Memes, Money & Influence: The Secret Formula | Jack Jay DSH #1156

general is to empower as many other people as possible.

I like this term that I call enlightened capitalism and I think this is something which will actually become more of a truth over time is that the only eternal currency is let's say good karma is one of the best ways to represent the empowerment of others.

All right, welcome back to the Digital Social Hour.

I'm your host, Sean Kelly, here with a great guest today, Jack J.

Thank you for having me.

How's it going, man?

So beautiful time.

Grateful to be here.

Grateful to be alive.

Yes, you're pretty low-key, so I'm going to need you to tell people your story.

It's an ever-evolving story.

Can kind of sum it up with never had a job, just been building stuff since the beginning, and always thinking deeply about why I'm here, what's the meaning of life, really driven to think about life as a video game and then thinking about how can I really play it well?

How can I become someone who all respect a thousand years in the future if I'm able to live that long, you know?

Ooh, so you want to hit a thousand?

I want to live indefinitely, I like to say.

Immortality.

Indefinitely.

Okay.

I think immortality is actually more scary to like have to live permanently.

But I definitely want optionality and I definitely want

to alleviate a lot of the suffering that comes from just genetic diseases for people.

And so that falls in line with my egoic desire to want to live longer as well.

So even if your physical body decayed, you would want to still live or would you want to transfer your soul to another body?

That scares me a little bit in terms of the transfer.

I'm unsure.

We don't really know all about consciousness.

I think that's something we're just starting to explore.

We looked towards space through the 60s.

Now we're really starting to look internally and study ourselves, which is very, very interesting.

I'm not sure about the soul transfer or consciousness transfer.

I'd like just to maintain the health of my body for sure.

I do think we're programmed to die evolutionarily.

This was a effective model to continue getting gene mutation forward to allow us to be more adaptive to an environment.

Do you believe the world is losing sense of religion and spirituality?

100%.

I mean, 100%

on the decline.

I like to think about it like this.

I have an interesting take on this front.

Basically, the internet was a big push of a decrease of people's faiths.

Where people used to be zealots on certain topics, I think they're more like sports fans now, where they're like, I grew up this, I believe this, I identify as this.

You may put it down on the card, people are really not the same in terms of, you know, what they're asked to do is be full preachers, full devotion.

I think that has good values, but the bad value side and why some people are moving away from it is because also each one of these religions, for the most part, is claiming we are the only true religion.

And I think people are consciously aware that, hey, this was just passed down to me from a familial aspect.

It's not like I had a coming to with God specifically here.

I don't believe that my friend who's of a different religion is wrong.

You know, I don't think mine's right.

I think we have different pathways to get to the same truth.

And so I think to some degree, the internet was a connective nature of what you could call our global brain.

Say we're all neurons.

We're all sharing information, it's like axons and dendrites in a brain.

The internet changed the speed of our brain from a horse to the speed of light.

Now we're interconnected at sharing information at such a fast rate, it made us have to face these truths and come together online and realize that no one truly has the truth.

If there was one true truth, the internet connecting everyone, we would have seen a ton of people moving towards one certain religion.

And really instead, it was more, well, faith is good, these values are good, but it's just good that we have have those good values and we stick to that core.

So the global brain almost realized, hey, I have so many different belief systems.

And there's no belief system of the internet today.

I do think that will emerge.

I do think that will be a positive emergence.

I do think it will be an open-minded one.

If you're familiar with like the term metafiction.

No, I'm not.

A metafiction is basically a story which claims to be false but represents itself as true.

Okay.

And so it's, it's, it's meta.

All right.

Shout out to today's sponsor, specialized recruiting group.

Navigating the professional job search is hard.

You know the perfect job is out there.

You're just not sure how to find it.

The good news is you don't have to go at it alone.

You just need specialized recruiting group.

Connect at srgpros.com.

We're here to guide you and help you find a role that fits all without costing a dime.

Meet specialized recruiting group offering a tailored approach to find your next role.

Go to srgpros.com and get on the right course.

Your local specialized recruiting group team knows which businesses are hiring and can offer you a path to contract and full-time roles.

Don't see the role you're looking for on the website.

Well, they also recruit for confidential roles.

So give an office near you a call to learn more.

Take the next step in your career by starting srgpros.com.

To that degree.

Got it, got it.

And so to that, it's like, okay, we're going to pick our own story.

We're going to pick our own narrative.

We're going to have some sort of narrative or creation story.

But as long as we represent that as, yeah, we made this up, but it's positive that we believe in this, I think that's going to be great.

And I think

that could be a positive thing for humanity to have that positive story.

I think we're lacking really big, positive narratives that are deep and spiritual and connect people to their highest selves and give people a purpose and reason.

and why to really dedicate themselves to becoming their highest self.

I love that.

So there was an article in in the Wall Street Journal today that dove into the live of billionaires and it was revealed that a lot of them take psychedelics.

You strike me as a guy that takes psychedelics.

What is your opinion on psychedelics?

Well,

I do believe that they completely changed my life when I was 18,

when I was searching for meaning, a little bit nihilistic.

And

after taking mushrooms, I had a come to experience.

It was spiritual.

It was almost like the closest I could really say to meeting God.

But it was,

you know, at its core, the total diminishing of my ego, fully experiencing reality from a new plane.

I like to think of psychedelics as somewhat of your brain's always operating on a default mode network.

You can think of that like a ski resort.

And you're normally going down the same lanes every day, somewhat sort of changing it.

Psychedelics is like this temporary avalanche.

And then it's a clean slate.

You can now ski entirely new routes.

You can think in new ways.

And the avalanche eventually goes away.

The old routes are there, but the new ones are too.

And the new ones can be so improved because you can come at it from an entirely new perspective.

So yeah, I mean, it inspired me when I read that Steve Jobs said that was one of the most five important things that he ever did in his life in terms of me taking it at that time when I was 18 with my friends.

And I do think it allows just that external creativity and thinking that's outside the box that allows people to innovate to a different degree and see the world in a different way and think about where the future may be going.

And that helps these billionaires reach those heights and innovate and be creative about the direction of their companies.

So I think it's beautiful.

I think there's a little bit of a revolution.

I was just at the psychedelic conference in Denver.

There's a conference?

Yeah.

Oh, that's it.

12,000 people.

Oh, I would have went to that.

Yeah.

And it wasn't something like a festival where you see a bunch of like very trippy people or hippies.

It was actually quite corporate.

I mean, the tickets were 800 bucks.

So that probably had a barrier to the degree of person who could attend.

But yeah,

it was a very intelligent crowd, a very open-minded crowd.

That sounds like an exciting man.

Was it just a bunch of speakers or how was it laid out, the conference?

Yeah, so there's main conference and then obviously side events.

Lots of speakers, Paul Stamitz, Aaron Rodgers.

Really?

You take psychedelics?

I would assume so.

I think a lot of NFL players are getting into it because of all the PTSD and then degenerative brain diseases that come with just slamming your head together in a plastic helmet for so long.

Yeah, and there's studies coming out that it fixes anxiety and depression now, too, right?

Yes, yes.

And you mentioned you were depressed at a young age.

Walk me through that battle and what you realized afterwards.

I think there was

a

connection with the idea that everything was going to go away.

And that led me to this idea that this is meaningless.

And I think what psychedelics did was it showed me that I don't know shit.

That it is like somewhat egotistical for me to claim that there's no meaning.

And then farther than that, look at all these amazing people who have given you so much love.

What can you just do for them?

This is an opportunity.

This is an opportunity to be there and to become someone great for your family, for your community, and then even farther than that, for the world.

Like if you really focus on living an amazing life path, imagine how much you can do.

Do you not want to do that?

That was sort of the new mindset it gave me.

It broke down these barriers and and and that was beautiful i love that i went through that phase too where i didn't think there was a meaning to life i wonder how many people actually experienced that so have you found your meaning

yes i think in general it's to empower as many other people as possible i i i like this term that i call enlightened capitalism and i think this is something which will actually become more of a truth over time is that the only eternal currency is let's say, good karma is one of the best ways to represent the empowerment of others.

And it's really just the idea.

I mean, artificial intelligence talk is obviously heating up.

It's amazing just to watch and use GPT-4 and all these other things and be like, wow, yeah, I mean,

this intelligence is rapidly, rapidly increasing.

And

even Elon Musk has gone on record and said, in 20 years, we won't be able to really

like

see

reality the same way it's going to be so different he fully believes that there's lots of people on online who believe this which is why there's like billions of dollars pouring into an ai safety field there's um you know

factions forming online one who's saying effective accelerationism we need to accelerate this is going to help save the world and then there's the deceleration people who are like, stop this.

This might destroy us.

Terminator, Skynet level.

Right.

Speaking of AI, how do you think AI will shape the public education system?

It's super interesting already to see how many schools are treating different policies with ChatGPT.

Some of them are banning it.

Yes.

And I think that's wrong.

I think that's bad.

I think that's a part.

of the failure of our institutions to focus on the guiding light of the creation of value for the world.

Because if you look at ChatGPT as a calculator for the English language, you just unlock a lot of potential for these people.

You're going to be able to use this in the workforce.

So why not teach the kids, change the infrastructure of what needs to be taught?

Because now the economic landscape has just changed.

So I 100% think it's changing education in a vast degree that we're not even fully capable of realizing yet how much that needs to change.

But I think the solution isn't too scary.

It's just a connection of the creation of value while in school.

You know, that's why I dropped out, it wasn't connecting me and teaching me how to build a business right away.

Like, hey, this is four years.

That's a lot of time, as you know.

It is.

You've gone so far in four years.

Yeah.

Yeah.

In your prime, right when you're sort of thinking about who you are in the world and when when you still have that idealistic nature and capability to have big dreams.

Right.

And you also gave up a D1 football offer because you wanted to protect your brain, right?

No, you did your research.

I did.

Why'd you decide to go that route?

Because that could have been a whole different life path for you.

100%.

Definitely interesting to think about, but I knew that I wanted to build things.

I knew that I wanted to make companies.

And I knew that my brain, to that degree, was the most valuable resource.

So I love the camaraderie that comes from football.

I love the idea of just being on a team and having a direct life path.

And that was very direct.

It was very solid.

My coach was very upset for me saying no, of course, but I knew that there was so much more potential and compound interest in just learning to create things, learning to innovate.

And that's why I took that path.

And I'm happy I did.

Yeah.

One of the things you specialize in is memes.

How are you able to use memes to make money?

So a recent thing that I had one of my teams figure out was

on Giphy, if you're familiar with Giphy itself.

So they service Telegram, iMessage, Discord, all of the dating apps like Bumble, Tinder, just wherever you see a GIF keyboard, the Instagram stickers, the TikTok stickers, even Instagram comments now, that's all funneling from Giphy.

Wow.

And so I've used that for a while and just uploaded the stickers and memes and had my teams make these things because it's cool if you search it up.

And then I was like, well, they must have a ranking system as well.

I'm running SEO on Google.

Well, there must be SEO that's possible here.

And so I just hired a few developers and basically gave them the whole schema and some of the ideas that I had, what could potentially be their ranking system.

And they

figured it out.

And that's been pretty effective.

We did some work with Lucanets and Pudgy Penguins, helping helping them get up and get big.

We did it for this new AI search engine called U.com.

They're getting more views than Google itself now

on their gifts.

That one was easy to make a ton of gifts for.

We automated a ton because we just took a list of 10,000 of popular search terms and then put it, typing it into the

search asset.

Wow.

So I got to make some for the show then.

Yeah, I do believe it's very, very

powerful at just influencing culture.

It's more searches than Google Images itself.

It's like over 10 billion GIFs served daily.

And obviously, that is like the meme distribution network.

So that's what I say for our giffystud.com.

I say,

Elon Musk made it sweet, which says, who controls the memes controls the universe.

And here at Giphy Stud, we help you.

control the memes.

I love that.

What is your outlook on our generation, people our age?

We get a lot of hate.

Our attention spans are going down because of TikTok and stuff.

Where do you see us?

Do you see us in a good light or how do you view it?

You know, I think you have to see it in a good light.

I love thinking that way.

I think we need to look at everything that brought us here to this moment as divine.

I like to say everything happened for a good reason.

And if it didn't, it's better to think that it did.

Now, that being said, we need to understand that TikTok, Instagram reels, and YouTube shorts are soul-sucking demons that are maximizing, disempowering you, and keeping you in bed all day.

They're building a voodoo doll with 10,000 to 20,000 data points of who you are with the top engineers and billions of dollars to just keep you doing nothing but using that app.

It is an engagement algorithm.

It is maximize as much value from you as possible.

And I think what's really funny to me is all these groups which have had billions of dollars go into ethical AI or aligning AI.

They're saying, you know, AI may affect us in the future really negatively.

We need to do theoretical research about the future to get there.

What's so silly is that, no, it's very misaligned today.

That means that a majority of all information that we upload and download has a middleman, which is a soul-sucking demon pushing whatever content that we see towards the bottom of our brainstem, towards the stuff which extracts from us, that makes us, you know, one could say in a lower vibrational frequency if that resonates with someone.

But in general, just lower to the brainstem, the limbic system, the stuff that doesn't bring out your higher self.

And I think what's really interesting is that we haven't aligned AI to humans.

We haven't made a feed which maximizes the value that it gives to you,

which would be a feed that just recommends videos based on what gets people to leave the app.

So you try to minimize the amount of time it takes to inspire or empower someone.

And that's how you sort the feed.

I will counter that because I've catered my Instagram feed at least.

I don't know about TikTok, but to just health stuff, business stuff, mindset.

I'd say it's pretty good.

content for what I'm trying to achieve, but I understand what you're saying about the mindless stuff.

So yeah, the engagement algorithm at the end of the day is not just going to give you pure crap.

But what it's going to do is to give you stuff which is just going to maximize the amount of time you're spending on it.

And that means still servicing your sort of wants and needs.

Now, the interesting thing that did prove to me that like this algorithm is messing up what could be of a feed in terms of how powerful and healthy it could be was looking at these Hope Core videos that became popular on TikTok.

What's that?

It's basically videos that are inspiring people and empowering people.

Oh, okay.

And if you look at the engagement numbers on those relative to other videos, so the likes, the shares, the comments, et cetera, they are way more engaged, but they're not getting pushed as much in terms of views.

Well, these are videos that get someone probably so excited that they exit the app.

Wow.

That maybe they go call their mom or work on their dreams and everything.

And so those are getting diminished.

They're getting...

you know, hampered in terms of how far.

If you imagine the perfect video that when someone watches it, anyone goes, Wow, this is amazing.

I'm going to go work on my hopes and dreams.

And they exit the app.

That is going to get killed pretty quickly in the current algo state.

And that's exactly what the world needs: to share that information.

An engagement algorithm wants to push controversy.

That's what keeps people on the apps.

That's what keeps people on Twitter is fighting about things.

Controversy and conversation.

So it's driving more polarity and

building opposing sides more than I think we realize.

I mean, I like to think of media as like the nervous system of our global organism.

And right now, our nervous system is co-opted to want to drive controversy.

And it's like, okay, why is there so much fighting online?

Well, we have misaligned AI.

Like we don't have platforms that try to unify us.

We are being controlled by AI to a large degree.

I'll agree, because I will say my most viewed videos are all people debating in the comments and dividing.

So So how would you save the world based off the path we're going right now?

Good question.

I think about that a lot.

I just filed a foundation called Systemic Altruism.

There was one group that came together called Effective Altruism.

That somewhat became the Silicon Valley religion.

Like do the most good possible.

What they didn't do was storytelling.

What they didn't do was like show the impact and focus on the masses.

I actually did my giphy service for them out of love.

I was like, more people need to see this.

I guess they'd existed since 2012.

And I'm like, how have I not found this sooner?

This seems like my people.

So I blasted that out, posted about, you know, oh, got you 10 million views in the past week.

And then I got a call scheduled from the Center for Effective Altruism, their head of risk management.

They told me, take that down.

You know, we don't want to reach out to the masses.

We don't want to like pollute our water.

They're recruiting from Harvard, Oxford.

and it just was so elitist.

Wow.

And like to me, that's the main thing that the elite fail to do is to build a populist movement or to storytell or to actually like focus on empowering people and culture to like rise us all up.

Isn't that the best opportunity we have to be the most resilient to all the things we'll face?

And so

That at the core is

what my differences were with effective altruism was that it was not systemic.

A lot of the funding they were doing, you know, it was great.

You know, I really appreciate the fact that people are thinking about this and talking about this, but also

we need to understand that focusing on symptoms rather than causes is never going to solve the core driving problem.

So I started thinking about that.

What are those core driving problems?

And that's what led me to think about misaligned AI today, how that's driving controversy between people.

It's platforming clowns.

You know, if you're crazy enough, if you do wild enough things, you're going to get a ton of views.

And so not only does that give people a false view of reality where they think the world's more crazy than it is,

but it also gives people an incentive to be crazy.

Right.

It rewards them.

Correct.

Rather than them becoming full of strength and courage and virtue.

and rewarding just them empowering other people and getting other people to like go be your best self get off this app yeah you know and i think tate was the first person to break that mold

yes he was able to go viral without doing crazy shit you know yes he was very controversial he did have that edge but i think he did realize that the thing that was most important about what he was spreading was the strength aspect for males was like try to be an exemplar of positive masculinity we shouldn't push down we should always seek to push up so it's like we shouldn't focus on what toxic masculinity is we should find the exemplars of positive masculinity, platform them, support them, talk about why they're so great.

You know, absolutely.

Do you ever see AI getting out of hand like Terminator style?

Does that worry you at all?

What worries me is that

we don't take this engagement algorithm today and fix it now.

Is that we keep spending theoretically on that happening in the future, and we don't align AI to the sense of

taking people's souls and just trying to maximize the extraction of them.

Because these systems are getting more powerful, they're getting more persuasive.

They are going to and already have lots of people who have AI girlfriends.

That's going to get stronger.

They're going to get more lifelike.

And so the worry with AI is that it takes people away from like base reality, from connection, that it ruins the interconnectedness that we have as humans.

In my super far thinking, I like to say there's a few things I'll be zealots about, or I'll be a zealot about, which is like, no AI should ever be made indistinguishable from a human.

It's like, I never want to be able to not tell, like, because we eventually will have great technology and great power to do that.

And I never, never want to

talk to an AI,

think that that that's a human, and then it's not, because that's going to make me meet other humans and like be like, I don't know.

That'd be creepy.

That kind of ruins your connection to base reality, one could say.

Same thing, I mean, Inception was a good movie about this.

We should never have a VR reality that's indistinguishable from our reality with Neuralink and all that crazy stuff that's coming.

Because then when you come back to base reality, you don't know if it's actually base reality.

That's true.

So you're not about Neuralink, you wouldn't get it?

I definitely definitely would not be the first.

And I definitely think

we

are going to start to have to think about where the limit is.

I think there is a limit to how much we should tap into, you know, merging our brains with super intelligence.

Yeah.

You know, one deep thing I could say is I don't think that we should be men here.

who try to become gods because I think we're God trying to become man.

That's that's hold on.

I got to think about that.

What?

So we're God trying to become man.

So everyone's God, you're saying.

Yeah.

I've heard that theory before.

We all have that energy, right?

And we're all part of the greater cause.

If we all try to seek to maximize our power together, that's destructive.

Right.

But if we all look towards each other and say, wow, this is like a beautiful thing that we're here together.

Let's just try to like continue this forward.

To me, that's somewhat of what Buddha was onto.

So you you don't believe in war you believe in uniting everyone for sure as one

what that looks like you know I don't think there's some perfect solution it sounds very hard just because of all the dividing factors like religion just racism and stuff like that

I think that

we live in a like late stage capitalism society which means we've done a lot of extraction.

We've done a lot of things which doesn't actually focus on maximizing the health and mindsets of people.

We've just been destroying that.

The suicide rates and depression rates have been on the rise since the smartphone was released.

You think it's tied to that?

100%.

I mean, it's directly correlated to the iPhone release date.

Some very prominent figures like Paul Graham, who started Y Combinator, have been tweeting about this.

And basically, he tweeted, you know, we all know what the problem is.

No one's just really fixing it or thinking about it.

Well, it would be hard to fix at this point because everyone's so used to having a phone.

That's where I think that the phone is a device.

The device is supposed to literally destroy your vices.

It has become the vice.

But I think that it can destroy our vices if we just properly align the recommender system to maximizing value for the user, which is if someone is watching a feed of videos and they say, this video is great.

Now I'm going to exit because of this video.

We can then rank the videos on what got people to exit.

Right.

And I think that's a powerful.

But that doesn't align with the platform because then they're losing money.

So how would you argue that that's good for them?

I think that's where things like Web3 can come into the picture, which really just monetize community and it monetizes value.

And, you know, currency itself is

faith-based assets.

And so,

you know,

that's an interesting format of pushing this out there that I've been trying and thinking of is, okay, I have this app, Empowerverse, and that has a bunch of these different empowering apps, one called White Pill.

And then I made one called Holy Vible because really, like, the idea is to search for the holiest of vibes and what pushes people.

And I also did some writing.

about how I do think the next sort of global philosophy or religion will form.

And since I I do think it's sort of just open-ended, just fun, just spreading good vibes, like pointing towards people's highest selves, but not claiming to be divine truth, I think it will be a meme religion.

And so, Holy Bible fits that stack, and it fits with the idea of having a token related to this app, because look, we're not going to monetize with ads.

We're trying to not have people use the app as much as possible.

We're trying just to feed you value and create a community of people who want to become their highest selves.

And I think from that perspective, look, it doesn't cost that much at the core to serve video.

And there's other ways to monetize and to just keep this thing going.

Because if it's really giving people enough value, as long as it can just exist, even be open sourced and ran by the community and funded by the community.

That's a great thing.

Absolutely.

You had an interesting take on your Twitter.

You said video games are a waste of time, one of the worst things you could do.

Why do you feel so strongly about that?

Did I say it's one of the worst things you can do?

Yeah.

Nice.

I like that.

It was a year ago, so I don't know if your opinion has changed, but why did you tweet that out at the time?

I think that

life

is the best video game that there is.

I think it's a beautiful gift.

Like, I understand late at night, relaxing, playing a game with friends, that type of thing.

But I think video games for the most part, for most people, become an escape, become a distraction.

And

at the end of the day, these are getting better as well at hacking your reward system.

That's all of where all this depression comes from, is that we're using artificial sources.

of deriving and getting dopamine.

And then it's like, why is it hard to go after your goals?

Well, you've just been overstimulating yourself.

Your body, evolutionarily wants to maximize its capability to get dopamine with the least amount of effort.

You can sort of think about that as like dopamine divided by calories.

And so video games where you can sit in a chair and achieve things and get rewards,

it's faking gratification.

That same energy that your brain is outputting has the potential to be gratifying in the real world, in your life path, in helping other people.

And so I think there's lots of games that you can play in the real world.

Yeah.

And you got to create these games.

You can play them with friends that create a ton of value.

And I think we do somewhat need to wake up to the fact that

AI is moving very, very quickly.

And to that degree, there's somewhat of a limited amount of time for us to play this game where it really matters.

You know, there will be a certain point when we have such powerful AI systems that either we align it to humanity and everything is really amazing.

And then there is the fear-based state where people are like,

you know, this is going to be Skynet.

And at the end of the day, if that's our thoughts, and if we have the richest person in the world, Elon Musk, saying this is happening in the next two decades, and that's supported by top researchers, it's almost like the movie, Don't Look Up, Have You Seen That?

It's almost metaphorical to like the top researchers are talking about the comet but the comet is ai

and

if if true playing video games seems kind of silly to me right now does

jack it's been a pleasure man where can people find you uh jackj.io on instagram jackjio on twitter there we go guys thanks for tuning in that was a blast i'll see you next time cheers