May 26, 2024 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
58:47
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| Elon Musk talks a lot about there's already enough energy falling on the earth to run everything forever for all time. | ||
| We just don't know how to harness that energy. | ||
| Well, if AI can solve that problem rapidly and then help you rapidly figure out all the materials problems, because that'll be the next part of this, and then figure out where's the right place to put it and blah blah blah, you'll be able to recognize that these are intelligence problems | ||
| and we are not butting up against the laws of physics. | ||
| So anyway, that's how AI will help. | ||
| But the part that everybody's focused on, and I think rightly so, because we are gonna live through | ||
| it is the valley of despair. | ||
| And before it gets better, it will be so disruptive that it will rip at the fabrics of society. | ||
| Now whether we explode apart or not, I'll say optimistically no, but it will be, it's really going to be brutal. | ||
| And that's the part where I think people, people either go optimism and they don't think | ||
| about the valley of despair, or they trough into the valley of despair | ||
| and they stop thinking. | ||
| All right, I'm Dave Rubin, and joining me in studio today is the host of Impact Theory, Tom Bilyeu. | ||
| Tom, welcome to the Rubin Report. | ||
| Thank you for having me. | ||
| It's good to have you, man. | ||
| I have a lot of questions about all the pockets, mostly, in your pants. | ||
| Let's start. | ||
| We could probably do an hour on that, but you come from Los Angeles. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And I left Los Angeles very publicly, and I've had many people who still live in Los Angeles in this studio, and I always start by saying, why? | ||
| Why are you still there? | ||
| The honest answer is momentum. | ||
| So I have a company there. | ||
| I've been there for 30 years now. | ||
| And so if I could snap my fingers and my entire company would move with me and I wouldn't lose the people whom I care about very deeply, it's an easy tax consideration question. | ||
| I mean, that's just a no-brainer. | ||
| I paid so much just to California. | ||
| It's pretty startling, but that really is the biggest reason. | ||
| And then, look, L.A. | ||
| is an amazing place from a weather perspective. | ||
| So, yeah, but there, beyond that, the company, there's not a lot that anchors me. | ||
| Have you considered asking the team? | ||
| Because I can tell you that when I had two companies and when I was making the decision for us, for the family, I knew I had to ask my guys, and I thought, all right, maybe nobody's coming, and actually everybody came. | ||
| Yes, so we've certainly talked about it with the company. | ||
| Is that something that we should seriously consider? | ||
| And I think it is inevitable that we will leave LA should they can keep going in the same direction that they're going now. | ||
| But because we're building a video game, being in Los Angeles around all that creative talent and energy is nice. | ||
| But yeah, long term, I would be shocked if we stay there. | ||
| Is L.A. | ||
| like a gaming hub now? | ||
| I mean, I know a lot of tech people have left Cali, but are the gaming people? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| So gaming is a fascinating mix of hyper-creative and hyper-technical. | ||
| And so between the proximity to the Bay Area and the fact that we still have a ton of legacy echo from Hollywood being there for so long, it does still attract a ton of creative talent. | ||
| There's a lot of gaming that's there. | ||
| Now, look, everything is starting to disperse more and more around the country. | ||
| So there's less hold and a lot of our developers, if I'm honest, are offshore anyway. | ||
| But if the tax situation continues the way that it is, if more policies get put through that don't make sense from a business perspective, we would for sure leave. | ||
| But in terms of why I haven't left yet, that's the reason. | ||
| Do you want me to tell you your future? | ||
|
unidentified
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Please, yeah. | |
| I can answer those questions. | ||
| Yeah, it's not getting better, but, you know, kind of is what it is, I suppose. | ||
| All right. | ||
| So we, you mentioned right before we started, we're, we're both born in 1976. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So we are, we are Gen Xers. | ||
| We're old timers on the internet. | ||
| For people that have never seen Impact Theory, can you tell them kind of what the show is? | ||
| Just frame us up a little bit before we get into some of the Yeah, so the idea is to empower people. | ||
| So originally it's gone through what I'll call three phases. | ||
| Phase one was pure mindset. | ||
| Think like this, act like this, and your life will be better. | ||
| I started getting bored in that you're just hearing the same ideas over and over and over. | ||
| And so I wanted to start doing something new. | ||
| COVID hits. | ||
| I've had over 3,000 employees in my life and about 1,000 of them at my last company grew up super hard in the inner cities. | ||
| And so I was, because I didn't understand money printing, I didn't know what was about to happen and I thought a lot of those people who I loved and cared about were about to get obliterated. | ||
| And so I said, alright, we're going to start covering financial content because I want to help people navigate what I think is going to be a hyper tumultuous time. | ||
| And of course, my producers were like, you're out of your mind, this is gonna tank the channel, you're going in a totally new direction, the algorithm's gonna hate it. | ||
| And of course it did, and for about eight months it made things worse. | ||
| But then on the other side of that, it ends up becoming one of our most important pillars, and also just began to open my horizons in terms of becoming obsessed with shifting from a mindset focus on empowerment to tackling the most important ideas that we all face as citizens of planet Earth. | ||
| And so then I wanted to push it even farther. | ||
| And so we started, because every podcast is going to need an engine. | ||
| What is the thing that happens that you then talk about? | ||
| And so for me, for a long time, it was just somebody with a mindset bent puts out a book. | ||
| And so I was constantly waiting for the next great book. | ||
| And every now and then you'll get a David Goggins and it smashes and it's huge and was wonderful for me as a host to research. | ||
| But oftentimes, again, you're just rehashing, rehashing. | ||
| And so getting into now what I think the world would call world affairs is a far more fascinating engine for me as somebody who's going to do 12 hours of research on everything. | ||
| And in terms of empowering people, these are the ideas, whether it's finance, whether it's marriage, whether it's family concerns, all the big things that all of us are going to have to contend with in our lives. | ||
| World Affairs gives me the engine to touch across all of those things. | ||
| And so a thing happens in the world, and then I have an opportunity to talk about it. | ||
| So when you did that switch, and you saw that eight-month kind of cavern, or you saw that dip for eight months, did you consider changing at any point? | ||
| Because I remember, even when I was waking up politically, I had no idea what my audience was going to do, but I thought, I just have to tell people what I think. | ||
| I can't fake it, really. | ||
| So I was like, I'll just tell them, and we'll see what happens. | ||
| I'm in a very fortunate position for people that don't know my history. | ||
| I built a company called Quest Nutrition, sold it for a billion dollars, so I don't have to worry about money. | ||
| So for me, I understand meaning and purpose is the thing that's going to drive everybody, and I learned that before I made money, thankfully. | ||
| So I didn't consider changing the tack because at that point, remember, I really believe that Call it a thousand people that I know and care about are about to get obliterated by government shutdowns. | ||
| And so I'm like, whoa, I can't respect myself if I don't do something to help these people. | ||
| And even if it's bad for the channel, look, I'm savvy enough to know. | ||
| We'll go through what I call a valley of despair, which if we talk about AI today, we will almost certainly talk about that. | ||
| The channel will go through a valley of despair, but on the other side, I understand algorithms, and I know how this works, and I just have to find that new audience that will resonate with the new content. | ||
| The old people will watch my legacy videos, the new people will be on the current content, and we will get to the other side of this. | ||
| We just have to be consistent. | ||
| So, no. | ||
| There was no temptation to go back. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| So it's kind of a funny side. | ||
| I started a billion or I sold a company for a billion dollars. | ||
| Let's talk about that for a little bit. | ||
| That might've peaked a little something in people's minds. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What's the deal with that? | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So I'll give it to you in a real fast nutshell, and then if you wanna drill down on anything. | ||
| So I go to film school in the late 90s, USC, fight on Trojans, and I graduate in 98 | ||
| and have absolutely no idea how to break into the industry. | ||
| And I didn't come for money, and at that time, there's no cell phones with cameras on them, | ||
| there's no YouTube, like it, there's just this gigantic wall of unknown dimension | ||
| and depth to get on the other side of to break in. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| And so a no-budget film was $100,000. | ||
| And I'd never met anybody that had $100,000. | ||
| Certainly I'd never had it myself. | ||
| And so I started teaching filmmaking. | ||
| I ended up meeting these two very successful entrepreneurs. | ||
| And they said, look, you're coming to the world with your hand out. | ||
| And if you want to control the art, you have to control the resources. | ||
| And I had written a film that got turned into a I'd written a screenplay that got turned into a film starring Michael Madsen. | ||
| He's been in a ton of Quentin Tarantino films. | ||
| And the whole process was just brutal. | ||
| And so when they said, you should get into business and get rich, I was like, yeah, that's really smart. | ||
| Let's do that. | ||
| I thought it would take 18 months. | ||
| It took 15 years, but it actually did work. | ||
| Yeah, the overnight success. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| The overnight success, 15 years in the making. | ||
| And it really changed how I view the entire world, that whole process. | ||
| But it did put me in control of my life. | ||
| And so I went from wanting to tell stories just to tell stories to realizing that, oh, everybody's governed by a set of ideas. | ||
| And if you change the ideas that people are governed by, whether those are beliefs or values, you will change what I call their frame of reference. | ||
| Changing the frame of reference changes everything. | ||
| And so I knew that my success could not be guaranteed when I was first building businesses. | ||
| So I wanted to make sure that I was asking a new basic question because as entrepreneurs, when you're starting, everybody says, what would you do if you knew you couldn't fail? | ||
| And I was like, that's a terrible question because failure is the most likely outcome of any grand endeavor. | ||
| So I was like, what's the right question? | ||
| And to me, the right question is what would you do and love every day, even if you were failing? | ||
| And so, for a lot of reasons, my business partners and I decided we were going to build a nutrition company, and I just assumed I was going to be in it forever. | ||
| And so I was like, well, if I ever want to do my storytelling stuff, I'm going to start doing it inside this company. | ||
| And so we brought in, or built, I should say, we built a studio, which everyone thought was crazy. | ||
| a protein bar company with a studio. | ||
| You guys are making your own, we called now content, but it wasn't called content back then. | ||
| It weren't called influencers. | ||
| What year is this? | ||
| We started formulating in 2008 and launched in 2010. | ||
| So yeah, all the things that we think of now as social media. | ||
| Right, so this is very nascent YouTube. | ||
| Yeah, and very much so. | ||
| And so, because I was just doing it because I wanted to tell stories, we were way ahead of the curve. | ||
| And so, people will often ask, like, hey, what's the secret? | ||
| How do you build that company? | ||
| And I'm like, I'll tell you, but it won't work. | ||
| And the reason it won't work now is because what made it work then was it was completely novel. | ||
| Now it's all the things that everybody does because it works so well, of course everybody's going to pour into that. | ||
| So ended up finally being able to exit that company. | ||
| Look, it was amazing and I'm so glad and so honored, but nutrition, while it's critically important, is not the thing that owns my heart. | ||
| Was the content you were creating directly connected to the success of the business, or was that still too early on? | ||
| Very much so. | ||
| No, no, no, for sure. | ||
| So there were three things that we got right. | ||
| The product, your product better be good. | ||
| We did something in manufacturing that made that product possible, whereas previously everybody thought it was impossible, which is one of the biggest, most important things that we did. | ||
| And then we just... What was that, just in terms of the making of the bar? | ||
| So yeah, so here's a fascinating thing. | ||
| So we kept saying, because we made a protein bar that didn't have sugar but tasted like it did, and so we're making this thing and we're like, why haven't people done this before? | ||
| This just seems so obvious. | ||
| We know we're not the first people to think of it, so why hasn't anybody done it? | ||
| The first thing you'll run into in manufacturing is you don't want to do this yourself. | ||
| You want to find a co-manufacturer, somebody who Make things for a living, go find one of them and have them build it. | ||
| And so we did, and they all looked at our product and they're like, this can't be made. | ||
| We're like, what are you talking about? | ||
| And none of them could articulate it, but what we ended up realizing, because we would try it and it really wouldn't work. | ||
| It would stop the machines. | ||
| So what we realized was that all of the equipment that had been manufactured for scale over the last 70 years had been made in lockstep with the assumption that you'll be using high fructose corn syrup, which for people that don't know, creates a very specific textural quality to the items that you put it in. | ||
| And so now all the equipment, without even necessarily thinking about it, All assumes your products will have that texture. | ||
| And so they'll all run through the machines. | ||
| They operate at a certain temperature in a certain way. | ||
| And so everything's just standardized for the inclusion of high fructose corn syrup. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| And what were you guys using for sweetening? | ||
| In the beginning, we were using inulin and then we moved on to something called IMO. | ||
| And both of those had a similar textural quality. | ||
| So once we adjusted the equipment to deal with a liquid fiber instead of a liquid sugar, Boom, breakthrough. | ||
| But we had to engineer our own equipment. | ||
| So imagine, we're software guys the day before, and now we're making literal manufacturing equipment with designers and building things ourselves. | ||
| One of my partners... Did you have to own the whole manufacturing end? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Dude, it was crazy. | ||
| It was crazy. | ||
| And there was, when we started, there was only three of us. | ||
| And then three years later, we've got probably north of a thousand employees already. | ||
| Five years, we're 3,000 employees deep. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| I'm in the midst of making my own tequila right now, so I'm very interested in food service and how the whole operation goes and all that. | ||
| So it becomes a huge, huge success. | ||
| Everyone knows Quest. | ||
| Now talk to me about the sale, because that's sort of the, of course, a life-changing moment. | ||
| And you mentioned before you didn't know anyone that had a hundred grand. | ||
| Next thing you're selling this thing for a billion. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yes. | |
| So that is a fascinating ride. | ||
| So one, I want people to understand there's a big difference between paper money and bank account money. | ||
| Oh, so that's not all cash just in all these pockets. | ||
| Believe it or not. | ||
| So a lot of people think that, oh, all these rich people, they're so sinister, they're hoarding, you know, however many billions of dollars. | ||
| And the reality is most of those guys, it's all equity. | ||
| It's like all the maybe. | ||
| Maybe they're worth this. | ||
| This is why I was so outraged when they started talking about taxing unrealized gains. | ||
| That's literally hilarious. | ||
| Wait, can you explain that for a moment because it's so stupid. | ||
| It's so stupid. | ||
| It is literally money that does not exist. | ||
| Correct. | ||
| It is all a big movie. | ||
| Thus the perfect progressive policy. | ||
| Here's how equity versus actual money works. | ||
| So I'll just use Quest as an example. | ||
| So at one point I was worth hundreds of millions of dollars, meaning People would look at our company and go, based on how much revenue you do, based on the brand goodwill, so basically based on what a potential acquirer might pay if everything lines up, your company is worth a billion dollars. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But I haven't sold it. | ||
| So that billion dollars is purely hypothetical. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| So this is true. | ||
| I was worth hundreds of millions of dollars. | ||
| My wife and I shared one car. | ||
| It was a 2006 Ford Focus with a leaky exhaust. | ||
| It was absolutely hilarious. | ||
| It would rattle when you got up to 60 miles an hour. | ||
| I used to have to bum rides off my employees. | ||
| Wait, just to be clear though, because people I don't think really understand this. | ||
| It's like, you did not, there was no cash associated with that. | ||
| You have a company that you're hoping to get off the ground and probably, was the company in debt at that point? | ||
| Not really. | ||
| We were, I mean, we could do a whole another hour about how we did it while avoiding debt. | ||
|
unidentified
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Sure. | |
| We did, but it was very minor. | ||
| And so yeah, to scale, because we were growing at, we grew by 57,000% in manufacturing | ||
| in the first three years alone. | ||
| And it was just pure insanity. | ||
| So you're going from like 3,000 square feet to 300,000 square feet. | ||
| So you can imagine, every dollar I make, I'm just putting right back into the company. | ||
| I'm not taking any of that home. | ||
| My lifestyle didn't go up when we launched the company, it went down. | ||
| But you do it saying, one day, I might be able to exit, and then all will be well. | ||
| And that's exactly what happened, and it was well worth it, and I highly encourage entrepreneurs. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| But you have to understand that in the beginning, none of that money is mine. | ||
| There's nothing, I can't access it, I can't touch it, because it's hypothetical. | ||
| It's not real money. | ||
| So I'm already paying taxes on the money that we take in as a company, but that's not coming to me. | ||
| So anyway, it is make-believe money. | ||
| Now, once we sold the company, then it became real money and I paid my taxes. | ||
| A lot of taxes. | ||
| And you're in galley. | ||
| Yeah, and look, fair enough. | ||
| No beef. | ||
| Yay! | ||
| But I'm just saying, to have taxed me previous to that would mean I can't invest in my company. | ||
| I would have to sell my company to pay the tax. | ||
| It's literally absurd. | ||
| So when you hear these politicians, I mean, Elizabeth Warren's huge on this, Bernie's big on this, unrealized gains, things that have not... And by the way, that stock could all crash, and then you've paid tax on something that could be worth less than nothing. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I don't understand politics well enough to know if they are dumb. | ||
| Or if they are sinister, but they are one of the two. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Because that is either wild ignorance to how business and economies work. | ||
| And the thing is, isn't Elizabeth Warren the one that everybody throws shade at for making all these huge bets on the stock market? | ||
| Nancy Pelosi is the usual one, but Elizabeth's doing quite well, by the way. | ||
| But that means they understand what it means to have a stock that you haven't sold. | ||
| And so to make the money that you would need to then pay the tech, you have to sell the stock. | ||
| It's crazy, it's crazy. | ||
| So okay, so you sell. | ||
| Now you're sitting on some cash. | ||
| Talk about what a life change that is. | ||
| How did it change not only your life day to day, but your philosophy, maybe something spiritual attached to that? | ||
| Okay, so here is, this is where I made my bones. | ||
| And for whatever small amount I'm known, I'm known for the mindset stuff. | ||
| So what I want people to understand is, The money is not going to solve your problems. | ||
| It will change the things that you can buy, and money is actually more powerful than people think. | ||
| It just isn't what they think. | ||
| So people think it's going to make them respect themselves the way they respect somebody with money, or admire themselves the way they admire somebody with money. | ||
| I'm sure you've had countless guests comment, but your place is amazing. | ||
| This incredible compound. | ||
| You have a basketball court. | ||
| It's insane. | ||
| And so of course, people that see this are going to be like, yo, I want that. | ||
| What they don't understand is, I'll liken it to sports, since there's a basketball over your shoulder. | ||
| The point of life is not to win a championship ring, because if you sat on the bench and you got a ring and you contributed zero to the team, there would be no pride internally for that. | ||
| Conversely, if you are killing yourself to become capable of a championship performance, but you never actually win a championship, there's still a lot of pride in the person that you became. | ||
| So when you build a business and sell it, your money comes all at once. | ||
| So you have nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, and then one day you hit refresh on your banking app and suddenly there's a lot of commas and zeros. | ||
| And so it is this really fascinating moment where you go, huh, I'm now a rich person and All of my insecurities are still there. | ||
| It's an inside job, basically. | ||
| So I was like, wow, this one, thankfully, I had learned that lesson when I became a multimillionaire on paper, but realized, wait, this doesn't impact my life. | ||
| This is all make believe. | ||
| I don't feel any differently about myself. | ||
| I can't guarantee I'll ever be worth more. | ||
| So I better just figure out how to love the struggle. | ||
| So I had learned that 10 years before I end up getting wealthy, thankfully. | ||
| So when that happened, like if you were to ask my employees, What day did Tom get wealthy? | ||
| They'd say I have no idea because I went into work the same that day as I did every other day before because I know that the only thing that's going to matter to any of us is whether we respect ourselves when we're by ourselves. | ||
| And if when you're by yourself, you don't respect yourself, you're in trouble. | ||
| And since I respect myself, not for the outcome of making money, I respect myself for the discipline of building something. | ||
| I was like, of course, I'm going to go into the office and work and push the company forward. | ||
| So that's the key thing. | ||
| Money is the great facilitator in terms of it will let you build something, but it is not going to change how you feel about yourself. | ||
| Did you ever have a moment along the way where you were kind of like, I don't know what I'm doing, but I'm just kind of doing it? | ||
| Because when I built Locals, I really didn't know what I was doing. | ||
| I knew we had a product that I liked, but I'm trying to raise funds and I'm taking meetings all day and people didn't understand. | ||
| Rubin Report was my day job, but I was spending most of my day actually building that company, which eventually, to your point, we sold all for equity and obviously it's all worked out. | ||
| But a lot of the time I was like, man, if I had known how much work this was going to be, how crazy this was all going to be, meeting after meeting, repeating, trying to raise funds, all this stuff, I don't even know that I would have done it. | ||
| Because usually it doesn't work out. | ||
| So there's a little like naivete attached to it, I suppose. | ||
| Yeah, so I have joked many times, if I had known that the light at the end of the tunnel was an oncoming train, I might not have entered the tunnel. | ||
| So there's a lot of that in building something, and I think that entrepreneurs need to embrace that your job ultimately is to figure out the answer. | ||
| If you're a CEO, your job is to figure out the answer to one question. | ||
| What is a CEO? | ||
| And when I try to explain that to people, it is fascinating to watch them grapple with, am I being a CEO when I allocate the capital in the company? | ||
| Am I being a CEO when I navigate the drama between two incredibly talented employees that aren't getting along? | ||
| Am I being the CEO when I'm improving the product? | ||
| Am I being the CEO when I restructure part of the organization? | ||
| When I hire? | ||
| When I fire? | ||
| It is so many things. | ||
| Some are psychological in nature, some are financial in nature, some seem like they have nothing to do with business but really are. | ||
| There's a great TV show called The Offer about how they got the movie The Godfather made. | ||
| That is the closest thing to explaining what an entrepreneur really is. | ||
| Where one minute he's dealing with the mafia, the next minute he's figuring out how to get a shot, the next he's capital allocating. | ||
| It's like all of those things are what it takes to build something. | ||
| And so nobody really knows what they're doing. | ||
| But some people will boil something down to its essence well enough that they can repeat. | ||
| And so if you look at an Elon Musk, obviously repeat, repeat, repeat. | ||
| I built three companies in three totally separate industries all off the back of going, I have a set of principles and you can point that at any industry and it will work on a long enough timeline if you can avoid going out of business. | ||
| That's the catch because there's certainly no guarantees. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Do you find that sort of the personal responsibility stuff and kind of, you know, the Jordan Peterson-esque, just like, get yourself together and then go change the world, coupled with the financial stuff, that that's just become a really interesting nexus for where the internet is going? | ||
| It seems like so many people, probably our age and younger, just were not taught any of these things. | ||
| Like, they were not taught any of the proper things about, like, literally basic things. | ||
| How do you balance a checkbook? | ||
| Or even knowing what a checkbook is. | ||
| understanding what debt is, all these things, that these things were not handed. | ||
| So then a whole bunch of people magically appear on the internet to teach things | ||
| that actually should have been taught in some sort of functioning school way earlier than that. | ||
| Yeah, I think that will happen now that we have AI or even just the internet and the ability to broadcast. | ||
| But it is so hard to know how to do this stuff that I don't fault teachers for not being able to do it. | ||
| You can't teach something you don't understand, and if you understand something really important, odds are you're leveraging that to make money. | ||
| And so that's just a fundamental reality of the way the world works. | ||
| Now that we have AI, where, I mean, if you've seen the recent stuff with ChatGTP... Yeah, I wanted to ask you about that. | ||
| Yeah, utterly fascinating, where And look, it's probably weak now, but it will get better over time where you can say, hey, here's this complicated thing. | ||
| Please explain it to me. | ||
| And over time, you'll be able to say like, hey, I want to understand political podcasting. | ||
| Explain it to me as if you were Dave Rubin. | ||
| And then it will do that. | ||
| So it'll be really fascinating as AI takes off. | ||
| But up until this point, it's just the world is psychotically complicated. | ||
| I am very disturbed by there are two things that matter so much. | ||
| And I, barring AI, I don't see a way out of, which is your level of intelligence, unfortunately, is going to control a tremendous portion of your life, and then your frame of reference. | ||
| And your frame of reference, again, is just beliefs and values. | ||
| But your beliefs and values are controlled by who your parents are, and effectively your zip code, just to round it to something simple. | ||
| And if you don't focus on developing, for instance, the language centers of a child's brain before they reach the age of three, It will haunt them for the rest of their lives because the centers of their brains simply won't develop. | ||
| So the amount that your childhood matters, I find extraordinarily distressing. | ||
| Let's talk about this interesting moment that we're at with AI because you've been talking about this a lot. | ||
| I'm fascinated by the fact that it seems like we are entering every single dystopian sci-fi novel With all the bells, all the warnings have gone off. | ||
| We've all seen them, whether it's the Matrix or Terminator or Scanner Darkly, or I could list all the rest of them. | ||
| We're going to that world. | ||
| We know there's so many pitfalls along the way, and yet many of the people who screwed up a lot of the tech stuff and censorship and everything else are the very same people that are building that world right now. | ||
| How worried are you about that, if you think that's a fair estimation? | ||
| It is a fair estimation. | ||
| So let's talk about where this all ends up. | ||
| This all ends up in either utopia or the annihilation of the human race. | ||
| Uh, let's assume utopia because it really, I think is possible and it is wise to go into something, um, consciously optimistic. | ||
| Do you think there's such a, there is really a utopia or it's just, you mean like aim for a utopia and get somewhere kind of close? | ||
| I really do think that there is a utopia, if you'll let me define a utopia, in the way The Matrix does, where they talk about, the machines are like, we built a perfect world for you and you all rejected it. | ||
| And that's because people confuse happiness with fulfillment. | ||
| So fulfillment is about struggle, largely. | ||
| So the utopia is where everybody successfully earns their own respect. | ||
| So if you'll let me say that's utopia, Word. | ||
| So it's not going to be like you're eating ice cream and pies on a cloud and all is well. | ||
| It's going to be you struggle the perfect amount. | ||
| Things are perfectly difficult. | ||
| You suffer a perfect amount in order to earn your own respect. | ||
| Or we just shift human biology. | ||
| But I'm going to set that aside. | ||
| No, I like that definition. | ||
| So let's go to that. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So that becomes a question of energy production. | ||
| So are we able to both make sure that kids are developed as close to perfect as possible, meaning that you develop the areas of the brain that are going to mimic fantastic nutrition, a secure attachment style, A life full of love, confidence, a desire for struggle, growth mindset, like that sort of bundle. | ||
| Making sure though that just at a biological level the brain is developing well. | ||
| And so to do all of that you need a certain level of wealth. | ||
| What is wealth really? | ||
| It's the ability to get access to energy when you want it at a price you can afford. | ||
| And so the thing I think AI is going to do tremendously well is drive the cost of energy to effectively zero. | ||
| And then it will solve for incredibly complicated problems like Our biology. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Wait, let me pause you there for a sec. | ||
| So how, how is AI going to do that? | ||
| I think a lot of people are going, how's AI getting the energy to nothing? | ||
| So everything is about pattern recognition. | ||
| And so if you can recognize patterns well enough to figure out, for instance, the laws of physics, then you can begin to now actually unleash. | ||
| And if I could tell you how they're going to do it, then I would be the smartest person alive. | ||
| We'd already do it. | ||
| So I would just tell you directionally what AI is going to do is run the scientific method at a rate | ||
| that is billions of times faster than we can run it. | ||
| And so if you think of 20,000 years of human evolution playing out over a night, | ||
| you'll get the idea of how fast we'll be able to evolve. | ||
| Because in essence, AI will deal with so many of the tasks and organizational things that we need to know and | ||
| everything. | ||
| It will take so much of that off the plate in some ways. | ||
| Not off the plate, but it would automate it in a way, or it would be by default built into us. | ||
| It will accurately be able to predict based on pattern recognition. | ||
| So what do I mean? | ||
| If you look at alpha fold, Jordan Peterson, who we both know. | ||
| Jordan has this really fascinating idea that you think so your ideas may die and that you don't. | ||
| But I will also say, you can think so that you don't have to run the physical experiment in order to get the answer. | ||
| So this is something I beat into young entrepreneurs. | ||
| Please, for the love of God, if you can run a thought experiment to rule out an idea, instead of building the product, building the marketing, and doing it, do it as a thought experiment. | ||
| And oftentimes the thought experiment is simply, if this were successful, will it actually impact my business in a meaningful way? | ||
| The number of times the answer is no, but somebody's just excited about the idea, but you can think your way through that and you don't have to run the experiment. | ||
| AI will be able to do that at a rate, again, that's billions of times faster than what we can do. | ||
| So it will just chunk through things like the folding of proteins inside the human body. | ||
| And so now it's just gonna make all these predictions. | ||
| Oh, if you take a protein that folds this way and a protein that folds that way, | ||
| then you're gonna get this outcome in the body. | ||
| And it will just run billions of tests. | ||
| And it will say this drug at exactly this moment, this much sunlight, this much protein, whatever, whatever, | ||
| gets you this outcome. | ||
| And when you, so Elon Musk talks a lot about, there's already enough energy falling on the earth | ||
| to run everything forever for all time. | ||
| We just don't know how to harness that energy. | ||
| Well, if AI can solve that problem rapidly and then help you rapidly figure out | ||
| all the materials problems, because that'll be the next part of this, | ||
| and then figure out where's the right place to put it and blah, blah, blah. | ||
| You just, you'll be able to... | ||
| recognize that these are intelligence problems and we are not butting up against the laws of physics. | ||
| So anyway, that's how AI will help. | ||
| But the part that everybody's focused on, and I think rightly so, because we are gonna live through | ||
| it is the valley of despair. | ||
| And before it gets better, it will be so disruptive that it will rip at the fabrics of society. | ||
| Now whether we explode apart or not, I'll say optimistically no, but it will be, it's really going to be brutal. | ||
| And that's the part where I think people, people either go optimism and they don't think about the valley of despair or they trough into the valley of despair and they stop thinking. | ||
| What do you think that actually looks like in a tangible sense as far as how the world will look over the next decade or so? | ||
| Because I keep saying to everybody that I think for all the political craziness and everything else, it's like this moment we're at where everything's, there's old people holding on too long and nothing kind of seems right and we're confused about issues we had settled a long time ago. | ||
| It all seems like that it's exactly where we were going to get 20 something years into this thing. | ||
| Good or bad or indifferent. | ||
| Like we were supposed to be at this moment, but yeah, I agree with you. | ||
| We're now just sort of sliding into what will be the really wacky part of it. | ||
| Yeah, I have an allergic reaction to the idea that old people are holding on too long. | ||
| We should talk about that. | ||
| But first I'll get to the... Not many or not, but there's this small set of people that's... You have to beat them. | ||
| You have to. | ||
| If you can't outperform a geriatric, what is happening? | ||
| People raise the bar. | ||
| And if it's like they've entrenched themselves and they have too many powerful friends, get powerful friends. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| It's not an excuse. | ||
| It's just a reality, I would say. | ||
| It was Eric Weinstein that first brought that idea to my attention. | ||
| And Eric, I literally adore every word out of his mouth. | ||
| He is brilliant and I love him beyond measure. | ||
| But when he said that, I was like, huh? | ||
| You can't expect anyone to give up power. | ||
| You have to outperform them. | ||
| Anyway, okay, so the Valley of Despair, how do we end up thinking through that well? | ||
| So the reality is, what is going to happen in terms of the real picture of what happens over the next 10 years, I've thought a lot about. | ||
| Now I could be wrong, but this is how I see it very clearly. | ||
| The first thing that's going to happen is you're going to see a bifurcation in society between humanists and transhumanists. | ||
| If you're paying attention on X, it's already happening. | ||
| So that's going to go fast. | ||
| So you're going to get people that will revert back to something approximating 90s technology. | ||
| It will be the doubling down on religion. | ||
| It will be all about the family, things that are beautiful and wonderful. | ||
| I'm not saying these things are bad, but that's going to be the camp. | ||
| They will start to have an inherent distrust of technology. | ||
| Then you're going to have the other side that's like, hold on a second, I don't want to be outperformed by AI. | ||
| I want to leverage AI to augment myself so that I can keep up with or accelerate past AI. | ||
| And that's the people that are transhumanists. | ||
| And it's utterly fascinating to watch Elon Musk because he's like sketching out between, am I a humanist? | ||
| And that's why I stopped talking to Larry Page. | ||
| because he was saying that, you know, I'm a Elon, you're a speciest. | ||
| He's like, you got me. | ||
| But he's also the one behind Neuralink. | ||
| And he's like, we're going to have to ultimately merge with technology in order to keep up. | ||
| So I like seeing his struggle related to all that, by the way, | ||
| because it's very much how I feel about all this. | ||
| And I sense how you feel. | ||
| If you're not a little bit of two minds, you're probably not thinking to the problem well. | ||
| Okay, so that bifurcation happens. | ||
| I think that will lead to real violence, and there will be some sort of cold civil war here in the U.S. | ||
| for sure. | ||
| It'll be mirrored in other countries, but certainly here. | ||
| How violent that gets, I don't know. | ||
| Hopefully, not super. | ||
| Hopefully, it's pockets of riots and things like that, and that we, as technology delivers more to more people, Hopefully, just the preponderance of good things that it adds to people's lives ends up outweighing it. | ||
| But I don't think the two cultures will ever re-emerge. | ||
| Because basically, they're so disparate in their belief system, right? | ||
| So basically, the transhumanist will be looking at the, what are we calling them? | ||
| The humanists. | ||
| The humanists, in essence, is basically just saying, well, you guys aren't part of what the future is, and if you're not going to be part of it, we're pretty much going to have to take you out. | ||
| And the humanists are going to basically be like, you guys in essence are doing ungodly things, or you guys are trying to replace God, something like that. | ||
| That I hope for, and then here's the thing that worries me. | ||
| Okay, so if the ratio ends up being a 50-50 split, it ends up being very ugly. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| If it is a small number of people that are like, we're going to be humanists, this is going to be a total purity thing, and unfortunately that is going to be the language, then that could be self-containing, because there will be so much energy, it will be so abundant, because of what AI will bring, post trough of despair, that The people that are transhumanists won't have to be offended or bothered because they won't be in a competition over resources, which is the thing that brings out all the ugliness. | ||
| So if there really is all this abundant, close to free energy, then they can live. | ||
| But if there's enough energy over here where it's like you're an abomination of God and you must be stopped because what you're doing is just inherently an affront to the religious truths, and if the sort of All religious people who have a purity ethos then get together and they go against people who are sort of breaking that, that could get ugly. | ||
| And so I will, my internal compass always leans optimistic, so I have a feeling things will just happen, it will normalize over time, kids will grow up in a world where it's just like, like when you look at the Amish, right? | ||
| It's still a beautiful culture and there are reasons to admire and to learn from the Amish, but most people don't end up walking that path. | ||
| Most people go over to the technologically advanced side, and so my feeling is that either the technologically imbued side really will be better, meaning people will have more respect and more love in their heart because of what they're doing with technology, I want to jump back to something that I started asking before about the people that led us to a lot of what people are struggling with right now. | ||
| Big tech and collusion with government and censorship and all that. | ||
| I mean, you know, when I think about the metaverse, it's like, why would I want to follow Mark Zuckerberg? | ||
| into the metaverse when I know just limitedly what he did with Facebook as it pertains | ||
| to silencing people and everything else. | ||
| And yet, that is a huge portion of it. | ||
| So it's, so I guess it's not pure, right? | ||
| It's not, it's not a pure world that is being presented on the other side. | ||
| It might be manipulated in ways that neither one of us can possibly imagine. | ||
| Yeah, so I'm a massive proponent of the metaverse. | ||
| Uh, but I will say no one is more terrified than me of the subtle ways in which people nudge you | ||
| in a direction that they think is good for you, and it ends up being tyrannical so fast. | ||
| I cannot believe that people aren't just In screaming terror of what happens when people do top-down control. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And so I see people feeling like... So how do you put those two feelings together? | ||
| Because that's what it is, right? | ||
| The only way I see this is AI, the metaverse, all of it has to proliferate. | ||
| So you must have 10,000, 100,000 AIs so that people can vote essentially with their feet of which AI they're going to invite into their life. | ||
| This one helps me be productive, full of love, earn my own respect, be moving forward in life in any metric that we could, let's say, measure at the biochemical level. | ||
| So I'm reading the data coming off your body, and you're less stressed. | ||
| Your life is longer. | ||
| You spend more time in brain states that we would relate to the parasympathetic nervous system instead of fight or flight. | ||
| We will get to the point where we can actually say you're in a good place. | ||
| So putting aside Mark Zuckerberg's metaverse for a second, basically what you're saying is each of us will select into a metaverse, not Mark's metaverse, but some AI Uh, controlled universe in essence that is catered to what we want out of life. | ||
| And I mean, it's a good idea for a sci-fi movie. | ||
| To me, it seems like those metaverses will then be at war with each other. | ||
| Like that would be, are we going now? | ||
| Now we're going like, like the movie AI a thousand years past, right? | ||
| Well we certainly are and that's, I just tweeted about this today, they're part of what deranges people with social media is the velocity and volume of information is so crazy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And you're pulling future worries into the now that you can really drive yourself crazy. | ||
| So some of this I say with the enthusiasm of a sci-fi writer who's just fascinated by the different ways that this could go, but the way that I see the metaverse playing out is that There will be second and third order consequences that we have to protect ourselves from that will be deranging. | ||
| And if people are not honest about what those are, we'll have a problem. | ||
| And this is why I really believe if people do not articulate what their life philosophy is, they are in trouble. | ||
| You need to understand what you're aiming at. | ||
| So I'm aiming eternally at human flourishing for as many people as humanly possible. | ||
| Is that hard to achieve? | ||
| Of course it is. | ||
| But if you don't have an aim, you're going to be all over the map. | ||
| And so we can just ask ourselves, okay, define human flourishing at a KPI level, the entrepreneur in me comes out, at a KPI level that I can actually track, right? | ||
| So I think those are going to be biochemical markers, you figure out what they are, and you just start tracking them. | ||
| So anyway, back to the metaverse. | ||
| So We're, any individual should be asking themselves which of these metaverses is more fun to be in. | ||
| Because until we transcend our biology, you're not going to be living in a metaverse, you're going to be playing in a metaverse. | ||
| But if you understand the concept of being nudged, you have to know when I'm in this metaverse, it's nudging me in a direction. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| It's the, I mean the most hilarious example was Google Gemini, where George Washington is black, I mean, it's just absolutely hilarious. | ||
| And so, suddenly you see, oh shit, I'm being shoved. | ||
| This isn't a nudge anymore. | ||
| But once you understand everybody is nudging you in a direction, | ||
| I've heard you say this and this is absolutely true, when you go into a social platform, | ||
| there's so much information, you have to make an algorithmic decision. | ||
| That's a nudge. | ||
| And so you can try to be as even-handed, as transparent, whatever, but you're nudging people. | ||
| You have to order information somehow. | ||
| Correct. | ||
| Period. | ||
| So people just have to go in with their eyes wide open and say, do I feel better or worse about myself and my life in this one versus the other one? | ||
| Because this is just a form of entertainment. | ||
| So be careful. | ||
| So to do a little ready player one on you or something like that I mean is the inherent problem with that is that most people won't ask the right questions when they're going into this world right so they won't ask they won't have the introspection or even to realize that they have to aim at something and thus will be left with there will be people who live in the endless orgy or in the endless thinking that they're a professional basketball player and really what they are the battery in the matrix. | ||
| Okay, so this is where this gets tough. | ||
| We're going, we're going. | ||
| I want to see how far we can take this thing. | ||
| Oh, we can take it all the way. | ||
| This is where I get distressed again that your intellect matters. | ||
| And so the big problem I see with social media and the reason that I'm excited, I don't believe in God, but I am very glad that Jordan Peterson is just hammering on about God. | ||
| Because religion, as far as I can tell, is the best way to propagate memes, which are the good ideas that have survived the test of time in terms of making your life better. | ||
| It's the medium by which memes propagate amazingly well over time across all levels of intellect. | ||
| So whether you are a literal, by definition, moron, or you are a super genius, all of them find their path to God, to religion, and they love it the most. | ||
| And so it is an utterly fascinating phenomena that works. | ||
| And so it gives this fascinating, galvanizing principle. | ||
| It taps into something inside of humans, this desire to kneel before something, to have somebody to appeal to that's beyond yourself. | ||
| And I literally have a chill just saying it. | ||
| Even as a non-believer, I am so moved by that architecture of the human brain that I understand its potency. | ||
| And so… Is that a type of belief, do you think? | ||
| What exactly? | ||
| The understanding of everything you just said there. | ||
| The understanding of the need for… Is that the thing I kneel before? | ||
| Is that what you mean? | ||
| Yeah, in a sense. | ||
| Isn't that a belief system to some extent? | ||
| Of course. | ||
| Yeah, you have to have a belief system. | ||
| The thing that makes me nervous is Is your belief system leading to human flourishing? | ||
| Or is it leading to the righteous indignation which feels very potent? | ||
| Compared to anxiety, righteous indignation is a way better place to be. | ||
| It just feels better. | ||
| However, they're both not human flourishing by my definition. | ||
| So I want to see people find a path forward that is unity, finding a way to draw people together, | ||
| to make the circle bigger and bigger. | ||
| Monks that do the loving kindness meditation for decades actually change a region in their brain. | ||
| It's really fascinating. | ||
| So anyway, there are things to be thoughtful about there, but that runs contrary to my big fear, | ||
| which is that there's a distressingly large percentage of the population that will have a hard time | ||
| thinking through their own belief system, which means they won't be able to manipulate | ||
| their own belief system, which means their belief system will be manipulated by people they admire. | ||
| Do you think that could also not be a function of intelligence, but it's just a function of our pleasure centers and everything else? | ||
| Like, I think people are going to enter this world, they're going to be fed all of these things that they just want, and they won't be able to stop in essence. | ||
| Like, if you live, if you can go into an alternate world, where you are the most popular person, | ||
| you have everything you want, and you just live in that world, | ||
| when in reality, you have a very mundane job, and you just use that money to get by | ||
| so you can get into that world. | ||
| I mean, again, this is basically Ready Player One. | ||
| I see just people, it's not about intelligence per se, it's just human nature. | ||
| People will just go there. | ||
| Intelligence is necessary, but not sufficient. | ||
| So, here is the reality. | ||
| I find it very hard to think through a lot of these problems. | ||
| And I'm not dumb. | ||
| I'm not that smart though. | ||
| And so because I am highly verbal, people will often confuse my ability to spend a very long time slowly plodding through a problem to finally get to a useful answer for intelligence. | ||
| Intelligence is not the thing that I think is my strong suit. | ||
| My strong suit is persistence. | ||
| My strong suit is the ability to go, I don't feel right, why don't I feel right? | ||
| And then to spend an inordinate amount of time figuring out how, what would I have to change in order to feel better? | ||
| And I can get to a useful answer. | ||
| But when I see people, like Eric Weinstein, that actually are smart, I'm like, whoa. | ||
| Okay, that is a level of thinking that is astonishing. | ||
| So please understand, what I'm saying, I do not say as any self-congratulatory way. | ||
| Yeah, I'm not taking it. | ||
| I am terrified by my ability to become blind to myself. | ||
| I distrust myself wildly. | ||
| I don't think enough people do distrust themselves wildly. | ||
| I think that people hear something that makes them feel something and they get caught up in that. | ||
| Now if you're smart, you're not immune to that. | ||
| And so here's an idea for people to chew on that's going to seem sort of mundane but If you fail to understand this, your life will be guided in very weird ways. | ||
| What you are fascinated by is going to control a huge portion of your life. | ||
| If you're fascinated by growth, That's one life. | ||
| If you're fascinated by sex, that's another life. | ||
| Now, of course, most of us are fascinated by a lot of things. | ||
| So what becomes primarily fascinating to you? | ||
| And if your primary fascination, for instance, is the acquisition of money, it'll be a very different life. | ||
| But you'll probably end up making money because you just return to it. | ||
| It is your gravitational center. | ||
| And so sometimes, unfortunately, people get sucked into a base or fascination loop. | ||
| So it might be, I am fascinated by the way that dopamine makes me feel. | ||
| And so I live in the pursuit of dopamine. | ||
| So it could be video games, it could be cocaine, it could be sex, whatever. | ||
| I just need that loop. | ||
| Or I'm fascinated by the study of history and learning new things. | ||
| You go down the intellectual path. | ||
| Okay, now, if you have high intellect, And you're fascinated by useful things, you're going to go in a great direction. | ||
| But here's the one people see all the time, and it is worthy of laughing at. | ||
| Somebody who is just utterly hyper-intelligent. | ||
| Jeff Bezos. | ||
| But really fascinated by sex. | ||
| And Homeboy actually has pictures of his dick on the internet. | ||
| Like, I cannot believe that Jeff Bezos, of all people, he didn't get taken down because he's still such a powerful entrepreneur, but it's, and look, I'm not above it. | ||
| I'm worse than Jeff Bezos, right? | ||
| So like, this is not me saying, look at me. | ||
| I don't know exactly what that means, but I'm not even going to ask you. | ||
| It means that I'm probably more into sex than him, I just happen to aim it all at my wife. | ||
| But it is like, I do not consider myself... I will make bigger and worse, dumber mistakes. | ||
| I just have no problem laughing at myself. | ||
| So anyway, you've got This two factor thing you have to look at. | ||
| Do I have the ability to think through these problems? | ||
| For me, yes, but it takes me way too long. | ||
| And do I get fascinated by things that will allow me to move forward? | ||
| So for instance, I am a tenth of the entrepreneur I could be because I can't focus. | ||
| And if you ask me, What is the number one thing an entrepreneur should do? | ||
| Focus. | ||
| Relentlessly. | ||
| The problem is, I have a broad array of things that I like. | ||
| If I had just stayed in phase one of impact theory and just focused on mindset, I'd be making a lot more money now. | ||
| But I just can't. | ||
| I got bored. | ||
| That's just being honest about one of my legions of limitations. | ||
| And I assume you ultimately think that AI actually could help even cater that, or could curb some of that, right? | ||
| That inability to focus. | ||
| You might... It'll warn me. | ||
| It'll say, hey, you're getting off focus. | ||
| But then I'll say, remember AI, I want to live a life of human flourishing. | ||
| And so, I lament that as an entrepreneur, I find it hard to focus, and so I'm not making as much money as I could, but I lament that from my ridiculous Beverly Hills mansion. | ||
| So, you know what I mean? | ||
| Like, you can get lost into like, yes, my life could be even better, but do I love my life? | ||
| Yes, I do. | ||
| Okay, do you love that you're fascinated by this breadth of things? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Are you trying to find ways to mitigate the point at which All of the distractions become too much? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Are you finding ways to monetize your breath? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| But where I'm trying to exist and where I invite other people to exist is Confront your limitations honestly. | ||
| Figure out, can I improve this or do I just need a mitigation strategy? | ||
| And then exist in what I call the physics of progress. | ||
| But the physics of progress requires you to say, I think by doing this thing I will get this outcome. | ||
| Now what ends up happening is people lie about that outcome. | ||
| And so they don't get it and they go, yeah, but COVID. | ||
| Or, yeah, but I'm Hispanic and nobody wants to see me succeed, | ||
| which somebody actually told me once. | ||
| And I was just, oh my God, like, that is a nonsensical thing. | ||
| You just need to say, I did this thing and I did not get the result that I was expecting. | ||
| So even if it's because I'm Hispanic, what do I have to do to create so much performance, | ||
| such a high level of performance that people can't stop me? | ||
| As Kobe Bryant said, booze don't block dunks. | ||
| No matter how much somebody hates you, if you can outperform them, they can't stop you. | ||
| And so, if you look at that and just say, yep, all ten fingers of responsibility pointed back at myself, I did not get the outcome that I desired, regardless of all the very real reasons why I was held back, I have to do a new thing to get a better result. | ||
| And I find that people lie there because it really hurts your ego to say, I thought I would get this result and I didn't. | ||
| Let's spend the last couple of minutes discussing interviewing in general, because you and I do a similar thing day to day, at least the online portion of our lives. | ||
| And as I said, we were both born in in 76. | ||
| And so there's a generational, a Gen X piece of that. | ||
| I know for me that interviewing people over the years, I didn't realize how much I was going to change and learn just by sitting across from people. | ||
| And I mean that in the positive ways sometimes and in the negative ways. | ||
| You know, it's funny you mentioned Eric Weinstein a couple of times. | ||
| I could tell you something that you'll probably find fascinating. | ||
| But when I was starting Locals, I kept bringing it up to Eric because we were in the midst of the free speech battle with Jordan and some of these other guys. | ||
| And I wanted to basically bring Eric in on the company. | ||
| And he had so many questions constantly. | ||
| Because he's so smart, I thought, I can't be in a business with him. | ||
| And I don't mean that as a shot to him. | ||
| This is something we've discussed privately. | ||
| But I realized I need to just move forward. | ||
| I need to move forward. | ||
| And people all operate differently and I'm wondering how much of just sitting down or across from people over the years, some of the people we've mentioned and plenty we haven't, did you incorporate into your life and then was that conscious or was it unconscious? | ||
| I don't know what I'm about to say may be a distinction that I should just stop making, but I learn very little from the sit-down and I learn a lot from the research. | ||
| So I am so grateful that I've structured my life in such a way that I get to spend about 12 hours per interview learning very deeply about a topic and then I'm forced to go on and confront my limitations in the interview itself to see where the edges of my knowledge are. | ||
| So that cycle is incredibly beneficial to me and is one of the great gifts of my adult life and is certainly why I love doing it, but it's really about the research. | ||
| And so if somebody is like, I don't want to do a podcast but I want to be in that loop, then I would say teach. | ||
| If you go learn a thing and then try to teach it, Uh, you will be shocked at what that does, uh, to your own understanding of a thing. | ||
| It's really pretty incredible. | ||
| Is that basically the problem we have at colleges right now? | ||
| We have a bunch of people who never did the thing. | ||
| They just teach about the thing and that kind of leaves us with a bunch of very confused teachers and students. | ||
| That's part of it. | ||
| But the bigger part is probably just the administrative class that it's become so ballooned and you're telling teachers, uh, what you want them to do. | ||
| I think. | ||
| That all the problems in our university stem from one thing. | ||
| If you believe that you know the truth, and that this academy is about imparting that truth, you're already in trouble. | ||
| If you believe that truth is one's ability to predict the outcome of their actions and that we're only ever edging closer to proximity to the truth, then you will understand that Feinstein was correct when he said There's two things you need to remember. | ||
| One, question everything. | ||
| Two, remember number one. | ||
| And that's what it means to follow the science. | ||
| That's what an educational institution should be. | ||
| My belief system is meant to yield a key metric. | ||
| So for me, it's human flourishing. | ||
| Most people don't even know what their key metric is. | ||
| And then you simply ask, have the things that I put out into the world lead to human flourishing? | ||
| If no, then that's okay. | ||
| It just means I need to adjust. | ||
| But if I lie to myself and say, well, it would if more people would listen to me. | ||
| Uh, no, it just says that my flaws, I'm not able to convince people. | ||
| Oh, I have a persuasion problem. | ||
| Cool. | ||
| Let me see if I can be more persuasive. | ||
| Now you're more persuasive and people are just like, no, your ideas are terrible. | ||
| They don't work. | ||
| Or let's take socialism. | ||
| Hey, has anybody tried this experiment? | ||
| Going back to, if you can think your way out of something, do. | ||
| Everywhere that it's been tried, it does not work, and so... They always say it's never been fully tried. | ||
| That's the line. | ||
| Well, so, but now I'm saying, oh, amazing! | ||
| Thank you for identifying what broke so that we can now try it better. | ||
| But what broke? | ||
| And if their answer is, human psychology is set up such that once you are putting power from the top down, you incentivize people that like to put power top down. | ||
| And that is the thing that creates the problem. | ||
| So now it becomes a question of, well, will your system ever work from the ground up? | ||
| And if it will, then do it! | ||
| Because it will be amazing. | ||
| But what history shows us over and over and over again is humans think for themselves, and so you will inevitably get all these fracturings, and the people in power then will get verbal stones or real stones thrown at them. | ||
| And they will have an impulse to control that. | ||
| Because I'm right, and I just want to make your life better. | ||
| Read Nietzsche's Will to Power. | ||
| If you don't understand that, it's all going to be very confusing. | ||
| But even just being pure for a second, I just want to make your life better. | ||
| And if you'll do all the things that I say, everyone's life will be better. | ||
| So I'm just going to kill you really fast. | ||
| I'm going to try to do it as painlessly as possible. | ||
| I may have to kill tens of millions as well, but it's just for the good of everybody. | ||
| That's where this deranges. | ||
| And you can thought experiment your way through that, because that is how the human animal responds. | ||
| Because it is extraordinarily hard to lead a group of people. | ||
| And if you look at people that have done Grassroots things. | ||
| Dr. Martin Luther King or my favorite, Long Walk to Freedom, Nelson Mandela. | ||
| Like that story is insane. | ||
| It's always about inspiring people. | ||
| It's about doing things that actually work so that more people's lives are made better. | ||
| And when you get that, people will follow willingly. | ||
| But you really do need like a galvanizing figure. | ||
| That's one of the weird things. | ||
| And it's very hard to get somebody that will fight that hard to get to power only to give most of their power away. | ||
| I believe that is the human story right there. | ||
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Facts. | |
| Tom, I suspect we will do this in the Metaverse one day. | ||
| There will be the Tom Metaverse flying out here, the Dave Metaverse out here, and they will be allies in the fight against the machines that are coming to kill all of us. | ||
|
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I'm here for it. | |
| Thanks for having me. | ||
| Yeah, thanks. | ||
|
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If you're looking for an unfiltered lens into the world of tomorrow, check out our tech playlist. | |
| And if you want to watch full interviews on a variety of topics, watch our full episode playlist all right over here. |
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