomb going off. Yeah, yeah.

This is weird. Like you have a fake nuke. And they didn't even take out the like the watermark of the. Really? No. Oh God. Unless they can see that it's an AI generated video. They're just trying to like scare people. Bizarre world. Bizarre. Can you imagine like going back in time telling your like 2005 self that Iran's going to be nuclear posting on Twitter? Nuclear shit posting. Nuclear shit posting on Twitter. Yeah.

No, it's fucking weird, man. It's really, really weird. It's dangerous, too. And again, I just don't think people should be on it. And this is, again, I'm friends with Elon. I don't think people are going to listen to me. They're going to be on it no matter what. But just for the individuals that are hearing my voice and know that it's having a negative effect on your life, get off of it. Right. Get off of it. You'll feel better. Get off of it or be incredibly diligent in how you curate. That's like...

telling me to play Quake a little bit. You know what I mean? It's so addictive. So, you know, you asked me what could be the evolution of... Yes. One way I found to try to predict where the future is headed is like look at trends today and try to extrapolate. You know, that's the easiest way. So if group chats are the thing, you could imagine a collaborative curation of social media feeds through group chats. So

So your group chat, you know, has an AI that gets trained on the preferences and what you guys talk about. And maybe it like picks the kind of topics and curates the feed for you. So it's an algorithmic feed that is – that evolved based on the preferences of people in the group chat. And maybe it has an –

maybe there's a way to also prompt it, using prompts to kind of steer it and make it more useful for you. But I think group chats are going to be like the main interface for how people sort of consume media. And it's going to get filtered through that, whether good or bad. Because I think Twitter still has a place for debate.

I think it's very, very important for public debate between public figures. And breaking news as well. Breaking news, yeah, definitely. Well, breaking news is the most interesting. Like, I was telling my wife that Israel had started attacking Iran. Mm-hmm.

And she's like, well, I looked on Google. I don't find anything. Yeah. I was like, yeah, you got to go to Twitter. Yeah. And I showed her on Twitter the video of it. And she's like, oh, my God. I was like, yeah, like this is where breaking news happens. X is where I go immediately. Immediately. If there's any sort of world event, I immediately go to X. Right. I don't.

I don't trust any mainstream media anymore. Right. I just, especially after I was attacked, I was like, I know you lie because you lied about me. So I have personal experience with your lies. Right, right. So you've lost me. Yeah. You know, and now I have to go somewhere else. Right. Yeah.

Yeah, I think there's some of this investigative journalism that is not real time that some reporters are still good at it. But a lot of them moved to Substack as well. Yes. I think most of them. Yeah, like Schellenberger. Yeah. Greenwald. Right. Matt Taibbi. Right. These are just too ethical to work for a corporate entity that's going to lie and push a narrative. Right. Yeah.

And that's the business. That's the business model. And that's also like the clickbait business model. I've talked to people that had articles that they wrote and then an editor came and changed the heading of it. That's the norm. That's like every time it happens. And it fucking infuriates them. It's like that's not the article, man. This is not what I'm saying. You're distorting things. You have my name still attached to it. This is fucking crazy. I watched –

I watched these entrepreneurs like Zok and Elon and all these guys come up in this very hostile media environment. And so as I'm building my company, I actually never hired a PR agency. I hired once a PR agency, paid them $30,000. They got me a placement in like a really...

crappy publication got like maybe two views i tweeted the same news i got like hundreds of thousands of views i'm like fuck that like i'm not gonna use you anymore it's like you wasted my time and since then i've uh i've been uh you know just going direct to my audience and just building an audience online uh to to put out my message and i i thought you know um

If they don't build you up, maybe they can't tear you down. Right, right, right. You're in control of the message that gets out of there. And I've learned how people react to

to communications and, and, and, um, it's almost like trial by, by fire. Well, there's a deep hunger for authenticity right now. Yeah. So if they know it's coming from you, yeah. Like, okay, this is great. Like it, it takes a little weight off of them. Like, Oh, this is nice. It's nice to hear it from the guy who actually runs the company. Yeah. And like, I make mistakes and, and,

you know, they happen and I try to correct them and I'm not going to be perfect. And I think just the corporate world changed because of this hunger for authenticity.

And I think more and more founders and entrepreneurs are finding that that's the way to go. You don't really need those more traditional ways of getting the news out. But actually, I'm friends with a lot of reporters that are really good, but they tend to be the reporters that do really deep work. I've met them over time, and I still go direct, but sometimes they write about our company. But they're a minority. Yeah.

I think the whole industry's economics and incentives are just like the click bait and all of that stuff. Yeah, that's what I was going to say. They're not incentivized. You want a career in journalism, being authentic is not the way to go. No, not at all. Which is so crazy. Right. Such a crazy thing to say. Yeah.

But then I think there's probably a naivete that we all have about past journalism that we think wasn't influenced and was real. I think there's probably always been horseshit in journalism, you know, all the way back to Watergate. You know, when Tucker Carlson enlightened me in the true history of Watergate and that Bob Woodward was an intelligence agent and that was the first –

assignment he ever got as a reporter was Watergate. Like, what are the odds that the biggest story ever you would give to a rookie reporter? You wouldn't. And that the people that actually involved in all that were all FBI. Like, the whole thing is nuts. It was an intelligence agent. Yeah, it was the rumor is that Washington Post has always been that. Probably. I mean, who knows now? Because, you know, now it's owned by Bezos and he just...

made this mandate to stick with the actual story and not editorialism. This is what I was talking about in Trend in Silicon Valley of founder-owners stepping in and actually becoming managers. Well, they kind of have to, otherwise it's bad for the business now because...

Because of the hunger for authenticity, the more you have bullshit, the more your business crumbles. Right. It's actually like negative for your outcome. Yeah. And I think you can look at it at a societal level, which is, again, why I'm interested with this idea of like AI making more people entrepreneurs and more independent is that, you know, macro level, you know, you'll get more authenticity. You'll get just more dynamism.

Yeah, I think so. I mean, that's the, again, the rose colored glasses view. Well, you know, there's, there's obviously going to be a lot of things that are a lot of disruption, a lot of disruption. There's going to be jobs that are, uh,

that, you know, are going to go away. And there's going to be spam and bots and fraud and all of that. There's going to be like problems with like weapons, autonomous weapons and all of that. And I think those are all important and we need to handle them. But also like I think the...

The negative angle of technology and AI gets a lot more views and clicks. And, you know, if we want to go viral right now, I'll tell you, these are the 10 jobs that you're going to lose tomorrow. And, you know, that's the easiest way to kind of go viral on the internet. But like, you know, trying to think...

uh, through, you know, what are the actual implications and, and what is true about human nature that really doesn't change and really is timeless. Um,

And I think the people want to create and people want to make things and people have ideas. Again, everyone that I talk to have one idea or another, whether it's for their job or for a business they want to build or somewhere in the middle. Just yesterday, I was watching a video of an entrepreneur using a platform, Replit,

His name is Ahmad George, and he works for this skincare company. And he's an operations manager. And a big part of his job is managing inventory and doing all of this stuff in a very manual way and very...

You know, wrote tedious way. And he always had this idea of like, let's automate big part of it. It's like, you know, it's no problem ERP. So they went to their software provider, NetSuite, and told them we need these modification to the ERP system so that it makes our job easier. We think we can automate, you know, hundreds of hours a month or something like that. And they quoted them $150,000. And he had just seen a video about our platform

And he went on Replit and built something in a couple weeks, costed him $400.

And then deployed it in his office. Everyone in the office started working at using it. They all got more productive. They started saving time and money. He went to the CEO and showed him the impact. Look at how much money we're saving. Look at the fact that we built this piece of software that is cheaper than what the consultants quoted us. And I want to sell the software to the company.

And so he sold it for $32,000 to the company. And next year, he's going to be getting more maintenance subscription revenue from it.

So this idea of people becoming entrepreneurs, it doesn't mean everyone has to quit their job and build a business. But within your job, everyone has an opportunity to get promoted. Everyone has an opportunity to remove the tedious job. There was a Stanford study asking people what percentage of your job is automatable just recently. And people said about half.

Like 50% of what I do is like routine and tedious and I don't want to do it. And rather, and I have ideas on how to make the business better, how to make my job better. And I think we can use AI to do it. There's hunger in the workforce to use AI for humans to sort of, for people to reclaim their seat as the creative driver because

Because the thing that happened with the emergence of computers is that in many ways people became a little more drone-like and NPC-like. They're doing the same thing every day. But I think the real promise of AI and technology has always been automation so that we have more time either for leisure or for creativity or for ways in which we can advance our lives, change our lives or careers. Yeah.

And, yeah, this is what gets me excited. And I think it's – I don't think it's –

predominantly a rose-colored glasses thing because I'm seeing it every day. And that's what gets me fired up. It's also you have a biased sample group, right? Because you have a bunch of people that are using your platform and they are achieving positive results. But they're from every walk of life. Yes. Look, we have a bunch of things that are happening simultaneously. And I think one of the big fears about automation and AI in general is the abruptness of the change. Because it's going to happen instantaneously.

Boom, jobs are going to be gone. And then, well, these tedious jobs, do we really want people to be reduced to these tedious existences of just filing paperwork and putting things on shelves? And they will tell you they don't want to be doing it. They don't want to be doing that. But then there's the thing of how do we educate people, especially people that are already set in their ways and they're mature adults, right?

How do you get and inspire these people to like, okay, look, your job is gone. And now you have this opportunity to do something different. Go forth. I think...

Re-skilling is something that has been done in the past with some amount of success. Obviously, if you've never been exposed to technology, did you remember that I think was a very cruel thing to say to the miners to go learn the code? Yeah, learn the code. Yeah, I think that's really cruel. But if you're someone whose job is sort of a desk job, you already are in the computer, you're –

there's a lot of opportunity for you to reskill and start using AI to like automate a big part of your job. And yes, there's going to be job loss, but I think a lot of those people will be able to reskill. And what we're doing with the government of Saudi Arabia, I would love to do in the U.S. So how is the government of Saudi Arabia using it?

So we're just starting right now. What's their goal? Their goal is twofold or three. One is an entire generation of people growing up with these creative tools instead of just textbook learning, instead learning by doing, making things.

So an entire generation understanding how to make things with AI, how to code and all of that stuff. Second is upgrading sort of government operations. So you could think of it sort of like Doge, but like more technological. Like can we automate a big parts of what we do in HR, finance and things like that? And I think it's possible to build these specific AI agents that do...

part of finance job or accounting job, again, all these routine things that people are doing, you can go and automate that and make government as a whole more efficient. And third is entrepreneurship. If you gave that power to more people to be able to kind of build businesses, then not only they're growing up with it, but also there's a culture of entrepreneurship. And there is existing already in Saudi Arabia.

I mean, the sad thing about the Middle East, there's so much potential, but there's so much wars and so much disaster. Well, there's so much money. There's also so much money. Yeah, which is good. And I think it's good for the United States. Like, I think, you know, what President Trump did with the deals in the Gulf region is great. It's going to be great for the United States. It's going to be great for the Gulf region.

But I think we need more of that. We talked about government. We need more of that enlightened view of education, of change in our government today. This idea that we're going to bring back the old manufacturing jobs, I understand Americans got really screwed with what happened. People got...

These jobs got sent away by globalism, whatever you want to call it. And a few number of people got massively rich. A lot of people got disenfranchised. And we had the opiate epidemic. And it had just massive damage. It made massive damage on the culture.

But is the way to bring back those jobs or is there a new way of the future? And there's probably a new manufacturing wave that's going to happen with robotics. The humanoid robots are starting to work.

And these, I think, will need a new way of manufacturing it. And so the U.S. can be at the forefront of that, can own that, bring new jobs into existence. And all of these things need software. Like our world is going to be primarily run by AI and robots and all of that. And more and more people need to be able to make software, even if it is prompting and not really, you know. But a lot more people just need to be able to make it.

There's going to be a need for more products and services and all of that stuff. And I think there's enough jobs to go around if we have this mindset of let's actually think about the future of the economy as opposed to let's bring back certain manufacturing jobs, which I don't think Americans would want to do anyways. Right. They don't want to do the jobs. My problem is there's some people that are doing those jobs right now and it's their entire identity. Yeah.

You know, they have a good job, they work for a good company, they make a good living, and that might go away. And they're just not psychologically equipped to completely change their life. What do you think is the solution there? Which I agree, it's a real problem. Well, desperation, unfortunately, is going to motivate people to make changes. And it's going to also motivate some people to choose drugs.

That's my fear. My fear is that you're going to get a lot more people. There's going to be a lot of people that they figure it out and they survive. I mean, this is natural selection, unfortunately, in applied to a digital world. There's going to be people that just aren't psychologically equipped to recalibrate their life. And that's my real fear. My real fear is that there's a bunch of really good people out there that are valuable parts of...

certain business right now that their identity is attached to being employee of the month. They're good people. They show up every day. Everybody loves them and trusts them. They do good work and everybody rewards them for that. And that's part of who they are as a person. They're a hardworking person. Of course. And they feel that way. And there's like a lot of real good people out there that are, you know, blue collar, hardworking people. And that's

They take pride in that. And that job is going to go away. Well, I actually think that more white-collar jobs are going away. I think so too. Yeah. So then blue-collar, which is what was the – like go back 10 years ago and we thought, okay, self-driving cars, robots and manufacturing. And that turned out to be a lot harder.

than, actually, like, more desk jobs because we have a lot more data. For one, we have a lot more data on people sitting in front of a computer and doing Excel and writing things on the Internet. And so we're able to train these what we call large language models, and those are really good at, like,

Using a computer like a human uses a computer. And so I think the jobs to be worried about, especially in the next months to a year, a little more, is the routine computer jobs where it's formulaic. You know, you go, you have a task like quality assurance jobs, right? Software quality assurance. It's like you get you get you have to constantly test the same feature.

of some large software company, Microsoft or whatever, you're sitting there and you're performing the same thing again and again and again every day. And if there's a bug, you kind of report it back to the software engineers. And that is, I think, really...

in the bullseye of what AI is going to be able to do over the next month or year. And do it much more efficiently. Much more efficiently, much faster. Yeah, those people have to be really worried. Drivers, you know, professional drivers, like people who drive cars

Trucks, things along those lines, that's going away. That's definitely going away. Yeah. And that's an enormous part of our society. It's millions of jobs. Right. You know, I was watching a video on this coal mining factory in China that's completely automated. And it was wild to watch. Every step of the way is automated, including recharging the trucks. Like the trucks know they're all electrical. Everything's run on electricity. They recharge themselves automatically.

They're pulling the coal out of the ground. They're stacking it, inventory, everything. Storage, it's all automated, and it runs 24-7. I'm like, this is wild to watch. It's crazy. Yeah, I remember watching the video of BYD making an electric vehicle. Mm.

It is really satisfying to watch. It's all like the entire assembly line is automated. The way they like, you know, put the paint and the way they like do the entire thing is. By the way, China's electric vehicles are so good. They're so advanced. Yeah. There's this guy that I follow on Instagram. Okay.

I can't remember his name. I really wish I could right now. But he reviews a lot of electric vehicles, like very – like I've never even heard of these companies. And they're incredible. They're so advanced. Yeah. And their suspension systems are so superior to the suspension systems of even like German luxury cars. Like they did a demonstration where they drove one of these Chinese electric vehicles over an obstacle course. Mm-hmm.

And then they had like a BMW and a Mercedes go over and the BMW is all... And the Chinese one is fucking flat planing the entire way. Every bump in the road is being completely absorbed by the suspension. Right, there's all AI. It's so much better than what we have. Right. Like so much...

What is this? That's him. Yep. That's him. Forrest Jones. Shout out to Forrest. He's great. He does like these really fast paced videos, but he does a lot of cars that are available here in America as well, but he does a shit ton of them that aren't.

Which one is this one here? Yeah, listen to him because he's pretty good at this shit. 710 horsepower. I get cameras here, LiDAR there for self-driving, and this has two Neo-made chips. And for reference, one of those chips is as powerful as four NVIDIA chips. And this has two. Neo also has battery swap stations. So if you're in a rush, you can hit one up. It'll lift your car, swap out your battery, put in a fully charged one in between three and five minutes.

But here's where the S-Class should be worried. Not only does it have rear steer and steer-by wires, so it's extremely easy to maneuver, it may have one of the most advanced hydraulic systems I've ever seen. It can pretty much counteract any bump. Wow. And after you go over something four times, it'll memorize it so that the fifth time, it's like that bump never existed. Inside, you get pillows near headrests, heated ventilated and massaging leather seats, a passenger screen built into my dash, a main screen that works super fast. I get a driving display, a head-up display, and my steering works super fast. I also...

Pretty dope. Yeah, what's interesting, what he said is that the car is learning the terrain. If it went over it once, it'll learn it. Yes. I think this is the next sort of big thing with AI, whether it's robotics, cars, or even chat GPT now, it has memory. It learns about you and starts to...

Sort of similar to how social media feeds, but I think in a lot of ways more negative, learn about you. I think these systems will start to have more online learning instead of just online.

Training them in these large data centers and these large data and then giving you this thing that doesn't know anything about it is totally stateless. As you use these devices, they will learn your pattern, your behavior, and all of that. Yeah. Why is China so much better at making these cars than us? Because they're really advanced. Yeah. I think a lot of people think that... I'm not an expert in China, but a lot of people think that...

The thing that makes China better at manufacturing is the sort of quote unquote, like more like, you know, treating workers like slaves. That's, you know, slave work or whatever, which I'm sure some of that happens, you

But Tim Cook recently said, maybe not so recent, but he thinks part of the reason why they manufacture in China is there's expertise there that developed over time. Yeah, that's why they want to use the Chinese manufacturing for the iPhone 17. Yeah, and I think one of the things that are good about our technocratic systems is

Singapore, obviously China's the biggest one, is that the sort of leadership, it comes at a cost of freedom and other things, but the leadership can have a 50-year view of where things are headed, and they can say, while yes, we're now making the plastic crap,

we don't want to keep making plastic crap. We're going to build the capabilities and the automation and manufacturing expertise to be able to leapfrog the West in making these certain things, whereas it's been historically hard

Again, for good reasons, I think there's more freedom preserving when you don't have that much power in government. But I feel like America, we're like the worst of both worlds, where increasingly the government is making more and more decisions and choices than any state. But at the same time, we don't have this enlightened 10-year roadmap for where we want to be.

Yeah, because we never think that way because we deal in terms. Yeah, four-year. Four-year terms. That's the problem. But also public companies, four-year terms, public companies, quarters. Right. Quarters. And again, this is back to this managerial idea run by managers that part of the reason why Zuck has complete control, he can – how much did he spend on VR? Like, I don't know, $30, $40 billion? Yeah.

maybe more per year, maybe he spent a ton of money, like, and like a, like a GDP, like a small state GDP worth of money on VR in the public market was totally doubtful of that. And the reason he could do that is because he has, uh, what are they called? Super, super voting shares. And so he has complete control of the company and he can't be unseated by activist investors, uh,

Sort of what's been done to... Wasn't there like a recent trial where they were trying to impeach him for saying that? They were trying to remove him from that? They can't, unless... I know, but there was a trial. I think there's a trial that's going on. It was going on like very recently. Oh, I think you're thinking about the antitrust. No, no. There's something about him saying that he can't be fired. But it's true. It is true. It's legal. I know. It is nonsense. The trial, I believe the trial is nonsense, but...

like a friend of mine was actually representing him in this. Maybe in Europe or something. I don't think so. I think it's in America. Google Mark Zuckerberg, Josh Dubin trial. See if you can find anything on that. But yeah, Mark can think on the order of decades. Like when I was there at Facebook, he was talking about the idea that like, there's going to be a fundamental shift. He's like, if you look, if you look back,

100 years, computers every 20 years or whatever change the user interface modality. You go from terminals and mainframes to desktop computers to mobile computing. And it was like, okay, what's next? And the first guess was VR. And now I think their best guess is AR plus AI.

like the AR glasses, their new meta Ray-Ban glasses plus AI. And they can make massive investment. They just made...

Crazy investment. This company, Scale AI, Scale AI is a data provider for OpenAI and Google. And what they do is, you know, OpenAI will say, I want the best law and legal data to train the best legal machine learning model. And they'll go to, you know, places where there's the labor costs are low and

but maybe still well-educated. There are places in Africa and Asia that are like that. And they'll sit them down and say, okay, you're going to get these tasks, these legal programming, whatever tasks, and you're going to do them and you're going to write your thoughts as you're doing them.

I'm simplifying it, but basically they collect all this data. Basically, it's labeled labor. They take it, they put it in the models, and they train the models. And OpenAI spends billions of dollars on that, Anthropic, all these companies. And so this company was the major data provider, and Meta just acquired them.

There's this new trend of acquisitions, I assume because they want to get around regulations. But they bought 49% of the company, and then they hired all the leadership. So the scale AI, like Meta, hired the leadership there and bought out the investors. They put $15 billion into the company.

The weird thing about it is Google and OpenAI are like, we're not going to use this shit anymore. So the company value went down because people, you know, these companies don't want to use it. And now they're going to other companies. And so in effect, Zuck bought talent for $15 billion. Wow. Can you imagine that? Talent for $15 billion. Google recently...

bought a company for one known researcher who's one of the inventors of the large language model technology, Noam Chazir, for $3 billion, bought his company, and I think they're not really... They do these weird deals where they buy out the investors and they let the company run as a shell of itself, and then they acquire the talent. Right.

Microsoft did the same thing. That's crazy. So it's just these unique individuals that are very valuable there. Very, very valuable, worth billions of dollars. Sam Altman says Metatron failed to poach OpenAI's talent with $100 million offers. So this $100 million is sign-on bonus.

This is not even salary. Or, yeah, equity. It's just bonus. Just a bonus. $100 million bonus. Just come here. Failed. And failed. I don't know about failed. I mean, I'm sure he's going to say that. He worded it in a weird way. He said, our best talent hasn't taken it. So you could have been right. Of course he's going to say that. Well, of course. The people that did take it, well, they weren't our best talent. They weren't our best, yeah. We don't even like those guys anymore. And by the way, OpenAI doesn't accompany us like ours. It's just a question of scale. Like Zuck.

can give them $100 million and steal the best talent. And companies like OpenAI, which I love, but they go to small startups and give them $10 million to grab their talent. But it's very, very competitive right now. And there are... I don't know if these individuals are actually worth...

These billions of dollars. But the talent war is so crazy because everyone feels like there's a race towards getting to superintelligence. And the first company to get to superintelligence is going to reap massive amounts of rewards. How far away do you think we are from achieving that? Well, you know, like I said, my philosophy tends to be different than I think the mainstream in Silicon Valley is.

I think that AI is going to be extremely good at, you know, doing labor, extremely good at, and like, you know, Chad Cheptin being like a personal assistant, extremely good at like, you know, like Replit being an automated programmer. But the definition of super intelligence is that it is,

than every other human collectively at any task. And I am not sure there's evidence that we're headed there. Again, I think that one important aspect of superintelligence or AGI is that you drop this entity into an environment where it has no

idea about that environment. It's never seen it before. And it's able to efficiently learn to achieve goals within that environment. Right now, there's a bunch of studies showing like, you know, GPT-4 or any of the latest models. If you give them an exam or quiz that is slightly, even slightly different than their training data, they tank, they do really badly on it.

I think the way that AI will continue to get better is via data. Now, at some point, and maybe this is the point of takeoff, is that they can train themselves. And the way we know how AI could train itself through a method called self-play. So the way self-play works is, you know, take, for example, AlphaGo.

AlphaGo is, I'm sure you remember Lisa Dole, a game between DeepMind, AlphaGo, and Lisa Dole, and it won in the game of Go. The way AlphaGo is trained is that part of it is a neural network that's trained on existing data, but the way it achieves superhuman performance in that one domain is by playing itself, like playing.

Millions, billions, perhaps trillions of times. So it starts by generating random moves and then it learns what's the best moves. And it's like basically a multi-agent system where it learns, I did this move wrong and I need to kind of re-examine it. And it trains itself really, really quickly by doing the self-play. It'll play fast, fast games with itself. But we know how to make this in game environments because game environments are closed environments, right?

But we don't know how to make it. We don't know how to do Southplay, for example, on literature because you need objective truth. In literature, there's no objective truth. Taste is different. Conjecture, philosophy, there's a lot of things. And again, this is, I go back to why there's still a premise of humans is there are a lot of things that are intangible.

And we don't know how to generate objective truth in order to train machines in the self-play fashion. But programming has objective truth. Coding has objective truth. The machine can construct an environment that has a computer and has a problem. There's a ton of problems. And even an AI can generate sample problems. And then there's a test to validate whether the program works or not.

And then you can generate all these programs, test them, and if they succeed, that's a reward that trains your system to get better at that. If it doesn't succeed, that's also feedback. And they run them all the time, and it gets better at programming. So I'm confident programming is going to get a lot better. I'm confident that math is going to get a lot better.

But from there, it is hard to imagine how all these other more subjective, softer sort of sciences of AI will get better through self-play. I think the AI will only be able to get better through data from human labor. If AI analyzes all the past creativity...

All the different works of literature, all the different music, all the different things that humans have created completely without AI. Do you think it could understand the mechanisms involved in creativity and make a reasonable facsimile? Uh,

I think it will be able to imitate very well how humans come up with new ideas in a way that it remixes all the existing ideas from its training data. But by the way, again, this is super powerful. This is not like a dig at AI, the ability to remix all the available data into new ideas.

potentially new ideas or newish ideas because they're remixes, they're derivative, is still very, very powerful. But, you know, the best marketers, the best... Like, you know, think of...

One of my favorite marketing videos is Think Different from Apple. It's awesome. I don't think that really machines are at a point where they – I try to talk to Chachapti a lot about marketing or naming. It's so bad at that. It's like midwit bad at that.

- For now. - But that's the thing, it's like, I just don't see, and look, I'm not an AI researcher and maybe not working to have ideas there, but in the current landscape of the technology that we have today,

It's hard to imagine how these AIs are going to get better at, say, literature or the softer things that we as humans find really compelling. What's interesting is the thing that's the most at threat is these sort of middle-of-the-road Hollywood movies that are essentially doing exactly what you said about AI. They're sort of like...

You know, they're sort of remixing old themes and tropes and figuring out a way to repackage it.

But I think actually those tools in the hands of humans, they'll be able to create new interesting movies and things like that. Right. In the hands of humans. So with additional human creativity applied. Right. So the man-machine symbiosis. Right. This was the term that's used by J.C. Licklider, like the grandfather of the internet from ARPA. A lot of those guys kind of imagined a lot of what's going to happen, a lot of the future, and this idea of like –

Human plus machine will be able to create amazing things. So what people are making with Vio is not because the machine is really good at painting it. Right. Like generating it and making it. But it can't make it without the prompts. Like the really funny like, yeah, without the prompt, like the Bigfoot finds Trenn.

and they inject themselves with trend, they start working out. I'm telling you, my TikTok feed is really wild right now. Like,

It's like this real weird distorted human mind to come up with this. Lightweight, baby. Have you seen the ones where it's Trump and Elon and Putin and they're all in a band? Right. They're playing Creedence Clearwater Revival. Right, yeah. Fortunate Son. It's crazy. Another one is the LA riots and...

how like they're all the world leaders are sort of gangsters and the riots that one is hilarious yeah that kind of stuff is fun and it's interesting how quickly it can be made too

You know, something that would have taken a long time through these video editors where they were using computer-generated imagery for a long time. But it was very painstaking and very, you know, very expensive. Now it's really cheap. On the way here, I was like, I want to make an app to sort of impress you with our technology. I was like, what would Joe like? And then I came up with this idea of like a squat form analyzer.

And so in the car over way here, started in the lobby, but I made this app to... You made it on the way over here? On the way, on my phone.

And this is the really exciting thing about what we built with being able to program on your phone is being able to have that inspiration that can come any time and just immediately pull out your phone and start building it. So here, I'll show you. So basically, you just start recording and then...

do a few squats. Okay. It's going to analyze it just from there? Yeah. But I mean, the camera angle is not that great, but let's try it. Okay. And it's going to be able to tell you whether or not you're doing it well? Yeah. Those are not my best squats. Just so you know, Joe Rogan. I'm not judging you. I used to squat, you know, 350 pounds.

So now it's integrating Google Gemini model to kind of run through the video, analyze it, and it'll come up with a score and then suggestions. And so, again, this is like a random idea. It's like, okay, what would...

What would be interesting to do? That's a really interesting thing that people could use at the gym, though. Like, not just for squats, but maybe for chin-ups and all kinds of stuff. Like, oh, maybe, you know, I'm looking at your form, and this is what you need to do. Get a little lower, you know, make your elbows parallel to your body, whatever. I build so many personal apps. Like, I build apps for analyzing my health. I talked about some of my health problems that are now a lot better. Look, bad form. Oh, yeah.

just like straight away critical so mean yeah knees position unable to probably assess from the video angle so yeah it's a little okay so it's saying it's not the best angle but it's saying my depth is bad which was which was actually bad

And I was leaning forward. But it's pretty good. I tried it a few times. It's really good at that. And so I build a lot of apps for just my personal life. That would be great for a person who doesn't want a trainer. Right. You know, I don't want to deal with some person. Let me just work out on my own. But am I doing this right? Set your phone up. Have it correct you. Yeah.

Yeah. At the office, some guys are building, we have this partnership with Whoop. I don't know if you've tried it. Sure, I use Whoop. And they're building an app so we can start competing on workouts based on Whoop data. Oh, that's awesome. Yeah.

Yeah. Our company is like very weird for Silicon Valley. Like we have a jujitsu mat and we have, Oh really? Yeah. We have a, do you guys bring in trainers? Oh, that's awesome. Don't get hurt. It's, um, you know, I only recently got into it, but the, uh, the, the,

the hardest thing about it is to be calm because your impulse is to overpower. Yes. Yeah. The Gracies have a great saying, keep it playful.

Yeah, and that's how you really learn the best. It's very hard, and listen, I'm a giant hypocrite because most of my jiu-jitsu career, I was a meathead. That's one of the reasons why I started really lifting weights a lot is I realized strength is very valuable. And it is. It is, yeah. And it is valuable. But technique is the most valuable, and the best way to acquire technique is to pretend that you don't have any strength. The best way to acquire technique is to pretend to –

Yeah, don't force things. Just find the best path. And that requires a lot of data. So you have to understand the positions. So you have to really analyze them. The best jiu-jitsu guys are really smart. Like Mikey Musumichi, Gordon Ryan, Craig Jones. Those are very intelligent people. And that's why they're so good at jiu-jitsu. And then you also have to apply that intelligence to recognize that discipline is a massive factor. Yeah.

Like Mikey Musumichi trains every day, 12 hours a day. 12 hours a day? 12 hours a day. Oh, yeah. Is that a humanly possible? It's possible. Yeah, because he's not training full blast. It's not like you can't squat 12 hours a day, 350 pounds. Your body will break down. But you can go over positions over and over and over and over again until they're in muscle memory. But you're not doing them at full strength, right? So like if you're rolling, right? So say if you're doing drills.

You would set up like a guard pass. When you're doing a guard pass, you would tell the person, lightly resist, and I'm going to put light pressure on you. And you go over that position, knee shield, pass, hip into it, here's the counter, on the counter, darse.

Go for the dars. The person defends the dars, roll, take the back. And just do that over and over and over again. Until it's muscle memory. Right. And it's completely ingrained in your body. Instead of chess players, it's like, let's focus on the endgame. Yeah. Just keep repeating the endgame, endgame. Yeah. I read the Josh Weitzkin book. What was it called?

You know his book about, I think, chess and jiu-jitsu, was it? Yeah, Josh was just in here a few months ago. He's great. But it's so interesting to see a super intelligent person apply that intelligence to jiu-jitsu. Yeah.

You know, one of the interesting things when I started getting into – I've always been into different kinds of sports and then periods of extreme programming and obesity. But then I tried to get back into it. I was a swimmer early on. But one thing that I found, especially in the lifting community, is how intelligent everyone are. They're actually almost like –

You know, they're so focused. They're autistically focused on, like, form and program. And, you know, they spend so much time designing these spreadsheets for your program. Yeah. Well, that's... People have this, like, really...

We have this view of things physical that physical things are not intelligent things, but you need intelligence in order to manage emotions Emotions are a critical aspect of anything physical any really good athlete

You need a few factors. You need discipline, hard work, genetics, but you need intelligence. It might not be the same intelligence. People also, they confuse intelligence with your ability to express yourself better.

Your vocabulary, your history of reading. It's like a bias almost. Yes, it's a huge bias. That's like the sort of modern desk job, the laptop class bias. Well, they assume that anything that you're doing physically, you're now no longer using your mind. But it's not true. In order to be disciplined, you have to understand how to manage your mind.

Managing your mind is an intelligence. And the ability to override those emotions, to conquer that inner bitch...

That comes to you every time I lift that fucking lid off of that cold plunge. Right. That takes intelligence. You have to understand that this temporary discomfort is worth it in the long run because I'm going to have an incredible result after this is over. I'm going to feel so much better. Right, right, right. Yeah, I haven't thought about intelligence in order to manage your emotions, but that's totally true because you're constantly doing the self-talk.

You're trying to like trick yourself into doing people that are very intelligent that don't have control over their emotions Yeah, but they're intelligent in some ways It's just they've missed this one aspect of intelligence Which is the management of the functions of the mind itself right and they don't think that that's critical, but it is critical It's critical to every aspect of your life, and it'll actually improve all those other intellectual pursuits. I

To tie it back to the AI discussion, I think a lot of the programmer researcher type is like they know that one form of intelligence and they over-rotate on that. And that's why I was like, oh, we're so close to perfecting intelligence. Right. Because that's what you know. But there's a lot of other forms of intelligence. There's a lot of forms of intelligence. And unfortunately, we're very...

We're very narrow in our perceptions of these things and very biased. And we think that our intelligence is the only intelligence. Right. And that this one thing that we concentrate on, this is the only thing that's important. Right. Have you read or done any CBT, cognitive behavior therapy? No. No.

So basically CBT is like a way to get over depression and anxiety based on self-talk and cues. I had to use it, again, I had like sleep issues. I had to use CBTI, cognitive behavior therapy for insomnia. And the idea behind it is to build up what's called sleep pressure therapy.

Uh, so you don't, first of all, you, you, insomnia is performance anxiety. Once you stop, once you have insomnia, you start having anxiety. Like by the time bedtime comes, you're like, Oh my God, I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna, you know, turn over in bed and I'm just going to be in bed. And then you start associating your bedroom with the suffering of insomnia.

because you're like sitting there and like, you know, you're all night and really suffering. It's really horrific. And first of all, you treat your bedroom as a sanctuary. You're only there when you want to sleep. So that's like one thing you program yourself to do. And the other thing is you don't nap the entire day. You don't nap at all, no matter what happens, like sleep.

even if you're really sleepy, like get up and take a walk or whatever. And then you build up what's called sleep pressure. Like you're, now you have like a lot of sleepiness. So you go to bed, you try to fall asleep. If you don't fall asleep within 15, 20 minutes, you get up, you go out, you do something else. And then when you feel really tired again, you go back to bed. Oh God. And then, and then, and then finally, once you fall asleep, if you wake up in the middle of the night, which is another sort of form of insomnia, you,

instead of staying in bed, you get up, you go somewhere else, you go read or do whatever. And like slowly you program yourself to see your bed and, oh, like the bed is where I sleep. It's only where I sleep. I don't do anything else there. And you can get over insomnia that way instead of using pills and all the other stuff. Oh, the pills are the worst. God, people that need those fucking things to sleep, I feel for them.

I can sleep like that. That's amazing. I can sleep on the ground. That's a blessing. That's a blessing. My wife hates it. It drives her nuts because sometimes she has insomnia. I could sleep on rocks. I could just go lay down on a dirt road and fall asleep. Wow. But I'm always going hard. When you're always going hard, you're... That's the other thing. Yeah. I don't take naps. Right. And I work out basically every day. And so I'm always tired. I'm always ready to go to sleep. So...

So do you fight it or do you just, it's not in you to like take a nap? I don't need a nap. Yeah. Yeah. I never need naps. How many hours do you sleep? I try to get eight.

Mm-hmm. Do you get it? No last night? I didn't get eight, but I got seven six and a half probably got six and a half last night Yeah, but that was because I got home and I started watching TV because I was a little freaked out about the war and so when I'm freaked out about the war I like to fill my mind with nonsense Well, I just watch things that have nothing to do with the world like I'm I play pool and

I'm pretty competitive, I'm pretty good. And so I like watching professional pool matches and there's a lot of them on YouTube. So I just watch pool.

And I just watch patterns, how guys get out, stroke, how they use their stroke, how different guys have different approaches to the game. - It's crazy, the type A people, it's like for you, although pool is an escape, it suddenly becomes an obsession and you're like, "I need to be the best at it." - I'm very obsessed. - So I told you I quit video games, but then last year I was very stressed. The company was doing really poorly before we sort of invented this agent technology.

And then also the Gaza genocide. I was watching these videos every night. It was just really, really affecting me. I can't watch that stuff at night. At night is when I get my anxiety. I mean, I don't...

generally have anxiety, but not like a lot of people do. I mean, when I say anxiety, I really feel for people that genuinely suffer from actual anxiety. My anxiety is all sort of self-imposed. And when I get online at night and I think about the world, my family's asleep, which is generally when I write

As long as I'm writing, I'm okay. Comedy? Yeah. I write sort of an essay form, then I extract the comedy from it. But when I get online and I just pay attention to the world, that's when I really freak out. Because it's all out of your control, and it's just murderous psychopaths that are running the world. At any moment, you could be...

you know, in a place where they decide to attack. And then you're a pawn in this fucking insane game that these people are playing in the world. That's why I felt really frustrated with my family being there. I was like, they have no say in it. Right. The war started, rockets are flying. Right, right. But anyways, I started...

I was playing a video game. It's called Hades, Hades 2. It's like an RPG video game. And I was like, I'm trying to disconnect. And then I started speed running that game. Do you know what speed running is? No. It's like you're trying to finish the game as fast as possible, as fast as humanly possible. Oh, okay.

And I got down to like six minutes and I was number 50 in the world. Whoa. But legitimately. Oh, yeah. My score is online. To play for. That was crazy. Why is he doing that? That was crazy. It's myth building, you know. Yeah. Weird. Yeah.

But yeah, it is this thing about type A people. Like you're just... Even your escapism becomes competitive and stressful. Well, sort of, but it's also...

Feel like it's a discipline. I feel like pool is a discipline just like archery I'm also obsessed with archery archery is a discipline and I feel like the more Divergent disciplines that you have in your life the more you understand what it is about these things That makes you excel and get better at them and the more thing when I get better at those things I get better at life and

it's, I apply it to everything. Yeah. This is another thing that AI now struggles with, which is called transform learning. You're learning something from domain, like learning something from math on how to like do reasoning on math and being able to do reasoning on politics. We just don't have evidence of, of that yet. Um,

And I feel the same way. Everything, like even powerlifting when I got really into it, which is like the most unhealthy sport you can do. You break your joints down. You break your joints. You look like shit because the more you eat, you can lift more. You get fat. They're all fat. They're all fat. Unless they're competing in a weight class. Right. You have to be lean. Yeah. And what is that repertoire? Have you ever had him on? The Jug of Milk?

Go mad. You know, go mad. No gallon of milk a day. Do you know that? Uh, do you know it? Disgusting. Yeah. So basically gallon of milk a day. Yeah. So Mark repertoire, he's, um, he wrote this book called starting strength.

And it became like the main way most guys, at least my age, like getting into powerlifting. It was about technique. It was about like his whole thing is like, look, you know, everyone comes into lifting. They think it's bodybuilding. Powerlifting is nothing like that. And he also looks like shit and he's fat. But his technique is amazing. And so the way he gets young guys to like get really good and really strong, he puts them on a gallon milk a day.

Does that really have a positive effect? Yeah. I mean, he has a YouTube channel. He has a lot of guys that are really, really strong, and he's been a coach for a lot of people. What is it about a gallon of milk a day? Is it just the protein intake? What is it? Calories. Paragraph on it. Okay, here it is. Drink a gallon of milk a day. Go mad.

is undeniably the most effective nutritional strategy for adding slabs of mass to young underweight males. Milk is relatively cheap, painless to prepare, and the macronutrient profile is very balanced, and calories are always easier to drink than eat. Unfortunately, those interested in muscular hypertrophy who are not young...

underweight, and male, populations where GoMad is not recommended, will need to put more effort into the battle to avoid excess fat accumulation. Body composition can be manipulated progressively, much like barbell training, to achieve the best results. For example, the starting strength novice linear progression holds exercise selection frequency and volume variables constant. Okay. Every 48 to 72 hours, the load stressor is incrementally increased to elicit adaptation in strength.

If the load increases too significant or insignificant, the desired adaptation won't take place. Yeah, this is the intelligence. This is the intelligence involved in lifting that people who are on the outside of it would dismiss. Science. Yeah. You know, I'm so honored to be the guy that introduces Joe Rogan to starting strength.

Go mad. Yeah, go mad. Robert Duvall is so funny. You should watch some of his videos. He has this very thick Texan accent. And his audience shits on him all the time. They call him fat and ugly and whatever. And he abuses his audience, too. Let me see this guy. Put his picture up. That's the dude? That's an old photo. He's not much better.

So he's just a nerd. Yeah, he's a huge nerd. But yeah, he used to lift a lot of weight. Yeah, that's what he used to look like? That one photo with him with the hairy chest? The black? Oh, okay. Wow, damn. Is that him? I don't know. I don't think so. Really? It does look like him. Yeah, that's him. He used to be jacked. Okay, that's good. Oh, so he was a bodybuilder at one point in time.

But then he got on that go match yet. Now he's a power lifter. Simply no other exercise, no machine, prevent the level of muscular stimulation and growth than the correctly performed full squat. While he's dead lifting in that image. That's weird. So he also makes you squat on every day of lifting. Oh. So squat every time. Every time you lift. Really? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, his idea is like squat is a full body exercise. Like you can just go to the gym. And when I, when I used to be busy and I just want to maintain, like be healthy, I'll just squat every 15, 20 minutes, 15, 20 minutes squat and just get out of the gym. Um,

But I do something with legs every day. Yeah. Yeah. You have to. Yeah. But squat actually, it does feel like there's an upper body component to it as well. Well, it's also your body recognizes like, oh, this asshole wants to lift like really heavy things. We got to get big. Right. Exactly. Yeah. It's the best way to get big. Yeah. Yeah. Because your body just realizes like, okay, we have to adapt. This shithead wants to lift giant things every day.

Yeah, it's hilarious. And the other one, I'm sure you know him. I think you introduced me to him through your podcast, Louis Simmons. Oh, yeah. Those guys are crazy. You watched the Netflix documentary? I didn't watch the Netflix documentary, but we did actually interview him. He's like one of the few people that I traveled to go meet who went to West Side Barbell. I saw that. It was great. We have some of his equipment out here. He's gone now. That reverse hyper? Yeah.

We have the reverse hyper is so good for people that have back problems. Everyone that has a back issue, let me show you something. And I bring them out to the reverse hyper machine and I'm like, this thing will actively strengthen and decompress your spine. Right. It's so good. It's so good for people that have like lower back issues where the doctor just wants to cut them. I'm like, hold on, hold on. Don't do that right away. I had back pain.

since my late teens. And the doctors want to, like, they did an MRI and they found that there's a bit of a bulge and they want to do an operations on it. Yeah, they want to do a disectomy. Someone wanted to put me in antidepressants. Apparently you can manage pain with antidepressants. Have you heard of that? What?

Yeah. Apparently it's a thing. Um, and, and, um, and through listening to your podcast and others, uh, I was like, it was just going to get strong. So I got, I got strong squats and things like that. And, and, and the pain got a lot better. It didn't, didn't go entirely. But the thing that like really got me over the hump and this, this one was crazy. Um,

Are you familiar with the mind-body prescription? No. John Sarno? Oh, okay, yes. I heard about him on Howard Stern. He was talking about how a lot of back pain is psychosomatic. Psychosomatic, yeah. So his idea, and again, this is like... He doesn't understand jujitsu because a lot of back pain is real as fuck. Right, right, right. Settle down. Settle down. I think for me it's always a combination of both. There's something physically happening. But his idea is that...

His idea is that your mind is creating the pain to distract you from emotional, psychological pain. I think that's the case in some people. Yeah. And then doctors will go do an image and often they'll find something and he thinks that like lumbar imperfections are almost in everyone. Yes. I think that's true. And then the doctors latch on to that image.

And, uh, and your mind latches onto that and you start reinforcing, telling yourself that, uh, that I have this thing and the pain gets worse. There's also another thing called the salience network. Have you heard of this? No. If you can bring up the Wikipedia page for salience network, uh, cause I don't want to get it wrong, but the salience network is a network in the brain that neuroscientists found. Um, uh, my doctor, uh, Tadiyaki, he told me about this, um,

the sales network gets reinforced whenever you obsess over your pains or your health issues. Yeah.

That makes sense. So it's responsible for perception. And the more you reinforce, it's like a muscle. The more you reinforce it, it's sort of like AI, reinforcement learning. The more you reinforce it, it becomes more of an issue. Including various functions, including social behavior, self-awareness, and integrating sensory, emotional, and cognitive information. Boy, I bet social media is really bad for that. Right. Totally. Yeah. Right. And so a lot of the fatigue and things like that

At some point, I'm like, fuck it. I did a lot of other things, but at some point, I'm like, fuck it. I don't care about it. I don't have it. I'm just going to be good. Just not concentrate on that at all. Yeah, because I was reading about it all the time. I was doing it. I was really worried. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I had Abigail Schreier in here. She was talking about that in regards to cognitive therapy, that there's a lot of people that like obsess on their problems so much that their problems actually become bigger. Yes. And this is it. This is the neuroscience behind it, the salience network. Makes sense. Yeah. But there's legit back problems. Of course. Legit back. That's why the John Sarno thing, I was like, okay, not for me. I understand how some people could develop that issue.

But his insight was like, look, I ran a clinic in New York City for a long time. And these chronic illnesses come in waves. There's an ulcers wave in the, like, 90s. Oh, because it became a thing that people were talking about a lot. Yes. Wow. And then there's, like, a neck pain. And then there's an RSI. The most recent one was RSI. What is RSI? Repetitive strain injury. And, again, all these things have rational implications.

explanations. For me, I was in the computer all the time. And I was like, oh, my arm hurts. And yeah, maybe there was some aspect of it. I was programming a lot

But also after I read John Sarno and I realized that some of it might be also psychological that, you know, it's stress. I don't know what's – maybe I have some childhood issues. But like you just realize that a lot of it – and maybe the other way is true as well when you just like minimize it. It just becomes less of an issue in your mind. Yeah.

But the fact that it is like fashion should tell you that there's something psychosomatic about it. Right. The fact that it does come in waves like that for sure. And then once it's in the zeitgeist, ulcers or whatever it is. Right. I remember when we were kids, like everyone had ulcers. And I was like, oh, it's from coffee in the morning.

Uh, like there's all these, I don't know anyone that has house alerts now. Right. That's true. That's right. That's crazy. That's wild. It is wild. The mind, like the, the way it can benefit you or the way it can hold you prisoner. Yeah. And again, this is maybe why I have like a little like, um, different view about AI and humans and all of that from, from, from Silicon Valley. Like this is a weird thing, but, um,

Every time I set my mind to like meet someone, I meet them, including you. That's weird. Like, yeah, I want to meet this person. Something happens, some chain of events, but obviously you also see it in some way. But it's obviously you're doing something very... You're not just thinking it. Right. You're also doing things. Right. Which is my problem with like the secret and like the power of manifesting things. I don't go that far, but...

I don't know. There's something to it. There's something. There's something there. Yeah, I agree. There's something to it. I just – I think the mind and our connection to reality is not as simple as we've been told. Not at all. I think there's something there. And again, when you start looking at psychedelics and stuff like that, there's something there and –

Um, I remember, um, listening to, to one of, I, I love Jerry circa early 2010s. Um, it was a, there was a remote viewing, uh, you were talking about a remote viewing episode. Um,

And I was like, wow, that's crazy. And obviously very skeptical of it. The idea that you can meditate and like see somewhere else or see it from above. Yeah. I read a book by Da Vinci. It's called Da Vinci's Brain, I think.

Da Vinci is like fascinating. Who's this fucking guy? He does everything. And he literally is like across all these domains and he barely sleeps. Like he has this polyphasic sleep thing, which I tried once as torture. Basically every four hours you sleep for 15 minutes.

When I was in university, I was very good at computer science, but I hated going to school. And in Jordan, if you don't go to school, they ban you from the exam. I was getting A's, but I just didn't want to sit in class. And actually, this is when I started thinking about programming on my phone. I was like, maybe I can code my phone in class.

But I felt there was injustice. ADHD, whatever you want to call it. You just can't sit in class. Just give me a break. And so I felt justified to rebel or fix the situation somehow. So I decided to hack into the university and change my grades so I can graduate. Because everyone was graduating. It was like five years in. It took me six years to get through a four-year program just because I can't sit in class. Wow.

and have some dyslexia and things like that.

So I decided to do that. And I'm like, okay, like hacking takes a lot of time because like you're coding, you're scripting, you're running scripts against servers and you're waiting. And I'm like, I'm just going to, you know, to optimize my time, I'm just going to do this DaVinci thing where like for hours. By the way, there's a Seinfeld episode where, what was his name? The crazy guy in Seinfeld. Yeah.

Kramer? Kramer. Kramer does polyphasic sleep. Maybe I learned it from there. I'm not sure. How do you wake up? You set an alarm. Oh, God. Yeah. It's torture. That sounds so crazy. Apparently Da Vinci used to do that. But anyways, I was able to hack into the university by working for weeks using polyphasic sleep and was able to change my grades. And...

Initially, I didn't want to do it on myself, but I had a neighbor who went together to school and I was like, you know, let's change this grade and see if it actually succeeds and actually succeeded in his case. And it was my lab rat. But in my case, I got caught. And the reason I got caught is there is...

You know, in the database, there's your grade out of 100, you know, 0 to 100. When you get banned because of attendance, your grade is de facto 35. So I thought I would just change that, and that's the thing that will get me to pass. Well, it turns out there's another field in the database about whether you're banned or not.

This is bad coding. This is bad programming because this database is not normalized. There's a state in two different fields. So I'll put the blame on them for not designing the right database.

That's hilarious. You blame them for your hacking being unsuccessful. So what was the punishment? So the entire university system went down because there's this anomaly. I was, you know, I passed, but at the same time I was banned. And so I got a call from the head of the registration system saying,

And it was like 7 p.m., whatever. It was landline. And I pick up the call. He's like, hey, listen, we have this issue we're dealing with. Like the entire thing is down. And it just shows your record. There's a problem with it. Do you know anything about it?

And at the time, I'm like, all right, there's like a fork in the road. You know, I either like come clean or just like this is a lie that will like live for me forever. And I was like, I was going to say it was like, yeah, I did it. And I was like, what do you mean? I was like, OK, I'll come explain it to you. So the next day I go there and it's all the university deans. And it's like one of the best computer science universities in the region, the princess of my university for technology there.

And they're all nerds. So the discussion became technical on how I hacked into the university. And I went to whiteboard and explaining what I did, and whatever. And it just felt like a brainstorming session. I'm like, all right, I'll see you guys later. It's like, wait, we need to figure out what to do with you. This is serious. And I'm like, oh, crap.

but the president of, uh, they, they kind of put the decision to the president and he was, I forgot his name, but he was such an enlightened guy. Um, and, and I went and told him like, I just didn't mean any malice. I just felt like justified. I need to graduate. I've been here for a long time. I actually do good work. And, um,

And he's like, look, you're talented, but with great power comes great responsibility. He gave me the Spider-Man line. And he said, for us to forgive you, you're going to have to go and harden the systems in the university against hacking. So I spent the summer trying to work with the engineers at the university to do that. But they hated me.

because you know i'm the guy that hacked into the system so they would like blackball me like sometimes i'll show up to work and they wouldn't open the door and i can see them like i could see you there i'm knocking and they wouldn't let me in and let me work with them um we did some stuff to to fix it and and then uh uh i i gained uh you know fame maybe notoriety and the in the university and actually got me my first job um uh while i was in school and um

It's a different story, but that job was at a startup that ended up making videos that were a big part of the Arab Spring. Oh, wow. Yeah. And I was part of some of these videos as well. But anyways, so one of the computer deans was like, hey, listen, I really helped you out. A computer science dean, I really helped you out when you had this problem. And I need you to work with me in order to do another research to hack into the university again.

I was like, I'm not going to do that. No, it's like, no, you're not going to get in trouble. You're going to be sanctioned. So again, I worked hard on that. This time I invented a piece of software to help me do that. And I was able to find more vulnerabilities. And so I show up at my project defense. And it's like a committee of different deans and students and all of that.

And so I go up and I start explaining my project. And like I run a scan against the university network and it showed a bunch of red, like there's vulnerabilities. And one of the teens is like, no, that's fake. That's not true. It started dawning in me that I was like a pawn in some kind of

- Power struggle. - Power struggle. So that guy was responsible for the university system and this guy's using me too. I was like, oh shit. But like, I'm not gonna back down. I was like, no, that's not a lie, it's true. And so I'd like tap into that vulnerability and I go to the database and I'm like, all right, what do you want me to show? Your salary or your password? It was like, show me your password. So I show him the password.

And I was like, no, that's not my password. And it was encrypted. But they also have in the database like a decrypt function, which they shouldn't have, but they had it. So I was like, decrypt to the password. And the password showed on the screen in the middle of the defense. And so his face was red. He shakes my hand and he leaves to change his password. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.

That's awesome. And I graduated. And they cut me some slack, and I was able to graduate. That's awesome. That's a great story. We'll end with that. Thank you very much, brother. I really appreciate it. It was really fun. That was a great conversation. Thank you. Your app, let everybody know about it. Replit, R-E-P-L-I-T dot com. How did I find it? There it is. Replit.

Remplit.com. Go make some apps. Go make some apps, people. Avoid the whatever the hell's going to happen with AI. All right. Thank you very much. Thank you. Bye, everybody.