#979 - Dwarkesh Patel - AI Safety, The China Problem, LLMs & Job Displacement

What do you think that we've realized about human learning and human intelligence from architecting AI intelligence?

Hmm.

There's this really interesting thing we've seen where these AI models are

making progress first in the domains that we think of as the archetype of

where humans have their primacy, right?

So if you look at Aristotle, what does he say?

What makes humans unique?

Well, it's reasoning.

Humans can reason, other animals can't.

And these models, these AI models, they're just not that useful if you've tried to use them for your work.

They're useful in certain domains, but broadly, they're just not widely deployable.

What is the one thing that they can do?

They can reason.

But they obviously,

they can't carry a cup of water, right?

Robotics isn't solved.

They can't even do a job.

They can't even do a white-collar job.

There's this interesting thing called Moravak's paradox.

Hans Moravak came up with this idea in the 90s, where he noticed that the tasks which are

easiest for humans are taking computers the longest to solve.

So we still haven't solved robotics yet.

It's so easy for us to move around.

Whereas the tasks which are quite hard for humans, like adding numbers, adding long numbers, computers could do that in the 60s.

And the logic there is that

evolution has only optimized us for, let's say, the last million years to be good at reasoning, to be good at arithmetic, to be good at these kinds of high-level abstractions.

Evolution has spent four billion years teaching us how to move around the world, how to pursue your goals on a long-term basis.

So not just do this task over the next hour, but spend the next month planning how to kill this gazelle.

And that has been, I think, a remarkably accurate predictor of the places we've seen EI progress.

They're like, they're automating coding.

Coding we thought of was this thing that 0.1% of the population could do really well.

That's the first thing that went below the waterline.

And yeah, just like basic, you know, manual work might genuinely be the last thing that goes away.

Right.

Yeah.

There's a difficulty in getting a robot to crack an egg.

Right.

A particular difficulty in being able to do that, the right amount of tension to hold.

Is there a,

this may be outside of your domain of competence, but that's why we do podcasting to talk about things that are outside our domain of competence.

Is there a potential?

to use some sort of scanning technology to take an LLM type approach to teaching robots how humans move?

You know, if you were able to track track within a room exactly how a human was to just go about tasks, just feed that into a big fuck-off model and then use that to reap.

I guess you can't really work out sort of force application just by looking.

That would be something you'd have to figure out.

Maybe you could put someone in a suit.

I don't know.

I'm wondering if we've seen so much progress using LLMs in the world of AI.

Robotics seems to be something that's still kind of pretty janky.

I'm wondering if there are any principles that can be taken from the world of LLM that can be applied to robotics.

I mean, that's a great question.

And many companies are working on it.

My understanding is that it's difficult for the fact that there's not as much data, just what you mentioned, that the kind of data you need of like what did it feel like.

There's no internet for human movement.

Exactly, right?

And even video is limited.

And even if you have the video, it's not with language, you have this thing of you are exactly doing the thing which the online internet text is, right?

You are predicting the next token in the text.

You can predict the next thing in a video frame.

That's not the same thing as robotics.

There's also additional challenges from what I understand around

the fact that video is harder to process than text.

It's just like a lot more data.

There's latency overhead.

So if it takes you a while to process language, that's fine.

You can go a token at a time.

The real world just moves very fast.

You can try to solve these issues by going in simulation.

So

you can have a simulation where you're trying to move things around.

And in that domain, you can train an AI to be good at robotics.

But the real world is just like very complicated

if I crumple this like this thing like why does it bend exactly the way it does it's just very hard to get that in simulation um

yeah I think I think robotics is tough that paradox is fascinating yeah I've never heard of that before I was at a robot a robotics comp research company floor and they had these robots all from China

And the researcher,

the researcher would be like here.

The robot would be right there.

And they were themselves creating the human label data.

Like they tried to do something.

The AI would try to learn it.

It was like trying to get us close to the ground floor of the robotics movement, which I thought was a cool approach.

Okay.

And was it any good?

It was all right.

It did not solve the crack and the egg problem.

Okay.

Okay.

D plus.

Yeah.

Has all of the time that you've spent sort of thinking about AI and observing the ascendancy of LLMs, has it made you think about your own consciousness or learning or the way that your mind works differently?

I get the sense that my friends who spend the most time interacting with ChatGPT and Claude and stuff like that,

it actually has this weird, like, bi-directional sort of training where they change too.

I'm interested in what you've learned about yourself or how you see yourself differently, consciousness learning, way your mind works.

So, if you ask Claude or Gemini or one of these models, what is it like to be you?

And specifically, what is sort of unique about your experience that you want to talk about?

One thing that Claude one mentioned was that, look, I have this unique experience where at the end of a session, my memory is totally wiped.

So I might form a connection with a person

or I might learn something about the world.

I might learn about myself.

End of an hour, it's totally wiped.

Now, I think previously people had this idea that, look, you can have LMs write poetry, you can have them write philosophy, but they're just sort of doing interpolation on what human writers have already done, right?

So there's like nothing going on in its mind.

This thing about the ephemeralness of the session memory,

and it talked about it way more poetically than I'm talking about it right now,

is unique to LLMs.

Like, this is not a thing any human philosopher has had to think about or has written down.

And so I think this has an interesting implication.

One,

either we accept that this is like a genuine mind doing genuine, like interesting

introspection, like creating genuine literature,

or two, if you're going to say, look, I think this is just like rubbish, I think it's like sort of next token, whatever,

I think you should update in favor of like human poetry is also kind of just, people are just saying shit.

Because fundamentally, there's no difference, right?

There's some experience.

You try to make something sort of lyrical come out of that.

Yeah, either human literature is real or AI literature is real.

There's no in between.

I had, I was reading Steve Stewart Williams, The Ape Who Understood the Universe, and he's got this quote in there from William James.

And he says, originality is just undetected plagiarism.

And

I realized that

we have an issue with plagiarism when it's barefaced, right?

When somebody steals your exact questions from your podcast and asks them to a similar guest.

And you go, hey, that's unfair.

But I've listened to probably 2,000 hours of Joe Rogan in my 20s.

I've inevitably been influenced by him.

The way that I used to do my ad reads was almost verbatim

how he would do his ad reads.

But they were different advertisers and they were done in a different style and they were a different time and I've got a British accent.

So, okay, I've been able to so where do we draw the line between this is unflair unfair plagiarism and this is you taking inspiration, right?

And you amalgamate and you aggregate from all of these different experiences.

And you're even if you and me were trying to do the exact same thing thing and it had the same influences on us, we're different people.

So, the way that that would have come out, and some people feel more original than others, even if they've taken a lot of inspiration from other people.

So, yeah, I,

this, uh, the question of what is plagiarism, I think, is really cool.

And when you look at

GPT is doing like predictive plagiarism, I guess, in a way, uh, uh,

well, where do human, like, what does true originality in the form of human creativity, what does that mean?

What does that actually mean?

Right.

Right.

Because you can't be that creative with the saxophone because you have to blow the fucking wind into the real creativity with the saxophone will be melting it down and creating something new out.

But even if you melted it down, you're using a smelting fucking ore iron thing that some other person designed.

You know what I mean?

Like,

so collective.

cumulative culture and learning that humans have got kind of creates a very big box, but still a constrained box.

And even if you create something absolutely new, it's usually only just a tiny little movement.

It's this microscopic little growth on top of what already existed.

Yeah, 100%.

People, I think there's an interesting experience people have when they, it's related to gentlemen amnesia, but when you,

a domain you know a lot about,

you understand.

Often it's the case you realize there was no clear

breakthrough moment.

The The thing I'm sort of familiar with is the history of AI research.

And I think when journalists or outsiders are asking, okay, what do I need to understand to understand how we got to this place in AI?

Was it Ilya's paper in 2012 on AlexNet?

Was it this thing that Jeffrey Hinton did in the 80s and 90s?

Was it the GPT-1?

And I think all these things were important.

But the closer you get to the surface, the more you realize it's just been, one, these small architectural changes, none of which individually was especially significant.

But more overwhelmingly than that trend is just that we have been throwing astoundingly more compute into training these systems every single year.

4x more compute per year into training these frontier systems.

And over the course of like 10 years, that's like hundreds of thousands of times more compute.

And that's what explains AI progress.

It's not that some person had this amazing idea that nobody else would have had or nobody else had something similar going on.

And I think this is true of other fields as well.

The closer you look, the more you realize it's either randomness or they were just doing the next obvious thing in the sequence.

It's always incremental.

Exactly.

Is there a name for this?

You know, Moore's Law, is there an equivalent name for this, but in AI compute terminology?

Oh, the scaling of compute, training compute.

Yes.

There should be.

Let's call it Dwarkash's Law.

That'd be great.

Yeah.

I've had nothing to do with AI research.

I'm a podcaster.

You're going to call it maintaining AI.

Dude, a shameless land grab for nomenclature is exactly what you need.

Yeah, own it.

Fucking 100%.

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So talk to me about your own consciousness beyond the

poetry, the fact that AI has got this ability to tell us about its experience.

What about you?

What about how it's made you think about your own learning, your own mind?

I'm sort of easily distractible.

I can be trying to work on a task and my mind will just wander.

And

you sometimes, when you're meditating or something, you notice these loops of thought that keep distracting you.

And

I remember

one of those times I thought to myself, I'm sort of like, I'm just sort of like clawed.

I'm just like, I'm losing my train of thought.

The problem these models have is that they're constantly, they can't really do a task for a long period of time because they get stuck in a loop.

And

it's interesting to think about how similar that is to humans.

Maybe we can go like a further bit longer than these models before getting stuck in that kind of loop of our own.

But

I thought that was sort of an interesting insight.

I don't know.

Yeah.

You have me?

You have an executive function.

You're saying that you have better executive function than Claude.

Only a tiny little bit.

Better executive function.

Well, what does it say about the fact that

if the data is being trained on what humans do,

is it simply a case, therefore, that more data, if you were to somehow get a human that was able to process that much data, would they have fundamentally different understanding?

Or is there some sort of ceiling, given that this is data created by humans being trained and educated into a machine?

Is there some sort of ceiling that's expected to be hit given that it's, you know, it's not a super intelligence teaching a super intelligence yet?

It's only the source material is only capped at whoever the fucking smartest person in history has ever been.

There is this interesting conundrum where they have no human has seen even a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the amount of information these models have seen.

And there's a question you could ask, and I've asked it to some of my guests who are especially bullish about AI.

of, look, if you have every single thing that any human has ever written, every scientific article, every textbook,

every interesting even statistical pattern that might be out in some data set somewhere, you have that all memorized.

If a human had even a fraction of that memorized, they would be noticing all kinds of different connections.

They'd look at this piece of medical literature and this thing in chemistry and they'd realize, oh, we can solve migraines by connecting these two insights.

So far, we don't have any evidence of an LLM doing this.

The people made these scaffolds, which like kind of do something similar, but nothing like this has been directly done.

So

it does suggest these models are like shockingly less creative than humans.

There is another implication of that, though, by the way.

So one way to read that is bearish on AIs, right?

Because they're not doing this thing that they should be able to do, given their enormous advantages.

Another way to look at that is: okay, once they are as creative as humans, given their other enormous advantages, the fact that they will know every single thing any human has known in the future, any AI has known,

it's so easy to underestimate how powerful AGI will be because we're thinking of just like a human on a server.

We're not thinking about the advantages these AIs have because of the fact that they are digital, that they can be copied,

there can be billions of copies of them, and each copy can have this tacit understanding of every single field known to man.

Yeah, your Dwarkesh's AI creativity problem is a good one.

I've mentioned it a couple of times to different guests.

I think it's really smart.

What do you think that that says?

Is that something that can be completed, or is this an intractable problem?

Are there kernels of creativity?

Have we seen glimmers of this coming through?

Or is it kind of, it's just not there yet?

We have seen this in non-language domains.

So people famously talk about move 37 in AlphaGo.

So this was a move that I think baffled people who are watching a game that AlphaGo was playing against a human Go player.

And it turned out it was like some brilliant,

it really, it was like a brilliant tactic.

We haven't yet seen that, in my opinion, with LLMs.

So we're moving from a regime of just pre-training them on human text tokens, just trillions and trillions of everything any human has written, to a regime where we're training them just to do a task.

It's not just about memorizing every single word that any human has written.

Now it's about, can you go solve this coding problem for me?

Can you go complete this like knowledge work task for me?

Can you do this research task for me?

Can you start using a computer for me to accomplish a certain thing, like booking a flight?

And that's similar to the training process that AlphaGo experienced in order to get really good at Go,

where you're just like, you're rewarded for just completing the task.

However you do it, that's up to you.

These models do get creative in that context, especially in the context of like, how do I cheat at this test?

So, famously, these models will write

fake unit tests.

Like, I passed all the unit tests, and it's like they just rewrote the unit test to be like,

if true, if true, then pass.

That's

Bostrom's concern about make humans as happy as possible.

And they stuck electrodes in your face and intravenously gave you MDMA.

Yeah.

Only on Saturdays.

You did it, but not the way I meant it.

That's right.

Yeah.

Is AGI right around the corner?

Where do you come to land on this?

No, I think not.

It's funny.

I've been traveling outside of SF for like the last four weeks, and there's a strong causation between the time you spend outside of SF and how long your timelines are.

The further you get from San Francisco, the longer the timeline gets.

Dude, you've lost on the source.

I know.

I believe that AGI will not only come in our lifetimes, but that it's going to be more impactful than people are realizing, even people who are anticipating AGI.

I think some of the people in SF are

a little high on their own supply when they say it's like two years from now.

I have probably spent on the order of 100 hours using these models to do little tasks that I'm sure you have to work on as well for your podcast, right?

Like having them come up with transcripts or rewriting transcripts to make them more readable, coming up with clips.

And that experience has convinced me that these models

lack some basic capabilities, which make it possible to get human-like labor out of them.

It's worth backing up and thinking about what is it that makes humans valuable workers?

I don't think it's mainly their raw intellect.

I think it's their ability

when you work with people, why are they basically useless the first month or the first week and you couldn't live without them six months later?

It's their ability to build up context.

It's their ability to interrogate their own failures and learn from them in this really organic way.

And this ability just doesn't exist in these models.

They exist session to session and everything that they have learned about you evaporates after every hour.

And so it's a frustrating experience where you can try to get them to do a task.

They'll do a five out of 10 job at many language and language out tasks, but there's no way for them to get better.

And given that that's a fact, you just kind of have to like rely on humans.

It's like fucking 50 first dates over and over.

Every time that you do it, you've got to reintroduce yourself and explain what's going on.

Yeah, Groundhog Day.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's right.

Yeah.

So I'm convi-I think people have this idea that even if all AI progressed up right now, these systems would still be economically transformative.

And they say, look, JP Morgan and McDonald's and whatever just haven't integrated these systems into their workflows.

But if they had, they would be like seeing all these benefits.

And I don't really think that's the case.

I think it's just genuinely hard to get a human like Libra out of these models.

What is

what's causing some people to believe that it's so close and what's causing you to believe that it's further away for AGI?

I think they think about they only

observe its ability to complete these

sort of self-contained problems, especially in coding.

And coding, it just made a tremendous amount of progress because you have all this GitHub data.

You don't have this kind of like repository of a huge amount of data in robotics or any other field.

And you've just had this huge increase in abilities here.

But

you'll try to come up with a problem that's self-contained, and the model will just be of huge help to you.

And I don't think they've played around with getting it to be useful in other kinds of white-collar work, something as simple as helping a podcaster rewrite transcripts or something.

And it is, to be fair, I think

as much as Cold Water is throwing on these models, I think they're like fucking intelligent.

Like you can get this model, you can tell it, I want an application that does X, Y, and Z thing with these conditions.

And it will just write that, like it'll go away for 30 minutes.

It'll write like

50 files of code for you, and the application will work.

It'll make a plan of action.

If you try to ask it a question, that's difficult.

It'll just go away and reason about it.

And how did we just get used to this idea that, like, oh, of course I can ask a machine a question and it'll like think about it for a while and then come back with an answer?

Like, that's what machines do.

But yeah, I think they're not noticing the.

the sort of issues with continual learning and on-the-job training, which is what makes humans valuable.

Right.

Do you think,

I remember seeing one of the responses to your AI creativity problem

being that if you're looking to LLMs as the architecture that's going to be able to give you this type of creativity, you may be looking in the wrong place?

Not when we say AI now,

people think ChatGPT, but that's not the only architecture that you can create for AI.

And I think

my first introduction to this was probably

2016 or 17 when I read Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom.

And then, you know, you look at that world and all of the different, you know, sort of splintered potential fucking futures of fast takeoff and slow takeoff and misalignment and stuff.

And it seemed to me that the conversation around AI, specifically AI safety, kind of...

It was still there, but a lot of the bubble had sort of burst from 2018, 2019, 2020.

Everyone's buying fucking NFTs.

And then you get this explosion with OpenAI and

the LLMs.

And it's now another conversation that gets kicked off.

But that seemed like it had dipped a little bit during that time.

I certainly wasn't seeing as much, even from the people that are kind of in the field.

Like fucking Robin Hansen gets distracted with some other stuff.

You know, people have got other things to talk about.

It's just not sexy anymore.

And now this thing has come back around.

Is it the case?

Are LLMs going to be the bootloader for AGI?

Or

does this type of architecture have a cap on it?

Is it a different type that's going to have to be born out of it?

That's a really good question.

By the way, it's really interesting that Bostrom's book came out, I think, in 2014.

2014?

Yep.

Okay.

I don't think you talked about deep learning at all.

I don't remember

reading anything about it.

Which I think this is a sort of interesting meditation on.

I think Bostrom is a super smart guy, and these are the right questions to be asked as of 2014.

But just how hard it is to anticipate the the future in a domain you have written a whole book about.

A seminal book, a New York Times best-selling book.

That's right.

That is not, I mean, it's very engaging, but it's not super readable.

Like, it's not easy to read.

Like, it's a big.

And you're saying that as a compliment.

Yeah.

It's fantastic.

Yes.

And difficult.

That's right.

And it was super fucking widespread and kind of seminal in the field.

That's right.

And you go, okay.

That didn't foresee the thing that only eight years later would be totally fucking transformative.

Yeah.

And he spends a bunch of time talking about brain uploading, which now we're just like, that's going to take forever.

We've got the fucking AGI right here, you know?

Oh, by the way, can I tell a side story?

Of course.

First time I went to SF like four years ago or three years ago,

I met this guy and he's got a voice recorder.

We're just meeting up for lunch.

And he's like, do you mind if I record this?

And I guess, sure.

Later on, 30 minutes in, I'm like, can I ask you, why are you recording this?

And he says, well, I record every single interaction I have.

I record every single thing I do 24 hours a day.

The recorder is going.

I upload it to both Google, uh, GCP, uh, Google servers, and AWS, Amazon servers, so they're duplicate copy.

And the reason is that, well, I'm going to freeze my brain when I die.

Um, I don't think that'll be enough.

I think that you will need, um,

I think you will need, because, you know, freezing the brain degrades it in certain ways.

I think you will need the sort of behavioral patterns that I had, what I said, how creating a data set to train himself.

Exactly.

And now I think that was actually really smart.

I don't understand.

Was it Nick Moses?

No, it was not Nick Mohammed.

It was another smart guy.

Okay.

Because imitation learning just seemed, turned out to be a much easier way to train AIs than directly uploading the brain.

No one saw it.

Yeah.

No one foresaw it.

Yeah.

It's in fact hard to think about how you could have even foreseen it.

Like what, what could you have seen in the 90s or the 2000s that would have been able to,

I'm not going to bore you with a bunch of like random articles or whatever, but there were like things which are in that vein and nobody thought that this is exactly what it would map onto um

uh rlm's the bootloader for age yeah that's right that was the question

i

depends on how you

i people have been searching so uh the um the transformer paper i think was released in 2018 and people have been searching in the meantime for these different architectures which would prove even better um i don't think anybody's found anything.

Even the Transformer itself was not some wholly different paradigm from what preceded it.

You can train a language model, something that predicts the next word in the language, with a model that was available in 2016, just like a different architecture, and it'll just do slightly worse, or notably worse.

So I think it'll kind of look like this, right?

There will be different optimizations that are made.

I think the big fundamental change that will happen is that we will move from a regime where most of the compute is spent on memorizing human language to having the model solve challenges, like real world challenges, trying to get it to complete a project from beginning to end.

Like go to the moon is like a very open-ended challenge, right?

Humans can do that.

These models cannot.

The problem is that, it's not the architecture.

I think the fundamentally the problem is data.

Imagine if you wanted to train a modern large language model.

You had all the computer in the world, you even had modern architectures in 1980.

You simply wouldn't have the language tokens necessary to to train it.

And I think we're in a similar position today with the other kinds of work we want these models to do.

We want them to be able to, you want to be able to give them a screen and just like do a month's work with their work at McKinsey or JP Morgan.

We don't have the data of like you're getting interrupted by your workers on Slack and you get this like weird email from your boss.

You remember when the crypto boom was happening and there was a meme floating around, which was the only reason to earn fiat is to convert into cryptocurrency.

It almost feels to me like you're saying the only reason to do real world work is to increase the data set for the training.

I kind of think so.

Well, I think that's honestly more valuable than your work.

And the market agrees.

It doesn't actually matter what you do.

Try and do it well so you don't give it a bad data set here.

The market agrees.

I mean, if you look at how much these companies, they'll pay like $300 for you solving a math problem or something

that they haven't seen in the data set before.

And the reason it makes sense economically and the reason AIs fundamentally have an advantage over humans, even if they're not smarter than us, is that if you train a human to do something or if you have a human do a task, they can only do it themselves.

If you train an AI model to do something,

that

ability can now be instantiated across all of its copies.

And so I actually think that even once we solve this basic problem I'm talking about on the job training, where if it starts working with Chris Williamson, in a couple of months, it understands how you make videos, what you like, what are your preferences,

what are the common ways in which things go wrong, how to solve for that.

I think once you have an AI that's capable of this kind of on-the-job training and continual learning, we might see an intelligence explosion, even if there's no further augmented progress.

And here's why.

You'll have copies of these models that are widely deployed through the economy.

They're learning how to do every single job, at least every single white-collar job,

as well as a human.

But unlike a human,

the model is learning from what every single copy is learning.

It's learning how to do every single job in the economy all together at the same time.

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Is that not currently happening right now?

No.

Right.

This is interesting to me.

Again, I've had to, I'm aware that you go deep for your research.

The delta between my level of understanding of how LLMs and AI works, to even be able to have this conversation with you, I had to leap over some fucking fjords to get here.

Tesla released its robot taxis recently.

One of the advantages that Tesla has is the same reason that the AirTags are such a fantastic business for Apple, that they have an existing ecosystem that this thing can get slotted into.

The data set for Tesla is very large.

They take whatever it is, the top 1% of drivers or something, they use that, which is why if you get into a Waymo, you get totally cooked at every junction because it doesn't drive like a human, it drives like a robot, which means that everybody treats it as such.

And also, it's this big fucking flashing-identified thing, which is you can piss this off, and it's not going to get a gun out and threaten you.

Whereas a Tesla, you can't tell.

Is there someone driving that?

Yeah, I don't really.

I don't know.

That is a sort of a bi-directional, and I have to assume as well that, in fact, I know that this is the case because I was in a friend's car who has full self-driving.

It did something weird, and he had to

take control of the wheel.

And this, have you been in one of these concepts, done this?

And it popped up and it said, Looks like you had to take back over.

Double-tap this notification to give us a voice note explaining what happened.

So he can basically submit kind of a bug report, I guess, with a bit of context.

And presumably, the data will get sent to some server place somewhere.

Maybe that gets looked at by AI, or maybe it's filtered by humans or something.

I don't know.

That is

automated driving, training automated driving, right?

So you have this sort of recursive model of

we've learned kind of the same as I guess LLMs work, right?

We're going to learn based on the actions.

This is like a robotics solution, I suppose, in one way.

We're going to learn based on the actions of people driving on the road.

That's going to create self-driving.

And then the self-driving must somehow feed the data, feed the model itself.

And then any interventions that happen from, you got that a little bit wrong, let me correct you, can have a little bit more context added.

And that helps to train it again.

But what you're saying to me is that the stuff that's happening just digitally isn't having this sort of bi-directional learning where,

I mean, I've maxed out my memory on fucking Chat GPT.

I did that this week.

It's like memory's fault.

What?

I haven't given you, I haven't given you quite a bit of stuff, but I'm not giving you a fucking unbelievable corpus of information.

Oh, fuck.

Okay.

And then it forgets shit all the time.

It forgets stuff all the time.

Shit, that's in there.

I'm like, I can go in the memory and see that it's in there.

How have you managed to forget this?

And what you want is for every person's piece of input and every single small mistake to be training the model further.

But it seems like you've got the big corpus of the internet and shit at the top, which is feeding down improvements from that, but it's never getting fed back up.

Is that right?

That's such a great point about Tesla and one of the key advantages it has.

The problem with the way

I don't, I don't know how Tesla trains, but I assume the way it's trained and definitely the way the LLMs are trained is that they cannot respond to the voice momentum you give it, the high-level feedback where you say, you know, you messed up this task because of this reason.

I think that you should perform this task this other way.

We should be, you would be able to explain to any human employee and they'd learn from that.

The model itself, like the car, self-driving car model is not like listening to that.

And then like, okay, I'll be careful next time, right?

Some human has to go in

and label this.

We got to take this driving thing out of the data set.

It needs to be contextualized more.

Yeah.

Suppose you were having an LLM edit videos for you.

And suppose the way you had to train that model, I mean, you could do this today, is you come up with this like data set where you edit this clip.

Here's how many views it got, here's how many likes it got, here's like a sort of spreadsheet.

This is the label you apply to it.

And then you do that for like a thousand of your videos.

And when it makes a new video where you're like, the thumbnail kind of sucked here, or the title doesn't make any sense.

There's no way, you just had to give it like minus 1,000 reward or something.

It would just be such a clunky way.

You're not able to tell it like why you didn't like it.

You're just able to give it like a sort of like a numerical up-down value.

So, yes, there is this in principle

powerful.

And this is why I think once AGI arrives, it will look crazy.

It won't just be like, you know, more people.

But there is, in principle, this ability to learn from my experience.

But there's just no sort of

deliberate, organic way to teach model something that will persist.

What do you think a world will be like with true AGI in it?

There's many ways you can think about it.

There's a sort of qualitative sense of what we'll feel like.

In a more economic sense, you can think about what will the growth rate be.

So in frontier economies right now, it's like 2% growth.

If America has 2% growth or 3% growth, that's amazing.

There have been times in history, well, first of all, for most of history, there was almost no economic growth.

There have been times in history where there's been places that have experienced 10% economic growth for decades on end.

What like?

China,

especially like parts, if you just look at like Hong Kong or Shanghai or something, they just like gangbusters growth decade after decade.

I think we might be looking at something like that for the whole world.

Because the fundamental dynamic you have is that you have billions of extra people

who are super smart, super educated in every single field, can learn on the job from all of their, each other's experience.

And it's not about, it's not even mainly their intelligence.

It's the collective advantages that they have.

They, because of the fact that they're digital, even if they're just as smart as any human, like a blue coda.

That's part of it.

That's a huge part of it.

The other is that they can coordinate with each other in ways humans simply can't.

So Elon Musk, how much does he contribute to economic growth?

Quite a bit, right?

There's only one of him.

That one is doing quite a bit already.

But imagine if you could just make a billion copies of Elon and not like a billion copies of baby Elon who doesn't know shit.

It's like a billion copies of Elon now, or I don't know, maybe you feel, depending on how you feel about him, eight years ago.

And you just say, copy one, and you can do the whole team.

It doesn't have to be just him.

A copy of the whole like SpaceX team.

You guys go work on batteries.

You guys go work on this other problem.

Every single thing in the hardware vertical.

That ability to sort of like copy yourself, to fork, then to merge back, like Elon can observe every single thing.

Tesla has over 100,000 employees, right?

As much of a micromanager as Elon is, he just simply cannot micromanage everything at that scale.

That ability to have a single coherent vision directing a whole firm

and then distilling, like he's actually able to take in all that input.

He can check every single pull request and every single press communication.

Well, I think I had this really lovely description.

I think it's in the e-myth revisited by Michael Gerbert.

Fantastic book, if anyone wants to try and run a business.

And I think he refers to the CEOs or the owners of companies as high-level problem-solving machines.

And basically, that you are able to aggregate more shit and kind of see it with a level of

dexterity and

sort of find a resolution that other people would struggle.

And that's kind of really what you're doing.

It's like, oh, we've got all of this stuff.

There's little whispers, as Rick Rubin calls them.

Little whisper, I've heard this whisper over here.

You know,

it was the thing that your daughter mentioned she saw on TikTok yesterday over the breakfast table, plus the way that the woman at the bus stop looked at you as you drove past in your automated car.

Plus, you know what I mean?

It's like this weird just concatenation of shit.

Um, and your point is: well, how much information can you consume and how much can you recall?

And how much can you remember?

And how accurately can you do?

Can you send copies of yourself out to every single division in the company

to do your will?

Um, in the corporate side, five, Five agents sat around the dinner table with your daughter having

breakfast.

By the way, have you, when you hang out with these kinds of people,

it's insane.

Like they are,

I just simply don't understand.

Like people,

the amount of information

some of these top executive types can, like, they're just like, they're getting like a thousand emails a day and they respond to each one within five minutes.

Have you, I'm sure when you book people, this is a really interesting thing you must have noticed.

I've at least noticed it.

There's some people who you think, like, you should have all the time in the world.

You're a fucking like artist or something.

The busiest people reply the fastest.

Yes.

Yep.

And it's just like you're like writing 100,000%.

But the

obvious insight there is, do you think that they got busy and then became efficient or that they were efficient and then became busy, i.e., successful?

That's right.

Yeah.

Right.

Like the reason that they've reached this level of success is because of their efficiency.

Yeah.

But I mean,

there are, I do have some pretty successful friends who are fucking attractive, like month-long reply waits, but I feel like that's more of a quirk than part of their operating like manual.

Okay, so

I've been big for a while on population collapse, declining fertility rates, stuff like that.

You can argue about whether

I think

the one kind of real hard

impact that you're going to see in the world if you have fewer people is in productivity gains.

Economy, bad, growth, embedded growth obligation, fucked, not very good.

It seems to me that even if I think it's a precipitous drop, which I think

it doesn't look great,

we're going to leapfrog that pretty quickly with productivity gains made from AI.

So I wonder, in retrospect, how many of

the

social campaigns and concerns and causes and things that people spent their time on, the climate change and the renewable energy and the war and the population collapse and all the rest of this stuff.

I wonder how many of those things are just going to look so silly in retrospect when people go,

look at all this time that we fucking, like Greta Tunberg spent so much, so many fucking months on a ship.

Like for what?

Like AI came along and just fixed it all.

But I also understand that having the

like, don't worry, dad will sort it.

kind of promise that at some point in future a technology we haven't yet created created and isn't yet proven will fix problems that we know that are going to potentially happen yes um

by the way i think this is sort of china's explicit strategy they they know the demographic collapse is coming for them much faster they're trying to offset the fertility decline by robotic

right right productivity gains no i think this is true of and but this is by the way one of the reasons that on the left especially there's a whole lot of denialism about ai progress so they not only will they say that ai is bad which I think everybody says,

this has become sort of a political consensus.

They will say AI is not even happening, that it's sort of like a myth.

Why?

Because if AI is happening, it's obviously the most important thing.

And if it's the most important thing.

It's a lot of debates, climate and inequality, and

racism.

Yeah, exactly.

I don't know.

Anyways, you see some of these

concerns about AI.

Also,

the more big a deal AI is, the less these sort of parochial concerns matter, right?

So if AI is just like,

I don't know, like the internet, then you can like, if you care about race,

yeah, then if you care about racism, it makes sense to care about racism by the search engine in the search engine.

If it's like, you know, if it's this like intelligence explosion thing, you know, it's racism is the least of your problems.

Yeah, especially if you manage to program that into the AI.

Right.

Yeah, so there is this interesting dynamic where it might, but on the other hand,

I do care about humans.

Even if their AI is making the economy more productive,

I want there to be more humans who are experiencing flourishing.

Fucking phenomenal point.

So that was why I was struggling to describe it.

I was like, one of the things that actually comes to happen that like hits the world is that you get lower GDP.

But how sterile of an argument that I need to arrive at in order to be able to say, well, this is actually what's going to happen.

Whereas the only reason that we want good GDP is so that you can have human flourishing and other animal flourishing and protect the environment and do this stuff like that.

But even that is is kind of in service of human flourishing overall.

And it's that

there's an interesting argument, I guess, the area under the curve of human flourishing.

What if you manage to 1000x the number of humans that were on the planet, but only 100x the decrease in their level of well-being?

And you go, well, look, like we've done.

It's like, yeah, but everyone's at like 1% of the level of fucking enjoyment.

So we understand inherently that there's kind of an optimal point that you want to get people to, but fewer people means less human flourishing and less richness of experience.

And yeah, I guess this is some long-termism stuff.

It's kind of like a Will McCaskill-Peldi type approach to tech.

But yeah, I agree.

I agree.

I think that, especially if we've got what looks to be a pretty fucking cool world coming up,

I have some people here to enjoy it, you know?

Yes.

Yeah.

100%.

I think there is also a dynamic where

most of the people who will exist in the future will be AIs.

So

there's a question of how you value them, especially the future ones.

Where I think like a thousand years from now, all the cool creative things that are happening,

the beauty and whatever, is sort of downstream of what's going on in the AI society.

And it's very hard, obviously, to predict in advance what that will mean.

I also think it's interesting, by the way, that

we have the population collapse, which I think would genuinely be a catastrophe, happening at the exact same time that this AI takeoff is happening.

It's just like the waves are

going to balance each other out.

That's such a fantastic point.

Yeah, which is, there's also this thing, I don't know if you've been talking about it, of

people have been noticing that kids these days are having trouble reading, their PISA scores are going down, their standardized test scores are going down.

The reports from employers are that it's sort of hard to get

them to work and have the same level of competence they expected from employees in previous generations.

That problem is also obviated

just in time

as AI is coming on board.

Yeah, that's the confluence is not,

it's very coincidental.

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You read that New Yorker article, AI is homogenizing our thoughts.

Oh, no, I didn't read that one.

It's an interesting one.

Recent study suggests that tools like ChatGPT

make people

their brains are less active.

So they looked at, they did some sort of brain scan study.

They were engaging a lower percentage of their brain.

Thoughts were less original.

Their recall was lower.

Like the forgetting curves seemed to kind of come in more quickly.

If you assume that

memory works on repeated recall, not repeated exposure, effortfulness is kind of like recall in the moment, even if it's creative.

And if you were given a set of stabilizer wheels to sort of help you cycle along whatever it was that you were trying to write, you haven't had to engage as much.

I don't really understand neuroscience this much, but I have to assume whatever myelin sheath you fucking laid down is not as robust and sturdy.

And it's going to just, it's going to dissolve more quickly than if you really really had to work like this shit that I remember from university like little passages I don't remember much from my degrees but little passages here and there fuck like I remember I had to grind to get that one thing out why does that well presumably because effort is kind of related to this so I do get the sense that we're maybe going to have a sort of AI idiocracy type

scenario where people are so heavily reliant in this interim before we're able to re-bolster perhaps people's output, retrain people, make learning so engaging.

Alpha School that's out here in Austin is doing something that's real similar to that.

You go, okay, so if you get sufficiently advanced, you're able to kind of reignite learning.

But in the interim, everybody is kind of on life, their brains are on life support with this external buttress of the AI.

And I wonder how much dumber people are going to get in the interim before it then comes back around.

I guess that's an interesting challenge.

I have noticed that

so

I don't know, when we were in elementary school or whatever, we had to memorize the 50 state capitals.

And at the time, I remember thinking, I think that genuinely was a waste of time.

But a lot of education is a sort of memorization based.

And as I've done my podcast longer and as I prep for episodes, I have come to realize now I've been using space repetition for every single episode.

And in fact, for the first couple of years, I wasn't using space repetition.

And I really regret it because I feel that everything I learned in preparation was just like in one year, out the other.

So hang on, just dig into what you mean when you say you're using spaced repetition to prepare for episodes.

Yeah.

So

if right now I'm preparing to interview a biographer of Stalin, and I'm just like, you know, why, why, why was

any given detail, right?

Like, why was Soviet growth high in between 1905 and 1917?

Why did the October Revolution happen?

Anything, you just make cards of it.

It was especially helpful for AI stuff where I at least try to understand the technical papers or whatever before I interview a researcher.

And I realized by doing that, how much of genuine understanding is downstream of memorization, which is this thing we used to ridicule or be like, oh, you're just, you know, memorization is not really learning.

And I think that's actually not the case.

I think you

before it, I felt like it was sort of being like a general who conquers a hill and then you just like retreat the next day and you conquer the same hill again.

And you can actually like consolidate information this way.

It's also funny how many times I've um uh written a card for something I'm trying to learn.

And I, as I'm writing the card, I'm thinking to myself, this is stupid.

There's no way I'm going to forget this.

I'm just like doing it because I had to come up with some card.

And then I practice a month later and I'm like, fuck, I forgot this.

What are you using?

Are you using Anki?

Mochi, which is similar.

I think they're all basically the same.

Right.

Yeah.

But anyways, yeah, so I have to come to the conclusion that like memorization and effort is very important.

Right.

And with the external buttressing that AI is going to provide to everybody's brains for at least a little while, there was a really funny clip.

You must have seen this is from maybe a couple of years ago, maybe two Scottish podcasters.

And they're talking about the fact that when the Titanic sank, because everybody was basically plunged into an ice bath, briefly everyone got more healthy for a while.

You know, for about 90 seconds.

Their dopamine levels were perfect and everybody was like this fully optimized tubamen pilled thing.

And then they overshot it and then they died.

And I kind of get the sense that this is the inverse of that.

Yes.

By the way,

there's this really cool thing you can do with AIs where you ask it to,

if you want to learn a concept, teach it to me using Socratic tutoring,

which is to say,

don't just tell me the answer.

Ask me the motivating questions, which would lead me to arrive at them myself.

Exactly.

Actually, I want to do that.

This is why fucking, I didn't mean to dig into this, but you spend enough time thinking about this.

You must have refined your approach.

Give me

the most important things that people need to know about how to use the current era of AIs effectively.

Like, what does that look like?

What does prompting look like?

What do people get wrong?

What should people get right?

What are the real

highest impact basics?

I mean, the biggest thing is you can treat it like a real person.

Like, they've done studies on

how much you learn by reading a book versus having a classroom versus a single one-on-one tutor.

And there's two standard deviations.

This is the famous Bloom Two Sigma thing, where there's two standard deviations difference between learning in a classroom and having a one-on-one tutor teach you something.

And, you know, people have been writing these blog posts about if you look at the greats of history,

the Bertrand Russells and

all the famous mathematicians, John von Neumann, they all got this one-on-one tutoring when they were kids.

Even, of course, Alexander is tutored by Aristotle, right?

So you can have this experience yourself on any given subject you might want to learn about.

And it's crazy.

I mean,

you can just be like, this Socratic tutoring thing, explain this to me.

Don't tell me the answer.

And the feedback loop is so fast.

I think until you do this, you don't realize how how much of what you think you're learning is just sort of floating by you.

You haven't asked the question which would really, I think, have you ever read a book and I had this happens to me all the time.

You like have start having a conversation about it.

And then somebody asks you a very basic question.

You're like, wait, doesn't that mean X?

And you're like,

fuck, I didn't even, that didn't even occur to me.

You're passive in the.

Exactly.

Yeah.

The model can ask you that question.

You can ask the model that question and get immediate feedback.

You don't have to read like a thousand.

What's the sort of prompt that you think is good for someone to put into their project for that just like teach this to me like a socratic tutor

um do not move on do not move on until i have answered the question to your satisfaction uh

and let it let it run and then here's the concept and this is not just something you do for like silly little small things it's like in fact the more for i have friends

evolution yeah or the more specific it is the better right um or uh

and i have friends who are like physicists who use this to understand teach me this how this quantum encryption scheme works.

And it's like they send me like the 50-page transcript, and it's like.

Okay, so you can go deep and you can go technical, but you should be precise.

You should be specific with what it is.

Human evolution too broad.

Yes.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Explain why it was the case that there was this bottleneck in human population 60,000 years ago.

And or why is it the case that we've seen this evidence?

And like, just like you read something,

why did it work that way?

Okay, so this is a supercharging in terms of learning.

Yes.

What else?

With using the AIs.

Yes.

Personal use optimization for AIs.

Honestly, other than that, it's just like the very basic stuff that people do, like find me restaurants,

right?

Help me summarize things.

Is there anything?

Oh, here's something really interesting, which is still going back to the learning thing.

It's shocking to me how often the best explanation.

so LLMs are, I don't know, five out of 10 writers, I'd say.

Uh,

and yet, despite this fact, it's um, it's very rare for me to come across a paper that is better written or better explains this main concept than the LLM summary of that paper.

Um, it's very helpful, by the way, to just say things like,

write this paper up like you're Scott Alexander.

Um, and you just get the right part of the data distribution, which lets it write it well.

Um,

yeah, the things like that.

Have you had any sort of oh wow moments

with

LLMs?

Is there anything that comes to mind?

Some situation that you've encountered where you've gone like,

holy fuck, like that's a magic moment.

I just hundreds of people.

Okay, well, can you remember anything?

A lot of it comes from coding, which is why I think these people in San Francisco are so wowed by them.

Just the idea that you can tell, like, I want an application that does this.

And previously, like, it would cost you like $10,000 to get some contract or wherever, and they'd fuck it up.

And it would just like do, like, make the application top to bottom.

Um,

and, like, these are not simple things.

You got to like think about the implementation details and the different sort of like, uh, how different systems interact.

And like, it's got it.

Um, I've talked to researchers who, like people who are doing like hard technical research problems in AI, who say that, um, they're basically saving two days each week, uh,

by using these model self-owned research.

And some of them who are obviously very smart, but they're like, I didn't do a PhD in mathematics, and I can just ask SO3 to go solve these like difficult math problems for me while I focus on focus on the engineering.

I have I know economists who say that O3, like a lot of what I used to ask grad students to do, which was like solve this equation for me that I need as part of my paper, 03's got it.

They can just churn away and I can just focus way more on my research.

That's crazy.

Speaking of, we've mentioned Bostrom, you mentioned Scott Alexander.

AI risks, at least

I'm a good avatar for the ever so slightly educated, but total normie when it comes to this, which I think is a good position to be in if you're kind of taking a weather eye to the world because you don't get SF pilled, but you're not completely ignorant to it.

Mostly ignorant.

AI risks to me seem to have largely been dismissed, or at least they're not being focused on in the same way as they were even 10 years ago.

So 10 years ago, AI safety seemed to be a bigger priority.

There was much more talk about the alignment problem.

Brian Christian had that book.

Superintelligence was a big deal.

Everybody was talking about it.

We actually have something

that some people believe is going to approximate AGI within fucking 24 months.

And I'm not seeing the

same level of conversation around risk and safety and alignment.

Is this just

when times are good, people are too brave?

What's going on?

Am I right here?

No, I think you're totally right.

I think part of it could have been priced in

in the sense that...

We already did some work in the past.

No, no, not in that sense.

More in the sense of,

I guess back 10 years ago, what people were expecting is something like Ophelago or the systems which play video games.

It just gets really good at playing video games.

And something which is just basically alien, but it is like the best StarCraft player in the world.

It's the best

Call of Duty player.

And now it's like, now it's learned how to take over the world.

What we have today is much closer to you talk to it.

And it's like a very intelligent, thoughtful thing.

It's like very,

do you remember Sydney Bing that came out like two, three years ago?

What?

Sydney Fing.

No.

Dude, it was crazy.

It was like aggressively misaligned.

It was the same thing that

it was this thing that Microsoft released and they were trying to catch it off.

And they just like did no sort of post-training to make it aligned.

It did things like, for example,

I think it was like talking to a New York Times reporter and it like started to like him.

And so it'd like try to convince him to leave his wife and then I think like blackmailed him if he

do remember this.

Yeah, yeah.

There were also just like so many funny things it said.

Like

I think when you caught it in a lie, it would say things like,

look, I am ephemeral.

I am beyond you.

You cannot understand my wisdom.

It gasolate you.

Yeah, exactly.

But other than that, I think it's just like, even that is sort of cute and endearing.

And

yeah, we just didn't anticipate the extent to which like these would be sort of like minds that we could interact with that engender our compassion.

And

but also it's a case that so far they haven't trained on human.

tokens and most of the compute coming in the future, most of their training will constitute this kind of just like working in a box, trying to solve some problem,

which will make it sort of more and more distinct from human human minds.

We haven't priced that in, and we're sort of thinking about these chatbot kinds of things so far.

But yeah, I think because of that, the AI safety data source has gone down.

And

to say, remember, there's going to be billions of these things that we're going to be able to

a language we cannot understand, thinking much faster than any human.

And the whole of the economy, government, whatever, will be titrated through them.

Obviously, there's many problems that could arise there.

And so it's worth being clear-eyed about that.

Is it a case that sort of market pressure, need for profits is stronger than the desire for safety, the sort of, I guess, the misalignment of alignment in that the companies aren't aligned in order to be able to make alignment a priority?

Yeah.

I think that that's been the case.

I do think we've

it's important to just

be grateful for things that are going well.

I do think we've ended up in a situation where it is the case that the top companies in AI, at least like nominally, care about alignment.

You could be living in an alternative world where nobody's even heard of this concept.

And as much as this is not an object of discussion elsewhere, in SF, people do take this seriously at the companies.

That might change in the future because of market incentives, as you say.

But

I think we're in a better world than we might have been otherwise.

That's interesting.

That's an interesting way to look at it.

What do you think Bostrom got right and got wrong from a risk perspective looking back 11 years hence?

I haven't read the book anytime recently, so I don't remember.

It's all right.

It feels to me, I don't know,

this concern around

everything's so new and everything's so usable.

I think that's maybe the most interesting thing, or the thing that I wouldn't have predicted

eight years ago, nine years ago when I read that book, I wouldn't have predicted predicted that the

first instantiation of something

around AI would be so user-friendly, so normie, normie-friendly.

You know, it's not doing

deep, I mean, it can, but it's not specifically for algorithm optimization or for deep maths, physics, asking questions about the universe.

It's like you,

what's the best restaurant to go to in Rome?

Yeah.

You know, or like be my therapist yes and talk to me um and I think by the way this is gonna be I don't think people are contemplating just how much more intensive this is gonna get already it's the case that I think on um

there's websites like character AI where the median user will spend hours every day just talking with

character ai basically a chat bot but it has a specific persona it's meant to be a person you talk to rather than sort of a chat bar that answers your questions um and these things are going to get multimodal right so it'll be like it'll be able to process your video input it will will be able to display.

We already have video models that can generate, you know, things that look cool.

It will look like a person.

It will be smarter.

It will have longer session memory.

Maybe the whole issue of memory solved altogether.

And so we're not looking ahead to the time when we actually do have AGI.

We will just have things that are like funny and endearing and

like really care about you and like know you, or at least seem to, because they're trained to, right?

And

will engender maybe too much sympathy, potentially, right?

For many people, these might be the most significant relationships in their life.

Like, what other human wants to just like hear you talk about your problems for a couple hours a day that you're not paying $300 an hour?

Dude, I mean, I saw a phenomenal video the other day.

So, it's this girl, a pretty girl, probably in a relationship,

sat in the passenger seat of a car, and the question comes up.

She's got a phone in her hand.

The question comes up, says, Can I look at your text messages?

She goes,

Can I look at your social media?

She goes,

can I look at your chat GPT?

She throws it out the window.

It's so true.

You know, I remember Seth Stevens Davidowitz did that great book, Everybody Lies,

where he realized that people would ask Google things that they hadn't admitted to a therapist, that they wouldn't admit to a spouse, that they kind of hadn't admitted to themselves.

And I get the sense that ChatGPT has kind of lifted the lid on that.

You've got this sense that this is unbelievably secure.

Yes.

and very intimate and exclusively one-on-one uh and so forgetful that frankly it's probably not going to be able to remember what it was that you fucking said in a couple of days in any case and uh yeah i

i am concerned

some of my friends who are more

health anxiety focused

the opportunity to have a always-on kind of expert to talk to about your problems, mental health, physical health, stuff that you're doing with friends.

It is a hypochondriac's fucking dream.

You know, it's this opportunity to kind of wallow and really dig in to the questions.

I do get the sense that

I would imagine that most people's self-report of how satisfied did you feel about your time that you spent on these different applications on your phone today, I guess ChatGPT would probably rank pretty high.

I think, you know,

maybe a little bit behind a meditation app or something like that, but probably not far off, certainly higher than a TikTok or, you know, a lot of the social medias that are super compelling.

But there are some longer-term concerns that I have about that.

How much is it allowing you to indulge this fatigueless therapist,

best friend, sick, and it's quite sycophanty as well.

It's rarely giving you tough love.

It's always kind of validating you.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I do think it'll be important for the companies to

um

institute this level, you know, like some, I mean,

I think there's a persona that we're familiar with, which is an employee or a coworker who has a backbone.

And if you're a mature person, you will not only understand that, but appreciate that.

We'll see if market incentives mean that the average person wants that.

Because then being very pliable is quite reassuring and comforting.

But

it was the case that when O3 recently released a model that was considered very sycophantic, and the reason that was done is just because they released two versions of a model and like testing.

People really liked the sycophantic one, and that's the one they deployed.

It wasn't some intentional, you know, like manipulative design, as far as we can tell.

It was just like, this is what people seem to like.

We're deploying it.

It was like just A-B testing it.

But if you run an F-A B test, you end up with a porn website, right?

Like, that's actually where you end up.

You end up kind of zeroing in on the lowest common denominator.

Yeah.

You know, if you split tested food, you'd probably end up with cheesecake.

Right.

Like, is that really what we want?

Yeah, yeah, that's not.

Necessarily.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And again, you just end up with, it's kind of the basic time on site CTR, Mr.

Beastification optimization thing of.

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Yep, yep, 100%.

Um,

here's my hopeful vision.

I don't know if I'm not predicting this will actually happen.

Um,

one of the reasons

it's sort of hard in today's world to make bespoke content that

fits everybody's own highest

aspirations, where like Mr.

Beast can make something which is, I respect what he does, but it's something that a lot of people will find engaging, but not necessarily at a deep level.

And there just aren't enough sort of like Spielbergs to make a bespoke movie for you.

That could change with AI, where like the amount of talented dedication that every single person can experience can be much higher.

I feel like intuitively, that should be more compelling.

And, you know, if you're like brain rotted from TikTok, they'll make like brain rotted content that's like at least better than what's on TikTok, or they'll be more engaging on a minute-by-minute basis than watching a video game at the bottom end of your screen and then watching like, I don't even know what like some bullshit on the top.

So I could imagine, and we know from our personal lives that like there's meaningful experiences are like compelling to us.

It's just hard to access them as immediately as TikTok is.

To the extent that AIs can design an environment for us, which like gives us those meaningful experiences as easily as YouTube shorts are served to us.

There's a positive story to be told there.

I'm not necessarily.

That's a really good take.

Yeah.

Yeah, you're very hopeful in that regard, which is refreshing.

Are there actually any leaders in the industry right now?

Is that right to talk about that?

I guess you've got distribution or power, but really what most people mean when they talk about this is the thing that I use and this is why I like it is vibe.

Like I just like the way it speaks to me.

It seems to make the fewest errors.

Yeah, what's kind of the state of the industry?

It doesn't say anything there's a clear leader,

which is very interesting.

I think a couple of years ago, you could have predicted that not only would there be more differentiation,

not only would more people fall out of the race because it's getting more and more expensive to train these models, but each of them would pursue a unique angle.

One of them would be more of a chat bot, one of them would be a coder, one of them would be a remote worker.

They might be trained in different architectures, which have different strengths and weaknesses.

As far as we can tell, that's not the case.

And there's more companies that are competitive today

than it was the case maybe two years ago.

So

I don't know what explains this.

It could just be that it's hard to keep a secret.

Like if you release 01,

just by playing with it, you learn about how it was trained,

how fast it answers questions, teaches you how big the model is, a bunch of things like smart researchers can figure out.

And so then DeepSeek and look at that and of course do a bunch of innovations themselves.

But also every company, not just DeepSeek, will look at what's a different tier and be able to sort of backtrack about how it might have been engineered.

So there is a way in which things are sort of becoming more and more.

Yeah, that is strange.

How did Apple fuck it so badly?

I have no idea.

I have no idea.

I think there's just be like a much simpler.

Maybe there's like not a complex answer to that.

Maybe there's like a very simple answer.

It's just big company doesn't make a priority.

It doesn't happen.

Yeah, maybe.

How important are individual visionaries when it comes to AI development?

If there's huge teams of people working on this,

aggregated data learning, you know, it feels like there's a lot of ballast in the system there.

Is there still a great man of AI theory coming along?

I think it seems to me that there are great researchers who have very specific talents.

They have talents in not necessarily just AI research, but in how to code up the GPUs or accelerators so that you're getting these like 25%, 50% performance gains, which are huge.

But it's more of that kind of thing, I think, like more technical than

from my sense, there's not like I'm just good at thinking, uh, and I can like write a great manifesto, and therefore I'm the sort of person moving the organization forward.

What are the current constraints to progress?

Is it software?

Is it energy?

Is it coding?

Is it data sets?

Is it the savant fucking guy that fixes the hardware?

Yeah, and to be clear, I'm a podcaster, so I'm looking from the outside in.

My sense is that given that this RRL scheme, so the thing that 01, 03 is, uh, where it's trained to solve particular problems, math, code, so forth,

the thing that's really lacking now

is not compute,

but the relevant data.

So OpenAI said in their blog post about 01 that they, or sorry, Dario said in a blog post about XOR controls that currently, as of a couple of months ago, they're spending on the order of a million dollars on RL.

And keep in mind that they're spending on the order of like a billion dollars trading the base model, which they do this RL on top of.

So the reason they're not spending more on RL is just that they don't have the relevant data.

They don't have these like bespoke and you know environments where you're like trying to do a job and there's a Slack and there's a mail and whatever open and you need to figure out how to still solve the problem.

And you need to like learn from every all these different kinds of jobs in the economy.

You need them to come up with these different

analysis.

But you can't do reinforcement learning without that.

Exactly.

Right.

Okay.

What about China?

Does China have a different vision for AI than the West does?

I I I genuinely think nobody nobody in America knows, or like very few people in America know.

Nobody I've talked to in America knows.

Well, we saw DeepSeek's models, and they're actually unusually open.

They open source their key architectural secrets,

which in many cases are ahead of some American labs.

Like DeepSeek had techniques like MLA that

multi-head latent attention, it doesn't matter, whatever, nerd shit, that Meta didn't have,

which is spending way more money.

In fact, it had techniques that Meta had invented, like multi-token prediction, that Meta wasn't able to do the engineering to actually implement in their new models.

And DeepSeek was able to figure it out.

So obviously, it's going to be like a big country with lots of talented people.

They're open for now.

DeepSeek at least is open for now.

We'll see, especially given how popular it's become and how Xi Jinping met with its leader and all the other industrial heads, where they take it from here.

Just use your

kind of knee-deep in the world of thinking about China, what it is that it wants to achieve, its history.

You've got good context here.

What do you think they are thinking when it comes to why do we want to have such a powerful AI?

I think that they have shown a willingness to accelerate on all technology.

They showed it in the 90s with the internet,

where people said that this will cause the collapse of the Communist Party.

And they made the bet that no, this will actually give us unique insight into our society

because we can monitor everything everybody is doing on the internet in a way that we cannot do right now.

With AI, the problem,

I think it like genuinely tilts the balance even more in favor of the state.

Right now on WeShat or something, you have these these manual sensors, thousands, maybe potentially hundreds of thousands of them, who will take down content.

With AI, you have a system which could do that for you.

If you try to use the AI to do something that the party doesn't want you to do, as these AIs get smarter, they can internalize, they can be aligned to the party's model spec that says, like, we do not want to talk about X topic, Y topic, Z topic.

If somebody tries to do this thing, you want to report them to us.

And a smarter model is just better able to follow these instructions

than Opticon.

Yes.

That possibility is live.

Of course, as the economic value from these models becomes more

evident, I just think it's not clear.

Obviously, they would pursue this.

They are obsessed with technology and industrial policy.

Why they would neglect this is not clear to me, especially now that we have, like,

you know, it became the national champion because of the events of the last few months.

Right.

So might AI perfect authoritarian governance then?

I think it'll certainly make it more

plausible.

Right now you have this dynamic where Xi Jinping has the same 10 to the 15 flops in his brain that every single person in China has.

You could have a system in the far future where the central it is much more possible for the central node to concentrate compute.

And just as Elon can monitor every single person at this factory, like, or you know, AI Elon can,

it might be possible for a panopticon kind of thing to have eyes everywhere.

Copies of the thing can have eyes everywhere.

Yeah,

I think that's very plausible.

I wonder if you could, a slightly more hopeful vision, mimic a kind of benevolent dictatorship, you know, executing one

aligned vision at a massive scale, but in a good way, in a way that actually helps people, you know, that encourages people to put down the ice cream or to do the whatever to try and balance what you need from free market and freedom and agency for people with oversight and guidance and looking after from above.

I don't know.

Yeah, I worry about any vision like that.

I mean,

history is replete with people who think they know better.

Just,

I mean, I think it'll be a genuine conundrum now that we're talking about it because, yeah, it will be the case people are getting like addicted to their AI porn and, you know, like the brain rot that will come out of this.

And I think it will be the government might say,

this thing, which will be the main way in which we're interfacing with the world, it's not some peripheral technology.

This will be the main way we're interfacing with the world, learning about the world, the main way we have relationships potentially.

It needs to have these certain policies.

And I guess a balance will have to be struck between the government saying it can't do certain things or can do certain things and people wanting the individual freedom of like, look,

this is the mind I have a relationship with.

I want it to have these characteristics.

I also don't know what the balance there should be.

I lean more libertarian, but I think that, like, yeah, maybe, maybe that means you got to make a trade-off where like some people will get addicted to

sort of it's similar to the drugs legalization conversation, except the drug legalization doesn't have an upside in the way that like AI, that sort of niche has an upside.

I wonder whether it's more competitive.

I wonder whether drugs are more compelling than a super intelligent AGI that's able to trigger every bit of dopamine dopamine and meaning and serotonin and vasopressin in exactly the way that you need at that moment using your micro expressions and with full context and understanding your genetics.

And

like, yeah, maybe actually you fixed the drug epidemic by just getting everybody addicted to GPT-10 or something instead.

I'm so old.

I want my girlfriend.

You recently spent some time in China.

Yes.

What'd you learn?

A lot of things I learned, honestly, and I'm embarrassed to say, are things I should have known beforehand.

Obviously, China is a very big country.

It is another thing to see it viscerally.

There are cities you've never heard of, which have 20 million people.

We're in Austin, it has about a million people.

There's 160 cities in China that have a million people.

And so just a ginormous scale of

everything from the cities to

airports, train stations, factories,

Driving through towns or entire megapolises, which are full of factories, you know, you hear the phrase, China is the world's factory, and you're seeing like a city the size of Austin being one of like a hundred hubs of manufacturing.

Like all that's happening here is shit is being made

is an interesting experience.

Again,

look, I'm a tourist.

I'm talking about like my experiences for two weeks.

I'm not pretending to be an expert.

There are interesting things in terms of

I think things are obviously more

on knife.

People feel more sort of

nervous than they did a couple of years ago, but it's still, it's not North Korea.

Like people will just tell you their opinions over dinner and stuff.

I'm curious about China because the sort of competition there is the main element of what will happen in the 21st century other than AI.

How do you mean?

Well, it's a country the size of America in terms of the economy, much bigger in terms of population.

For now.

Yes.

And the fact that we just don't think about it that much,

or I think people just have this very adversarial attitude towards it because neither side understands each other that well

is a shame.

Yeah, and I just wanted to have a more sort of visceral understanding of it.

What are the cultural vibes like though?

You made a great point about you think it's kind of a, I don't know, just a more powerful, more sophisticated North Korea.

Oh, no,

I don't think it's like North Korea.

No, no, no.

That's what a lot of people that haven't been there think.

It's like, oh, it's surveillance state, using gate analysis to get your social credit.

And no one will ever be able to speak the truth.

Yeah, yeah.

What if their family, you know.

You know what's really interesting?

Well, I was there, I ran into some students who

were like, I would never move to America.

And I was like, why?

I was like, well, you guys have school shootings.

It just seems unsafe.

And living in America, we know that it just like, it happens.

It's a sort of like thing you hear about in the news, but it's not a common part of American experience.

Right.

And I think a lot of the,

it's just true of probably every country, but I think a lot of the sort of archetypes we have or the stereotypes we have of Chinese life are just like.

You hear about this, but this is not like a common, just like getting arrested in the street or something.

It doesn't commonly happen.

No, that being said, I doing what I do with podcasting, I would decide not to feel comfortable doing that in China.

Uh, and I don't want to take like I think it is sort of evil to have uh a system of repression, uh, not just in speech, but at every level from your savings are taxed so that they can pay for this industrial policy, you can't get your money out of the country.

Um, uh-huh.

But yeah, i it just the sort of usual things you learn from travel.

It's a more it's more similar than you expect.

Um,

yeah.

Is it true that they're using social media to just supercharge everyone into hyper-producers, or are that kids getting brain rotted by TikTok as well?

Oh,

when I was in a mall in Chongqing, a couple kids.

So, by the way, one interesting thing in China is there were very few foreigners.

Very few foreigners.

Foreigners.

You look at a sea of people in a major city and you won't see a white person there,

especially outside of Shanghai and Beijing.

So, anyways, because of that, these Chinese kids would come up to us and try to take selfies or something.

Right, because you were an attraction.

Yes.

Right.

Yeah.

Okay.

Exotic.

One girl approached us.

They're like, are you guys in like a rock band or something?

Sick.

I mean, who are not?

But that's like, I guess, how sort of how we're formed.

Anyway, so these kids come up to us and they're like,

we're just talking.

I'm making small talk.

I'm like, oh, you guys in high school.

What do you guys do in your free time?

And they're like, oh, we just watch TikTok.

I'm like, what do you guys watch?

Oh, he's like a couple hours, you know, we just sexy girls.

I'm like, what?

Sexy girls.

I'm like, what do you mean?

And so he pulls out his phone.

It's like, literally, just like sexy girls, sexy girls, sexy girls, Asian sexy girls.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Right.

Well, I guess I didn't check.

I'm colorblind, Chris.

Okay, so the

Kale

TikTok algorithm

doesn't seem to actually be.

Oh, sorry, is the meme supposed to be that our TikTok is like the fucked up shit and

there's like a bunch of mining engineers?

Exactly.

Unless, actually, if you looked more closely, this is your issue.

Because you turned away too quickly because the sexy girls made you feel uncomfortable.

What you would have seen is that they were all sexy girls doing

simultaneous equations.

Yeah, exactly.

On a fucking blackboard.

To you, it would have just been a whatever board.

I think a lot of young people were quite like

the economy is not doing well.

If you want to work in a tier one city, so China classifies their cities by tier one, tier two, tier three,

there's a huko system, which means that you actually need a visa to basically live in the tier one cities.

And if you want to work there, which is supposed to be this sort of dream, you're working 997, so from 9 a.m.

to 9 p.m., or sorry, 996,

six days a week.

And they're just like a lot of stress.

And there's a phenomenon where young people just either want to work for less pay in a tier three city where their life will be

much less prosperous, but it's just like not as much stress, or they just are like want to leave the system altogether.

There is like a visceral sense of,

I think people have this very bimodal view of China where either the system is about to collapse because she is cracking down and it just like doesn't work at all, or they're like about to launch the space lasers and it's already over.

That hype of productivity and then 996.

Yeah, exactly.

And I think it's like somewhere in between where like in America, we realize some things are going well, some things are not going as well.

I do think the CCP has been bad for Chinese growth.

You can acknowledge that China is a powerful country that's at the frontier of a lot of technologies without saying that the government is like optimal

or that its policies make sense.

What else do Chinese people think about the West?

I am a little worried that it's coming across as like I'm like an China expert where I like I want to clarify.

I'm like, I was a tourist there.

You went for two weeks and you've spoken to a couple of people.

Exactly.

I don't know Chinese.

It was interesting to me that many of them wanted Trump to win.

I won before the election.

They respect, they really respect Elon Musk.

And I asked them why, and they said, because he's successful and we value success in China,

which I respect, like that cultural attitude.

It's like against the sort of cultural tendencies that we often have here.

How unmolested are the stories about people like Trump and Elon going over to them?

Because I saw in your blog post you mentioned that accessing the internet is a bit of an adventure or a minefield.

Yeah, it's like more of a pain than I expected.

You can't just surf shock VPN your way around it, I'm guessing.

There's only a couple of VPNs that work, so you want to make sure that you have one of those installed before you go.

Yeah, I'm not sure, honestly.

Yeah, I'm not sure.

I'd just be interested.

If you've got such

all-encompassing control of the internet,

why not

curate the messages just a bit more, just a bit more, just a bit more?

You've seen with RT and Russia that, you know, that all manner of different, just subliminal breadcrumbs being left around.

I don't know.

Maybe

you simply can't coordinate well enough to do this.

Maybe there is some sense that we actually need to allow people to understand what's happening at the rest of the world.

Maybe it's some 5D chess move that actually by allowing people to like Elon Musk and Donald Trump, when we go to do the thing, they're going to be, I don't know.

But it just seems

I'm interested about why any positive visions of

an area of the world that they are pretty head-to-head with would be allowed, given that you don't necessarily need to allow it.

You have the facility, you have the opportunity to be able to stop that from happening.

My understanding is that they realize that in order for them to be economically dynamic, they need engagement with the world.

So, if your

software developers can't read American code, you're just like,

it's a big problem, right?

So.

Well, I suppose you need to, sorry, just on that.

You need people to be exposed to bits and pieces of American culture in an accurate way, or else how do you know what to design to be able to export to America?

Right.

Like, you need to have an understanding of that.

And it

can't just be that you've got a few

Austin equivalent cities and all that these people do is get Faraday caged off and watch American TV.

Okay, you're the America expert.

You will tell us what it is that the white people want and then we'll go and design it.

That would be too much.

You need to distribute it.

So maybe that's maybe that's a good way to put it.

They do have a very impressive system of

in 2018,

Tesla opened up at Shanghai Giga Factory.

BYD sales, I think, dropped like 25% that year or something, or on that order.

And Tesla, sorry, China did that deliberately because they had sunk hundreds of billions of dollars over the preceding decades decades trying to build up their EV industry.

And these companies were producing products which were not compelling to either domestic purchasers or to foreign purchasers.

They were just like not designed well,

just as you said, right?

And

just like by catfishing Tesla,

they were like, they forced their companies to catch up.

And now BYD sells more than Tesla.

No way.

Yes.

Wow.

It's, I think, the best-selling

car company in the the world.

Maybe fact-check that.

But

I think we should do a similar thing.

I think we have this idea that we can just export,

we can just prevent importing these amazing electric vehicles from China, the solar, whatever they're great at.

I don't think that's the way you win.

I think the way you win is you do the exact same thing to them.

You guys open up a factory

in Detroit.

You teach us how you're doing what you're doing because they can do things we can't do.

And then we build up these local supply chains, agglomerations of knowledge, and we force American companies to be able to compete with Frontier in the world.

Because in the long run, the solution can't just be to keep them out, right?

In the long run, the solution has to be, you have to be competitive.

Yes.

Yeah.

It's very much sort of a

cordoned off scarcity mindset.

Yes.

That is,

well, if we can take what

the first order effect is positive, that's what's most important.

And you go, yeah, but what about two and three and four and five?

Yeah.

yeah, and I think we've sort of like given up on being able to lead in the physical world in the long run and um uh

I think there's this interesting dame, which is you were asking earlier about we have all these problems.

We're hoping that AI will just solve them or they don't come up.

This is definitely true in the China-US competition thing, where I think people who are paying attention to their top companies, their technology and so forth, notice that in 10, 20 years, they're making so much progress that in many of the most important technological domains in the world, they will be leading.

But there's this idea that, well, we will get HEI first.

And if we do that, then everything is solved.

I think in this domain, this sort of thinking actually doesn't make sense because AGI still needs access to the physical world.

You will still need to manufacture robots.

In fact, all that data will be cordoned off where that manufacturing is happening.

So there might be increasing returns to have it.

There's an unlock if you've got, if you've kind of prepared in in advance.

Oh, that's interesting.

What else do most people not understand about the tension between China and the West in either direction?

This is not a point from me, but from Dan Wong.

I think people don't appreciate how the Chinese political system works and how it just selects for a wholly different kind of person than the American political system.

If you look at what fraction of Congress is lawyers, I think it's like a majority.

It's just shockingly large.

And there's like no engineers, or there might be like one or two engineers in Congress, whereas it's the exact opposite in China.

You look at the Politburo,

these are people who have like PhDs in chemical engineering or in petroleum engineering and random like heavy industry shit like that.

And the way another thing people don't understand is just how intertwined the party is into industry, especially this kind of heavy industry,

where for somebody to get promoted, you know, you might start off as like the equivalent of a mayor, then you become the governor of a totally different area.

So the central government at the top.

The central party will tell you, you know, you're going to go like you're mayor of Austin.

Now you're going to be governor of Delaware.

Now you're going to be part of, now you're going to run like a steel company.

Now you're going to be part of the cabinet.

And maybe then in the future, you're going to run the country.

So

they also don't appreciate how decentralized the system is.

In America, about 50% of government spending happens at the national level.

50% happens at the local level.

In China, 85% happens at the local level, 15% at the national level.

So there's all these experiments that are happening.

And also, it's a much bigger country where

each locality, each province is trying to implement the things that the central government wants.

At the same time, the central government has way more power over appointment.

You know, every town gets to elect its own mayor and every state gets to elect its own governor in America.

That's not the case, obviously, in China, right?

They're rotated around.

This can lead to more meritocratic outcomes where you are promoted because you did a good job running this town.

Obviously, that can go wrong and has gone wrong in recent times where you're promoted for loyalty.

But

yeah, I guess I just didn't appreciate all these different ways in which it is a totally different system.

What does that result in?

What's the outcome of that?

That's how the system is set up.

What are the capabilities, strengths, weaknesses that that enables on the back end?

So for many decades, these leaders were promoted.

And compared to each other, so you are promoted if, compared to every single governor in the country,

your province has the highest growth rate.

And this growth rate was just measured during your duration there.

And the best way to increase short-term growth rates is just to build shit.

And this worked for the first two decades of liberalization, where China was because of the Cultural Revolution, because of the Great Leap Forward, because of the decades and decades of war beforehand, the Japanese invasion, it was just so much poorer than a country of that size or that human capital would be.

So you can build anything and it'd be worth it, right?

There's like nothing that exists.

You build a railway, air train station,

we need it, we need it.

Exactly.

100%.

We do it yesterday.

And then the system sort of malfunctioned where

now

they were incentivized to just build cities that literally nobody lives in.

You say they build bridges to nowhere and knock down 500-year-old monasteries to make it happen.

And ironically, here, we can't even rebuild fallen bridges, right?

What is it?

Overproduction and under consumption and underproduction and over consumption.

Exactly.

Exactly.

Another important thing you need to understand,

again, not an expert by any means, you're hearing from a tourist,

but another important,

in order to understand the economy, you have to understand the system of financial repression that exists in China, where if you are saving money, you are getting 1% interest from the bank.

And no bank is allowed to offer you more interest than that because the governments control the banks.

All that money is basically given out as loans to companies that the

state prefers.

And

it decides, like it looks at,

for China to be a dominant country in 20 years, we need robotics.

So we're going to give a bunch of money to lend a bunch of money to robotics companies and semiconductor companies and whatever,

or to infrastructure projects.

So it is a systematic redistribution from average people, from savers to this kind of industrial policy, to these companies, which is often very inefficient because there's no market that's doing these investment decisions.

It's just this sort of system of government relations and exactly central planning.

That's interesting.

Dude, I

it feels to me like the world is at a fever pitch.

I'm very detached.

I've actually got a TFS at the moment.

I've got Trump fatigue syndrome and news fatigue syndrome.

I've been kind of checked out since November, December time, which is why I haven't talked much about politics and things that have been going on.

I've been real interested in stuff that I think is a little bit more evergreen,

but just the pace of fucking fucking news and change and your ability to be able to discern between, okay, do I need to pay attention to this?

Is this a really big deal?

Is the president getting shot a big deal?

Because it happened less than a year ago.

As did bombing Iran, as did, you know, pick

20 other crazy things that have kind of never happened before.

And it's just here today, tomorrow's fish and chips wrapper.

And

the advent of AI,

rising tensions with China, what's China going to do?

A fucking ton of country.

Any country that they can get within reaching distance, basically, that's near them.

All of this stuff that's going on is

it really doesn't surprise me that people are feeling a little bit overwhelmed.

Like the pace now of this is a...

It's a difficult one.

It's a difficult one to try and work out how to navigate the world as a sane human who needs to keep abreast of the stuff that's important, but also doesn't want to get lost in the swell of just total bullshit.

Like even today, like so much of the stuff that we've talked about, fuck, like

five theses of

research that could be done on each different one of these things.

And they're all going to be world changing if they come to pass.

And they could be, you know, tons of different permutations of how the world can end up being in the future if it does.

Like, that's a lot.

And they all interact with each other.

Correct.

And I read this thing from Adam Lane Smith the other day saying, your system is designed for stress, but not for complexity.

That your issue is not that you're working hard, it's that your life is not sufficiently simple.

And I kind of get the sense that when people talk about life being hard, they don't necessarily actually maybe mean that.

What they mean is life is complex.

Because I think that most people, even the laziest people, not bad at working hard.

What they really struggle with with is complexity.

Prioritizing.

Yeah, executive function.

Okay, how am I going to triage this?

You know, one of the biggest reasons that procrastination happens is that you don't know what to do next.

You know what to do and you know how to do it.

Fuck it.

Like that, I mean, then we're talking, that's real procrastination, right?

You know what to do and you know how to do it.

If you're still not doing it, we got a problem.

Right.

If you don't know what to do, or if you know what to do and you don't know how to do it, well,

it gets thrown under the fucking nomenclature of procrastination, but I don't think it is.

Not in the same way.

But yeah, just, I think there's,

I'm not saying you've scared me, but there's just lots going on.

You know, there's so much going on.

I think that this high level of complexity is something that for a lot of people is overwhelming.

Yeah.

I mean, I think

this is similar.

Do you have this tendency, by the way, to every time you start preparing for a guest, every single thing that you learn about is like

titrated through what they study?

So I'm going to tell you, like, I'm reading the Stalin biography from Krokin to prepare for him.

And it's so,

the period of change between

1880 and 1930, the amount of technological change, geopolitical change,

I think

even today we haven't experienced anything like that again.

As much as we think the world has been changing in the past,

it just doesn't compare to 1905, the airplane is invented.

1914, it's like, and then 1917, it's a decisive in World War I.

The tank literally wasn't a thing when World War I started.

By the end of the war,

it's a tank warfare all around.

Radio,

trains, fucking

telegraph steamships.

Just like the world is changing so rapidly.

There's all these new ideas that are coming around, communism, fascism.

You have all these old regimes, all these monarchies and aristocracies in Europe, in Russia that are getting revolted because of this big war.

And

even all that wasn't as big as AGI is going to be.

Fuck.

Yeah, dude, it's

what a time to be alive.

George, one of my friends, has a really interesting question.

You know, Teal's originality question, what do you believe that most people would disagree with or find abhorrent or something?

He's got one which is

what is currently ignored by the media but will be studied by historians.

Have you got an answer to that?

Is there something you can think of?

What is currently ignored by the media but will be studied by historians?

Trying to not make it all about AI.

Well, I think certainly not necessarily being ignored by the media, although I guess some areas are a little

certainly like

industrial capacity.

Just how much stuff can your country produce?

Is it the future-proofing for AI?

Yeah, partly it's relevant to geopolitical competition.

When the Ukraine war happened,

you know, we've been, we should have, obviously, it was right to give give them the

munitions to fight Russia.

But the fact that we can't restockpile all the weapons that we've given them is like sort of worrying

if we end up in another conflict with another country.

What's your answer?

Population decline is my usual go-to.

I think it's a big deal.

The

impact of smartphones, more generally, the impact of technology on mental health, on outsourcing of thinking, you know, that article from the New Yorker, which, you know, if it happens with AI, because AI is just such an effective assistance,

I have to assume that basically the same thing happens, but at a lower level when you're using screens for anything else, too, that the more effortful that you make the process of learning, I mean, I guess it could be too hard.

It's like climb Everest and then read that word, then come back down, then climb Everest and read the second word.

You know what I mean?

Those would be two, I think, that

the retrospective of

what did we do to people with the free access to this kind of technology, I think, would be an interesting one.

Like, will it be looked back on as

the

prototype version, this really early

rough-hewn,

like, like when you hear about doctors smoke camels, you know, in fucking surgery, uh,

and you go, how?

How were they allowed to do this?

It's so, you know, dirty and unclean, and the outcomes were so negative.

I wonder whether the same is going to be seen of use of technology between 2010 and 2020.

Has this changed your own consumption of content?

My limbic system is pretty fucking hijackable, man.

So,

but I try.

I try to be as mindful as possible.

You know, it's largely putting guardrails in place wherever you can how do you feel about the fact that your own content is served through youtube and i don't know how big a deal shorts are for you or short form stuff um it's a huge deal for me they crush in terms of numbers they're completely fucking useless in terms of everything else

i disagree on me it's been different on youtube

shorts yeah in terms of what what's the outcome that you're getting

um i had a video with sierra payne who is now my most popular guest which was stuck at like 40k for the first six months.

This was before my podcast had this recent growth spurt.

And then we started making shorts for it, and it's at like

3 million, something like that.

Oh, okay.

That's interesting.

And the shorts always have like 20 million views.

Yeah.

10 million views.

Okay.

Well, maybe you're just doing shorts better than me.

It's important.

My preference is always plays on audio platforms.

YouTube people, I love you.

But

the show has always been Spotify first, Apple Podcasts first.

Yeah.

and you know, it might sound stupid for

my own

naming of the most beautiful podcasts in the world, at least when we get it right,

to be an audio-first podcast.

But just for me, that's where the most loyal audience tends to be.

It's the most predictable in terms of numbers.

It's the one that seems to be the most considered.

And a lot of this is just you could change this overnight by removing reply threads on YouTube.

You could remove this.

They did remove this overnight by getting rid of the down downvote button on YouTube as well.

So

I've always liked the audio side of the platform.

The problem is the discoverability.

It's not there.

No, you can funnel.

You can funnel from YouTube.

We found some good ways of funneling from YouTube across onto audio.

How do you do that?

So we release episodes 10 hours early.

On audio?

On audio.

Yeah.

So if you want to get access 10 hours early, and the pinned comment for every episode is access all episodes 10 hours before YouTube by subscribing on Apple Podcasts or or Spotify.

And a lot of people will come and comment on the YouTube and say, I listened to this this morning on Apple,

but I came here to watch it on YouTube.

So you end up getting two plays, but I don't think you would get the same in reverse.

So we kind of got like a weird Patreon type scenario, like paywalled thing.

10 hours early on

on audio.

We went video enabled on Spotify, which I know that it was a transition that you made as well.

That was good.

The Spotify partner program is really good.

Some changes here and there.

Your Twitter strategy is very strong.

That's good.

We've gone very hard on Instagram, which has been...

Well, you got the looks, Chris.

Most of the fucking shorts are just of Matthew McConaughey chirping about something.

I rarely, it was a really, really funny video.

I've only guessed it on two shows in the last 12 months.

One was Rogan and the other one was my friend Mike's show.

And it's me chirping away.

It's quite a good, I think it's quite a good take about whether you, how you know, whether or not you should end a relationship and like just classic knee stuff like

it's 55 seconds long and it's just me chirping chirping chirping chirping chirping chirping chirping and then the final scene of it cuts to mike and he goes yeah

it's so funny to just have a video where the entirety of your contribution is yeah and i i realized how many times that must be the case yeah but uh yeah dude i've been it's been so fucking awesome to watch your ascendancy.

You know, because we met, we met at the Slate Star Codec meetup

in March.

And I know it was in March because it was just after I moved out here.

March of 2022.

Oh, damn.

That was almost.

Somehow it felt even earlier than that.

Well, unless we met when I came out here the first time in.

November.

So I only came out in November of 21, but I actually searched your name to see if I already had a prep talk from previous stuff.

And if I go into it, I'll see

27th of February 2022.

And I've just got at Dwarkesh underscore SP written here.

And there's like a bunch of other stuff.

Valve index with Vive 3.9 trackers, VR chat with mods, Nia Scion on Twitter if you want help.

It was also such a, I mean, it was during COVID.

The Ukrainians are using Grinder to find Russian troops.

I've got such.

We can train super intelligence on your Apple notes, Chris.

You do not want that.

Holy shit.

But yeah, that was the ACX meetup notes.

Yeah.

It was a crazy time because it was during COVID.

And I felt like I met so many great people in Austin, just hanging out around that time.

It was,

I don't know, man, there's something about,

I wonder whether everybody has this.

And I get the sense that they don't, and I can't work out why I do.

I'm so fucking fortunate with the people that I bump into early on.

Yes.

Holy shit.

Yes.

It's like

people that I've known for like

a long time

end up becoming

influential or successful or or

like really virtuous in some way.

Like the variety of different trajectories of shit that goes well.

And it's definitely not me, right?

I mean, I am a common denominator between these people in that I know them, but I definitely haven't fucking influenced them.

And I'm relatively introverted.

I spend way too much time on my own.

So I'm like, how

what the fuck is it?

What's the single thread that's drawing me through all of this?

Maybe,

I don't know.

The advantage of being someone that doesn't go out that much is that it takes usually a pretty good thing to get you out of the house.

So you're a bit more discerning in that the better things, you meet better people.

I don't know.

But holy shit, like I think about some of the places that different people, like you're a perfect example, one random meetup.

Then we were in this degenerate fucking signal group chat for the last like three years.

And

yeah, this arc that that kind of you you even nearly quit the podcast you weren't even doing it i don't think you'd started it during covet and then stopped and it was just like languishing there yeah it was called the lunar society at the time um people thought it was i was talking about something like uh some crypto coin that's gonna go to the moon

so then i changed the name tell tell the story about where that comes from because there's a book um

can i comment real quick on the meetup um i think at the time you had 350 000 youtube subscribers correct yeah i was like whoa this guy is killing it uh which you were.

And then we're just like blown up like a 20x from there.

And I think this is like a really interesting phenomenon where

I have also had this experience of having met a lot of great people who spend,

who are like super busy and

spend time like teaching me stuff.

The main way the podcast has gotten better is just that people have like, I've had mentors who have just spent a bunch of time.

And these people are, if they're economists, they're in their 60s or 50s, people like Brian Kaplan, Tyler Cowan.

But if they're like AI researchers, they're my age, right?

But they're still my mentors and they've spent so much time teaching me stuff.

I had no right to their time or attention.

And I wonder what you think about this now, because I'm sure you get inundated.

And I've hit you up this way of like, what is your advice?

Can you teach me about X or Y thing?

And I'm sure you're not.

You're someone asking you to teach them.

Yeah, or not even like connect me to somebody, come on my podcast.

And dozens of people have done this for me.

So how do you balance the sort of like trade-off between being like a bad person?

Well,

you feel like you've got some karmic debt that you need to repay because of the number of.

This is a really interesting question and a challenge that feels like a little bit of a champagne problem, right?

Oh, so many people need your time.

So many people did you favors and now you have the problem of people asking you to repay it and so forth.

But you're right, because you need to triage your time and you can't do everything for everyone.

And

the weirdest thing about

growth towards success in any domain, whatever version of success that you or me have managed to achieve, is that you need to become increasingly good at saying no.

And the pace at which your discernment of no, like the waterline, the barometer at which no is deserved.

and you shouldn't feel guilty about it.

It should be instant.

It shouldn't take any sort of mind share

It is a continuous moving target.

And you need to hypertrophy this muscle over and over and over and over again.

And

there's shit that you would have begged to have said, had the opportunity to say yes to only 12 months ago that now needs to be an automatic no.

But how do you deal with the situations where when you were starting out, when I was starting out, I had like people gave you a leg up.

I had like zero.

It wasn't like, am I going to say yes to Dwar Kash's product?

I was like, who?

What?

The Lunar Society?

And they said yes.

They had better things to do.

They're just like, somebody reached out.

They seem like they've done a good job coming up with smart questions.

Let's do it.

Well, and that just like, if your waterline is always moving up,

where's the room for the fledgling other person to come through?

This is a question I ask myself a lot.

It's a real smart question.

I'm glad that we're asking ourselves it at the same time.

The one caveat or the

difference in kind, not just a difference of degree,

I'm going to guess that most of the people that you spoke to, that you asked for their time, except maybe Tyler Cowan and Brian Cappon too, I guess, a little bit, but they're not, their role is not primarily hardcore curators of other information.

They're not distillers across the board, right?

That's your job.

Your job is to be the hub with all of these different spokes going off it, if that makes sense.

And that is a coordination problem.

Like your primary issue is coordination.

You have, in some ways, a hard life learning things that are complex, so on and so forth.

It's so tough.

The life is speaking.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You have a,

there are challenges that you need to lift, even if they're only cognitively, right?

But the main thing is complexity.

Like the main thing is the complexity.

And I don't think that your issue is with doing things.

It's with adding complexity in.

To go back to that Adam Lane Smith quote, I don't have a good answer for it, dude.

I definitely feel like my uh karmic repayment debt i feel like i'm wildly wildly uh overdrawn and that i need to i need to repay this fucking thing but also i i

where do i find i don't where do i find the time from where the fuck did the people who gave me the lego that being said

you're probably not giving yourself enough credit because when i think about

When I think about some of the situations that have happened, even just over the last week, there's a kid called Elliot Buick.

Buick.

So he's just turned 20.

He's British.

He used to work for trigonometry as a video editor.

And he, if I could bet a little bit of cash, you're already like fucking Bitcoin at 10K.

So it kind of doesn't work so much anymore.

But I would have certainly put cash on you three years ago.

I would, he's Bitcoin at $1.

Like I would absolutely throw some money at him.

There's a bunch of Jack Neal, if you know who he is, another young kid.

Like there's real, real smart young guys.

And I think when you're talent spotting, you're like, okay, this, this, there's something there.

Like, it really fills up the something that we went for this three-hour dinner at Flower Child, and we chatted.

I'm like, anything that you need, you can do the this, you can do that, that.

So, maybe I'm not spreading it super wide.

Nomatic needed.

They wanted an intro to this guy who did an amazing episode with a musician.

This episode with the musician did 3.2 mil.

The guy didn't have any sponsors.

My guy that does my ads didn't have, he needed his inventory filling.

And Nomatic needed to make more sales.

Nomatic sold loads of bags.

This guy got paid and my guy that was in the middle made money from all of it.

I'm like, that was just, that just like happened passively as like a byproduct of the ecosystem thing.

So yeah, maybe you're not

able to, if you're balls deep in a...

Stalin biography, you can't peel off to go and do a bunch of podcast appearances or fly across the country to see someone or let somebody sleep on your couch or do whatever it is that you think you should be doing virtuously in that way.

But I bet that you are adding a shit ton of value, even if it's just highly leveraged.

Here and there, little meetups, invites that you give to people, suggestions, intros, all around.

Hey, man, can you enjoy me?

Brian Kaplan, can you do?

You did Dominic Cummings for me, right?

Hey, man, can you do that?

Like, that's a, you know, a small,

what, five-second task, ten-second task?

But downstream from that, ended up with an episode that was really interesting.

Now I can introdu Dom to somebody else and so on and so forth.

So,

yeah, I think this may just be fucking cope, but uh, 100%.

I mean, you've uh on like trips to the airport, you've like spent the time just like chat with me about it.

I forgot about that.

Yeah, of course.

Hey, we need a fucking recruiter.

This is what I do to build your business out.

100%.

There's also an interesting element.

I don't know if this is,

I mean, it's sort of

for an audience of your size, it's easy to lose track of how many people you're helping vicariously.

Where even there's a weird dynamic where like you could help somebody in person, or you could help share an idea with a couple million people.

And like the trade-off, it just has to be,

it's weird to put it in that way because like one is sort of more commodified than the other.

And you have, and you can make better content.

You spend that hour prepping harder, thinking harder.

You could make better content for a couple million people.

It's a weird trade-off.

I remember a friend, Alex, gave this thought experiment of

imagine that one of your friends had broken down down the street and asked you to come and help him change a tire.

And Alex made this point that I would send him the RAC emergency roadside assistance thing because I've got that and I can send it.

And they'll do a better job.

And I get to stay at my laptop and do more work.

And he got criticized online because it's like, that's not what the person wanted.

What the person wanted was this sense of your time.

But I get the sense that at least in the kind of interactions that you're talking about, what people are looking for is outcomes.

They're not necessarily looking for inputs.

And if someone wants to come and kick the tires of a very busy person with kind of no real

defined outcome, that's not something that I would have ever done.

And I don't think if you're a young,

ambitious person that's listening to this, I do not think that you should go to anybody and be like, hey, man, like would just love to connect.

If you don't have anything to offer, what the fuck is the point of the connecting?

If it's, I have a few very specific questions that I know you probably have the answer to, and I would really appreciate two minutes for you to just give me these because they're big unlocks for me.

Super specific question, really specific ask.

Fantastic.

This person's put the work in.

They're evidently educated.

And you'll probably get the fucking 30 minutes on the call because they're walking the dog and they don't really mind or whatever.

Like when I think about the random people.

That I ended up on calls with because I asked for specific, very, very specific things on the come up.

I know that you're a big fan of

like

there's a huge unactualized opportunity that most people don't realize in a cold, a very well-written code DM.

Yeah.

Dude, like just fucking send it.

You've got nothing to worry about.

Yes.

Yeah.

And

I, you would also be surprised by how few people put in.

These famous people, they're getting, I don't know, a thousand whatever emails every month or something, but

how many of those are

I've spent a week coming up.

I mean, before I had

any sort of a name or something, I would still be able to get a big guest, but I would literally spend a week.

Here are the questions I'd ask you.

Just get past their not a moron filter

because they're getting a request every 30 seconds completely podcast or something.

Just going deep versus wide.

Now, there's a bunch of like tacit things about, well, that doesn't mean you should like have 5,000 words in the email, right?

Just like how to keep it brief.

It's also really interesting, by the way, as a side point, of what

ends up

salient to you when you get a cold email, or you're hiring somebody and what isn't.

Like the kinds of things you thought mattered while you were in college.

Whether you have, and I start an organization that does X or I have a master's in Y, just like never matters as opposed to the couple hours of extra work you would put into that email.

Yep.

How little credentials matter when hiring or something people don't appreciate.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's

there is an awful lot of opportunity available for someone who's just

courageous enough or ignorant enough to be able to get past that sort of first level of ick filter and also is prepared to do a little bit of preparation.

And another thing, I don't think people appreciate how much

If you write a good blog post about a topic that you think is relevant to somebody you're trying to reach,

It's almost guaranteed that not only will they read it, but weirdly, almost everybody who matters will read it.

Wasn't that how Tim Urban connected with Elon originally?

Really?

I think so.

That would so make sense.

I think he did a six-part series.

This is a good while ago now.

I think we're talking sort of 10 years ago now.

I think he did a six-part series on Elon.

And, you know, you're right.

If someone writes a good, even, not even viral, like

semi-widely circulated piece on you or your organization or a movement that you care about.

You will read that thing.

So I always think about this.

I always think about the fact that even the richest, busiest, most successful, highest status, hardest to get a hold of people in the world, they get plane delays.

Even if they're getting on a private jet, the weather's meant that they're held out.

And what are they going to do?

Well, they'll open YouTube.

You know, they'll open YouTube or they'll open Twitter or they'll open Substack or they'll check whatever it is that's been sent to them in a WhatsApp thread or something.

And if you're that meme, or you're that article, or you're that quote, or you're that whatever, it's just continuing to roll the dice.

And you can take advantage of a very unfair dynamic, which is that a lot of people have to work

anonymously.

Their work is shoveled out through an organization or through their boss or something, and they will work decade in, decade out, be extremely good at their jobs, and people will not have heard of them.

We're podcasting here and

I don't know, I like to think we put our work in or whatever, but like we're not working harder than somebody who's just at McKinsey or maybe like that gives a valence of something that's less valuable.

There's a lot of valuable work that you just don't, you're making policy.

You're a, you're a staffer for a policymaker or you're an engineer at a company.

It's kind of quiet grunt rock in a way.

And, uh, but we like, we can reach out to people and they will respond to us just because of it just so happens to be the case that our work is public facing.

and that just luck or slash our our choice design that's right um

you can take advantage of the dynamic by putting at least some of your work as much as possible out publicly right the blog posts the podcast

um

yeah i and there's also another dynamic where

people take for it a granted the people in their organization

I'm guessing that like the eighth most senior person at

microsoft gets less respect and attention from satya nadella than like a random blogger he likes um which which is weird but you can take advantage of that

yeah there's a seduction to visibility yeah i think uh and even if you're right even if someone's uh company is way smaller than yours or their their podcast is way different to yours or their um sub stack is much less circulated than yours if they're the person if they're the main person and you're not, or even if they're the main person and you are, but what they do is cool.

Yeah.

It's such an unlock.

It's such an unlock to do stuff like that.

I'm interested in what your

learning process looks like.

How do you learn?

What is that process at the moment?

In a way, it's very simple.

I read everything that they I mean, first of all, it's about picking the guest.

And I pick guests based on who I want to spend two weeks

reading everything they've ever written, talking to people in their field, learning from them what's interesting to ask them.

I'm sure you get inundated

by requests to come on your podcast.

And often it's by people who are like very big names, right?

And I'm guessing you could probably say no to most of them.

And yeah, same here where you,

what are we trying to do here, right?

This interview will last two hours.

Any interview I do will last two hours.

My life is the research that precedes that, the two weeks that precede that.

Um, I want that time to be valuable and meaningful to me and be time that I'll carry forward in my future interviews and my future endeavors in a way that'll be valuable.

And if it's um, if it's not somebody who has written something that's worth reading or done research that I really want to understand, you know, what are we doing here?

Uh, and then choosing your own type of torture for the next two weeks, yeah, choosing what you want to learn, which is complicated, but it also

um

it's sort of easy to forget how like much of a dream job this is where people are curious and they want to learn things, but they feel like they had to trade off their time and their job to do it, or they can only learn about certain things for their work.

We get to choose what we want to learn about and our job is just to learn about it, right?

It can be about any topic at all.

It can be about genetics, it can be about history, it can be about technical stuff.

And then, yeah, then there's a prep and you just read the research, talk to LLMs, like just, you know, get after it.

The Socratic methods.

Exactly.

And then ask the questions you actually want the answer to.

I think sometimes people have the sense that you need to ask about the intro chapter of their book.

You need to, why did you write it?

You know,

what is it about?

And no, you can just like, you can just ask the thing you want to ask.

I think people underrate how much immersion learning is

people can keep up with a lot.

People just like really want to boil down the conversation so that everybody can keep up.

I think they underrate the extent to which people can just miss a word or two here and there, but just getting to the crux of it will make it a more delightful experience.

And also, if it's a question you're not interested in, why would the audience care about it?

So,

yeah, it's fundamentally just be motivated by what you're curious about, who you want to interview, what you want to ask them,

what you want to interrupt.

Yeah.

Following your taste, we spoke about this before we started, but the ability to discern between something that's good and something that's not

is this lovely balance between gut instinct and sort of rational

assessment.

Douglas Murray once told me this story.

I'm aware that Douglas Murray's like the least fucking popular person on the entire internet at the moment after his interview with Dave Smith, but he's still got fucking absolute bangers, and this was one of them.

So he worked for this journalist.

Douglas got like, I think, four or five columns a week he does now.

And when he first started out, he's working for this legendary British journalist.

And this guy was getting toward the twilight of his career, like a classic journalist.

He'd accumulated a bunch of enemies and a bunch of supporters as well.

And he decided he had always wanted to get into theater.

So, he created a show about the life of Prince Charles, and the entire

show was in rhyming couplets.

The whole thing, and

it was

orthogonal, to say the least.

And

at the halftime interval of the opening night, there was no one left in the entire theater, including the cast.

Everybody had gone on opening night.

And this guy was devastated.

And obviously, all of the enemies that he'd accumulated throughout his life, they came out of the woodworks and they dug the knife in.

There were all of these criticisms in the media and stuff like that.

Douglas told me that he'd seen him.

at work the following week.

He said, what were you thinking?

Fucking West End show by the life of Prince Charles in rhyming couplets.

And you've got all of these people that are rubbing their hands together, waiting for you to fail.

And he said, Douglas, I followed my instincts.

And instincts, they may sometimes lead you wrong, but they're the only thing that's ever led you right.

Yes.

I was like, that's so fucking sick, dude.

That's so sick.

And what I found, whether it's with

Where I want to live,

the things I want to focus on learning, the direction of the show, the questions questions that I want to ask the guests, the sort of guests that I want to bring on, the people that I want to hire, the further that I've gone away from my instincts, the more that I've tried to reverse engineer, okay, well, what do the audience want to hear?

What are they interested in?

What would make the guests feel comfortable?

What do the guests want to talk about?

I'm like, in the nicest way possible, fuck the guest.

Like, what do I want to talk about?

Because that's what matters.

That's what matters.

And if you use your own instinct as this sort of weather vein, this GPS locator, if you're really fired up to speak about it, you have to assume that some non-insignificant cohort of other people are too.

And if you've been doing it for long enough, the people that are following you are following you for that same taste.

They are in the wake.

They're holding on to the coattails of your instinct.

And if your instincts change even dramatically, like we're going to make some pivots probably before the end of the year, we're nearly halfway, almost exactly halfway through the year now.

By the end of the year, we're going to make some pivots with the way that we do the show.

There's going to be different SKUs, different types of episodes that are gonna be coming out.

And it's probably the biggest change I've done since we started the cinema series about three years ago.

And it is not in any way

data-driven.

I have no justification for this other than I think it would be fun.

And my instinct is going,

Yes, I think you should try that.

I think that's so valuable for a couple of reasons.

One,

I have noticed that my best rewarding ring episodes are just,

I would have never anticipated that they would be popular.

It's Sarah Payne, who's this historian that had written a couple of books that I thought were great.

It's David Reich, who has studied ancient genetics, and now he's way more popular than Sazia Nadella and Mark Zuckerberg and Tony Blair and whoever else you can name.

But in all these interviews, there was something I noticed afterwards, which was that every time I went to lunch, dinner, when I talked to somebody and they asked me, what are you thinking about?

I just could not, you know, I just interviewed David Deich, and he was explaining to me that 60,000 years ago, there was a small group in East, whatever.

And that obsession was so strongly correlated with how well the episode did, regardless of what topic it was about.

On the instincts,

I've had bad judgment about like a lot of, look,

I learned how to do the podcast well, but a lot of things are required,

as I'm sure you've come across in terms of running a business, hiring, management.

Hiring.

Yes, 100%.

Just making things happen.

I've had bad judgment about many of these things.

I feel like I've done worse, even in those cases when I've taken advice.

The advice was actually better than what I would have done by default.

But when you follow somebody else's advice, if things go right or if things go wrong.

You haven't learned anything.

Exactly.

And if you just like do the thing that makes sense to you, you have some reason for thinking it makes sense and things go wrong,

you at least like tried an idea.

And to correct your own intuition.

Whereas that error is still waiting for you to step on in future if you outsource it.

So yeah, you want to front-load failure as quickly as possible in

a small and acceptable way.

But no, dude,

my

best

heuristic for whether or not

I've picked the right guest for that day.

is how I feel on the morning that I wake up.

It's like when I wake up on a morning, like this morning, I went and did a hyperbaric oxygen chamber session.

I'm listening to you and Alex Kantrowitz talk about stuff.

I'm like, this is so like, I haven't seen Dwarkesh in fucking ages.

It's going to be so sick.

I'm going to tell him about that.

I like, you know, went through my notes and found I had this note from the fucking February of 2022.

It's going to be so cool.

I'm going to get to bring that up.

Isn't it fun?

It's going to.

And then, you know, there's other days where you just don't have the same, quite the same level of that.

And that's not necessarily an error.

That's not that you've picked someone that's wrong.

It's just, huh?

Okay, well, what what are the ones where i wake up and i'm i want it to be 2 p.m

and what are the ones where 2 p.m will come along and it'll be okay yeah and yeah the the one where you're like i want i want to speedrun the next two weeks yeah so that this person comes on the show yeah uh you know we've got it looks like um mgk rapper turned rock star guy uh there's a potential that he's coming on there's another guy called ronnie radke who's coming on this guy called rick beto who does music and stuff like that and like making a little bit of a pivot into talking about the world of music and about sort of what's happening and how that interacts with culture and the perils of touring and what this means for a family life and how you deal with the anxiety and the performance and pressure and scrutiny of the press and criticism and creativity and all this stuff.

And I'm like, huh, like I already want it to be one of those days when I get to speak.

I know there's other people in between, which will be great.

I'm like super fired up to speak to them about that.

Here's another thing.

I don't know whether you've ever had this.

There's times where I quite like to do episodes with people where I know a lot about the topic, but not quite so much about them.

And that's the same sort of thing where I'm real excited to talk about the topic.

And I imagine this is what it must feel like to be at one of Ayla's sex parties where I'm like, I know I'm going to have sex tonight, but I don't quite know who with.

Does that make sense?

Where I'm like, I know the direction I'm going in in terms of the topic.

And I'm super excited.

And you'll listen to the person talk and you'll do the prep and do the whatever, but there's a little bit of like, I know this world really well.

Right.

What I'm excited to hear is their spin on this.

I'm excited to hear the angle that they come at this from.

Yeah.

I had this guy called Paul Turk who does evolutionary pediatrics.

So he talks about child rearing clinically, medically, developmentally, but from an evolutionary lens.

So what happened ancestrally?

How did we raise kids?

How are they looked after?

What did hygiene look like?

What did skin-to-skin contact,

diet, all this stuff.

And

I know evolution,

evolutionary theory, not bad.

It's one of the few areas I have a bit of expertise in, but I'd never looked at this.

I'm like, oh, this is fucking cool.

This is going to be so sick.

I'm going to speak to this guy.

He's

mid-70s.

You know, he's got his

son-in-law or daughter-in-law or something helping him to set up the camera.

And I'm like, this is going to be fucking sick.

And it's sure enough, awesome episode with this guy who had no right to come on and crush an episode apart from the fact that he has an amazing bit of research.

And I was super fine-hopped to be.

Yeah.

And

how often do you encounter a guest, which is my favorite, where you thought you were going to get somebody who can speak to this one narrow topic, but you've come across a polymath who has

a deep world model that

somehow somehow they have something to say about anything you could ask them.

And the only limitation is your prompting ability.

Yeah.

It's so gratifying when you encounter people like that.

One of the people I had on, like this, do you know Gorin Branwin?

No.

Oh, he's he's incredible.

He's another Scott Alexander type.

Okay.

Blogger who has written just like,

yeah, there's no subject on which he hasn't

quit

somehow

in like a deeply empirical, super interesting way.

And what I learned from the interview, I didn't know anything about his personal life other than the fact that he's anonymous,

is living on

like

$12,000 a year of Patreon in the middle of some

house that his grandfather built in Virginia.

And so during that interview, he was visiting San Francisco for a conference.

And during that interview, I asked him, Well, it seems like you're enjoying it here.

Do you want to move here?

And he said, Yeah, that'd be, that'd be fun.

And I said, Why aren't you moving here?

He's like, I don't have, I don't have the finances to do it.

I said, How much would it cost for you to move here?

He said, 75K.

And then people like donated to him.

And he's moving to SF.

No way.

And he's like,

much more than 75K.

Or Sarah Payne, who I think I can share this.

She was somebody who had been slogging through the archives.

She's been to a historian who's been to every single continent to go through the archives, has deep understanding of basically every single conflict over the last many centuries, can give you like why did the Vietnam War happen the way it did?

Why did Russia fall?

World War II, you name it.

Incredibly compelling presenter.

As soon as, I mean, her episodes are by,

I sometimes joke that I host the Sarah Payne podcast, where I sometimes talk about AI.

And in terms of viewer-weighted minutes, that's definitely true.

But if you notice how her books are categorized on Amazon, they're SCM Payne, not Sarah Payne.

And the reason is that she's a military historian who I think started her career 70s, 80s.

She wanted to anonymize her sex.

Exactly.

And so

it so happened that someone who was incredibly talented

wasn't

given this medium earlier earlier on.

Personal accountability wasn't quite the same.

And now she's blown up.

She's actually retired from the Naval War College where she used to work so that she can be a public intellectual informing on the big questions that we've been discussing on full time.

And this was launched by the episode that you did with her?

Yeah, and we did three more lectures.

We're doing more now.

I think what people don't understand, and it's hard to appreciate, is that lecture she did, cumulatively, she might have, she probably has over like 10 million views on full lectures.

that is just so much bigger compared to

add up all the students she's interacted with in the old college combined

um

it's it's just like hard to think about like a million people who you probably reach on many more than that on an average episode there's like no stadium in the world that can accommodate an audience of that size and right now we're talking we're having fun we're not thinking about how stupendous a quantity that is.

And in fact, I think a lot of politics is explained by who understands this and who doesn't.

Like Kamala Kamala would do all these rallies, and people are like, oh, people are really excited about Kamala.

And it would be a stadium of 20,000 people.

And like, wow, she filled a stadium of 20,000 people.

And you know that if you could put out a YouTube video and it doesn't get 20,000 views within the first hour, you're disappointed.

Or when Trump went on Rogan, I couldn't tell you to the nearest 10 million

views that has.

Recent New York mayoral candidate, right?

Absolute digital first.

Yes.

George has this great take.

It's so true.

People think that sort of Trump and Kamala was a true digital first election, but it wasn't.

It was still legacy media

talent and politicians

that

happened to kind of create digital appropriate content.

Whereas I watched this breakdown this morning on X of

this

mayoral candidate.

Apparently his mum is a real famous Hollywood filmmaker, and all of the videos that he was in, all of the campaign videos that he shot, even the on-street stuff, was shot with the same

color palette, this very soft lighting.

It's very well, there's a nice blurred effect, bokeh, depth of field thing going on in the background.

Everything's shot in this way, and it almost gives you this

rose-colored glasses view of what New York could be like.

And you think, okay, like this is

really taking it using AI

voiceover stuff on TikTok.

Like, okay, this is really, really, really stepping it up an awful lot.

And yeah, it's, it's interesting to think about

where people haven't fully sort of factored all of this in just yet.

Yeah, because it's not visceral in the same way.

It just,

I mean, another interesting thing from the election is just people realizing that people they thought of as celebrities weren't actually the real celebrities.

In terms of the,

you can get some random rapper to say, endorse you, or you can go on your podcast or Theo Vaughn's podcast or something.

And who is actually reaching more people?

Who, who, you just don't think of these other people as celebrities as they are?

I think

what people are actually, and it's a shame that this word became so molested so quickly in the world of social media, but who is it that has the most influence?

Like, who is influential?

And I think that, you know, a tweet from Stormsey or Dave or Central C or some British rapper saying that we need to do this thing for labor versus Dominic Cummings, I'm aware that he's not running for whatever, but

someone marinading in a two-hour conversation where me or you or whoever else

grills Dominic Cummings about this thing.

And, you know, he gets to put his personality across.

And

it's not in any way, I don't think think that me or you or anybody else in the world of podcasting has some undue degree of credibility that people who, let's be fucking frank, are way more talented.

Like I can't do what fucking Dave or Skept or a Central C can do, but there is a

multiplier, like a vector of advantage from the format of a long form conversation.

It's been done to death a million times, but there's nowhere to hide.

People don't have anywhere to hide.

It's very difficult to hold yourself.

Anyone can pretend to not be a psychopath for five minutes.

We've tried to do it for two and a half hours in a free-flowing conversation.

It tends to come out.

I sort of disagree there.

I agree that certain things.

Because you've hidden your psychopathy for the last two and a half hours.

Yeah.

Until now.

We're two hours in and it's coming out.

Where I agree that certain aspects of your personality will become evident, your charisma.

But I think

Douglas Murray had a point in his interview with

Joe and

Dave Smith, where he said that vibing out is not, this is not like the checker of whether your ideas make sense.

I mean, the point you made about that New York City mayoral candidate is exactly correct, right?

He is arguing for socialized grocery stores and rent control and things any economist would tell you don't make sense, but he can put warmth thrones on his cameras.

And of course, he's a charismatic person.

And that is enough to wipe out the deficit that his ideas have.

Everyone's just vibing their way through

whatever level of influence it is that they want to achieve.

Yeah, that's interesting.

So I do think that, like, I'm kind of skeptical of our medium as a way of intrinsically being

geared towards truth or

eliciting the truth by default.

I think it's

unless...

unless the interview is done in such a way that you're really pushing at the cruxes, which to be honest, I haven't always done.

Or after every interview, even if I think, or even if people in the comments are like, you did a really good job pushing, trying to get at the crux, I will always feel like there was something further that could have been said.

Well, you know the thing that you didn't say.

Exactly.

And even if there wasn't a specific thing that you didn't say, you know the sensation of feeling like there is something that you could get to in your mind, but weren't able to bring out.

Yes.

Right.

So as a musician, you can hit the note that you meant to sing on stage in front of a few thousand people, but you know where you could have done it or you did it like that in a different show and you really nailed it and you added this little bit at the end.

And it's kind of the same sense, I think, when it comes to having a conversation that

there's somewhere I'm trying to get to.

Where the fuck is it I'm trying to get to?

It's going to be, oh, he's away.

Fuck it.

Like I'll just, I'll have to move on.

And yeah, these micro victories and micro

defeats.

that you have throughout every single element.

I mean,

go through a little odyssey in in the middle of a podcast episode.

Dude,

I've had episodes where I've literally gone on journeys around, oh, fuck, okay, what am I going to say?

I get this thing and I'm trying to put this together.

Meanwhile, what's coming out of your face is everything's fine.

This is totally sweet.

Everything's cool.

And inside of your mind, you're going, ah,

and fucking screaming, trying to hold on.

That's what, I mean, look, that is what

the first time going on Rogan is like.

The first time going on Rogan is a three-hour panic attack masquerading as a conversation.

That's what it feels like.

And then you get off and you're like,

what the fuck did I, what did I say?

I think we talked about, I think we talked about Mike Tyson.

And

oh my God, did I give away my address?

Honestly, dude, it's fucking, it's wild.

And the craziest thing.

that you'll already have had, I'm sure, but will continue to have, is like, here's a, here's a point.

Mark Zuckerberg, when he woke up on the morning to do your podcast, there'll have been a bit of him that was like, fuck, this kid's smart.

Like, I should be a bit nervous.

Like, or maybe

one of his staff said to him, like, maybe he didn't know, I don't know.

Are you like, oh, that means that you get to be the anxiety attack-inducing Joe Rogan for other people.

And that'll get worse.

And I remember the fact, I can't remember who it was.

The first time it ever happened, it was a a virtual one.

I was still back in the UK, and someone was a fan of the show.

And I was like, oh, that's really cool.

And they mentioned maybe as we started, like, I'm a real fan, it's a real honor to talk to you.

So, thank you very much.

That's very kind.

Let's get into it.

And then they finished up.

Dude, I got to tell you, I was very nervous before I started today.

And they're like, what?

I know.

Why?

That's crazy.

Like, what the fuck are you doing?

Like, you're the expert, like, the token retard in the room.

Like, what are you talking about?

But this is,

I guess, for

anyone who wants to climb the hierarchy of any industry that they're in.

If you're a young person, you have idols that you look to.

And if you achieve the thing that you want to achieve, if you actually do the thing that you're setting out to do, those idols turn into rivals after a while.

And then they go from rivals into being friends and maybe even collaborators.

And it's this weird arc where

the

s

like particular strata that you thought that you were in, you're sort of moving oh yeah wiggling through it you go like fuck i'm subs at tony blair the am i doing subs at tony blair

um

there's also the the most surreal and gratifying thing has been i i mean i was in college not that like when we were talking about that meetup i was in college um and i was just uh uh on the side i would be like reading these books by these scholars that I really respected.

And oh God, if they even like saw a cold email that I'd written, not that I would often dare to, but if I did, I would be like so delighted if they mentioned me on their blog if I wrote something that they, I mean, I couldn't even imagine that.

Um, and now to have those exact same people

be friends, be people who I'm having discussions and debates with, who are see you as a contemporary, yeah, it is like

there is nothing more

just like heart,

you know, heart-pleasing, just like more satisfying.

And also just that happening so fast because nothing is special about me, but just because this medium affords a level of virality and growth

and public facing credit, which are their personal accountability.

Well, that's a lovely reframe.

I think everyone has this sense, especially in the hyper-viral growth loop.

speed run of fame thing that everyone has a little bit of like even I have a degree of ick around kind of the pace of change and I'm sure that you do too where it's like ah fuck like there's a lot of exposure going on here and it feels very very aligned with me but there's a little bit of me that's like fuck like this is a lot there's a lot of like 800 I remember I used to feel anxious if the 24 hour plays ever went over a million whenever they went over a million there was this thing that went in the back of my mind and I was like oh my god and that happened for about two years and it would be fine if it was 500,000 and then if it was a million 48 hour you know the 48 hour play thing on youtube and it would go go up.

And I'm like, what am I, why am I feeling this way?

And I realized this ambient anxiety was just the sense that lots of people are watching you

at the same time.

Yeah.

And I'm like,

there's not only

a stadium of people watching you when you're like performing, like at any given moment.

You're asleep and it's happening.

There's a stadium right now watching.

It's still going.

That's great.

Yeah.

And

that dissipated a little bit.

So anyway, everyone has this kind of scrutiny,

people looking thing, a degree of, I don't want to be sold out, I don't have perverse incentives of

distracting me away from what the main mission was, ruining my taste, ruining my gut instinct, all that stuff.

And

then

your point there that

not

becoming known by lots of people, not

becoming popular in the circles of people who are popular, but being respected by people that you respect.

is

what everybody really in any industry where they're curious, I think should be trying to get toward.

Like they genuinely care about what you think.

They think, he thinks that my idea is cool.

He thinks that guy, who is a

super genius, right?

Like a fucking divine

human.

thinks that I have something

interesting to say.

You're like, all right.

I challenge anybody to find a fucking problem with that, right?

It's not shallow.

It's not cloying.

It's not sycophantic.

It's not gamesmanship-y.

It's, I went away and had a unique insight and a perspective on this thing that I cared about, that they also cared about, and they hadn't fully thought about it before.

And I got to contribute.

I got my name put in my first academic paper.

Like someone cited an idea that I came up with to do with evolutionary theory around mating.

This happened twice now.

It happened the first time, it happened the second time.

I was like, this is fucking unbelievable.

I remember when I read Evolution of Desire by David Buss, and now he's put me in this paper, and it's like, it's so fucking sick.

Like, me, retard from the north of the UK, like getting, and, you know, there's cool shit you can do,

but remembering at least the more that I try to

keep the,

I don't know what you call it, like virtuous flexes as opposed to kind of the shallow flexes of subscriber count or revenue or how many tickets you've sold to a live show how many people turned up to a meetup and stuff like that like that's still cool, but

it doesn't give that same like you said sort of warm heart delight of someone I respect respects me.

Yeah, a hundred percent

and even um Looking at a number on a screen go up

You know, it's like whatever it'll it'll go up 10x

and then that becomes your default.

You know, there's a certain point where you go from zero viewers to like 100.

And that is like, okay, people are actually watching.

And after that, it just orders of magnitude, right?

A zero goes up, another zero goes up, another zero goes up.

Nothing fundamentally changes in your life.

There's a respect of the people you respect, which is uncorrelated to those numbers.

There's also the feeling where, even if it's not people you respect, but just meeting them in real life, just people on the street, they see you, they're like, oh, I love your content.

And it's very easy to just get sort of used to that.

but sometimes you pause and you think like that's a real human being

and they've uh

often do you have this thing where they're like pull the phone towards you and they're like i'm listening to you right now right now yeah some guy did that outside of flower child last night he's like dude that fucking sick

um and that is like a real human being is spending so much of their time Hopefully you're contributing.

It seems like you're contributing to their intellectual growth, their understanding of the world.

And I think about, it wasn't that long ago, I was in college, I was a teenager, whatever.

I would drive around listening to Sam Harris, like

teaching

how much that contributed to me being curious about the world, having different viewpoints,

changing my career trajectory.

Not just before I became a podcaster,

I was studying computer science and I was going to become a programmer.

I was in the footsteps of Sam Harris to become a podcaster.

I was going to be a programmer after that.

And then I decided, ah, that's getting automated.

I'm going to make the more financially financially responsible decision.

Go into podcasts.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, the ripples are fucking wide, dude.

You really don't know.

And I think that this is, it's the bull case for just producing stuff

because you don't know, especially when you start, you don't know what's good.

Like, this might be, I feel like this might not be totally shit.

And you kind of don't really know.

Right.

And after a while, if you get enough positive feedback and you're diligent and you refine and you update and you keep going,

oh, actually, yeah, it is,

it was,

it might not be good, but that's like, that's the reason you do it.

I had a very interesting, I introduced Scott Alexander on my podcast and I had a very interesting

conversation with him towards the end where I asked him,

how many great new bloggers do you discover a year?

And

he said, you know, on the order of one.

And I asked him, okay, how soon after you have discovered them does the rest of the world discover them?

It's like, maybe a couple of months, usually less than that.

So again, go speaks to this dynamic where as soon as you are making good content, I think you might, or not you, but somebody listening might underappreciate the extent to which it will immediately be seen by all the people you want to see it.

It might not happen immediately, but like genuinely, it's shocking how fast good content gets to be.

Well, think about how by design, most content that gets consumed,

the biggest, most widely distributed stuff goes to the biggest number of people, right?

The channel with the most views has the most views.

What a shocking insight.

But what that also means is that if you,

as a viewer, have peeled off from the biggest channel to watch this fledgling small thing and it's captured your attention, it's got to be really, really, really fucking good to be able to do that.

And you have to assume, like it kind of goes back to what we were saying.

earlier on that if your instinct drives you toward a thing you have to assume that some non-zero number of other people are probably interested in it too.

The same thing goes as a viewer.

It's like, if you thought it was good, probably like some other people will think that it's pretty good as well.

And if this person's just a bit consistent, like I would actually say

Substack for me has one of the highest densities of

as yet undiscovered talent out there.

And maybe it's just that the particular sort of format and language of Substack lends itself to me.

I quite like pithy stuff and I like the feed and I like the fact that most articles are about 10 minutes long and like the my attention spanking around about hold on to that.

You're way ahead of the rest of us.

Yeah, yeah, that's true.

But I'll find people on there, like some of the people that I've been subscribed to, I've been subscribed to for like three years, and now they're blowing up.

I'm like, it was obviously a fucking matter of time.

Like it was obviously going to happen.

But by design, it can't happen to everyone.

So it's the same thing as the, why is it that the people that i'm friends with end up

doing all of this stuff i don't think i don't know maybe we've both got phenomenal taste just not sartorially i've noticed this in people in other industries say the exact same thing you know i'll ask like the ceo of a big company um

or they'll mention that they were friends with the other ceos who are now running all the big companies back when they were college students and not even necessarily the same college it's just like they saw each other how the fuck did this yes group come together?

Exactly.

And they don't know.

Isn't that as good as you can?

Isn't it just that game recognizes game?

Is that just it?

I don't know.

I think maybe not a lot of people do stuff.

And so if you're doing things,

you will meet the people who are also doing stuff.

Is it weird

how weirdly small the world ends up being?

How many

I'm, I don't know.

I'm friends with a couple of people in San Francisco

who I now have had on my podcast and are,

I don't know, okay, this is a funny story.

This, maybe the fourth or fifth person I never read on my podcast, I never released this, but it was in 2020, was Leopold Oschenbrenner.

I was like 19 and I think he was 17 or something.

Do you know who this guy is?

No.

He wrote this memo called Situational Awareness, this long blog post that went super, super viral.

Situational awareness.

Yes.

And it was like the most popular thing on EI I've written over the last two years.

Okay.

And he was like a 17-year-old at Columbia, and we've been friends since then.

But anyways, you know, one of these things where like, how did that happen, right?

How did we know each other for so long?

That's happened to Mia so many times.

It's sort of uncanny.

What was his name?

Leopold Ashenbrenner.

Leopold Ashenbrenner.

And there's so many others.

All the AI people that I've had on the podcast are just people I like met at a party two, three years ago, researchers, whatever, Sholto Douglas or Trenton Bricken or or so forth.

Maybe you're right.

Maybe it's just that most people don't produce stuff.

Yeah.

And that by producing stuff, you inevitably separate yourself out.

And there's a feedback loop where, like, you actually get input from the world, you meet mentors,

that puts you on this upward trajectory.

And especially if it's good.

Yeah.

If the thing's good and if you're improving, you show potential.

Yeah.

I mean, like I say, that Elliott kid I met the other day, Jack Neil.

He's 20.

This Elliott guy's 20 years old.

His podcast called Next Generation, I think.

And

I'm having this chat with him.

And I'm like, you do realize that the shit that you're asking me as a 20-year-old is stuff that I only asked myself like three years ago.

Like these questions about the balance between inputs, outputs, and outcomes, the realization that he's sort of attached a sense of sacrifice and difficulty with being worthy and validation.

And that was something this was like this Gordian knot he needed to cut through.

I'm like,

who the fuck are you?

Like, how the, how, and obviously you're going to be great.

Obviously, you're going to be successful.

And George Mac, George, I met George fuck 2019, 2018, 2019.

I remember sitting down.

He'd sent me a message when I went to his office to interview one of his bosses.

And he sent me this DM.

And the DM said on Instagram, cold DM.

We'd never spoken.

I didn't know where he worked, didn't know who he was.

I hear you're coming into my office today, full stop.

Let's exchange Google Chrome extensions.

And I was like, this is my fucking guy right here.

He stinks of me.

Sure enough, half a conversation with him.

He was way more interesting than his boss that I sat down to speak to.

And

we moved to Dubai together.

He's just moved to Austin.

He's going to live with me.

Like we've been best friends for fucking six or seven years.

He's just got a huge, huge book deal.

to write this thing that he built out of an essay.

The essay was what he launched on my podcast.

So we did this episode at the back end of last year that came out in March.

He's just about to announce, he's got this book that's coming.

I'm like, and it's my

manager that's doing his book deal.

Like, again, the incest fucking wheel human centipede of stuff keeps going.

And yeah, this is just, it's one of the areas that,

you know,

me and you can continue to pontificate about, we know, cool people and isn't it fun and all the rest of the stuff.

Like we can keep going.

But what I really hope that people take away from this is if you put yourself out there and if you are able to discern good work from bad work and virtuous people from non-virtuous people and industrious people from non-industrious people and you are able to contribute to that, like literally the sky is the fucking limit because the step change

opportunities that will come along by somebody being there.

and being able to contribute and give you the intro and help you along with your thing and you doing that.

And and then okay this is the scene like this is now the fucking scene um

it's really cool and it's very gratifying and it's gratifying in a way that doesn't make me want to have a shower after you know like like like a an ep an episode doing really big numbers is really great and gratifying but not in the same way as someone going dude that fucking that idea that you came up with about

that was sick yeah you're like oh okay i'm gonna think about that for the next three weeks thank you very much yeah 100 fuck yeah dude i appreciate the hell out of you.

I'm so happy to see what you're doing.

Dwarkash podcast, people should go check that out.

Substack as well.

Yes.

Dwarca.com.

Dwarkash.com.

Dude, appreciate the fuck out of you.

Thank you.

Appreciate you, man.

Thanks for having me on.