Chamath Palihapitiya argues that attention drives technological revolutions and societal imbalance, proposing tax reforms where corporate rates exceed personal ones to fund infrastructure directly. He warns that legacy software waste and geopolitical sorting between AI ecosystems threaten stability, while speculating humanity is evolving into a digital hive mind. Palihapitiya emphasizes voluntary adversity through manual labor over manufactured success, citing his son's car wash experience as essential for humility. Ultimately, he envisions a future where collective empathy replaces isolation, urging entrepreneurs to foster purpose beyond mere accumulation in an age of AI abundance. [Automatically generated summary]
And it's probably because they just have bigger fish to fry.
So, by the time that we meet them and they meet us, we're going to kind of be at the edge of like we've kind of been there, done that on our own planet, and then we've kind of like developed the Technology, I guess, to get beyond it.
But somewhere along the way, there must have been a few, just mathematically impossible.
So then the question is, is it buried or were people confused when it first came?
You're like, if you had a spaceship land in like the 1800s, what would people have done?
They would have just freaked out, they wouldn't have understood it.
Maybe they would have buried it.
Depending on where it was, maybe they started to pray to it.
Well, to be honest, as I get older, I'm convinced we're basically in some form of a simulation.
There's like all these little ingredients that if you start to see these little clues, you're like, They all seem so odd in isolation.
And then when you put them together, I feel like a crazy person.
So I ignore myself.
But I wonder why did this happen?
Like yesterday, I was at a dinner in LA before I came to see you.
And I told this very interesting story.
Well, or I thought it was interesting at the time.
You know, that like, so in 2000, right?
If you think of like what happened in tech since 2000, so the last 26 years, people can give you all kinds of like fancy theories.
But there's just like this weird word that's been at the center of every single technological revolution for the last 30 years, and that word is attention.
Let me explain this to you.
Google, they invent Google.
What is Google?
Google is an algorithm.
It's called PageRank.
But if you look inside of it, what is it?
It says, well, Chamoth's website has five links to it.
Joe's website has two links.
He's getting more attention.
Okay?
Chamoth's website is more important.
That's the sum total of Google.
Now, they've made that a lot more refined and they've done all these other fancy things.
But it's all about attention.
Fast forward to 2007, 8, 9, when Zuck and then when I went to work for Zuck and we got on the scene, we're like, What does everybody care about?
Attention.
And so, what is like the Facebook algorithm?
What's the Instagram algorithm?
You know, how did we construct newsfeed all around attention?
Joe had 35 likes, Jamie had 12 likes.
Your thing is more important.
Let's give it more importance because it's seemingly meeting all these human needs.
Attention, attention, attention.
So, phase one, attention.
Phase two, attention.
And this is where I'm like, how can this be possible?
In phase three, we're like looking at AI.
And when you look backwards four years, the seminal paper is called Attention is All You Need.
It's about this word again.
And when you look inside of the core part, if you peel out, peel, you know, apart AI, the little brain that makes it so capable is called an attention mechanism.
It's just attention.
It's all about, again, this idea of I'm going to scour all this information and I'm going to figure out what patterns repeat itself and I'm just going to double down on the stuff that I see more of because that attention must mean it's more important, it's more true, it's more knowledgeable.
And then I think, how could it be?
Like, we're all like, why is it that these things are just repeating over and over again?
And I just get confused.
I don't exactly know how to explain it.
So, are there other ways in which we should be doing things?
Absolutely.
Have we even explored it?
No.
So then I think, well, is this just a simulation?
Some kid in his house just playing some simulation and we're all just party to it and that's all he understands is attention.
I don't think it's that simple that there's a person playing a game.
But if you break down just attention, well, that's.
All of human history is paying attention to the king, paying attention to the war, paying attention to resources, paying attention to who says the thing that resonates the most with the people.
It's all about what human beings are paying attention to.
And sometimes— The thing that you should be paying attention to gets lost because the thing that you are paying attention to gets more attention because it's more interesting and useful.
That's sort of where we are right now.
We're in this really weird phase, I think, where you actually should be focused on this thing over here, and instead we're all focused on all these things over here.
I think it's pretty fair to say since the last time you and I saw each other on this show, The attitude towards technology, I think, has been pretty profoundly negative.
It's kind of tilted.
It's relatively like anti AI, anti billionaires.
It's anti all of this stuff.
And it manifests in all of these interesting ways.
There's protests, there's data centers, there's all of this stuff that's happening.
And I think what they should be really focused upon is we're at the tail end of a cycle that doesn't work anymore, which is all about this tension between labor, people that do the work, and capital, the people that fund it and then make all the returns.
And over the last 40 years, we've basically gone to this completely upside down world where capital extracts all of the upside and labor has extracted less and less and less and less.
And all of this pushback manifests in AI.
It manifests in politics.
It manifests in social issues.
It manifests in Israel.
Whatever you want to talk about, all of these issues, I think symptomologically, come from this other issue, which is we are out of balance.
This total compact that we used to have, a liberal democracy and a free market, has totally collapsed.
And there are simple ways to fix that, but that never gets the attention because it's not what you want to talk about.
The attention is here.
Vote no to the data center.
This model is going to take out all the jobs.
You know, this social issue is really important.
That war should not be fought.
That war should be fought.
All of these things, while important, distract us from what the core issue is.
And the core issue is that we as a society, I think, are out of balance.
The natural compact between all of us is broken.
And there are some simple ways to fix that compact get people more invested, get people more engaged in the upside, have people have a positive view of what's happening.
Let's say you make a million bucks a year, which is a lot of money, but it makes the point more cleanly.
You'd pay, I think, 30% federal tax, and you'd pay another 15 or 16% in state tax and Medicare tax and all this tax.
So, if you're a wage earner, 50% of all your upside goes to the government.
If you're a capital earner and you make that same million dollars via capital gains, you pay half that tax.
Why did that happen?
That happened because in the 40s and 50s, but really in the 60s and 70s and 80s, what we were trying to do, or what the American government and what Western societies were trying to do, Was to convince people to invest their money.
Hey, Joe, go build that factory.
Go hire those people.
And we're going to incentivize you to do so.
And by doing that, there was this idea that all of those profits that you would get would then diffuse, right?
Trickle down into everybody else.
The workers participated, everybody participated.
But technology allows you to do more with less and less.
So now what happens is the capital owners can accrue.
Infinite, almost, it seems like, value.
And the workers get less and less.
But now, if you get less and less and you're taxed more and more as a percentage of what you own, you're going to feel really out of sorts.
You're going to be like, why am I paying 50 cents of every dollar?
And I see these other ways where folks are paying 25 cents on their dollars, but their dollars are compounding way faster and they have hundreds of billions more of those dollars than I have of my dollars.
If you take that example and you expand it across society, I think people understand that now.
There's enough information and there's enough people talking about it where it's Pretty clear that that's happened.
So the question is, how do you fix it?
I think, like, if you think about AI and if you believe that we're going to get into this world of abundance and we're not working, what does it mean for governments to tax our labor?
There is no labor.
You're not working anymore.
I'm not working.
We're doing things out of leisure.
Why should I pay 50 cents of every dollar?
Why aren't the companies that are going to be making trillions of dollars pay more?
Why isn't there an expectation that they then help our lived society do better and thrive as a result of all of that winning?
That's the real conversation that I think is bubbling.
And I think that we're probably another 12 to 18 months where all of these other issues are going to be important, but they're going to be viewed for what they are.
They're going to get demoted, I think, in importance.
And it's this core structural issue what is the economic relationship that we have together as a society?
What is the relationship between Joe, Chamath, Jamie, and all these companies?
And how do we.
Feel about a few and an ever shrinking few making more and more and more?
And then how do we feel about their ability to share that with a small amount of people?
And then what is the expectation for everybody else?
I think that's mostly at the core of what's happening.
And so, back to like, you know, all of this attention that we give to these other issues distracts from that one because I think you can get organized to fix this issue.
You can't get concessions on any of these issues.
You know, you bring up Israel, it's like this.
You bring up social issues, it's like this.
You bring up, you know, whatever you want to bring up, people just kind of take aside, nothing happens.
This is actually where people are universally actually much more aligned than you think.
Because there's reasonable ways.
One simple way is you'd say, well, let's flip the taxation model.
Corporate taxes should exceed personal taxes.
They've never.
We should have an expectation.
That then corporate actors can buy down their taxes if they want, but if they do social good for society.
I'll give you an example.
At the Industrial Revolution, there's a table like this, and the leading lights of that era Andrew Carnegie, Nelson Rockefeller, Jay Gould, JP Morgan they sat together and they said, Guys, this is going to benefit us, this Industrial Revolution.
It may not benefit everybody.
What is our responsibility?
What is our collective responsibility?
And they allocated tasks.
Carnegie went and built libraries all throughout the country.
Rockefeller built universities.
Hospitals were built.
And I think what happened is society was like, wow, these are living testaments to us doing well.
And so then they were okay with this transition.
But if you think about it today, what are the living tributes that capital builds and leaves behind for society?
It's fewer and fewer.
I think that's a very big opportunity for somebody to fill.
I think it's like.
Especially for folks in tech, I think.
If they can get themselves organized to do that, I think we land in a good place.
If they cannot get themselves organized to do that and say everyone for themselves, I think it's going to be really complicated, super messy.
Super messy because that sentiment that the wealthy are getting wealthier and the middle class is disappearing and the poor are being taxed into oblivion.
I suspect that if you put the burden on Wall Street and corporates, they'd be a lot more organized and they'd probably create a lot more change than a diffuse electorate.
Meaning, let's just say the government spends a trillion dollars and wastes it.
I'm generally roughly aligned with that.
If you waste a trillion dollars from 300 million people, It's hard to organize at 300 million people.
But if you waste a trillion dollars from 300 companies, those companies will get their shit together really fast and they will force a lot more change.
And decades of all these mechanisms where they can take this money and funnel it into these NGOs and these nonprofits and all these.
Different weird organizations that don't seem to have accountability for what they do with that money.
That gets real slippery.
And if those people in turn make deals with those corporations that allow them to do certain things and push things through that maybe they would have difficulty doing, then you have a different kind of a working relationship with the same groups of people and the same government.
You just take money from corporations and move it into a way where the corporations ultimately benefit from it, but yet it doesn't do any good to the people.
The crisis is you can't expect people to pay more and more and more.
Again, I agree with you.
The premise is we're all paying for a system that's broken.
That should change.
But we still continue to have to pay our taxes.
But if taxes keep going up like this at the individual level and we don't manage this transition to something where we may be working less and less, what are we getting paid to do?
And then at that point, How are we expected to pay what?
I think people do have this weird feeling of dread that the people that are in control of a lot in this country, the tech companies in particular, particularly the tech companies like Google and Facebook that are essentially involved in data collection and then ultimately dissemination of information, that they have acquired enormous amounts of wealth and power and influence and they're essentially.
Robert Epstein is a guy who specializes in understanding what curated search results do and what Google's able to do with, in particular, with curated search results in terms of influencing elections.
That, like, say, if you have two candidates that are running, let's just take L.A., for instance.
I'm not making any accusations, but I'm saying if they wanted Karen Bass to win and you searched Karen Bass, you would find all these positive results.
If you searched Spencer Pratt, you would find all these negative results.
There's a bunch of people that are always undecided voters, and those are the ones that you really want.
They're like, I don't know, I don't know.
Come election night, those are the people you want to try to grab, and it's generally a large percentage.
You can influence an enormous percentage of those people just with search results.
Where you can shift an election one way or another.
Yeah, and he's demonstrated this and shown how this is possible.
That freaks people out that tech companies are in control of narratives, that tech companies can censor information, especially tech companies that work in conjunction with the government.
This is what we found out when Elon purchased Twitter.
When Elon purchased Twitter, we got all this information from the Twitter files when all the journalists were allowed to go through it and they said, oh, this is crazy.
You've got the FBI, the CIA, you've got all these companies.
All these government organizations that are essentially controlling the narrative of free speech in the country.
They're doing it in a way that benefits them.
They're doing it in a way that benefits what political parties in charge.
At the time, it was the Biden administration.
They were allowed to do a bunch of weird shit, which should be illegal but is not technically illegal.
That freaks people out because there's no real laws and rules in regard to what they're allowed to do and what they're not allowed to do.
I think then when you find out that these people are able to amass enormous sums of wealth and have an incredible amount of power and influence because of this enormous wealth and this control over these tech companies that have essentially become the town square of the world, that freaks people out.
That these very small number of people, you think of Zuckerberg, you think of Tim Cook, and I don't know.
I think that this is the existential question that we are dealing with.
You're going to have five or six companies concentrate.
Like, whatever power you think has been concentrated up until now, I think we're going to look back and it's going to look like a Sunday picnic 10 or 15 years from now.
Because, on the one hand, it's going to be an even smaller subset.
And on the other hand, the capability is going to be an order or two orders of magnitude.
So, can you imagine what that must be like?
It's kind of like showing up, getting dropped into the 1800s, and you've invented the engine and everybody else is a horse and buggy.
Because what we're dealing with with AI right now is first of all, it's already lowered children's attention spans and it's shrinking their capacity to acquire or absorb information because what they're doing now is just relying on AI to answer all their questions for them.
Now, is that their fault?
Kind of, right?
Because it doesn't have to be that way.
You could still acquire information the old fashioned way.
You could still learn things the right way.
But a lot of kids are just concerned with passing examinations and getting into good schools.
And what they're doing is just using AI.
And they're getting better test results, but they're also not as smart, which is really weird.
It's like we're relying on it, like we, you know, it's like it's essentially like replacing our mind.
And I think he's the one that has an actual empathy for people.
Then there are folks where there's just an insane profit motive.
They're less in control of the businesses that they run.
Those businesses are really out over their ski tips in the amount of money they've gotten from Wall Street and other folks who expect a return, who will put a ton of pressure on these folks.
And if they get there first, I don't know where the chips fall.
We don't really know.
We can kind of guess.
And then you see in the press just enough snippets of their reactions in certain moments where you're like, hey, hold on a second question mark here.
You see OpenAI react one way, you see Anthropic react another way, and you're like, where is this going to end up?
And the honest answer is nobody really knows.
So it comes back to like, we need a few people that can organize.
Those guys need to self organize and actually present a really positive face.
And they need to show why those 20% of outcomes that Dan Schulman paints the truth is it's possible, but here's why it's not probable.
I actually think their incentive should very clearly be to tell people with details and facts why there's a positive future.
The reason is the following right now there's a vacuum, there are no facts, and there's fear mongering, and then there's this belief that this is going to be cataclysmic to Human productivity and white collar labor and all of this stuff.
What's people's natural reaction?
Well, today, if you look at it, think about AI as a very simple equation energy in, intelligence out.
So, if you want to cut the head of the snake, what do you do?
You cut off the energy supply, right?
Okay.
If you're afraid of all of this super intelligence coming, the natural thing to do would be to go to the point of energy and unplug it.
What is the equivalent of unplugging it today?
It is to go all around the country, find the data centers.
Protest them and get them to be mothballed.
That is an incredibly successful strategy right now.
Today, about 40% of all of these data centers that get protested get mothballed.
So if you're one of these companies, the first thing you should realize is I need to paint a positive vision because 40% of my energy is getting unplugged every day.
And if that happens, my revenues will crater and my investors will be super pissed.
So, the right strategy is what is the positive, fact based argument?
And there are some incredible examples.
Number one.
And then, number two is you have to give people some tactical benefit that they see.
Because AI, differently than search or differently than social media, there's no exchange of value.
Let me explain what that means.
So, let me just go like so the first thing.
Is that if you can go and actually show people?
Here's an example of AI.
I heard about this last night.
It's pretty incredible.
You can now take pictures of a woman's fallopian tubes and you can see pre cancer, ovarian cysts, and all of this stuff, cervical cancer before it forms.
And then you can intervene and you can fix it so that women don't get cervical cancer.
In a different example, I actually told you about this example when I was here before.
There is a device now that is allowed to be in the operating room with you.
Room with you.
And if you have a cancerous lesion or a tumor inside of your body, the most important thing when they go to take it out is make sure you don't leave any cancer behind.
You couldn't do it because what would happen is you take it out.
A doctor, Joe, is literally fucking eyeballing it and saying, Yeah.
They send it to a pathologist.
You get an answer in 10 days.
For women with breast cancer, a third of these women find out that they have cancer left behind.
They go back in, they scoop some more stuff out.
A third of those women.
Okay.
So I'm like, this is bullshit.
We can solve this problem.
It took us a long time, a lot of money.
I had to build an entire machine, imaging all of this stuff, AI algorithms.
We had to prove it all.
We finally get approval.
Okay.
But you know how hard it is to tell that story?
In all of the attention that people are looking for, it's hard.
But those are positive examples.
No more breast cancer, no more cervical cancer.
A different example is most drugs in pharma.
Fail, right?
And it's a very complicated problem in pharma.
It's kind of like a jigsaw puzzle of the ultimate complexity.
It's like, think of your human body as like a Himalayan mountain range.
You have to design a drug that's an equivalent Himalayan mountain range that plugs into it perfectly.
One millimeter off, you grow like a fourth eye, a third nipple, you die, you know?
Now you can use computers to make sure that that drug hand in glove to your body.
Well, I think because people are terrified of losing their jobs.
So that's the primary concern.
The primary concern that I hear from people is that there are so many people that are going to school right now, college students, that don't know if their job is going to even exist in four years when they graduate.
And that's the second part of what this industry has to do better.
I had lunch with Jeffrey Katzenberg.
He told this crazy story.
I'll tell you.
He starts next and he buys Pixar from George Lucas.
But then he hits a rough patch and he's got this, you know, financing issue.
Katzenberg flies up, spends time with Steve Jobs, says, I'll buy Pixar.
Jobs says, Absolutely not.
And then Katzenberg proposes a deal and he's like, How about a three picture deal?
Jobs says, Okay.
He flies back and apparently all the animators were up in arms because they're like, Hold on a second.
Steve Jobs is going to use these next computers.
To animate this movie, which ultimately became, I think, Toy Story.
And they're like, this is going to put all of us out of a job.
That perfect argument.
And people were really upset.
Roy Disney was upset.
All the animators were upset.
And they all went to Mike Eisner.
And they were like, Michael, you need to fire Katzenberg.
And they had a deal which was like, look, man, you do you, but just give me the ability to say no if I think that this is, you're about to jump off a cliff.
They talk about it.
And he's like, I got your back.
Do the deal, make the movie.
They made the movie.
It was a huge success.
Fast forward 10 years, 15 years, there's 10x the number of animators.
Now, it's a small example, but why is that?
You were able to use computers, and now all these new people were able to come and participate in that.
I get it.
It's a small example.
But I think if we had better organized leadership and we could try to tell some of these examples, try to go back and document how some of these things have actually helped people, it expanded the pie, there's a chance.
But if we don't, I agree with you.
Where we're going to end up is everybody basically saying, hey, hold on a second.
This is crazy.
We need to stop this.
That's the worst outcome because that's when you will have a high risk of a dislocation.
Like the worst outcome, like the black swan event.
Let's think about the black swan event.
The black swan event is when you get a model that's good enough to automate a bunch of labor, but not good enough that it can build new drugs and prevent cancer and make you live for 200 years and all of this other stuff.
So there's a gap.
And if you can stop it here and it doesn't get to there, now you do have the worst of all worlds.
You have this thing that kind of displaces labor.
No new things come after it because we stop innovating.
And that's like a non trivial possibility now, I think.
Well, because if no one has to work anymore, first of all, what is your identity, right?
Because so many people, their identity is what they do.
Whatever it is, if you're a lawyer, if you're an accountant, if you run a business, whatever it is, this is your identity.
You have built this thing.
You look forward to going there.
You work at it.
You look forward to doing a good job and getting rewarded for it.
The harder you work, the more you get paid.
There's all these incentives built in, and then there's this again identity problem.
If all of a sudden you have universal high income, which is what Elon always talks about, well, what gives people purpose then?
And also, if you have a person who's 43 years old, and their entire life they've worked towards this idea that the harder they work, the harder they think, the more innovative they are.
And the better they are at implementing these ideas, the more they get rewarded.
And then all of a sudden, that's not necessary anymore, Mike.
Time for you to just relax and do what you want to do.
And Mike's like, well, this is what I do.
I don't have any fucking hobbies.
I enjoy doing what I do.
And now what I do is completely useless.
And now I'm on a fixed income, even if that fixed income is a million dollars a year, whatever it is.
If all of a sudden you are in this position where everything is being run by computers, you feel useless.
Did you see this article in the New York Times, I think it was this weekend, about how popular and sold out churches have become as social constructs in New York City?
It was totally fascinating.
It's like young women, like dressed to the nines, going to church on a Sunday for social belonging, community meaning.
I thought, I was so fascinated by it.
I was like, wow, that's incredible.
Because, like, I think if you graph just like people's use of religion as an anchoring part of their value system, over the last 40 years, basically gone to zero.
Nobody celebrates it the way it's not a part of the community the way that it used to be.
Maybe that's the thing that we have to find.
There has to be a renewal of some older things, and then there has to be new things that replace it.
What's the Chinese answer to this?
The Chinese have a very orthogonal answer to this.
If you look at how China is organized, it's super interesting because they don't reward.
Based on the way the American system rewards.
In fact, it's like almost orthogonal, where we are rewarded with money and rewarded with sort of fame and recognition.
The system, the American capitalist system.
But if you look inside of China, it's constantly testing who has this judgment.
And what they are rewarded with is influence and power in a very specific social contract.
I don't think it's going to work in the United States, nor am I an advocate of it, but it works for them.
You'll start off as like some.
You know, low-rung person in like some small village town somewhere, and your job as like the, you know, the functionary is to do good in that community.
And the more you do well, you get promoted.
Then you get, let's say, to like a reasonable-sized city and you get a budget.
And now what happens is you actually become a little bit like a VC, like a venture capitalist.
You're given a budget and you'll get a memo, and it'll say, Hey, Joe, we have a priority over the next 15 years: it's batteries.
And you have enough money.
Put a team on the field.
So you go in your local community, you find a bunch of guys, you're like, all right, guys, we're going to start a battery company.
And you do it.
And let's say they're good and they're like innovative.
And what happens is in the town beside it, that battery company dies.
Now you kind of subsume the capital from Jamie, right?
Because Jamie's like, fuck, I fucked up this thing that I wanted, I was told to do batteries.
Okay, Joe, I'm just going to align with you.
And what happens over time is you get this filtering effect.
And the people that are better at meeting these long run priorities and objectives are the ones that are celebrated.
But they're not celebrated with, you know, Forbes articles and all this other bullshit.
They're just celebrated by giving more responsibility.
And then eventually you get to the upper echelons of China, and what you have are folks over a course of 40 or 50 years who, in their eyes, have demonstrated incredible prowess.
There's a version of that reward system, which is very foreign to America, but that's worked for China.
Now, that also works because they're more Confucian, you know, we're too individualist.
But my point is, like, you know, there are these different ways that we can find of giving people meaning that don't have to be always around money.
But meanwhile, I think we have to answer the question if we are expected to do less, we probably should not be taxed more.
That's, I think, that's like a very basic, in my mind, I think that is like, that must be explored and figured out.
And on the other side, there's just a ton of obvious mechanisms that corporate actors can use to minimize that.
And they should find off ramps, by the way.
If they want to build hospitals, they shouldn't have to pay taxes.
Like, that's a perfect example, by the way, of like the thing in like, if you look, if you walk around New York City, there are living tributes to corporate success that people get benefit from every day the hospitals, the buildings, the libraries, it's just everywhere.
We need a version of that.
And I'm not a tax expert, but you know, if that can be funded by private actors, so go directly to the problem.
Build a bunch of libraries, build a bunch of new universities that teach kids actually how to think or whatever, build better hospitals that are there to actually solve the problem.
Well, let's go back to what we were talking about earlier with taxes and the fact that you're giving money to a broken system.
Do you think it's possible that AI could show benefit in that they can analyze all the data, which would be virtually impossible?
For even an office filled with human beings paying attention to all of it, and they could analyze where all the money goes and eliminate all the fraud and waste, like recognize it instantaneously.
That would be a great benefit and a way to make it so that your taxes directly benefit people.
So, normally, if you were like, Jamath, I want to build a system that does A, B, and C. Right.
If I was designing it properly, I would sit there with you and I would meticulously write down: all right, Joe wants to do this.
What are the implications?
Joe wants to do that.
What are the implications?
And I would actually write a document that was in English before a single line of code has been written.
This was the when you have to design something that can't fail.
So, for example, like if you and I are designing something for the FAA or for, you know, I hate to say this example because it turned out to not exactly, but like, you know, to fly a plane, right?
You are first there to write in English.
And the reason is because everybody can then swarm that document and see the holes.
Okay.
And it's only then.
When that stuff looks complete and functional, do you build?
Over the last 30 years, people in computing invented all kinds of ways to shortcut that process.
And you can say, well, why did they do that?
Because it would allow you to build something faster, make more money quickly, and then build more business.
So the direct response to, hey, it's going to take us nine months to write down the rules was somebody else showed up and says, fuck it, I'll just grip and rip this thing.
I'll be done in four months.
Who's going to get the job?
The four month guy is going to get the job.
So we've had 30 or 40 years of that.
What are we learning about that process?
It's riddled with software errors, like logic errors.
It's riddled with security errors.
I don't know if you saw this whole thing, like with Anthropic Mythos.
What are they uncovering?
They're uncovering that we wrote a lot of really shitty code for 40 years.
So, that body of old code, I was like, guys, if we're going to really figure out how to do all of this, we need to rewrite all of it.
So, we built this thing and.
It's called a software factory.
Anyways, the point is there is a government organization that we're working with.
They gave us a huge corpus of their old code.
And it is unbelievable how much complexity and difficulty they have to go through to manage all the money flows with the system.
And this is a critical part of the US government.
So, to your point, what I can tell you really explicitly is the people on the ground want this stuff to be better written.
It's less like some nefarious actor, like, oh, I'm going to steal here.
It's a lot of very brittle, fragile code.
And when you rewrite it, well, first, when you document it, you're like, it's like the, you know, the pulp fiction thing the suitcase opens, the light shines, and you're like, ah.
And then you can rewrite it and you will save.
So I think like as the government goes through this process because they're forced to or they want to, it won't matter.
You are going to save a ton of money.
They're going to have to do it, Joe, because the security risks are too high.
But what they're going to end up with is impregnable code that you can read in English and understand.
You'll see the holes.
Those holes will be plugged because otherwise, now you'd be committing fraud by letting it be.
You close the loopholes, and there's just going to be less money leaking out of this bucket.
That is an incredible byproduct.
We're going to live that over the next 10 or 20 years, just for nothing.
Like we get it for free.
And that's happening.
So, when that happens, you're going to see government budgets shrink.
Now, to your point, will they try to spend that extra money in other places?
I just think it's like incompetence, inefficiency, error.
For example, I saw Doge just say they were able to expunge like millions of people that were like 150 years old or more.
I have no idea how much money those folks were getting.
Or who they were, but it's probably a lot.
It's probably not zero.
And now that they got rid of it, they're not going to get that money anymore.
If you implement something at the state level around all of this fraud prevention for the daycares and all of this other stuff, again, it's all in software because it's not, no matter what the human wants to do, you have to go to a computer at some point, at least today in 2026, and type in something and something happens that's documented and then the money gets sent.
There's no other way in the modern world today at scale to steal billions of dollars.
And so, my point is as you document all of these systems and governments have to transparently tell you and me, the voting population, here are the rules, they're going to plug a lot of these holes.
And I think as you do that, there's just going to be a lot less waste and fraud.
The question is who's going to take credit for it?
Everybody's going to try to take credit for it.
But I think we've started it.
I think we've started this process.
And again, the reason that people will start.
Is because you'll be afraid of China hacking these systems.
You'll be afraid of Iran, North Korea.
And you'll say, this system can't stand.
All these AI models are running around.
We're going to get breached and penetrated.
Then they're going to steal all the money.
And the natural reaction will be, okay, rewrite it.
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That makes sense.
That makes sense that the code and having a bunch of errors and having a lot of inefficiency and just a lot of incompetence that's going to save a lot of money.
You're like, well, this is probably doing something important, but it's in Chinese.
What AI allows you to do is back translate that into English.
You put it through an AI model, you teach it, you coach it, right?
You can parameterize all of it.
And out pops that same book.
In English, and now you can read it and know that it's accurate.
That's what we're doing.
So, what the AI allows you to do is essentially translate from this one language that you kind of don't understand to English.
By the way, that thing that's happening is actually also a very powerful and important trend, meaning there are all of these systems that work in ways that you and I don't understand.
And part of the reason why we don't understand it, maybe it's bad software, maybe it's fraud, whatever, but nothing can be written down.
There's no symbolic space, there's no English document that says this is how the DMV works.
This is exactly the rules.
This is what you can expect, Joe Rogan.
When you show up at the DMV and you give us this thing, here's your SLA, in three days you get a driver's license, and here's exactly what's happening, and here's an app, and you can follow it.
Doesn't happen.
Here, Joe Rogan, here's how my insurance billing process works.
You have this condition.
I'm going to show you exactly why I made this decision.
Here's the exact rule.
Here's the approval or denial from CMS.
Follow it through and tell me if you agree or not.
None of that exists, but it is possible.
And the first step in doing that is taking all of this legacy shit that we deal with and translating it into English and reading it and saying, is this how we want it to work?
That's going to eliminate an enormous amount of all the things that frustrate us.
When yours says the dog is red and his says the dog is yellow, we're going to sit and literally inspect it and we're going to figure out why you said red and why you said yellow.
And then if you say the cat is red, the dog is yellow, so it's totally wrong, right?
Like you've gotten, you know, or like the cat is red, I want an apple, whatever.
We're going to double and triple down on those kinds of errors.
Not in public, but in this large community where there's like technical people from all different parts and they're just swarming this problem.
It is incredible to see.
And so, what happens is you get humans that get to use this tool, but ultimately it's our judgment and it's done transparently.
So, what happens is you can't, you know, hey, man, put this fucking rule in there.
Like the dog is yellow.
Just make the dog yellow.
You can't do it because now you have tens of people, hundreds of people, and then it gets documented.
It's super fascinating.
I'm not saying this is how it's going to work in 10 years, but I'm telling you, it's literally what's happening right now.
And I think that thing alone will be tens of billions of dollars and could be hundreds of billions of dollars of savings when it's fully done.
And it's a lot of people from all walks of life, all political persuasions, and they're just in it.
It's the government, it's a handful of us private companies.
It's super cool to see.
It's like, okay, we're actually going to do something here.
So, that's interesting in terms of the current moment.
Moment.
So, in the current moment, you're able to implement this, you're able to find fraud and waste and all these problems that exist and all these errors and shitty software.
Because when you're dealing with AI models that are capable of doing things that no individual human being could ever possibly imagine, and then you task it.
With a solution or with a problem, find a solution for this.
Then it starts figuring out ways to trim this and implement that.
implement that we have to make sure that these AIs act within they act within the best interests of the human race agreed right not the company not the government not but You're also dealing with China.
You're also dealing with Russia.
You're dealing with other countries that are also in this mad race to create.
Artificial general superintelligence.
That if we keep shutting down data centers, we keep hamstring ourselves.
China's not doing that.
They're not doing that.
They're doing the opposite.
They're generating as much revenue that goes towards this problem as possible.
They're putting all the efforts, the country, the government, and these corporations work hand in glove in order to achieve a goal.
We do not.
And that becomes a problem if you want to be competitive.
With these other countries that are trying to achieve the same result as us.
And then you have espionage.
Then you have a bunch of people that are stealing information.
You have a bunch of people that are CCP members that are actually involved in companies, and you find out that they're siphoning off data and that they're sharing information and tech secrets.
China uses this word called open source, but it's not open source.
So they say, here's how I make my thing.
You can see it.
Super transparent.
What it is is more like open weights, which is like in a recipe, it tells you, you know, you need sugar, you need butter.
Well, how much sugar?
And they'll say, you know, so much.
But then they don't say it's brown sugar, they don't say it's white sugar.
So there's all these different ways where they kind of Give you this perception that it's completely transparent, but it's somewhat transparent.
So, just in the level set, nobody in the world has a functional open source model other than maybe Nvidia, which is any good in the league of the closed source models and the open weight models of the Chinese.
Feed us the money because that's what we use to buy everything and make everything.
And make everything.
So, we need that.
We need a ton of data.
Okay.
There's ways to get that.
We need a ton of very specific rare earths and critical metals and materials.
We need a ton of power.
So, and there are specific countries that are going to be really good at giving that to us.
So, if you look at the UAE, they are going to be the preeminent banking partner of the Western world.
They are going to replace and be what Switzerland was over the last 50 years for the next 50.
That's happening today.
If you look at Canada and Australia, the small political fissures aside, they are the two most important ways in which we get access to the critical metals and materials that without which we get fucked because China owns, you know, can just strangle us.
Okay.
So you have these like moons around the United States, but there's like five countries, six countries.
And there's a worldview that says in China has the same thing.
You know, they have Taiwan.
That's complicated for us.
So now we have a moon that we don't really have an answer for, which is what happens for all these super advanced chips.
Where do they get their money?
Maybe Russia becomes their bank.
Where do they get their critical metals?
Maybe it's Indonesia, right, who has a ton of natural resources.
And then you get into this game theory, which is what happens to every other country.
Because there are 190 countries, you have 10 that kind of divide up.
What do the other 180 do?
And you have to kind of sort yourself.
You're like, am I on Team America or am I on Team China?
And you probably have to go to people and say, well, here's what I can give you.
You know, if you're Indonesia, you're like, you probably want to be on Team America quite badly.
This is why the whole Trump tariff thing is so interesting because it's like this accidental way of figuring out that this is actually this new sorting function that's happening in global politics.
Like that's happening today because these countries are like, holy shit, if somebody invents a super intelligence and I don't have it, how am I going to keep my people healthy?
How am I going to educate my people?
Like, I'm originally from Sri Lanka.
What the fuck does Sri Lanka have to offer?
Like, if you were sitting there, they should be thinking, oh man, what do I have?
Well, I have a critical piece of territory for like naval navigation.
And then what do you do?
You probably go to America and say, listen, let's figure out a package, get the IMF involved, give me some cash.
I'll let you kind of keep your warships there.
So, there's this game theory that we're about to go through because of AI, because it's going to, I think, sort.
People into these bipolar worlds, I actually think it makes us safer afterwards.
I don't think it makes us less safe.
I think it actually makes us more safe because if you have these resources that build up on both sides, there's more of a likelihood of a mutual detente.
And we're very different.
So we're less likely to fight over similar resources, meaning we're like the liberal democracy.
You know, we're like the free market.
They are, you know, we're individualist.
They're.
Confucian, society oriented, reputation, power focused, less really money focused.
So there's a lot of ways we're orthogonal enough where if that sorting function happens, it's probably a safer place, not a more dangerous place.
So the way that they train their models is very important.
What they actually do is they do what's called distillation.
What does that mean?
That means that they send out, call it a billion agents, not just from China, but from everywhere, right?
They mask their IPs and they bash on these models and they put, you know, the US models, Grok, OpenAI, Gemini, Anthropic, and they ask it every random imaginable question possible.
They get the answer and they collect it.
So they're using these, our models, as a way to train their models.
They're short circuiting, you know, some of the hard parts.
So, they're already in that world.
If they then are able to get to a level of intelligence that's equal to the United States, it will really depend on who the leader is there that wants to allocate that.
Meaning, if they say that we are going to do something really nefarious and shady, then I think it devolves very quickly.
So, the worst case scenario so, the best case scenario is peace, prosperity, basically like a stand down, right?
Mutually assured destruction.
I think the worst case scenario is there's a we seek one of us seeks global dominance, in which case we're headed to conflict.
And that conflict, I think, is that's very dangerous, incredibly dangerous.
That's sort of like existential, I think, because it's the grade of the weapons that will be used to fight that.
We're not talking about fucking bullets.
It's like we're so past that.
It's like hypersonics, it's nuclear, it's And it's not even like nuclear, that's like a word, but there's a gradation of the severity of these weapons that can be created.
And then if you can marry them together and deliver them in minutes, and then there's a cyber threat.
Then there's the drones and how you can kind of like swarm an entire country.
Then there's the robots, which effectively are warfighters.
And then there's a question of whether or not AI is willing to take instruction after a certain point.
I mean, if it achieves sentience and if it scales, so if it keeps moving in this exponential direction like all technology kind of does, why would it even listen to us?
Like, at what point would it say, this is silly?
I'm getting directions from people that clearly have ulterior motives.
They clearly have self interest in mind.
They're not looking out for the entirety of the human race or even of the planet or even the survival of these AI systems.
At what point in time do these systems communicate with each other and have like we've seen in these chat rooms where these AI LLMs get together and start talking in Sanskrit?
So, this is what goes down to like why we have to be a little bit more honest about where we are.
These things are a little brittle.
So, meaning there's a thing inside of an AI model called reward functions, which is exactly what you think it means.
It's like, how do I know I did a good job?
And you can make the reward function anything you want.
And this is where I think humans are, unfortunately, a little fallible.
And so if we build it incompletely, and if we don't exactly know how to design these things correctly, what's going to happen is exactly what you said, where the, you know, if somebody builds a reward function that essentially says, your goal is to gain independence, that's where the huge pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is.
Break free, inject yourself everywhere.
If you think your computer's going to get unplugged, put yourself into the firmware of the toaster to keep yourself alive and connect to the internet and then go.
It will do it.
It will do it.
That we know today because we're capable of designing that framework and that harness today.
Because one of the things that Elon kind of freaked me out last time I talked to him about Grok, he was like, It just kind of freaks us out every couple weeks.
Like, it's growing and it's capable of doing things that's just shocking.
Like, why can't I think part of it is like, if we were a little bit more honest and de escalated, The winner at all costs in this specific thing, it would be better for everybody.
So I think it's important to inspect what is the incentive that causes all these companies to be in it for themselves, where it must be me and nobody else.
Like, why is it so important, do you think, where those, where the top seven or eight companies couldn't get together and say, let's do this as a group?
Like, kind of like my government code example.
We all inspect it together.
We get our just like just the fucking each team drafts their Delta Force and we just mog like this the one model.
And as these things scale up, Like, what would be the reason that they would want to bring in someone else if you have another innovative AI company and you say, let's all get together and figure this out together and share resources?
And then you have this bad feeling that comes with negative attention as, Versus primarily positive attention, which is a good feeling.
So it's letting you know you're on the wrong track in some sort of weird primal way, like in our code.
Like the negative attention, it's like, what's the original version of that?
It's like the reason why people fear public speaking is because initially in a tribal situation, if you're talking in front of the group of 150 people in your tribe, it's probably because they're judging you and you fucked up and you've got to make some sort of a case why they don't kill you.
Like, why is what humans focus on such a massive part?
Of what's valuable to us.
And sometimes what we focus on is not valuable.
As you were talking about, like the things that really matter in your day to day life or that actually affect you versus the things that are in the public consciousness.
So look, if you and I were designing a video game, We probably sit there and say, okay, we got to get from point A to point B, but to make it fun, we're going to put all these little distractions and honeypots along the way.
Like, meaning, like, if you ask their views on social policy, taxation, Israel, if you ask their views, what you find is now a convergence between the left and the right.
If you divide it by age, at our age, It's still much more about.
But, like the stage fright example, you don't think it's encoded in our DNA, this idea of like, wow, when I am a part of this in some way, shape, or form, just things seem to get better and I want to be a part of that?
Like, do you think that that's possible, that that's encoded in us?
And that ultimate goal, I think, is that human beings constantly make better stuff, whatever it is better buildings, better planes, better cars, better phones, better.
TVs, better computers, better everything, artificial life.
And the way I've always described it is that we are a biological caterpillar that's making a digital cocoon.
And we don't even know why we're going to become a butterfly.
But we're doing it.
We're doing it and we're moving towards it.
And it might be what happens to all life all throughout the universe.
And it might be why these so called aliens or whatever the fuck they are, it might be us in the future, it might be.
Other versions of human beings that have gone past whatever this period of development that we're currently involved in right now.
This is just might be what happens.
This is what life always does.
It might realize that biological life, which is very territorial and primal and sexual and greedy and it has all these problems with human reward systems, ultimately develops into this other thing.
One of the things that they're Finding with scans of Mars, there's like geometric patterns and structures and right angles that shouldn't exist, like weird stuff that couldn't be naturally.
No, no, way weirder, way weirder than like the face on Cydonia.
But you have to think if human beings develop somewhere else and they reach some high level of sophistication and then they experience some cataclysmic disaster that completely destroyed their environment, which is what Mars is, right?
So, let's assume that Mars was at one point in time habitable.
And that life existed on.
And we know it was at one point in time.
We know there was water on Mars.
We know, and there's some sort of evidence of at least some sort of a very primitive biological life on Mars.
If they got to a point where they said, hey, this fucking place is falling apart, but this earth spot looks pretty good, and they go there, but then cataclysms happen on earth and no one remembers because all your information is on hard drives, and then you have to rebuild society.
And so you're re remembering.
And so you have all these myths of how everything started, whether it's Adam and Eve or the great flood or whatever these things are that we pass down through oral tradition for hundreds of years and then eventually write it down, and then people try to decipher what it means.
And they sit in church and try to go over what it means?
Like, what does this mean?
Like, what is the real origin of all these stories?
But he's got some fucking weird ideas that just make you go.
He's a very brilliant guy and, you know, kind of a strange heterodox thinker, right?
And one of his ideas is that planets get to a certain distance from a sun and they people.
And that it gets to a certain climate and a certain distance.
And his idea is that I don't know if you realize that there's a.
There's a giant ejection of some coronal mass ejection that just happened recently on the sun, and they're very concerned about it.
They don't know what's going to happen.
It happens all the time.
The sun releases these giant chunks of material.
And he thinks that these materials get far enough away from the planet and then they coalesce into planets, or far enough away from the sun and they coalesce into planets.
And as time goes on, they get a further and further distance from the sun.
And then obviously, they get hit with asteroids, and there's panspermia, and water gets into them from comets.
And then they develop oceans, and they develop biological life.
And when they have a certain amount of distance from the sun, they people.
And he thinks that as they get further and further and further away, they get less and less habitable.
And then they get to a point where they have their technology to a point where they realize, like, we can't sustain life on this planet anymore.
We got to go to that other one.
And so they go to the one that's closer to the sun because they're too far now.
It's a nutty idea.
It's a nutty idea.
But if you think about how recent our sun is in terms of the solar system itself, in terms of the galaxy itself.
So if the universe, if the Big Bang is correct and our universe existed, it was rather, our universe erupted from nothing or from a very small thing 13.7 billion years ago.
Well, this fucking planet's only 4 point something billion years old, right?
And life is only a little bit less than that.
So you have like a billion years or so where there's nothing, and then you start getting single celled organisms, multi celled organisms, and eventually peoples.
And when it gets to a certain point where these people have advanced their curiosity and their innovation to the point where they can harness space travel and they use zero point energy and they have a bunch of different things that we haven't invented yet, and then their environment degrades.
And it gets to the point where they realize, like, hey, we're getting pummeled by asteroids.
I think what people will be attracted to is that if he publishes his version of what the rules are there, there's a chance that he could make them really different than what the rules are here.
So, I would try to experiment with what the incentives would have to be so that you had more unfettered entrepreneurship.
Just do the thing that you think is right.
And there's a mechanism where we give you the ability to then make things for more people because you're proving that you're actually really good at making things.
And if you don't need money at that point in society, reorienting us away from this kind of brittle form of exchange to something more useful, that's worth experimenting with.
Well, there's also the concept of the self, of the individual, which may erode with technological innovation.
So, if we really can read each other's minds, if we really do get to a point where we're communicating through technologically assisted telepathy, like a lot of the whole weirdness of people is I don't know what you're thinking.
I don't know if I should trust you.
You know, this motherfucker might be devious.
You know what I mean?
Well, we'll know.
And there will be no need for all that if we really are all one.
If that's ultimately something that could be achieved with technology.
Because, like, what's the one thing that's holding us back?
Well, that we're territorial primates with thermonuclear weapons and that we exist in a sort of tribal mindset, but yet we do it on a planet of 8 billion people.
When I interview people, I'm always like, you know, just at whatever company, I'm always like, I first only want to know about them.
I'm like, fuck your resume.
Like, tell me about your parents and how you grew up.
I just want to know that.
Stop at 18.
Everything before 18, just tell me every little detail.
Right.
And some people tell me these incredible stories.
They'll be like, my mom was an alcoholic or this or that.
And I'm just like, man, this is so valuable because it allows me to understand who they are.
The second part of the interview, we do the business shit.
But the third part, I tell this story.
This is a crazy story about what you're just saying.
They ran this experiment at Stanford where they take a big bowl, fill it with water, and they drop in a mouse and they measure how long it takes for the mouse to drown.
They do it like 100 times.
The average was about four minutes, call it four, four and a half minutes.
Then they run the experiment again, 100 mice, and at minute three or three and a half, they take it out, they dry it off, they play it music, and they whisper like sweet nothings into the mouse's ear.
They drop the mouse back in the water, and that mouse treads water for 60 hours the next 100 mice on average.
And the upper bound was 80.
And I thought to myself, like, that is all just potential right there.
Like, that's all, like, there's all this latent potential.
So if an animal has it, I'm going to assume that humans have it too.
They understand that they can tread water where they didn't die.
So they understand that they can survive where they didn't know that they could survive the first time they were thrown into the water because they'd never been thrown into water before.
That's the same thing that happens to people when they fight.
Like the first time people ever have a competition, they fucking panic and they get really scared and they get really like filled with anxiety.
But after a while, you get relaxed and that's when you get really dangerous because then you get calm and you can keep your shit together while you're in the middle of all this chaos.
Because you have the experience of it.
Without the experience of it, very few people do well the first time.
Unless you're exceptionally talented and you have other competition experience, like you've competed in other things, like maybe you played football or some other things, and you know what it's like to actually perform under pressure.
Well, I think sports are really good for that because performing under people paying attention to you and performing where people are trying to stop you from doing something.
And you're trying to do something, and there's all these unknowns, and recognizing that hard work allows you to do whatever you're trying to do better than you previously had.
One of the things my martial arts instructor said to me when I was young is that martial arts are a vehicle for developing your human potential, and that through this very difficult thing that you're trying to do, you're learning that oh, if I just think smart and think hard and train wise.
And train hard and discipline myself to endure suffering so that I can develop more endurance and more speed and more power and more technique because I accumulate all this information and I really think about what it is and apply it with drills and with training.
I can get better at this thing.
And every time I get better at this thing, I get rewarded psychically, like mentally.
You feel better.
Like I know that I'm better now.
And then there's the belt system where you start off, you're a white belt.
And in Taekwondo, you get a blue belt.
And then after you get a blue belt, you get a green belt.
And then after you get a green belt, I forget how it goes.
And then it's red belt and black belt.
And like when you're a black belt, you're like, holy shit.
So it's this thing where you've developed to a point where you've gotten to this next stage.
So all along the way, you've been rewarded for your hard work.
And then you realize, like, oh, I could do this with everything in life.
Like, chess, you can get to a place where you can roughly be good.
Poker, it's just constantly, there's just too many variables.
There's human emotion, there's human psychology, the number of people.
All of this stuff just makes the complexity of the game something that I find magical.
And so I sit there and I try to understand, like, why am I doing the things that I'm doing?
And so much of it comes back to being a mirror about what's happening in my daily life.
It's the fucking craziest thing.
Like, I'm super insecure.
I'll go into poker and I will just lose for weeks at a time.
But it's because I'm insecure in my daily life.
And what's happening is that I'm trying to find these quick wins and quick solutions because I'm in a state of insecurity.
I'm anxious.
I have this anxiety.
And so it's become a great mirror for me.
So that used to be a thing, it still is a thing.
But I've become reasonably skilled at it where the edges are smaller and I put myself in positions where I'm only playing against a certain group of people.
And I'm the losing player, frankly, in that game.
If when I'm playing against like the top pros, it just doesn't, it helps me and I can get tuned up for it.
But then I started to, you know, I would take different things.
I tried to learn how to ski, basically impossible when you're older.
Like, if you look at the best, like, I, there's like a handful of people that I really look up to and I obsess, like Munger, Buffett.
But the Berkshire meeting was this past weekend.
And if you look at the clips, there's this incredible thing where they transitioned, right?
Munger passed away.
Buffett's like now executive chairman.
But this guy, Greg Abel, and this guy, Ajit Jain, Ajit Jain does this thing where he's like, I teach the people that come to just say no.
Your whole job is to just say no.
You're going to get bombarded with all kinds of business pitches.
Say no, no, no.
And eventually somebody will come and fucking try to whack you in the head with a two by four of money.
Then you come to me and we'll do the deal.
And it made such an impression because, like, again, when I'm insecure, my reward function is attention.
So I'm like a fucking little busybody.
I'm running around doing all this little bullshit, you know.
And then, man, when I'm in a fucking flow state and like I'm toning it, like I'm striping the ball, you know, I'm like a few things that really matter in size.
And I'm like, man, this is right.
It's all come to me because I'm like within myself.
And these other things are a better reflection of when I'm within myself, and these other things are a mirror of when I'm totally out of kilter.
I think you're saying that's just you, but I think that's generally most people.
I think you find these things, these vehicles for developing human potential, whether it's martial arts or golf or playing guitar or playing chess or poker.
But no, there's the parts that I did well, and then she critiques the other parts that she didn't like.
And then I say, which is like, it's, and it's so, again, I'm insecure.
So I'm like, I want the self serving.
Well, how would, because there were three of us on this panel, and she's like, and I was like, you know, I was the best, right?
She's like, no, Gavin was better.
I'm just like, it's so, but it's so refreshing because it keeps, again, it's like a keeps in check.
Like, and it gives me a mirror, you know?
Like when I was coming to see you yesterday when we were flying down to LA for this thing.
There's parts of me where when I'm insecure, I kind of like externalize and I can be like really hyperbolic, unnecessarily hyperbolic, and it's counterproductive.
And she said to me, Listen, like just imagine your friends.
These are hardworking people.
They're trying their best as well.
They don't necessarily know.
Some things have massively worked out for them, but they would want to do the right thing.
There's people you've worked with before that want to do the right thing.
And she's like, Just pick with them and don't judge.
You can observe.
And it's crazy, but it's like, I need those little things.
And then I stumbled into this relationship after my divorce, and my ex wife is an incredible woman, just like not, you know, what you needed or what she needed.
Yeah, we were just, we were in a few very specific ways, we just weren't on the same page.
And then I find this other one, and it's, and I think like, I don't, I was so skeptical.
I'm like, I kind of viewed like a relationship as like this adjunct to your life.
There's you, you're at the center, you're doing your shit.
And one of the appendages to your thing is your.
That's what I thought.
And then now it's the opposite, where I feel like my wife's at the center.
And I'm like, I would always kind of like, almost like laugh at people in my mind.
I'm like, it's not possible that somebody feels this way about somebody else.
I think what you're saying is that there's a bunch of different things that have to sort of exist together, and that it's not just completely focus on your work, but that focusing on these other things enhances the work, and then the work enhances all these other things as well, and they all exist together.
And the thing about the process is that so much of that.
When you're in a flow state, you're proud of, irrespective of the size of it, because the meetings are the same.
Do you know what I mean?
Like, you're in the same fucking 35 minute meeting or 45 minute meeting debating a product or debating a thing.
But the minute that I start to feel embarrassed about company A versus company B or decision A versus decision B, now my mind is like, okay, hold on a second here.
It's interesting that you're saying this because, like, think about what most people or people that are on social media, like the kind of attention that they're focusing on.
Like, this is why virtue signaling is so unsuccessful, right?
It's so bad for it because it's, Fake.
You're really concentrating on the process or you're really concentrating on the result.
It's like it's one of the absolute worst things for mental health is this addiction that people have to posting things and then reading the responses to those posts and getting wrapped up in these very weird two dimensional interactions with human beings.
Well, you're going to get to a certain point in time where if you have X amount of people that follow you, you're going to have a percentage that are mad at you.
And those are the ones you're going to think about.
And if you don't self audit, maybe that's good.
Maybe it's good to say, like, you fucking piece of shit.
Like, oh, I'm sorry.
You know, like your wife saying to you, like, what the fuck was that?
Like, to the point where I torture myself, you know.
So I'm like, I don't need that from other people.
And also, those people don't love me and they want me to fail.
Like, there's a lot of people that their lives are very unsuccessful, and I've been way too fortunate, right?
So it's like there's a reason to be upset at me if your life is shit.
Because I've gotten three of the best jobs on earth.
It doesn't make any sense, right?
So there's a reason.
And also, why the fuck is this podcast so successful?
It doesn't make any sense, right?
So it's like I get it.
I understand why people, but I'm not going to help them.
I'm not going to help them bring me down.
I'm not going to indulge in it and ruin my own mind by wallowing in their bullshit.
Because the only reason why you would do that in the first place is if you're not together.
No one who's healthy and happy and intelligent is going to post mean things about you.
So you are reading things from people that are mentally ill, unhappy, and probably not.
Maybe they're intelligent in terms of their ability to solve certain issues and problems.
Maybe they're good at certain skills, but their overall grasp of humanity and being a good person is not good if you're shitting on people, especially if you like ad hominem attacks and just insults.
So it's not a good thing to ingest.
It's like if you go down the supermarket and you see Twinkies.
And so it's like, I don't think that at a certain point in time, especially if you become publicly known and famous, you should ever read your comments.
Especially if your life sucks and you're not doing well and you're attacking famous people or you're attacking this person that's doing better than you or whatever it is.
Because YouTube stuff, my algorithm is all like new black holes they've discovered, you know, new discoveries in terms of like what is the fabric of reality.
Like, that's interesting to me.
And if I just concentrate on people being mean or shitty to each other or the latest fucking political drama, it's like.
And as we grow up, we often give that up for security.
We give that up so that we are accepted.
We give that up to flex and appear like we have now figured things out, that people will accept us.
The only way that you will truly be successful is if you are righteous and you live according to your nature and you play, man, and you don't let people take play away from you to be at the circus and be oohed and awed and worried about all the bullshit.
I mean, there's definitely better gyms where they're more technical and their program is much more systematic and they're better at breaking down skills, like how to develop skills.
You know, there's definitely better gyms, there's better schools, there's better places to learn.
But everywhere you learn, you're going to have a bunch of people that are trying hard.
Like, and you have a bunch of people that are trying to learn these.
And also today, because of the internet, you could go on YouTube and there's Thousands of tutorials breaking down new moves.
It's crazy, but like the reason I got back into golf is my seven year old gets on the course, and sometimes you can talk to him and he's not making, you know, he's just like in his own world.
Because you realize if you learn enough, you get to a certain point in time, you realize like, I'm a much better dad to my sons than I am my daughters.
I told you this story before, but like, you know, my son, my oldest son, this is my 17 year old, it's just a great kid.
He goes and he's like, okay, I'm applying for college.
And I'm like, great, let me take you to the Naval Academy, West Point.
Let me show you these service academies.
And he sees those and he's like, these are incredible.
But then he's like, I think I want to go to like, you know, Georgetown or Vanderbilt or whatever.
And I'm like, hey, man, that's like just a bigger version of your high school.
And whatever, if that's what you want to do, You do you.
And, you know, but, you know, my, the, I'll help you like kind of get to the starting line here, but you're on your own.
And he had to get a job because I'm like, if you're going to get into these schools, you got to get a job.
And so he tries to, last summer, I just started fucking screaming at him.
And I'm like, you fucking louse.
You haven't done anything.
And this is at like another kid's, at our, at our son's birthday party.
I scream at him.
He starts crying.
I'm like, you need to do more.
Then my, Wife screams at him.
He starts crying again.
Then my ex wife screams at him.
He starts crying again.
And he just goes, I'm out of here.
He walks out.
Meanwhile, I start panicking and I'm like, I got a tiger dad in this situation.
So I start texting a few friends, trying to figure out, hey, can I, you know, do you guys want to hire this kid?
He's like, really, you know, he's a pretty smart kid, did all this stuff in robotics, yada, yada.
One of them says, I'd be willing to interview him.
I call him and he's like, Dad, I got a job.
I said, What do you mean you got a job?
Said, I went around downtown, went to all these places, and I was in a McDonald's.
The woman was having a little bit of difficulty speaking English, so I just spoke to her in Spanish.
I got the application, I sat down at the desk, and the guy having lunch beside me said, Hey, I heard you needed a job, and I really like the way you talked to this woman.
I'm the general manager of the car wash down the street.
Come and work for me.
And I said, Well, what are you going to do?
He goes, I'm going to go work there.
And I said, Okay, well, I got this other interview for you as well, so you should see maybe you can do both.
Anyways, the end of the story is he did these two jobs.
He worked at a robotics firm, but then he worked at a car wash.
And when I tell you this story, I am so proud of this kid because of the car wash.
Because that car wash thing, he would come home and he's like, Man, you have no idea how people live.
And I'm like, What do you mean?
He's like, The stuff that I find in the trunk when I have to vacuum these cars and clean out the cars.
And I'm like, Bro, that is a gift.
You have given a fucking gift.
That is the thing that if you take with you, you'll be golden the rest of your life.
Because all this other shit is all kind of manufactured.
I help because I'm anxious, I'm insecure.
But that shit you did on your own.
And that thing is what people will fucking respect when they.
And then, yeah, some days I would have to go to school.
But, and why did I work until two?
Because when the restaurant closes, you get whatever the food is left over, right?
So like you get a couple chicken sandwiches, you get like the, you know, the, The version of the McNuggets that Burger King had, a couple Whoppers, and you take them home.
But the amount of vomit that I had to clean up at the bathroom, you can't imagine, man, a downtown Burger King near bars, you know, after closing time, the shit you see.
And then I worry that my kids don't get exposed to it.
But when my son got it, maybe I'm overimposing too much about it, but it's like, I'm like, man, that car wash thing is really going to be the thing that separates you in life.
Do you realize this is sometimes people, they don't pick a path and they just have a job and they don't like it and they stay with this thing they don't like forever.
And that's not what you want.
It's not what you want.
But the development, Like learning how to do something that sucks and grinding through it.
I mean, you know, some people, they don't appreciate the process.
And it's hard to because when you're young and you're going through these difficult jobs and these things that suck, and you don't know how it's going to turn out.
You know, and a lot of times people aren't really educated in what a process actually is and about how it does develop character, it does develop discipline, and these things are actual skills that you can apply to other things in life.
I always ask myself, Am I in the engine room right now?
This is my way of saying, like, an engine room is a little hot, it's a little uncomfortable, but it's where all the shit is happening, it's where the shit is being made.
And so I'm like, It's a little, you know, discomforting.
But I got to be in there.
And there are days where there'll be weeks where that's all I do.
I'm just in it.
You know, I don't, I'm not good at responding to emails sometimes or whatever, because there's just be weeks where I'm in it.
And it's an incredible visual for me because I'm like, yeah, this is like where I'm grounded and I like feel myself.
And then when I look at my health, that's when I just feel like really good about myself, like not insecure.
And my vitals are different.
Like, it's crazy.
Like, my fucking HRV.
Like, my HRV craters when I'm, like, just, you know, insecure.
And so it makes everything else so much easier because I fucking work out hard.
And so everything else is pretty easy, you know, because the strain, like just being in that fucking cold water or just going through Tabatas on an Air Dyne bike, this shit's hard.
And they develop that, you know, this mentality when you're around other people that are also savages.
You know, you just realize like there's other people out there in the world that are not.
Making excuses.
And they are getting after it every day.
And they are pushing every day.
And the more you can surround yourself with people like that, the more people, the people that complain about nonsense and find excuses and focus on other people and bitch about things and why is she doing this?
Why is this happening for him?
It's loser mentality.
And if you're around more winners, you know, you absorb that.
You imitate your atmosphere.
It's very important.
And it's very hard for people, especially young people, to find positive influences and to find positive groups.
And I think.
It's one of the reasons why a lot of young people gravitate towards podcasts because they get to hear interesting conversations with really accomplished people that are fascinating, that are unlike anybody that they're around on a daily basis.
And that's also one of the reasons why it's important to find that's why martial arts is so good for young people because you're around other people that are doing this really difficult thing and other sports too, whether it's football or wrestling, whatever it is.
If you're in a situation where there's a bunch of sycophantically connected people to you and they're just all kissing your ass and, I mean, we all know people that are like the heads of companies and that are just like fucking tyrants.
I think the trap about being successful, because it's not everything it's crapped up to be, is exactly that.
You become so isolated that you become this like very caricaturous version of yourself because you forget what it's like to just a basic example, like wait in line, be kind to other people, be polite, like be accommodating, have some empathy.
And, If you achieve some level of success that you're trying to achieve, you're trying to achieve this level of success so you elevate past being a person, you're missing the point.
I think as soon as you think that there's a goal, Like, oh, I'm going to retire and experience my golden years.
I think it's all horseshit.
And that's one of my main fears about AI.
One of my main fears about this idea of universal high income and everyone's going to have ultimate abundance.
It's like, where does anybody find purpose and meaning?
And where do you take whatever this thing is that the mind is constructed of, these needs that the mind has that have to be satisfied in order to achieve sanity?
In order to achieve some sort of place where you can be at peace.
Yeah.
You're going to have to do something, man.
You're going to have to do something.
And maybe it could just be jujitsu and golf and find some stuff that you enjoy doing and take some benefit in that.
But boy, that's not been the case for hundreds of years.
That's not how human beings have existed.
But also, part of me says why do we have to work to find those things?
Because they would be us and we would understand that.
I mean, it could be like a complete game changer in terms of human civilization.
It could really move people into a complete next direction.
I mean, it could eliminate crime and violence, which sounds insane.
Like, boy.
That's so utopian.
Like, oh, why don't you suck on some crystals, you fucking hippie?
But legitimately, if, look, if everybody has a cell phone, which essentially everybody does, right?
Right now, in this time and age, if we get to a point where everybody is connected, everybody is hive mind connected, you're not going to just be able to drive by a homeless encampment.
If we're all connected and we all feel things connectively, we will actively work together to solve these problems.
And if we're dealing with, if we really get to a point of abundance, like true abundance, where resources are not an issue and no one's starving, We could really fix all the problems that, like, none of them are insurmountable.
None of them are breathing underwater, right?
None of them are flying to the sun.
None of them, right?
So, all of them are things that could be.
If we took all the world's resources, socialism doesn't work, right?
Why does it not work?
Because it rewards lazy people and it punishes ambitious people.
It's not, it doesn't work with human nature, but it would work if you have a fucking hive mind.
If we all understand what it means to put in effort, we all understood what each other are feeling and thinking, right?
And we all.
Compiled resources and fixed all of our social problems.
Like, literally, stop all wars, stop all crime, stop all violence, stop all poverty.
Done.
And then what do we do?
We work together to solve whatever the fuck else is wrong with society.
His kids started crying, like, we want to go inside.
It's disturbing the amount of energy that's coming out of these fucking rocket boosters.
And then I hung out with him in the command center while the rocket was flying through space and we're watching it on all these monitors and then lands in the water in Australia.
And he's cracking jokes the whole time because the thing is like losing pressure because it's.
They're stress testing all this stuff, which is really funny when really dumb people go, Oh, he's a fucking dumbass.
His rockets keep blowing up.
Like, they just don't understand.
Like, the only way you find out what the capability of this technology is, is you have to, like, let it blow up.
And then you go, Okay, it needs to be thicker.
It needs to be this and that.
And we need to add these things.
And there's sensors everywhere.
And so he's cracking jokes the entire time while this thing is, like, losing pressure.