Sam Altman and Joe Rogan debate AI’s net-positive potential, from job displacement (UBI as a bandage) to emotional violence fueled by platforms like Twitter, where algorithmic manipulation thrives without societal guardrails. Altman warns of power imbalances—wealthy users controlling neural interfaces or AGI—while Rogan ties tech to evolutionary progress, questioning whether humanity can engineer out primal instincts (lust, fear, war) or risk collapse from inequality. They explore psychedelics as tools for empathy and societal reset, citing the Younger Dryas Impact Theory’s comet-driven civilization collapse, but Altman cautions that eliminating conflict might just replace it with simulated entertainment. The core tension: can humanity safely advance AGI while mitigating its risks, or will unchecked progress outpace ethical adaptation? [Automatically generated summary]
No, I mean, what have you done with AI? I mean, it's one of the things about this is, I mean, I think everyone is fascinated by it.
I mean, everyone is absolutely blown away at the current capability and wondering what the potential for the future is and whether or not that's a good thing.
My view of the world, you know, when you're like a kid in school, you learn about this technological revolution and then that one and then that one.
And my view of the world now sort of looking backwards and forwards is that this is like one long technological revolution.
And we had...
Sure, like first we had to figure out agriculture so that we had the resources and time to figure out how to build machines, then we got this industrial revolution, and that made us learn about a lot of stuff, a lot of other scientific discovery too, let us do the computer revolution, and that's now letting us, as we scale up to these massive systems, do the AI revolution.
But it really is just one long story of humans discovering science and technology and co-evolving with it.
And I think it's the most exciting story of all time.
I think it's how we get to this world of abundance.
And although we do have these things to navigate, then there will be these downsides.
If you think about what it means for the world and for people's quality of lives, if we can get to a world where the cost of intelligence and the abundance that comes with that The cost dramatically falls.
The abundance goes way up.
I think we'll do the same thing with energy.
And I think those are the two sort of key inputs to everything else we want.
So if we can have abundant and cheap energy and intelligence, that will transform people's lives largely for the better.
And I think it's going to, in the same way that if we could go back now 500 years and look at someone's life, we'd say, well, there's some great things, but they didn't have this.
They didn't have that.
Can you believe they didn't have modern medicine?
That's what people are going to look back at us like, but in 50 years.
When you think about the people that currently rely on jobs that AI will replace, when you think about whether it's truck drivers or automation workers, people that work in factory assembly lines, what,
if anything, what strategies can be put to mitigate the negative downsides of those jobs being eliminated by AI? I'll talk about some general thoughts, but I find making very specific predictions difficult because the way the technology goes has been so different than even my own intuitions, or certainly my own intuitions.
If you had asked me 10 years ago, I would have said, first, AI is going to come for blue collar labor, basically.
It's going to drive trucks and do factory work and, you know, it'll handle heavy machinery.
Then maybe after that it'll do some kinds of cognitive labor, but it won't be off doing what I think of personally as the really hard stuff.
It won't be off proving new mathematical theorems.
It won't be off discovering new science.
It won't be off writing code.
And then eventually, maybe, but maybe last of all, maybe never, because human creativity is this magic special thing, last of all it'll come for the creative jobs.
That's what I would have said.
Now, A, it looks to me like, and for a while, AI is much better at doing tasks than doing jobs.
It can do these little pieces super well, but sometimes it goes off the rails.
It can't keep very long coherence.
So people are instead just able to do their existing jobs way more productively.
But you really still need the human there today.
And then B, it's going exactly the other direction.
Could do the creative work first.
Stuff like coding second.
They can do things like other kinds of cognitive labor third.
And we're the furthest away from like humanoid robots.
If we do have something that completely eliminates factory workers, completely eliminates truck drivers, delivery drivers, things along those lines, that creates this massive vacuum in our society.
So I think there's things that we're gonna do that are good to do but not sufficient.
So I think at some point we will do something like a UBI or some other kind of like very long-term unemployment insurance something.
But we'll have some way of giving people like redistributing money in society as a cushion for people as people figure out the new jobs.
Maybe I should touch on that.
I'm not a believer at all that there won't be lots of new jobs.
I think human creativity, desire for status, wanting different ways to compete, invent new things, feel part of a community, feel valued, that's not going to go anywhere.
People have worried about that forever.
What happens is we get better tools and we just invent new things and more amazing things to do.
And there's a big universe out there.
And I think I mean that like literally in that there's like space is really big, but also there's just so much stuff we can all do if we do get to this world of abundant intelligence where you can sort of just think of a new idea and it gets created.
But again, to the point we started with, that doesn't provide great solace to people who are losing their jobs today.
So saying there's going to be this great indefinite stuff in the future.
People are like, what are we doing today?
I think we will, as a society, do things like UBI and other ways of redistribution, but I don't think that gets at the core of what people want.
I think what people want is agency, self-determination, the ability to play a role in architecting the future along with the rest of society, the ability to express themselves and create something meaningful to them.
And also, I think a lot of people work jobs they hate, and I think we as a society are always a little bit confused about whether we want to work more or work less.
But somehow, We all get to do something meaningful and we all get to play our role in driving the future forward.
That's really important.
And what I hope is as those long-haul truck driving jobs go away, which people have been wrong about predicting how fast that's going to happen, but it's going to happen, we figure out not just a way to Solve the economic problem by, like, giving people the equivalent of money every month, but that there's a way that—and we have a lot of ideas about this—there's a way that we, like, share ownership and decision-making over the future.
I think I say a lot about AGI is that Everyone realizes we're going to have to share the benefits of that, but we also have to share the decision-making over it and access to the system itself.
I'd be more excited about a world where we say, rather than give everybody on Earth 1.8 billionth of the AGI money, which we should do that too, we say, you get 1.8 billionth slice of the system.
You can sell it to somebody else.
You can sell it to a company.
You can pool it with other people.
You can use it for whatever creative pursuit you want.
You can use it to figure out how to start some new business.
And with that, you get sort of like a voting right over how this is all going to be used.
And so the better the AGI gets, the more your little 1.8 billionth ownership is worth to you.
Have something that's completely unbiased, absolutely rational, has the accumulated knowledge of the entire human history at its disposal, including all knowledge of psychology and psychological study, including UBI, because that comes with a host of You know, pitfalls and issues that people have with it.
I think we're still very far away from a system that is capable enough and reliable enough that any of us would want that.
But I'll tell you something I love about that.
Someday, let's say that thing gets built.
The fact that it can go around and talk to every person on Earth, understand their exact preferences at a very deep level, how they think about this issue and that one, and how they balance the trade-offs and what they want, and then understand all of that and collectively optimize for the collective preferences of humanity or of citizens of the US, that's awesome.
Where you're gonna get completely objective, the absolute most intelligent decision for virtually every problem, every dilemma that we face currently in society.
No, no, but I'm not comfortable doing that with anybody, you know?
I mean, I was uncomfortable with the Patriot Act.
I'm uncomfortable with many decisions that are being made.
It's just there's so much obvious evidence that decisions that are being made are not being made in the best interest of the overall well of the people.
It's being made in the decisions of whatever gigantic corporations that have donated to and whatever the military industrial complex and pharmaceutical industrial complex and just the money.
That's really what we know today, that money has a massive influence on our society and the choices that get made.
But when you think of AGI, when you think of the possible future, like where it goes to, do you ever extrapolate?
Do you ever like sit and pause and say, well, if this becomes sentient and it has the ability to make better versions of itself, how long before we're literally dealing with a god?
So, the way that I think about this is, it used to be that AGI was this very binary moment.
It was before and after.
And I think I was totally wrong about that.
And the right way to think about it is this continuum of intelligence, this smooth exponential curve.
Back all the way to that sort of smooth curve of technological revolution.
The amount of compute power we can put into the system, the scientific ideas about how to make it more efficient and smarter, to give it the ability to do reasoning, to think about how to improve itself.
That will all come.
But my model for a long time, I think if you look at the world of AGI thinkers, there's sort of two, particularly around the safety issues you're talking about, there's two axes that matter.
There's what's called short timelines or long timelines to the first milestone of AGI, whatever that's going to be.
Is that going to happen in...
A few years, a few decades, maybe even longer.
Although at this point, I think most people are a few years or a few decades.
And then there's takeoff speed.
Once we get there, from there to that point you were talking about where it's capable of the rapid self-improvement, is that a slower, a faster process?
The world that I think we're heading, that we're in, and also the world that I think is the most controllable and the safest, is the short timelines and slow takeoff quadrant.
And I think we're going to have, you know, there were a lot of very smart people for a while who were like, the thing you were just talking about happens in a day or three days.
And that doesn't seem likely to me given the shape of the technology as we understand it now.
Now, even if that happens in a decade or three decades, it's still like the blink of an eye from a historical perspective.
And there are going to be some real challenges to getting that right.
And the decisions we make The sort of safety systems and the checks that the world puts in place, how we think about global regulation or rules of the road from a safety perspective for those projects.
It's super important because you can imagine many things going horribly wrong.
But I've been...
I feel cheerful about the progress the world is making towards taking this seriously and, you know, it reminds me of what I've read about the conversations that the world had right around the development of nuclear weapons.
Do you think about the convergence of things like Neuralink and there's a few competing technologies where they're trying to implement some sort of a connection between the human biological system and technology?
If we imagine all the way out to the sci-fi future, there have been a lot of sci-fi books written about how you get that moment right.
Who gets to do that first?
What about people who don't want to?
How do you make sure the people that do it first actually help lift everybody up together?
How do you make sure people who want to just live their very human life get to do that?
That stuff is really hard and honestly...
So far off from my problems of the day that I don't get to think about that as much as I'd like to, because I do think it's super interesting.
But yeah, it seems like if we just think logically, that's going to be a huge challenge at some point, and people are going to want...
Wildly divergent things, but there is a societal question about how we're going to, like, the questions of fairness that come there and what it means for the people who don't do it.
Super, super complicated.
Anyway, on the neural interface side, I'm, in the short term, like, before we figure out how to Upload someone's consciousness into a computer, if that's even possible at all, which I think there's plenty of sides you could take on why it's not.
The thing that I find myself most interested in is what we can do without drilling a hole in someone's head.
How much of the inner monologue can we read out with an externally mounted device?
And if we have an imperfect, low bandwidth, low accuracy neural interface, can people still just learn how to use it really well in a way that's quite powerful for what they can now do with a new computing platform?
I think if someone built a system where you could think words, it doesn't have to be a question, it could just be your passive rambling inner monologue, but it certainly could be a question.
And that was being fed into GPT-5 or 6. And in your field of vision, the words in response were being displayed.
My real concern is that once we take the step to use an actual neural interface, when there's an actual operation, and they're using some sort of an implant, and then that implant becomes more sophisticated, it's not the iPhone 1, now it's the iPhone 15, and as these things get better and better, we're on the road to cyborgs.
We're on the road to, like, why would you want to be a biological person?
Do you really want to live in a fucking log cabin when you can be in the Matrix?
Like if you take away someone's phone and they have to go function in the world today, they're at a disadvantage relative to everybody else.
So maybe that's like the lightest weight version of a merge we could imagine, but I think it's worth like, if we go back to that earlier thing about the one exponential curve, I think it's worth saying we've like lifted off the x-axis already down this path, the tiniest bit.
And Yeah.
Even if you don't go all the way to, like, a neural interface, VR will get so good that some people just don't want to take it off that much.
Right.
And...
That's fine for them, as long as we can solve this question of how do we think about what a balance of power means in the world.
I think there will be many people, I'm certainly one of them, who's like, actually the human body and the human experience is pretty great.
That log heaven in the woods, pretty awesome.
I don't want to be there all the time.
I'd love to go play the great video game, but I'm really happy to get to go there sometimes.
Because the real problem is when you combine that with probability theory and you talk to the people that say, well, if you just look at the numbers – The probability that we're already in a simulation is much higher than the probability that we're not.
I was reading about how horrible systems like ChatGPT and Google are from an environmental impact because it's, you know, using, like, some extremely tiny amount of energy for each query.
And, you know, how we're all destroying the world.
And I was like...
Before that, people drove to the library.
Let's talk about how much carbon they burned to answer this question versus what it takes now.
But that's just people looking for some reason why something's bad.
That's not a logical perspective.
What we should be looking at is the spectacular changes that are possible through this.
And all the problems, the insurmountable problems that we have with resources, with the environment, with cleaning up the ocean, climate change, there's so many problems that we have.
No, because those creeps would still be pocketing money and they'd have offshore accounts and it would always be a weird thing of corruption and how to mitigate that corruption, which is also one of the fascinating things about the current state of technology is that we're so much more aware of corruption.
There's so much independent reporting and we're so much more cognizant of the actual problems This is really great.
One of the things that I've observed, obviously many other people too, is corruption is such an incredible hindrance to getting anything done in a society to make it forward progress.
And my worldview had been...
I was more US-centric when I was younger and as I've just studied the world more and had to work in more places in the world.
It's amazing how much corruption there still is.
But the shift to a technologically enabled world, I think, is a major force against it because it's harder to hide stuff.
And I do think corruption in the world will keep trending down.
I helped start a project called WorldCoin a few years ago.
And so I've gotten to learn more about this space.
I'm excited about it for the same reasons.
I'm excited about Bitcoin too.
But I think this idea that we have a global currency that is outside of the control of any government is a super logical and important step on the tech tree.
I mean, why should the government control currency?
I mean the government should be dealing with all the pressing environmental, social, infrastructure issues, foreign policy issues, economic issues.
The things that we need to be governed in order to have a peaceful and prosperous society that's equal and equitable.
What do you think happens to money and currency after AGI? I've wondered about that because I feel like with money, especially when money goes digital, the bottleneck is access.
If we get to a point where all information is just freely shared everywhere, there are no secrets, there are no boundaries, there are no borders.
We're reading minds.
We have complete access to all of the information of everything you've ever done, everything everyone's ever said.
There's no hidden secrets.
What is money then?
Money is this digital thing.
Well, how can you possess it?
How can you possess this digital thing if there is literally no bottleneck?
There's no barriers to anyone accessing any information?
Like a sort of way to trade labor or trade like a limited number of hard assets like land and houses and whatever.
And if you think about a world where like intellectual labor is just readily available and super cheap, then...
That's somehow very different.
I think there will always be goods that we want to be scarce and expensive, but it'll only be those goods that we want to be scarce and expensive and services that still are.
And so money in a world like that, I think, is just a very curious idea.
My current best idea, and maybe there's something better, is I think if we are right, a lot of reasons we could be wrong, but if we are right that the AGI systems, of which there will be a few, become the high-order bits of influence, whatever, in the world, I think you do need...
Not to just redistribute the money but the access so that people can make their own decisions about how to use it and how to govern it.
And if you've got one idea, you get to do this.
If I've got one idea, I get to do that.
And I have like rights to basically do whatever I want with my part of it.
And if I come up with better ideas than you, I get rewarded for that by whatever the society is or vice versa.
You know, the hardliners, the people that are against, like, welfare and against any sort of universal basic income, UBI, what they're really concerned with is human nature, right?
They believe that if you remove incentives, if you just give people free money, they become addicted to it, they become lazy.
But isn't that a human biological and psychological bottleneck?
And perhaps...
With the implementation of artificial intelligence combined with some sort of neural interface, whether it's external or internal.
It seems like that's a problem that can be solved.
That you can essentially, and this is where it gets really spooky, you can re-engineer the human biological system and you can remove all of these problems that people have that are essentially problems that date back to human reward systems when we were tribal people.
Hunter-gatherer people, whether it's jealousy, lust, envy, all these variables that come into play when you're dealing with money and status and social status.
If those are eliminated with technology, essentially we become a next version of what the human species is possible.
Look, we're very, very far removed from tribal, brutal societies of cave people.
We all agree that this is a way better way to live.
It's way safer.
I was talking about this at my comedy club last night.
Because my wife was, we were talking about DNA, and my wife was saying that, look, everybody came from K people, which is kind of a fucked up thought, that everyone here is here because of K people.
Well, all that's still in our DNA. All that's still—and these reward systems can be hijacked, and they can be hijacked by just giving people money.
And, like, you don't have to work.
You don't have to do anything.
You don't have to have ambition.
You'll just have money and just lay around and do drugs.
That's the fear that people have of giving people free money.
But— If we can figure out how to literally engineer the human biological vehicle and remove all those pitfalls, if we can enlighten people technologically, maybe enlighten is the wrong word, but advance The human species to the point where those are no longer dilemmas because those are easily solvable through coding.
They're easily solvable through enhancing the human biological system, perhaps raising dopamine levels to the point where anger and fear and hate are impossible.
Man, we could talk the rest of the time about this one topic.
It's so interesting.
I think...
If I could push a button to remove all human striving and conflict, I wouldn't do it, first of all.
I think that's a very important part of our story and experience.
And also, I think we can see both from our own biological history and also from what we know about AI, that very simple Goal systems, fitness functions, reward models, whatever you want to call it, lead to incredibly impressive results.
You know, if the biological imperative is survive and reproduce, look how far that has somehow gotten us as a society.
All of this, all this stuff we have, all this technology, this building, whatever else.
That got here through an extremely simple goal in a very complex environment leading to all of the richness and complexity of people fulfilling this biological imperative to some degree and wanting to impress each other effectively.
So I think evolutionary fitness is a simple and unbelievably powerful idea.
Now, could you carefully edit out every individual manifestation of that?
Maybe, but I don't want to, like, live in a society of drones where everybody is just sort of, like, on Molly all the time either.
Like, that doesn't seem like the right answer.
Like, I want us to continue to strive.
I want us to continue to push back the frontier and go out and explore.
And I actually think something's already gotten a little off track in society about all of that and we're...
I don't know.
I thought I'd be older by the time I felt like the old guy complaining about the youth.
But I think we've lost something, and I think that we need more striving, maybe more risk-taking, more explorer spirit.
And it often was the case that the very best startup founders were in their early or mid-20s or late 20s, maybe even.
And now they skew much older.
And what I want to know is, in the world today, where are the super great 25-year-old founders?
And there are a few.
It's not fair to say there are none, but there are less than there were before.
And I think that's bad for society at all levels.
Tech company founders is one example, but people who go off and create something new, who push on a disagreeable or controversial idea, we need that to drive forward.
We need that sort of spirit.
We need people to be able to put out ideas and be wrong and not be ostracized from society for it or not have it be something that they get canceled for or whatever.
We need people to be able to take a risk in their career because they believe in some important scientific quest that may not work out or may sound like really controversial or bad or whatever.
You know, certainly when we started OpenAI and we were saying, we think this AGI thing is real and could be, you know, It could be done, unlikely, but so important if it happens.
And all of the older scientists in our field were saying, those people are irresponsible.
You shouldn't talk about AGI. That's like, you know, they're like selling a scam, or they're like, you know, they're kind of being reckless and it's going to lead to an AGI winter.
Like, we said we believed, we said at the time, we knew it was unlikely, but it was an important quest.
And we were going to go after it and kind of like, fuck the haters.
I'm tempted to blame the education system, but I think that interacts with society in all of these strange ways.
It's funny, there was this thing all over my Twitter feed recently trying to talk about what caused the drop in testosterone in American men over the last few decades.
And no one was like, this is a symptom, not a cause.
And everyone was like, oh, it's the microplastics, it's the birth control pills, it's the whatever, it's the whatever, it's the whatever.
And I think this is not at all the most important It was interesting to me, sociologically, that there was only talk about what caused it, not about it being an effect of some sort of change in society.
I mean I've had a podcast with Dr. Shanna Swan who wrote the book Countdown and that is all about the introduction of petrochemical products and the correlating drop in testosterone, rise in miscarriages, the fact that these are ubiquitous endocrine disruptors that When they do blood tests on people, they find some insane number.
It's like 90 plus percent of people have phthalates in their system.
The real concern is with mammals because the introductions, when they've done studies with mammals and they've introduced phthalates into their body, there's a correlating...
One thing that happens is these animals, their taints shrink.
The mammal, when you look at males, it's 50% to 100% larger than the females.
With the introduction of phthalates on the males, the taints start shrinking, the penises shrank, the testicles shrank, sperm count shrinks.
So we know there's a direct biological connection between these chemicals and how they interact with bodies.
So that's a real one.
And it's also...
The amount of petrochemical products that we have, the amount of plastics that we use, it is such an integral part of our culture and our society, our civilization.
It's everywhere.
And I've wondered if you think about how these Territorial apes evolve into this new, advanced species.
Wouldn't one of the very best ways be to get rid of one of the things that causes the most problems, which is testosterone?
We need testosterone.
We need aggressive men and protectors.
But why do we need them?
We need them because there's other aggressive men that are evil.
Right?
So we need protectors from ourselves.
We need the good strong people to protect us from the bad strong people.
But if we're in the process of integrating with technology, if technology is an inescapable part of our life, if it is everywhere, you're using it, you have the internet of everything that's in your microwave, your television, your computers,
everything you use, As time goes on, that will be more and more a part of your life, and as these plastics are introduced into the human biological system, you're seeing a feminization of the males of the species.
You're seeing a downfall in birth rate.
You're seeing all these correlating factors that would sort of lead us to become this more Peaceful, less violent, less aggressive, less ego-driven thing.
Look, obviously testosterone has many great things to say for it and some bad tendencies too.
But I don't think a world – if we leave that out of the equation and just say like a world that has a spirit that we're going to defend ourselves, we're going to – We're going to find a way to protect ourselves and our tribe and our society into this future, which you can get with lots of other ways.
I think that's an important impulse.
More than that, though, what I meant If we go back to the issue of where are the young founders?
Why don't we have more of those?
And I don't think it's just the tech startup industry.
I think you could say that about young scientists or many other categories.
Those are maybe just the ones that I know the best.
In a world with Any amount of technology.
I still think it is our destiny in some sense to stay on this curve.
And we still need to go figure out what's next and after the next hill and after the next hill.
And it would be...
My perception is that there is some long-term societal change happening here.
But what I'm saying is if the human species does integrate with technology, wouldn't a great way to facilitate that to be to kind of feminize the primal apes and to sort of downplay the role— You mean like should the AGI phthalates enter the world?
I don't know if it's AGI. I mean maybe it's just an inevitable consequence of technology.
Because especially the type of technology that we use, which does have so much plastic in it, and then on top of that the technology that's involved in food systems, preservatives, all these different things that we use to make sure that people don't starve to death.
We've made incredible strives in that.
There are very few people in this country that starve to death.
It's not a primary issue, but violence is a primary issue.
But our concerns about violence and our concerns about testosterone and strong men and powerful people is only because...
And I think that biological imperative is because we used to have to defend against incoming tribes and predators and animals.
And we needed someone who was stronger than most to defend the rest.
And that's the concept of the military.
That's why Navy SEAL training is so difficult.
We want the strongest of the strong to be at the tip of the spear.
But that's only because there's people like that out there that are bad.
If artificial general intelligence and the implementation of some sort of a device that changes the biological structure of human beings to the point where that is no longer a concern, like if you are me and I am you and I know this because of technology, violence is impossible.
Yeah, look, by the time if this goes all the way down the sci-fi path and we're all like merged into this one single like planetary universal whatever consciousness, then yes, you don't.
They have some sort of a telepathic way of communicating.
They probably don't need sounds with their mouths.
And they don't need this urge that we have to conquer and to spread our DNA. Like that's so much of what people do is these reward systems that were established when we were territorial apes.
I don't agree that that would be the logical conclusion.
I think the logical conclusion would be They would look for problems and frontiers that are insurmountable to our current existence, like intergalactic communication and transportation.
The thing I was like reflecting on as you were saying that is, I don't think I... I'm not as optimistic that we can or even should overcome our biological base to the degree that I think you think we can.
And, you know, to even go back one further level, like, I think society is happiest where there's, like, roles for strong femininity and strong masculinity in the same people and in different people.
And I don't, like...
And I don't think a lot of these, like, deep-seated things are gonna be able to get pushed aside very easily and still have a system that works.
Like, sure, we can't really think about what, if there were consciousness in a machine someday or whatever, what that would be like.
And maybe I'm just, like, thinking too small-mindedly, but I think there is something But don't you think that cave people would probably have those same logical conclusions about life and sedentary lifestyle and sitting in front of a computer and not interacting with each other except
How different do you think our motivations are today and kind of what really brings us genuine joy and how we're wired at some deep level differently than cave people?
I think that's the problem, is that genetically, at the base level, there's not much difference.
And that these reward systems are all – we interact with all of them, whether it's ego, lust, passion, fury, anger, jealousy, all these different things.
I think that our concern with losing this aspect of what it means to be a person – Like the idea that we should always have conflict and struggle because conflict and struggle is how we facilitate progress, which is true, right?
And combating evil is how the good gets greater and stronger if the good wins.
But my concern is that that is all predicated on the idea that the biological system that we have right now is correct, And optimal.
And I think one of the things that we're dealing with, with the heightened states of depression and anxiety and the lack of meaning and existential angst that people experience, a lot of that is because the biological reality of being a human animal doesn't really integrate that well with this world that we've created.
And I wonder If the solution to that is not find ways to find meaning with the biological vessel that you've been given, but rather engineer those aspects that are problematic out of the system.
To create a truly enlightened being.
Like, one of the things, if you ask someone today, what are the odds that in three years there will be no war in the world?
That's zero.
Like, nobody thinks.
There's never been a time in human history where we haven't had war.
If you had to say, what is our number one problem as a species?
I would say our number one problem is war.
Our number one problem is this idea that it's okay to send massive groups of people who don't know each other to go murder massive groups of people that are somehow opposed because of the government, because of lines in the sand and territory.
Dr. Shanna Swan believes that it's the primary driving factor of the sort of drop in testosterone and all miscarriage issues.
Low birth weights.
All those things seem to be a direct factor environmentally.
I'm sure there's other factors too.
The drop in testosterone, it's been shown that you can increase male's testosterone through resistance training and through making...
There's certain things you can do.
One of the big ones they found through a study in Japan is cold water immersion.
Before exercise, it radically increases testosterone.
So cold water immersion and then exercise post that.
I wonder why.
Yeah, I don't know.
Let's see who can find that.
But it's a fascinating field of study, but I think it has something to do with resilience and resistance and the fact that your body has to combat this External factor that's very extreme that causes the body to go into this state of preservation and the implementation of cold shock proteins and the reduction of inflammation, which also enhances the body's endocrine system.
But then on top of that, this imperative that you have to become more resilient to survive this external factor that you've introduced into your life every single day.
So there's ways, obviously, that you can make a human being more robust.
You know, we know that we can do that through strength training and that all that stuff actually does raise testosterone.
Your diet can raise testosterone and a poor diet will lower it and will hinder your integrant system, will hinder your ability to produce growth hormone, melatonin, all these different factors.
That seems to be something that we can fix in terms or at least mitigate with decisions and choices and effort.
But the fact that these petrochemical – like there's a graph that Dr. Shanna Swan has in her book that shows during the 1950s when they start using petrochemical products in everything, microwave, plastic, saran wrap, all this different stuff.
There's a direct correlation between the implementation and the dip and it all seems to line up.
And when I objectively look at it in terms of like if you take where we are now and all of our problems and you look towards the future and like – What would be one way that you could mitigate a lot of these?
And it would be the implementation of some sort of a telepathic technology where You know, you couldn't just text someone or tweet at someone something mean because you would literally feel what they feel when you put that energy out there and you would be repulsed.
You know, it's true that violence in the world has obviously gone down a lot over the decades, but emotional violence is up a lot, and the internet has been horrible for that.
And it's very damaging to women, particularly young girls.
Young girls growing up, there's a direct correlation between the invention of social media, the introduction to the iPhone, self-harm, suicide, online bullying.
People have always talked shit about people when no one's around.
The fact that they're doing it now openly to harm people.
Do you know how many fucking times I've got up to go to the bathroom first thing in the morning and spent an hour just sitting on the toilet scrolling through Instagram?
Like for nothing.
It does zero for me.
And there's this thought that I'm going to get something out of it.
I was thinking actually just yesterday about how, you know, we all have talked for so long about these algorithmic feeds are going to manipulate us in these big ways and that will happen.
But in the small ways already where like scrolling Instagram is not even that fulfilling, like you finish that hour and you're like, I know that was a waste of my time.
But it was like over the threshold where you couldn't quite...
Well, there's just a lot of shit out there, unfortunately.
But it's just in terms of, you know, I was talking to Sean O'Malley, who's this UFC fighter, who's, you know, obviously has a very strong mind, really interesting guy.
But one of the things that Sean said is, like, I get this, like, low-level anxiety from scrolling through things, and I don't know why.
Like, what is that?
And I think it's part of the logical mind realizes this is a massive waste of your resources.
This is a completely new technology that, again, hijacks our human reward systems and hijacks all of the checks and balances that are in place for communication, which Historically has been one-on-one.
Historically, communication has been one person to another.
And when people write letters to each other, it's generally things like if someone writes a love letter or, you know, they miss you.
They're writing this thing where they're kind of exposing a thing that maybe they have a difficulty in expressing in front of you.
And it was, you know, generally, unless the person was a psycho, they're not hateful letters.
Whereas the ability to just communicate, fuck that guy, I hope he gets hit by a bus, is so simple and easy, and you don't experience...
Twitter seems to be particularly horrible for this, as the mechanics work.
It really rewards in ways that I don't think anybody fully understands, that taps into something about human psychology.
But that's kind of like...
That's how you get engagement.
That's how you get followers.
that's how you get the dopamine hits or whatever and like the people who I know that spend all day on Twitter more of them are unhappy about it than happy Oh, yeah.
I think maybe each day you go to bed feeling like you accomplished something and got your dopamine and at the end of each decade you probably are like, where'd that decade go?
I think I've watched it, like, destroy is too strong of a word, but, like, knock off track the careers or lives or happiness or human relationships of people that are, like, good, smart, conscientious people that just, like, couldn't fight this demon because it, like, hacked there.
And then there was a psychological aspect of it, like the angst that came from being socially isolated and terrified about this invisible disease that's going to kill us all.
And, you know, so you have this like, and then you're interacting with people on Twitter, and then you're caught up in that anxiety, and you're doing it all day.
And I know quite a few people, especially comedians, that really lost their minds and lost their respect to their peers by doing that.
Well, I mean, some people, I think if they're not inclined to be shitty to people, I think some people did seek comfort and they did interact with people in positive ways.
I see there's plenty of positive...
I think the thing is that the negative interactions are so much more impactful.
How many of the people that you know that use Twitter those 8 or 10 hours a day are just saying wonderful things about other people all day versus the virulent...
But then again, I wonder, with the implementation of some new technology that makes communication a very different thing than what we're currently...
Like, what we're doing now with communication is less immersive than communicating one-on-one.
You and I are talking, we're looking into each other's eyes, we're getting social cues, we're smiling at each other, we're laughing.
It's a very natural way to talk.
I wonder if through the implementation of technology, if it becomes even more immersive than a one-on-one conversation, even more interactive, and you will understand even more about the way a person feels about what you say.
About that person's memory, that person's life, that person's history, their education, how it comes out of their mind, how their mind interacts with your mind, and you see them.
You really see them.
I wonder if that...
I wonder if what we're experiencing now...
It's just like the first time people invented guns, they just started shooting at things, you know?
And then what causes someone to be a psycho and can that be engineered out?
Imagine what we're talking about.
When we're dealing with the human mind, we're dealing with various diseases, bipolar, schizophrenia.
Imagine a world where we can find the root cause of those things and through coding and some sort of an implementation of technology that elevates dopamine and serotonin and does some things to people that eliminates all of those problems.
And allows people to communicate in a very pure way.
I mean, you just—you, from the—when did OpenAI—when did you first start this project?
End of 2015, early 2016. And when you initially started this project, what kind of timeline did you have in mind and has it stayed on that timeline or is it just wildly out of control?
I remember talking with John Schulman, one of our co-founders, early on, and he was like, yeah, I think it's going to be about a 15-year project.
And I was like, yeah, that sounds about right to me.
And I've always sort of thought since then, now, I no longer think of like AGI as quite the end point, but to get to the point where we like accomplish the thing we set out to accomplish, you know, that would take us to like 2030, 2031. That has felt to me like all the way through kind of a reasonable estimate with huge error bars.
And I kind of think we're on the trajectory I sort of would have assumed.
On society would be like did you when you when you first started doing this and you said okay if we are successful and we do create some massively advanced AGI What is the implementation?
And what is the impact on society?
Did you sit there and have like a graph, like you had the pros on one side, the cons on the other?
Many of us were super worried about, and still are, about Safety and alignment.
And if we build these systems, we can all see the great future.
That's easy to imagine.
But if something goes horribly wrong, it's like really horribly wrong.
And so there was a lot of discussion about and really a big part of the founding spirit of this is like, how are we going to solve this safety problem?
What does that even mean?
One of the things that we believe is that the greatest minds in the world cannot sit there and solve that in a vacuum.
You've got to have contact with reality.
You've got to see where the technology goes.
Practice plays out in a stranger way than theory.
And that's certainly proven true for us.
But we had a long list of...
Well, I don't know if we had a long list of cons.
We had a very intense list of cons.
Because, you know, there's like all of the last decades of sci-fi telling you about...
How this goes wrong and why you're supposed to shoot me right now.
I'm sure you've seen the John Connor chat GPT. I haven't.
So that stuff we were like very clear in our minds on.
Now, I think we understand there's a lot of work to do, but we understand more about how to make AI safe in the world.
AI safety gets overloaded.
Like, you know, does it mean don't say something people find offensive?
Or does it mean don't destroy all of humanity or some continuum?
And I think the word is like gotten overloaded.
But in terms of the like, not destroy all of humanity version of it, we have a lot of work to do.
But I think we have finally more ideas about what can work.
And given the way the systems are going, we have a lot more opportunities available to us to solve it than I thought we would have Given the direction that we initially thought the technology was going to go.
So that's good.
On the positive side, The thing that I was most excited about then and remain most excited about now is what if this system can dramatically increase the rate of scientific knowledge in society?
I think that kind of like all real sustainable economic growth, the future getting better, progress in some sense comes from increased scientific and technological capacity.
That's how we can solve all the problems.
And if the AI can help us do that, that's always been the thing I've been most excited about.
Well, it certainly seems like that is the greatest potential, greatest positive potential of AI. It is to solve A lot of the problems that human beings have had forever, a lot of the societal problems that seem to be—I mean, that's what I was talking about in the AI president.
I'm kind of not joking because I feel like if something was hyper-intelligent and aware of all the variables with no human bias— And no incentives.
Other than, here's your program, the greater good for the community of the United States and the greater good for that community as it interacts with the rest of the world.
The elimination of these dictators, whether they're elected or non-elected, who impose their will on the population because they have a vested interest in protecting special interest groups and industry.
The thing that I find scary when you say that is it feels like it's humanity not in control.
And I reflexively don't like that.
But if it's...
If it's instead like it is the collective will of humanity being expressed without the mistranslation and corrupting influences along the way, then I can see it.
I mean, that— I don't think you can control it at this point other than some massive natural disaster that resets us back to the Stone Age, which is also something we should be very concerned with because it seems like that happens a lot.
We're not aware of it because the timeline of a human body is so small.
The timeline of the human existence as a person is a hundred years if you're lucky, but yet the timeline of the earth is billions of years and if you look at how many times Life on Earth has been reset by comets slamming into the Earth and just completely eliminating all technological advancement.
It seems like it's happened multiple times in recorded history.
I always think we don't think about that quite enough.
We talked about the simulation hypothesis earlier.
It's had this big resurgence in the tech industry recently.
One of the new takes on it as we get closer to AGI is that if ancestors were simulating us, the time they'd want to simulate again and again is right up to the...
Right up to the creation of AGI. So it seems very crazy.
We're living through this time.
It's not a coincidence at all.
This is the time that is after we had enough cell phones out in the world recording tons of video to train the video model of the world that's all being jacked into us now via brain implants or whatever.
And before everything goes really crazy with AGI. And it's also this interesting time to simulate, like, can we get through?
Does the asteroid come right before we get there for dramatic tension?
Like, do we figure out how to make this safe?
Do we figure out how to societally agree on it?
So that's led to, like, a lot more people believing it than before, I think.
It's the best, but it also has the most problems, the most social problems, the most awareness of social, environmental, infrastructure, the issues that we have.
And I intuitively, I think I feel something somewhat different than you, which is I think humans in something close to this form are going to be around humans.
I could totally imagine a world where some people decide to merge and go off exploring the universe with AI and there's a big universe out there, but, like...
Can I really imagine a world where, short of a natural disaster, there are not humans pretty similar to humans from today on Earth doing human-like things?
And the sort of spirit of humanity merged into these other things that are out there doing their thing in the universe?
It's very hard for me to actually see that happening.
And maybe that means I'm, like, going to turn out to be a dinosaur and Luddite and horribly wrong in this prediction.
But I would say I feel it more over time as we make progress with AI, not less.
It'll probably be a gradual change, like wearing of clothes.
You know, I don't think everybody wore clothes and they invented clothes.
I think it probably took a while.
When someone figured out shoes, I think that probably took a while.
When they figured out structures, doors, houses, cities, agriculture, all those things were slowly implemented over time and then now become everywhere.
I still have my other phone that I use for social media, but when I pick that motherfucker up, I start scrolling through YouTube and watching videos and scrolling through TikTok or Instagram.
I don't have TikTok, but I tried threads for a little while, but I'm like, oh, this is like a fucking ghost town.
And I think it was the last time I dropped the phone.
The phone was like, we're done.
And it just started calling people randomly.
Like, it would just call people and I'd hang it up and call another person.
I'd hang it up.
And I was showing my wife.
I was like, look at this.
This is crazy.
It's just calling people.
And so the phone was broken and so I had to order a phone and we were on vacation for like eight days and it took three days for Apple to get me a phone.
Well, he's a comic and I'm a comic and comics like chaos.
We like ridiculous, outrageous shit that is just so far beyond the norm of what you experience in a regular day.
Got it.
And also the understanding of the wide spectrum of human behavior.
If you're a nice person and you surround yourself with nice people, you very rarely see someone get shot.
You very rarely see people get stabbed for no reason randomly on the street.
But on Instagram, you see that every day.
And there's something about that where it just reminds you, oh, we're crazy.
Like, the human species, like, there's a certain percentage of us that are just off the rails and just out there, just causing chaos and jumping dirt bikes and landing on your neck and, like, all that stuff is out there.
I heard an interesting thing a few days ago about Instagram and the feed, which is if you use it at off hours, when they have more processing capability available because less people are using it, you get better recommendations.
So your feed will be better in the middle of the night.
Because I don't think it's outside the realm of possibility.
If we really truly can engineer, like one of the talks about Neuralink that's really promising is people with spinal cord issues, injuries, people that can't move their body, and being able to hotwire that where essentially it controls all these parts of your body that you couldn't control anymore.
And so that would be an amazing thing for people that are injured, amazing thing for people that are, you know, they're paralyzed, they have all sorts of neurological conditions.
That is probably one of the first, and that's what Elon's talked about as well, one of the first implementations, the restoration of sight, you know, cognitive function enhanced from people that have brain issues.
I try to be as neutral about everything as possible except for corruption which I think is just like one of the most massive problems with the way our culture is governed.
I think corruption and the influence of money is just a giant terrible issue.
But in terms of like social issues and in terms of the way human beings believe and think about things, I try to be as neutral as possible.
Because I think the only way to really truly understand the way other people think about things is try to look at it through their mind.
And if you have this inherent bias and this...
You have this very rigid view of what's good and bad and right and wrong.
I don't think that serves you very well for understanding why people differ.
So I try to be as neutral and as objective as possible when I look at anything.
This is a skill that I've learned.
This is not something I had in 2009 when I started this podcast.
This podcast I started just fucking around with friends and I had no idea what it was.
I mean, there's no way I could have ever known.
But also I had no idea what it was going to do to me as far as the evolution of me as a human being.
I am so much nicer.
I'm so much more aware of things.
I'm so much more conscious of the way other people think and feel.
I'm just a totally different person than I was in 2009. Which is hard to recognize.
No, it just came on recognizing that the negative interactions on social media that I was doing, they didn't help me.
They didn't help the person.
And then having compassion for this person that's fucked up or done something stupid, it's not good to just dunk on people.
There's no benefit there other than to give you some sort of social credit and get a bunch of likes.
It didn't make me feel good.
That's not good.
And also a lot of psychedelics.
A ton of psychedelic experiences from 2009 on, with every one a greater understanding of the impact.
I had one recently.
And when I had the one recently, the overwhelming message that I was getting through this was that everything I say and do ripples off into all the people that I interact with.
And then if I'm not doing something with at least the goal of overall good or overall understanding that I'm doing bad and that that bad is a real thing, as much as you try to ignore it because you don't interface with it instantly, you're still creating unnecessary negativity.
And that I should avoid that as much as possible.
It was like an overwhelming message that this psychedelic experience was giving me.
And I took it because I was just particularly anxious that day about the state of the world, particularly anxious about Ukraine and Russia and China and the political system that we have in this country and this incredibly polarizing way that the left and the right engage with each other and God, it just seems so just tormented.
Are you surprised psychedelic therapy has not made...
From what you thought would happen in, say, the early 2010s until now, are you surprised it has not made more progress sort of on a path to legalization as a medical treatment?
No, I'm not because there's a lot of people that don't want it to be in place and those people have tremendous power over our medical system and over our regulatory system.
And those people have also not experienced these psychedelics.
There's very few people that have experienced profound psychedelic experiences that don't think there's an overall good for those things.
So the problem is you're having these laws and these rules implemented by people who are completely ignorant about the positive effects of these things.
And if you know the history of psychedelic prohibition in this country, It all took place during 1970, and it was really to stop the civil rights movement, and it was really to stop the anti-war movement.
And they tried to find a way to make all these things that these people were doing that was causing them to think in these very different ways.
Tune in, turn on, drop out.
They just wanted to put a fucking halt to that.
What better way than to lock everyone who participates in that in cages?
Find the people who are producing it.
Lock them in cages.
Put them in jail for the rest of their life.
Make sure it's illegal.
Arrest people.
Put the busts on television.
Make sure that people are aware.
And then there's also you connect it to drugs that are inherently dangerous for society and detrimental.
The fentanyl crisis.
You know, the crack cocaine crisis that we experienced in the 90s, like all of those things, they're under the blanket of drugs.
Psychedelic drugs are also talked about like drugs, even though they have these profound spiritual and psychological changes that they I remember when I was in elementary school and I was in like drug education, they talked about, you know, marijuana is really bad because it's a gateway to these other things.
And there's this bad one, that bad one, heroin, whatever.
And the very end of the line, the worst possible thing is LSD. Did you take an LST and go, oh, they're lying?
Psychedelic therapy was definitely one of the most important things in my life.
And I assumed, given how powerful it was for me, I struggled with all kinds of anxiety and other negative things.
And to watch all of that go away...
Like that.
I traveled to another country for like a week, did a few things, came back.
Totally different person.
And I was like, I've been lied to my whole life.
I'm so grateful that this happened to me now.
Talked to a bunch of other people, all similar experiences.
I assumed, this was a while ago, I assumed it was, and I was like, you know, very interested in what was happening in the U.S. I was like, particularly like looking at where MDMA and psilocybin were on the path.
And I was like, all right, this is going to get through.
And this is going to change the mental health of a lot of people in a really positive way.
And I am surprised we have not made faster progress there, but I'm still optimistic we will.
Well, we have made so much progress from the time of the 1990s.
In the 1990s, you never heard about psychedelic retreats.
You never heard about people taking these vacations.
You never heard about people getting together in groups and doing these things and coming back with these profound experiences that they relayed to other people and literally seeing people change.
Seeing who they are change.
Seeing people become less selfish, less toxic, less mean, you know, and more empathetic and more understanding.
Totally.
Yeah.
I mean, I can only talk about it from a personal experience.
It's been a radical change in my life, as well as, again, having all these conversations with different people.
I feel so fortunate to be able to do this that I've had so many different conversations with so many different people that think so differently and so many exceptional people that have accomplished so many incredible things.
And you get to sort of understand the way their mind works and the way they see the world, the way they interface with things.
If we leave, like, why we can't get these medicines that have transformed people's lives, like, more available, what's the deal with why we can't stop the opioid crisis?
Or, like, fentanyl seems like just an unbelievable crisis for San Francisco.
It's a very complicated question because I think you're going to have a lot of addicts that wouldn't be addicts.
You're going to have a lot of people's lives destroyed because it's legal.
There's a lot of people that may not be psychologically capable of handling things.
That's the thing about psychedelics.
They do not ever recommend them for people that have a slippery grasp on reality as it is.
People that are struggling, people that are already on a bunch of medications that allow them to just keep a steady state of existence in the normal world.
If you just fucking bombard them with psilocybin, who knows what kind of an effect that's going to have and whether or not they're psychologically too fragile to recover from that.
I mean, there's many, many stories of people taking too much acid and never coming back.
But there's also, what is it about humans that are constantly looking to perturb their normal state of consciousness?
Constantly.
Whether it's, we're both drinking coffee, you know, people smoke cigarettes, they do all, they take Adderall, they do all sorts of different things to change and enhance their normal state of consciousness.
It seems like, whether it's meditation or yoga, they're always doing something to try to get out of their own way.
Or get in their own way.
Or distract themselves from the pain of existence.
And it seems like a normal part of humans.
And even monkeys, like vervet monkeys, get addicted to alcohol.
They get addicted to fermented fruits and alcohol.
A couple of drinks makes you so happy for a little bit, until you're an alcoholic, until you destroy your liver, until you crash your car, until you're involved in some sort of a violent encounter that you would never be involved with if you weren't drunk.
And you're probably aware of the pros and cons and you're also probably aware of how it affects you and what's doing good for you and what is detrimental to you.
But that's a decision that you can make as an informed human being that you're not allowed to make if everything's illegal.
I think he described heroin as getting a warm hug from God.
I think the feeling that it gives you is probably pretty spectacular.
I don't know if legalizing that is going to solve the problems, but I do know that another problem that we're not paying attention to is the rise of the cartels and the fact that right across our border where you can walk, There are these enormous, enormous organizations that make who knows how much money, untold, uncalculable amounts of money, selling drugs and bringing them into this country.
And one of the things they do is they put fentanyl in everything to make things stronger.
And they do it for, like, street Xanax.
There's people that have overdosed thinking they're getting Xanax and they fucking die for fentanyl.
Yeah, they do it with cocaine, of course.
They do it with everything.
There's so many things that have fentanyl in them and they're cut with fentanyl because fentanyl is cheap and insanely potent.
And that wouldn't be a problem if things were legal.
Yeah, I would net out towards that, but I would also put into place some serious mitigation efforts, like in terms of counseling, drug addiction, and ibogaine therapy, which is another thing that's illegal.
Yeah, I haven't experienced that personally, but ibogaine, for many of my friends that have had pill problems, and I have a friend, my friend Ed Clay, Who started an ibogaine center in Mexico because he had an injury and he got hooked on pills and he couldn't kick it.
Not exactly something you want to do on the weekend with friends.
It's something you do because you're fucked and you need to figure out how to get out of this fuckedness.
And that, like, we think about how much money is spent on rehabs in this country, and what's the relapse rate?
It's really high.
I mean, I have many friends that have been to rehab for drug and alcohol abuse, and quite a few of them went right back to it.
It doesn't seem to be that effective.
It seems to be effective to people when people have, like, they really hit rock bottom, and they have a strong will, and then they get involved in a program, some sort of a 12-step program, some sort of a narcotics anonymous program.
And then they get support from other people and they eventually build this foundation of other types of behaviors and ways to find other things to focus on to whatever aspect of their mind that allows them to be addicted to things.
Now it's focused on exercise, meditation, yoga, whatever it is.
That's your new addiction and it's a much more positive and beneficial addiction.
But the reality of the physical addiction That there are mitigation efforts.
Like there's so many people that have taken psilocybin and completely quit drugs, completely quit cigarettes, completely quit a lot because they realize like, oh, this is what this is.
Yeah, that's why I was more optimistic that the world would have made faster progress towards acceptance of – you hear so many stories like this.
So I would say, all right, clearly a lot of our existing mental health treatment at best doesn't work.
Clearly our addiction programs are ineffective.
If we have this thing that in every scientific study or most scientific studies we can see is delivering these unbelievable results, it's going to happen.
I still am excited for it.
I still think it will be a transformatively positive development, but...
Speaking of that, and psychedelics in general, many cultures have had a place for some sort of psychedelic time in someone's life or rite of passage.
But as far as I can tell, most of them are under...
There's some sort of ritual about it.
And I do worry that...
And I think these things are so powerful that I worry about them just being kind of...
Used all over the place all the time.
And I hope that we as a society, because I think this is not going to happen even if it's slow, find a way to treat this with the respect that it needs.
And thinking about what you're doing before you're doing it and why you're doing it.
Like I was saying the other night when I had this psychedelic experience, I was just like, God, sometimes I just think too much about the world and that it's so fucked.
And you have kids and you wonder, like, what kind of a world are they going to grow up in?
And it was just one of those days where I was just like, God, there's so much anger and there's so much this and that.
And then it's just...
It took it away from me.
The rest of the day, like, that night I was so friendly and so happy, and I just wanted to hug everybody.
I think the dynamics in social media certainly exacerbated anger in some people.
But I think anger in the world is just a part of...
Frustration, inequality, problems that are so clear but are not solved and all the issues that people have.
I mean, it's not a coincidence that a lot of the mass violence that you're seeing in this country, mass looting and all these different things are being done by poor people.
My concern is, again, what we were talking about before with some sort of a neural interface, that it will increase your ability to be productive to a point where you can control resources so much more than anyone else.
And you will be able to advance your economic portfolio and your influence on the world through that, your amount of power that you can acquire.
It will, before the other people can get involved, because I would imagine financially it'll be like cell phones.
In the beginning, you remember when the movie Wall Street, when he had that big brick cell phone?
It's like, look at him.
He's out there on the beach with a phone.
That was crazy.
No one had one of those things back then.
And they were so rare.
I got one in 1994 when I first moved to California and I thought I was living in the fucking future.
I actually had one in my car in 1988. I was one of the first people to get a cell phone.
I got one in my car.
And it was great because my friend Bill Blumenreich, who runs the Comedy Connection, He would call me because he knew he could get a hold of me like someone got sick or fell out I could get a gig because he could call me So I was in my cars like Joe.
What are you doing?
Do you have a spot tonight?
And I'm like no I'm open.
He's like fantastic and so he'd give me gigs So I got a bunch of gigs through this phone work kind of paid itself But I got it just because it was cool Like I could drive down the street and call people dude, I'm driving and I'm calling you like it was nuts To be able to drive, and I had a little antenna, a little squirrely pigtail antenna on my car, on the roof of the car.
But now everyone has one.
You can go to a third world country, and people in small villages have phones.
It's super common.
It's everywhere.
Essentially, more people have phones than don't have phones.
There's more phones than there are human beings.
Which is pretty fucking wild.
And I think that that initial cost problem, it's going to be prohibitively expensive initially.
And the problem is the wealthy people are going to be able to do that.
And then the real crazy ones that wind up getting the holes drilled in their head.
And if that stuff is effective, maybe there's problems with generation one, but generation two is better.
There's going to be a time where you have to enter into the game.
There's going to be a time where you have to sell your stocks.
Don't wait too long.
Hang on there.
Go.
And once that happens, my concern is that the people that have that will have...
Such a massive advantage over everyone else that the gap between the haves and have-nots will be even further and it'll be more polarizing.
Someone at OpenAI said to me a few years ago, you really can't just let some people merge without a plan because it could be such an incredible Distortion of power.
And we're going to have to have some sort of societal discussion about this.
When you enter into it information, you ask it questions, and it can give you answers, and you could ask it to code a website for you, and it does it instantly, and it solves problems that literally you would have to take decades to try to solve.
So imagine something like that, but even more advanced.
Multiple Stages of improvement and innovation forward.
And then it interfaces directly with the mind.
But it only does it with the people that can afford it.
And those people are just regular humans.
So they haven't been enhanced.
We haven't evolved physically.
We still have all the human reward systems in place.
We're still basically these territorial primates.
And now we have, you know, you just imagine some fucking psychotic billionaire who now gets this implant and decides to just completely hijack our financial systems, acquire all the resources, set into place regulations and influences that only benefit them, and then make sure that they can control it from there on out.
I think that's going to be very transformative too.
But my thought is that once...
I mean, we have to think of what are the possibilities of a neural enhancement.
If you think about the human mind and how the human mind interacts with the world, how you interact with language and thoughts and facts and something that is exponentially more powerful than that.
But it also allows you to use the same emotions, the same ego, the same desires and drives, jealousy, lust, hate, anger, all of those things.
But with this godlike power, when one person can read minds and other people can't, When one person has a completely accurate forecast of all of the trends in terms of stocks and resources and commodities and they can make choices based on those.
The only thing I feel a little confused about is You know, human talking and listening bandwidth or typing and reading bandwidth is not very high.
But it's high enough where if you can just say, like, tell me everything that's going to happen in the stock market if I want to go make all the money, what should I do right now?
And it goes, and then just shows you on the screen.
Even without a neural interface, you're kind of a lot of the way to the scenario you're describing.
Like I think what somehow matters is access to massive amounts of computing power, especially like differentially massive amounts, maybe more than the interface itself.
Well, first of all, I think it's very much like I think this is You could make the statement from many companies, but none is as true for OpenAI.
The CEO is far from the most important person in the company.
In our case, there's a large handful of researchers, each of which are individually more critical to the success we've had so far and that we will have in the future than me.
And I bet those people really are like, hmm, this is weird to be them.
It's certainly weird enough for me that it, like, ups my simulation hypothesis probability somewhat.
Well, if this really is—I mean, our inherent understanding of life is that we are these biological creatures that interact with other biological creatures.
We mate and breed and that this creates more of us.
And then hopefully as society advances and we acquire more information, more understanding and knowledge, this next version of society will be superior to the version that preceded it, which is just how we look at society today.
Nobody wants to live in 1860 where you died of a cold and there's no cure for infections.
It's much better to be alive now.
Just inarguably.
Unless you really do prefer the simple life that you see on Yellowstone or something, it's like what we're dealing with now, first of all, access to information, the lack of ignorance.
If you choose, To seek out information.
You have so much more access to it now than ever before.
And over time, like if you go back to the beginning of written history to now, one of the things that is clearly evident is the more access to information, the better choices people can make.
They don't always make better choices, but they certainly have much more of a potential to make better choices with more access to information.
You know, we think that this is just this biological thing, but imagine if that's not what's going on.
Imagine if this is a program and that you are just consciousness that's connected to this thing that's creating this experience that is indistinguishable from what we like to think of as a real biological experience from carbon-based life forms interacting with solid physical things in the real world.
But whatever it is, it's on the path to this thing that will be indistinguishable.
That seems inevitable.
Those two things seem inevitable to me.
The inevitable thing to me is that we will create a lifeform that is an artificial, intelligent lifeform that's far more advanced than us, and once it becomes sentient, it will be able to create a far better version of itself.
And then as it has better versions of itself, it will keep going, and if it keeps going, it will reach God-like capabilities.
The complete Understanding of every aspect of the universe and the structure of it itself.
How to manipulate it, how to travel through it, how to communicate.
And that, you know, if we keep going, if we survive a hundred years, a thousand years, ten thousand years, and we're still on this same technological exponential increasing and capability path, that's God.
We become something like a God.
And that might be what we do.
That might be what intelligent, curious, innovative life actually does.
It creates something that creates the very universe that we live in.
Yeah, maybe that's the birth of the universe itself, is creativity and intelligence, and that it all comes from that.
I used to have this joke about the Big Bang.
Like, what if the Big Bang is just a natural thing?
Like, humans get so advanced that they create a Big Bang machine, and then, you know, we're so autistic and riddled with Adderall that we'd have no concept or worry of the consequences, and someone's like, I'll fucking press it.
And they press it and boom!
We start from scratch every 14 billion years.
And that's what a Big Bang is.
I mean, I don't know where it goes, but I do know that if you looked at the human race from afar, if you were an alien life-form completely detached from Any understanding of our culture?
Any understanding of our biological imperatives?
And you just looked at, like, what is this one dominant species doing on this planet?
But it also consistently and constantly creates better things, whether it's better weapons going from the catapult to the rifle to the cannonballs to the rocket ships to the hypersonic missiles to nuclear bombs.
It creates better and better and better things.
That's the number one thing it does.
And it's never happy with what it has.
And you add that to consumerism, which is baked into us, and this desire, this constant desire for newer, better things.
Well, that fuels that innovation because that gives it the resources that it needs to consistently innovate and constantly create newer and better things.
Well, if I was an alien life form, I was like, oh, what is it doing?
It's trying to create better things.
Well, what is the forefront of it?
Technology.
Technology is the most transformative, the most spectacular, the most interesting thing that we create.
And the most alien thing.
The fact that we just are so comfortable that you can FaceTime with someone in New Zealand, like instantly.
And well, if you were an alien life form and you were looking at us, you're like, well, what is it doing?
Oh, it keeps making better things.
It's going to keep making better things.
Well, if it keeps making better things, it's going to make a better version of a thinking thing.
And it's doing that right now.
And you're a part of that.
It's going to make a better version of a thinking thing.
Well, that better version of a thinking thing, it's basically now in the amoeba stage.
It's in the, you know, small multicellular life form stage.
Well, what if that version becomes a fucking Oppenheimer?
What if that version becomes, like, if it scales up so far that it becomes so hyper-intelligent that it is completely alien to any other intelligent life form that has ever existed here before?
And it constantly does the same thing, makes better and better versions of it.
Well, where does that go?
It goes to a god.
It goes to something like a God, and maybe God is a real thing, but maybe it's a real consequence of this process that human beings have of consistently, constantly innovating and constantly having this desire to push this envelope of creativity and of technological power.
Yeah, he even believes in the resurrection, which I found very interesting.
But, you know, it's interesting communicating with him because he has these little pre...
Designed speeches that he's encountered all these questions so many times that he has these very well-worded very articulate responses to these things that I sense are like bits You know like when I'm talking to a comic in like a comic like the I got this bit on train travel and they just tell you they tell you the bit like that's what it's like he has bits on why he believes in Jesus and why he believes and Very very intelligent guy,
but I proposed the question When we're thinking about God, what if instead of God created the universe, what if the universe is God?
And the creative force of all life and everything is the universe itself.
Instead of thinking that there's this thing that created us.
But I wonder if our limitations Are that we are an advanced version of primates.
We still have all these things that we talk about, jealousy, envy, anxiety, lust, anger, fear, violence, all these things that are detrimental but were important for us to survive and get to this point.
And that as time goes on, we will figure out a way to engineer those out.
And that as intelligent life becomes more intelligent and we create a version of intelligent life that's far more intelligent than what we are.
We're far more capable of what we are.
If that keeps going, if it just keeps going, I mean, ChatGPT.
Imagine if you go to ChatGPT and go back to Socrates.
And show him that.
Explain to him that.
And show him a phone and put it on a phone and have access to it.
I think you'd be impressed with the phone's abilities to communicate for sure, but then the access to information would be so profound.
I mean, back then, I mean, look, you're dealing with a time when Galileo was put under house arrest because he had the gumption to say that the Earth is not the center of the universe.
Well, now we fucking know it's not.
Like, we have satellites.
We send literal cameras into orbit to take photos of things.
If it keeps going, it has to go to some impossible level of capability.
I mean, just think of what we're able to do now with nuclear power and nuclear bombs and hypersonic missiles and just the insane physical things that we've been able to take out of the human creativity and imagination and through engineering and technology implement these physical devices That are indistinguishable from magic if you brought them 500 years ago.
Maybe it's a nice reset to just like leave a few around, give them a distant memory of the utopian world that used to exist, have them go through thousands of years of barbarism Of horrific behavior and then reestablish society.
I mean, this is the Younger Dryas Impact Theory that around 11,800 years ago at the end of the Ice Age, that we were hit by multiple comets that caused the instantaneous melting of the ice caps over North America.
Flooded everything is the source of the flood myths from the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Bible and all those things.
And also there's physical evidence of it when they do core samples.
There's high levels of iridium, which is very common in space, very rare on Earth.
There's micro diamonds that are from impacts and it's like 30% of the Earth has evidence of this.
And so it's very likely that these people that are proponents of this theory are correct and that this is why They find these ancient structures that they're now dating to like 11,000, 12,000 years ago when they thought people were hunter-gatherers.
And they go, okay, maybe our timeline is really off and maybe this physical evidence of impacts.
Randall Carlson is the greatest guy to pay attention to when it comes to that.
He's kind of dedicated his whole life to it.
Which, by the way, happened because of a psychedelic experience.
He was on acid once and he was looking at this immense canyon and he had this vision that it was created by instantaneous erosions of the polar caps and that it just washed this wave of impossible water through the earth.
It just caught these paths and now there seems to be actual physical evidence of that.
That is probably what took place.
And that, you know, we're just the survivors.
And that we have re-emerged.
And that society and human civilization occasionally gets set back to a primal place.
I think the instinct of saying, like, we've really got to figure out how to make this safe and good and, like, widely good is really important.
But I think calling for a pause is, like, naive at best.
I kind of, like...
I kind of think you can't make progress on the safety part of this, as we mentioned earlier, by sitting in a room and thinking hard.
You've got to see where the technology goes.
You've got to have contact with reality.
But we're trying to make progress towards AGI, conditioned on it being safe and conditioned on it being beneficial.
And so when we hit any kind of, like, block, we try to find a technical or a policy or a social solution to overcome it that could be about the limits of the technology and something not working and, you know, hallucinates or it's not getting smart or whatever.
Or it could be there's this, like, safety issue and we've got to, like, redirect our resources to solve that.
But it's all, like, for me, it's all this same thing of, like, we're trying to solve the problems that emerge at each step as we get where we're trying to go.
And, you know, maybe you can call it a pause if you want, if you pause on capabilities to work on safety.
But in practice, I think the field has gotten a little bit wander on the axle there.
And safety and capabilities are not these two separate things.
This is like, I think, one of the dirty secrets of the field.
It's like we have this one way to make progress.
You know, we can understand and push on deep learning more.
That can be used in different ways, but I think it's that same technique that's going to help us eventually solve the safety.
All of that said, as like a human, emotionally speaking, I super understand why it's tempting to call for a pause.
Well, I would say that if an adversary of ours comes up with it first and uses it against us and we don't have some level of capability, that feels really bad.
But I hope that what happens is this can be a moment where...
To tie it back to the other conversation, we kind of come together and overcome our base impulses and say, like, let's all do this as a club together.
Go all the way there and say we're just going to have one global effort.
But I think at least we can get to a point where we have one global set of rules, safety standards, organization that makes sure everyone's following the rules.
We did this for atomic weapons.
There's been similar things in the world of biology.
I mean, Steven Pinker gets a lot of shit for his work because he just sort of downplays violence today.
But it's not that he's downplaying violence today.
He's just looking at statistical trends.
If you're looking at the reality of life today versus life 100 years ago, 200 years ago, it's far more safer than Why do you think that's a controversial thing?
They're completely engrossed in this idea that there's problems today, and these problems are huge, and there's Nazis, and there's— But no one's saying there's not huge problems today.
I mean, it's all the problems that we highlighted earlier.
And that that might be the solution to overcoming that is through technology.
And that might be the only way we can do it without a long period of evolution.
Because biological evolution is so relatively slow in comparison to technological evolution.
And that that might be our bottleneck.
We just still are dealing with this primate body.
And that something like artificial general intelligence or something like some implemented form of engaging with it, whether it's neural link, something, that shifts the way the mind interfaces with other minds.
It's fascinating intellectually, and I also think it is one of these things that will be tremendously net beneficial.
Yeah.
We've been talking a lot about problems in the world, and I think that's just always a nice reminder of how much we get to improve, and we're going to get to improve a lot, and I think this will be the most powerful tool.