#1035 - Mark Rober - How to Engineer a Life You Love

I never knew that you worked on the Mars rover for NASA. That's so fucking cool.
Well, what's really wild is my name, Mark Rober, is only two letters off for Mars Rover.

If you change the K to an S and the B to a V. And honestly, it was meant to be.
It took me like four years working at NASA to realize that. Just one day I'm like, oh, dang.
What did you do?

So I'm a mechanical engineer by trade. I got my bachelor's and master's in that.
And I worked on the rover that's on Mars for like seven years.

So the way it works is they just throw you into the deep end. And like, I was responsible for a chunk of the rover.

And so, you know, I design what it should look like. I, you know, you test it, you integrate it, you put it together.
You have a team of people working with you.

They have gray beards, they call them at NASA. who look at your design and tell you all the reasons it sucks.
So you go back and change it. This sounds like some Gandalf the white.

Like you need to go and pay homage to the dude at the top of the mountain. That's effectively what it is.
But they're smart. They know what they're doing.
They've put stuff in space before.

And so they give it to the young, the young folks who are just coming up. And they literally, I was in charge of a chunk on the top of the rover.

The arm go digs in the dirt, takes that sample, puts it into the belly of the rover. And like, I designed the hardware to accept that.
And it's still working, fingers crossed on Mars.

That's still going. Yeah.

Which is wild when you look up at the sky, you know, all the stars look the same. Mars has a little bit of red tint to it, right? You know where your baby is.

Yeah, and it's like that's 90 million miles away. And I have, I've touched and integrated, I've touched something that's rolling around on that dot in the sky.

And what's really cool is on Earth, things oxidize and break down. So they crumble and go away, right?

So let's say, you know, thanks to AI or whatever you want to say, a million years from now, our species is done. There won't be any, if you came here, you would just see nature.

Like at that point, everything's broken down and crumbled and rested and gone away. So the aliens would come and they'd just see this lush planet.

And then they'd go to Mars and be like, what the hell are these? Because on Mars, there's no oxygen and stuff doesn't break down.

So a million years from now, those rovers are just going to be sitting there spacing. The shit's going to still be there.
And it's like, where the hell did this come from? What did you learn?

that you didn't understand about

payloads going into space. What's interesting about that?

You know, one thing that's interesting about space is like there's no air resistance so once you get up there and you you you start you just you just thrust at the beginning essentially you get up to about 25 25 000 miles per hour that's like five times faster than the bullet and then you just coast for the rest of the period right you just accelerate and then you go to where mars will be in nine months And they have, and you get like three or four times to do little course corrections, but those motors, we call them mouse fart motors.

Because when you're 90 million miles away and you're just getting that initial thrust at the beginning, you know, fractions of a degree mean you miss the planet by, you know, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, a million miles.

So it's just the tiniest little poof, just to the side. And because of that, okay, now you're going to hit, now you're going to hit Mars when it comes around.

So it's really interesting, the math orbital mechanics.

It seems really complicated, but because there is no friction, it's like, you know, for a computer, it's, it's pretty easy to do and then we we eventually learned tricks of like orbital slingshots so you actually go around planets and you pick up speeds kind of like

you kind of slingshot around right yep so it's it's a really fascinating you know science but it's the equivalent of of hitting a golf ball in new york city and getting a hole in one in la

that's the scale of landing a planet on landing something on mars

uh have you ever read seven eaves by neil Stevenson?

No. Heroes.
Really cool. Really cool book.
Great. Anyone that wants a sci-fi recommendation

should read it.

The moon explodes in the first land, at the first line. Sorry.
Like the first line of the book, it's the moon exploded. That's a hook.
And

during that, you learn a lot about orbital dynamics because they repurpose the ISS into what will be the habitat for Earth.

Because if this happened, and Neil Stevenson's hard sci-fi, technically, so it should be correct. Love it.

Basically, what would happen, it breaks apart. You never find out why it broke apart.
It just did. And there's seven pieces that it breaks into.

But they realized that over time, those seven pieces would all be orbiting around each other, and they would crash into each other, and they would make 14 and 28.

And then it would basically turn into what they called a hard rain, which would be all of this material when it was no longer able to sustain itself in orbit would come down to Earth.

And it would just be, so it's 5,000 years or whatever it is, that it's inhospitable. So, you need to go up there.
So, they, I think, they have 300 days to get themselves off the planet.

And they're using all of these pods, and there's all the diplomacy, there's all of the politics of what's happening down on Earth. Like, how many people want to go from there?

And obviously, all of the politicians are using every bit of fuckery that they can to get their family off, and you know, playing with the system. And then they have to have new laws in space.

What does it mean if you kill someone in space? Is that prison? Do you just put them out the airlock? And one of the things that I was learning about were

apogees and zeniths, and the way that orbital dynamics and orbital um

getting two things to come together because it's not it's not just three dimensions it's also the angle and the speed and the map it's it's so even if it is easy for a computer uh it sounded pretty fucking hard yeah and it's a real problem like the concept of space junk of like if to your point if two satellites crash into each other in space and they each create, you know, 5,000 pieces of debris, now you have to track all 5,000 of those and you could have a runaway problem where just stuff just starts crashing like when the moon exploded.

Yeah, exactly. But with our own satellites.
So that's why we track everything over the size, I think it is a golf ball. We know where it is at all times orbiting our planet.

Because there's no vacuum cleaner to just go up and. No, not yet.
But there are missions of like, how do we clean up space junk?

They're actively working on ways to go up and like clean defunct satellites. And now if you put something up, we just, I just built a satellite, which is wild.

You could do that, where you, we put it into space, you can upload your picture to it, and there's a screen that will display a picture, and then there's a camera that will take a picture of that.

So basically, you get a selfie in space. You go to space selfie.com.
We did it for free as like an outreach to kids to get stoked about space. And we built this and launched it like six months ago.

We have a million pictures people have submitted. We're actively taking them every day.
But part of that is when you put that up,

you have to have a deorbit plan. So in about five years, it will come back down and burn up.
Wow. That's like being allowed into a country on a visa.
Yeah.

Them saying, and when do you intend on leaving? That's 100%.

When do you percent on like suiciding or something? Crash landing this thing back. Yeah, well, it burns up, right? So the friction is so high.
Oh, that would be enough. Yeah.

So most stuff, there's very... It's disposable.
Yeah, essentially. Yeah.

So that's why, as long as you decommission means you come to a low enough altitude, there's enough air molecules there that you start getting more and more drag.

It starts heating up and nothing makes it to the ground. Wow.
Okay.

I learned about astropolitics. Oh, yeah.
Now that, I think, is who owns the moon? Who owns this particular meteor?

Is the geostationary territory directly above your country yours? Yeah, yeah. How far out? Yeah.
What if I create something that's geostationary and is a little bit further out than that?

And I think

that sort of stuff to me is it's the perfect intersection of this should be sci-fi, but it has to be real life. Yeah.

And what's even going to happen when we go to Mars? Like, who owns, you know, if Elon gets to Mars first, does he just get to claim it? Is it the country that owns it, right?

Well, I mean, also, what would happen if

we captured some asteroid and managed to double the entire planet's lithium or gold? Yeah.

What happens to the stock market? What does it mean? Because almost all of the way that those resources are put together is done based on a closed system. Yeah.

And then if you start adding stuff into the closed system, all the maths breaks. Well, this is where like AI gets weird, right? It's just like all the rules that have normally applied just like don't.

And I don't know, there's a world where we see some pretty fundamental changes. Well, like, I'm, well, I mean, just like going, you know, for this analogy before, but, you know, going from the,

you know, farming, agriculture to the industrial revolution, like that was a big change for society. To go through that was kind of painful.

There was a lot of farmers that ended up having to go to the factories, right? And I think

we're going to see that in the next

20 years, like a similar change

where it's just a big, instead of just like, oh, here's a better way to farm. Here's a better way to farm.
Those are incremental changes over time.

Farming to the factories was a big, massive step change. And I feel like those kind of things are coming down the pipeline.
There was a whole industry.

I think it was muck shovelers in New York City for the horses.

Everything was horse-drawn carriage. Yeah.
So it's not just the main thing, it's all of the ancillary industries that trickle down from it. That's right.

And that's going to go.

Yeah, but almost potentially even more because it's like the computers can do just all of the jobs. You know, it's like generally you can go from, oh, there was this hill, the water rose.

Okay, now let's go over to this other hill. You know,

at some point, are there hills left? Right. And what does that mean?

What are some of the things you learned from working at NASA that sort of permanently rewired the way that you approach projects or productivity or efficiency?

There must be some fundamental principles that were pretty novel there.

Yeah, I think it's this idea of just like, you know,

I like building things, right?

And the number one mistake people make when they try and make something is try and make, they try and make the final version first. Like, I want to build a bird feeder.

I'm I'm going to build the bird feeder, but I'm going to build the final version of it out of the gate.

As opposed to, which is how you put stuff on Mars and really make anything, prototypes. You just do something quick and dirty first.
In fact, you do like four of them and you tweak and try.

And those, they shouldn't be pretty. They're ugly.
They're meant to just be tests and you learn from them.

And then once you've established all those learnings, and by the way, some of those prototypes, you break. You intentionally fail them to learn the limits.

And then once you've done all that learning, now you know enough to attempt the final thing.

And so really ingrained in the philosophy of NASA, which is something I've now taken into my life and how I make builds for my YouTube channel and even approach YouTube is like, I don't know.

Like, I don't know the answer, but you know what? I could test to find out.

So whenever we do anything, it's like

there's so many versions that fail before you get to the final output. And failing is the goal.
Like you want to break this thing.

So if I know I have to design the wheels for for the rover, you know, I'm going to make them out of three materials. I'm going to do some analysis on a computer.

And then I'm going to have a bunch of different thicknesses and I'm going to test it and I'm going to smash it and I'm going to break it because now I'm confident when I have my final answer, I know exactly why it is and the full limits of it, like what it's capable of.

What's your relationship like with failure?

I like I embrace failure and I like I teach that. So in my videos, so we just did a video where we made a goalie robot that goes back and forth at like 40 miles an hour.

And then you track the soccer ball, the football,

and then the goalie will move to stop the shot from going in. And we trusted Cristiano Ronaldo tried to go against it.

And the punchline is he has no prayer. Even from the penalty kick spot, kicking at 80 miles an hour, this thing,

in the first six milliseconds, we knew where the goalie needed to be. That means the ball goes from here.
Once it's moved an inch, we know exactly where we need to be. How?

Because you just have three points. We're tracking at 500 hertz.
Right. Or sorry, yeah, 500 hertz.
So it's like every two milliseconds, we take a snapshot, snap, slap, snapshot.

And so you just three points make two points make a line, connect that line. Okay, we need to go right there.

So literally, it's it's less than a blink and half of a blink of an eye and it's already in spawn. It feels like it's it probably hasn't even left his foot.
Yeah, that's right.

When we know, and then it takes a little bit of time, even at 40 miles an hour, takes takes a little bit of time. Tiny bit of wobble.
Yeah. Yeah.
Just.

So in that, though, we failed so many times. Right.
And to me, failure is part of the process.

And I want to show, you know, especially kids who watch the video, I want them to know that, that this is the case, right?

We started a company called Crunch Labs that is like basically these toys that you deliver your porch every month. You put them together.

And then there's a video for me where I teach you like the juicy physics that make the toy work. A lot of times with those toys, they don't quite work perfectly.

Like we intentionally make it so right when you put it together, like the disc launcher is the first one. It's not optimal flying.

And we want them to tweak and to change and to move this rubber band here and to push this a little bit. Oh, and now, oh, now I'm going to need to go farther.

And that victory feels so much better than if it just worked out of the gate, right? You know, the Ikea effect? Yeah, I think I've heard of this. Same thing.
Yeah.

It's the difference between pick your own strawberries and cheap strawberries, right?

I I picked my own strawberries. I really care about this thing.
People, you can go to IKEA, which is nice budget furniture, I guess.

And people love their IKEA pieces more than nicer, more expensive pieces that were prefabricated and made for them. And I think they measure that by how long you hold on to it, right?

You're much less likely to give away

the IKEA furniture because you put that

spent an afternoon with it. We had an argument about that.
I'm not going to give it away. So, to me,

I treat challenges sort of like a video game. It's like gamification where, you know, a lot of times what happens is people internalize failure and they say, like, you have a bad test.

I'm just, I'm, I'm bad at school. A bad breakup.
I'm not good at the love thing. Business fails.
I suck at business.

But in like video games, you know, if you pick up the controller and you go and you fall into a pit, you're not like, oh, I'm bad at video games and I don't want to do this. This sucks.

Immediately you're like, oh, shoot, I want to try this again. Like, what did I learn? I'm going to go a little faster.
I'm going to jump a little earlier, right?

You're excited because you're not, you don't view it. You're not viewing the failure as internally and you're focused on, you know, rescuing princess from Bowser.
You're focusing on the end goal.

And so if you can treat your life challenges and a failure like that, kind of gamify it, it's a framework that really works.

And I feel like this is my approach for the videos we do, like this Ronaldo one or really any one that I've attempted. We did another one of a dart board, same thing that moves, tracks the dart.

Although in that one, if your buddy, you give the dart to your buddy, then it can register that it's his dart and then the board moves the opposite way.

So instead of getting a bullseye, he can't even hit the board.

And there again, tons of failures, but it wasn't like, I suck at this. It's like, okay, I know one more way not to do this.
It stings. It still stings, just like it stings in a video game.

But you're like, you know what? Let's get back on it. Let's try again.

What do you think's the difference between people that play video games and happily will have a go at the same level over and over again and people that go through a breakup or try to give a presentation at work and it doesn't go well or apply for a job?

You're right. The fundamental is the same, that this is an iterative game.
You have multiple lives at this thing.

How successful have you been at being able to take the learnings from the science experiment across into real life?

I mean, I think it works in real life too. Like you see this, for example, with kids, like toddlers, right?

When they're learning to walk, when they don't like successfully walk, they're not like, oh, I suck at this, right? They're immediately excited to try again.

And as a result, we learn more in the ages of zero to five than we do at any other period because we're just like. Failure isn't in our brains.
We're just excited to learn and do cool stuff, right?

And I do genuinely feel like in my life, I love opportunities for mastery and opportunities to get better at something and to view it like a video game. Like I don't like public speaking, truly.

I hate it. It makes me really nervous.
And that's one of my goals right now that I'm working on. I've got like a speaking coach.
I've got a TED talk coming up in April.

Like I really want to get the public speaking as like something I actually enjoy. Right.
And I feel like I'm really good at it. Or like, you know, going to the gym.

I'd never worked out really at all in my life. Two years ago about, I was like, I think I just want to try this thing.
And it's an opportunity every day for an hour where I could just be perfect.

I could just give it everything I can.

And to see the incremental results of literally like a video game leveling up. Sometimes some stuff doesn't work, sometimes does.
Like, I crave those opportunities.

And I've lost, I've gained like 30 pounds of muscle, lost 15 pounds of fat in two years now. Just those noob gains, dude.

The noob games. Oh, man.
I remember them so well. Differences, it was

nearly 20 years ago for me now when I started training. Yeah, I mean, it's great.

It's one of the few things in life where you get a preview of what you will be like if you keep doing this in the future, the pump preview. Yeah.
So the fact that if I try to build a car,

I'm not as good as I will be at building cars in six months' time now because I just tried to build a car. Yeah.

But if I go to the gym and I get a pump on, that is me flat in six months if I keep going. I love that.
I've never heard of that. One of the few things that you get a preview of the future.

You're trying to learn Italian. Yeah.
You don't briefly become better at Italian before becoming worse at Italian. Like you just accumulate it over time and over time and over time.
That's so good.

I've never heard of that or thought of it that way. Does that still work then? If you said the noob gains, now what happens when you get the pump on? You're like, I will never be that.

That's only my pump self. I suppose, well, I guess it depends how consistent you're training.
That is one of the reasons it's so addictive that people keep going.

Even if you think I've hit my limit, this is as much muscle as my body is going to be able to carry without adding in some

enhancement.

You still want to chase it because even if it's just for the rest of the day, you know, I still look pretty jacked.

Um,

what a

talk to me about that mastery thing. I think that you're right.
We, me and you, both have an eye for detail, um, degree of obsession. Um,

how have you come to learn balancing that? Because there's a lot of benefits that come from it, yeah. Um, but there's also, it can be a painful compulsion to have.

Yeah, I mean, it's like with everything, it's like moderation, like taking it to a limit. I think I am good at saying no to a lot, which can help.
So it's like I don't take a lot on.

Like if, you know, I've got like five really close friends as opposed to like 50 kind of good friends,

a similar thing.

So I'll pick a handful of things that I will go deep on. I think where it could get tough is you're trying to go deep on everything and then you're going to get overwhelmed and burn out.

But yeah, I mean, I think there's a cost for everything. Like, I probably,

yeah, where it's like, if you, if you are, if you're too focused on a thing at the cost of a lot of other things, then

it can be a challenge. And I do have some, you know, I have this conversation with Mr.
Beast. He's another YouTuber.
He's like the biggest YouTuber in the world. And he's like,

he's like, you could be me or you could be happy. Like choose which one.

And he admits

he is a very dopaminergic brain. And like dopamine isn't an dopamine isn't interested in having things.
Dopamine is interested in getting things. Like that's the reward chemical.
Right.

And he loves leveling up, but it's really hard for him. You know, if he gets a video that gets 300 million views, he's like, why couldn't that have been 330 million? Right.
And I'm quoting him here.

He's self-aware, but it doesn't change the fact that it's like, you know, and so when you look at someone like that, or like an Elon Musk is sort of a similar brain, it's like, you don't want their brains.

And like, they'll tell you you don't want their brains. Like they can't, there's a level where they can't be satisfied because they just need.
more.

And it leads, I think a lot of the amazing change that has come in our world historically, you know, if you look back was kind of people with similar brains who are just so driven for more that they affect history.

Well, it's very adaptive, right, to keep on pushing because you only need one or two people like that in a tribe. Yeah.
And they will find the new valley that's got the bushes that have the fruit.

Yes. And some of them will die, but so what? Like only a few of them will die.
But the ones that do decide to, I think about Brian Johnson. Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like this.

I think of him or like an Elon or even the Mr. Beast.
They're kind of like scouts in an army. Totally.
It wouldn't do to have an army filled with scouts. And frankly, I don't want to be a scout.

I don't want to climb up that cliff that's probably treacherous and very well may die.

But they'll go up there and tell us. They'll come back and tell us what they've seen.
Yeah. And I will benefit from that.
That's right. And I tell Jimmy this, and he's a wary.

He's like whacking through the bush. And so many times he whacks on a path that was just terrible.
Mr. Beast Burger, right? Whatever.

He's had a lot of admitted like dead ends, but what's beautiful is that then I see the ones that work and it's like, oh, thank you. Now I could trod on this path that's hacked down, basically.
Yes.

And obviously do my own versions of that, but like the main path, people like that help break these glass ceilings that benefits a lot of others. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.

I do think though that that feature of

sort of the dopamine wearing off, I do feel like that is a...

That is a feature and not a bug of our brains, right? In the sense that like,

let's say you had a, let's say there's like a coyote chasing a bunny and like the bunny leaps out of the way and makes this amazing move and survives that right

you're gonna get a lot of reward chemicals to your brain being like good job you lived now i have a chance to continue to pass this dna on that's inside you you're gonna get rewarded and there was probably some bunnies in the population who

had that dopamine last for like three weeks just being like resting on the laurels of this sick move. I'm the fucking LeBron James.
I'm the LeBron James, just sitting back relaxing,

thinking about about that. Immediately, those genes are removed from the gene pool because they basted in that.

So there's this like sweet spot of like, I'm going to make you feel good about this, but then I'm going to make it go away. So you want to try again.

And I think that's a mistake people make with burnout is like, I could say, it's kind of like running on a treadmill. When you get on the treadmill, it's exciting.

You're getting those reward chemicals. This is really fun.

And what happens eventually, though, is like those reward chemicals subside, but you're still sprinting because you crank this treadmill because you could because it's exciting.

And I think burnout is when, you know, you're still putting in the same input, but you're not getting the reward chemicals for it.

And so one thing I really try and do is like keep my treadmill at like a jogging pace. Like I can do this.

There was a time in the YouTube algorithm where like they wanted, if you did daily vlogs, that was like what you need to do to be successful. And I was like, I can't do that.

I can do like one a month. And I've just kind of like tortoise in the hair of this thing.

And now 14 years later, you have got like 72 million subscribers. And still going.
And still going. And still stoked.
And like, I'm as far away from burnout as I've ever been.

You know the Red Queen effect? No.

So there's a scene in Alice in Wonderland where Alice is running around the tree and she has to run faster and faster and faster and faster and faster.

And

doesn't get anywhere. And the queen says, you see, my dear, you now have to run as fast as you can just to stay in the same place.

And I think about when people overcomplicate their lives,

which everybody falls prey to, like this is me speaking to me.

Fucking speak down.

But

when people overcomplicate their lives, you're able to, I think humans are pretty good at dealing with

pace. Yeah.
They're able to deal with difficulty, but not complexity.

And I think that it's the complexity. Complication really is damaging to the system.

If you've got a day and you look at it, and there's five different things that you need to do, and it's got to finish my taxes, and I've got that really important call to do with the team.

And then my mum's coming around. I'm going to have to have that conversation with her.
That's going to be awkward. And then I need to write that thing.

It feels horrible. Whereas if you just had a full day of one of those things back to back, it feels a little bit more simple.
If that was all you did with your life.

So a couple of things, like putting too much on your plate

would be like going into a buffet and piling, literally piling up all of this workload and then assuming that your stomach would expand to be able to fill it.

Like, oh, I'm going to be able to fit all of this in because I said I would do it. I will be able to do it.
Which is not the way that it works.

In the same way as no matter how delicious the buffet is, your stomach isn't going to just infinitely expand to be able to fit the food in. Yeah, there's only 24 hours in a day.
Correct.

And then the same thing for the complexity point: that your system is built to handle work, but it's not built to handle complication. We'll get back to talking in just one second.

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That's functionhealth.com slash modern wisdom. That's an interesting point.
I wonder if there's a correlation to like really successful human beings who can like handle like a lot of complexity.

Like certain brains probably can just handle it better, right? 100%. To be fair, like, I mean, say what you want about Elon, but like, I think that is something his brain does well with.

He's parallel processing king.

Yeah, that the executive function thing. But this is why you have sort of maker mode and manager mode in Paul Graham language, or you know, you tend to have a COO.
That's right.

And then you have like a chief innovation officer or something. And the two, they might be friends, but they've got fuck all in common.
Yeah. Apart from the fact they work for the same company.

That's me and my COO, Jim, 100%.

Like he is very, I'm good at like building a train and he is good about like keeping the trains running on time and just like, you know, all the things with the train station that I'm not good at and not interested at.

You also secretly worked at Apple. Yes.
What was that like?

I was there for like five years. I was working in their special projects group doing product design on the Apple car.
I don't know if I'm supposed to say that.

That's fucking to say. So you went NASA?

Yeah. Apple?

Technically, there was two years in there where I worked for a Halloween company. Like costumes? Yes, costumes.

That feels a little bit like a pivot.

I think you can say that from NASA, from NASA engineer to making Halloween costumes. Brief hiatus in between NASA and Apple.

It was like an entrepreneurial thing because my first video video ever was a Halloween costume where I had iPad on front and iPad in back of me.

You like cut a hole in the shirt and it looks like you have a hole in your body if you do a FaceTime call because the FaceTime camera pointing forward will record the hand and it shows it on the back.

And it went really viral. That was my first ever video.
And I was like, dang, I have more ideas than this. So I basically done one video a month since then.

But part of that were people like, cool idea, bro, but I don't have $1,200 for Halloween costume. So the next year, I was like, oh, we just had a design on the shirt.

Let's say it was like some guy's scary guy looking eye. And then I made a free app that had an eyeball that I filmed that was moving around.

If you cut a hole in the shirt, duct tape your phone to the back of the shirt, it looks like you have this like animated t-shirt that looked wild. And that was pretty successful.

So I did that like nights and weekends grinding, made this free app, made the t-shirts.

And it went well enough that like a year later, I sold the whole thing to these guys in the UK who make morph suits, Halloween costumes. and then I worked for them for two years.

And so that was like, it was more of like an entrepreneurial opportunity. And people are like, how could you leave NASA for that? But like,

it was, you know, it's one of those things that in the moment, it made a lot of sense. It was the rovers on Mars.
Yeah. What are you going to do? Okay.
Then you do Apple.

I went and looked at all of the patents that you've got registered online. It's not a small number.
There's quite a few.

Well, there's one that I was like lead author on, which is actually a funny story because someone at Apple was like, hey, you have all these cool ideas for YouTube. Where's your banger idea for Apple?

And literally like a week and a half later, I'm in a meeting about some stupid software tool. And then I had this idea of like, what happens when you combine a virtual reality with a self-driving car?

Like, what are the implications of that?

And I literally started shaking because I was like, whoa, there's so much here. Essentially, like a car is the world's greatest motion simulator.

So if you go to an amusement park and you have motion simulators to simulate moving forward, they just tilt you back like this. But then your butt's like, wait, but now there's no pressure on my butt.

That doesn't feel quite right. But in a car, you could actually simulate moving forward by moving the car.
So it's like, there's a lot of entertainment and just ways not to get motion sick, right?

Because like 40% of people struggle for motion sickness. We're going to be in self-driving cars, but we have all this time, but you can't use it if you still have to stare out the window.

So is there a way with virtual reality?

that you can actually be way less motion sick and actually watch movies or work on your computer. And there's a lot in the patent.

and we got like everything we asked for, which means we're sort of the first ones to really look at this. And I still think that's coming down the pipeline.

Could you do something like, because it's typically the back of the cars, not the front, right, that people have with motion sickness. Yeah, but that's only because you can't see what's going on.

So my point being, I wonder if you could somehow make the windows project.

the whatever you need in order to be able to help people feel better as opposed to having to wear and trying to work out how you integrate it into the car itself.

Yeah, but I mean, imagine though, virtual reality in Augmented, they're going to get to a point where it's essentially wearing sunglasses. So it's not this big, luggy thing.

And as long as then, you know, as long as you have things in your visual field showing the motion of the car and where it's going to go, you can solve a lot of motion sickness. Right.

And so then you can have your computer screen there and be working on it as long as you're getting the inputs. But you can also do like gaming stuff where it's like

you pull up, you know, you're leaving your house, but it's like a grand theft auto insane, where it's like, you put this on, suddenly your buddy just robbed the bank. They're coming down the steps.

They're like, go, go, go. And you're accelerating in real life and feeling that.
But in the game, you're actually like feeling that's actually happening because it knows your destination. Right.

And so when in the game, you're coming up an alley and it's like, oh, there's nowhere to turn. You're hosed.
But at the last second, it's like, oh, you make a right.

In reality, that was just a right turn. But in the game, it was like this insane thing.
Also, you have all these other cars out. You know where all the potholes are.

If you close your eyes, I've done this test. If you go over a pot or a speed bump, it feels a lot like running over a zombie.
But in the game, right, there's actually you where the potholes are.

I'm not striving for this because there's going to be some people that are really not focused on. Oh, no, no.
This is, it's autonomous driving.

This is virtual reality combined with autonomous driving. And what is the implication? I was just thinking about if somebody was to do this whilst trying to drive normally.
Yes, that's bad.

That's a guy. You're not allowed to do that.
So, okay.

What's your perspective, given that you've done a lot of work in the AR-VR space, you've thought about it a good bit. What's your perspective on kind of how it's delivered?

Because I think I had a XXX girlfriend got me an Oculus

Go, which was the all-in-one.

Fuck,

eight years ago, something like that. And I remember thinking, wow, I mean, this is like pretty not bad.

It's a bit pixe-y, but this is not bad.

Surely, surely, no time at all. This is going to come.
Apple Vision Pro,

we'd like, I think as many people returned them as bought them,

which for Apple is like, oh, and maybe it's the V1 and it's going to be expensive and the trickle-down, it's three grand, but then it's only going to be 500 in a few years' time and so on and so forth.

How do you think the world of AR and VR technology has sort of delivered on the promises that we assumed? And what's gone on? What's the journey there? They just don't have the killer app, right?

Like it's everyone who puts it on is like, this is the most craziest thing I've ever experienced. And they love it.
And then they put it on the shelf and never take it off the shelf. Myself included.

I've had a Go, a Rift, and Apple Vision Pro, and I never use them. And it's like, I wish they just had the killer app.
Like, I would want,

what's the killer app? I don't know. I mean, like, courtside at a basketball game, right?

Give you access to, like, I want to watch the basketball game real time, like on courtside, or even better, in a seat you can't even get. Put it on the crossbar.
at us at a soccer match, right?

You can't sit there, but now I get to watch everything. I mean, Messi's coming down and it goes in, right? I don't understand why they haven't just attacked that aspect of it.

But like, live sports seems like a great first place to start. I'm very non-conspiratorial.
That's a

like my tendency. I tend to believe the like mainstream to a degree

skeptical of most people, but do you okay? So, but what is your opinion on conspiracy theorists? Like, why, why do, why do they exist? Like, what is

my opinion on conspiracy theorists, I think that they're exciting. Like the theories are exciting.
A much more exciting way to think about the world.

A big part of it is this idea called compensatory control.

So if you

get people to imagine an uncertain medical diagnosis, they're more likely to see patterns in random, meaningless static.

The same thing happened, I think, during COVID.

Before there was enough evidence to know that the lab leak was legitimate.

A lot of people hooked into that because it's way easier to think

that this global pandemic is because of some malign scientist than the chance mutation of some silly little microbe. If it's up to chance, what control do I have over this?

But if I can personify it, so it's myth, it's archetype, right? It's mythology.

It's like a personification of this. There's good and there's bad and there's evil.
And ooh, I could have. I think a lot of it is to do with control.
So like having a reason.

If the Illuminati exists and is running everything, it's a nice, it's a nice model that just explains everything. Absolutely.
Yeah. Yeah.
I mean, it's not everything.

I'm sure there's a million reasons. I've had some really great guys on

that

do

conspirituality. Derek Beres from that podcast was real interesting.
They know, they wrote a book about the psychology of conspiracism.

but I'm uh I'm kind of fascinated by it. Um, even though I'm not, I get to watch it.
It's like I don't know, someone else loving a sport and you not being a fan of it.

Yeah, like, huh, it's kind of interesting to watch this. What do you think? What's your perspective on conspiracy theorists? I think similar.

I think as humans, we're just hardwired to recognize patterns. Like, that's probably evolutionarily like been good and helped us survive.

If you, you know, every time those bushes moved, you know, four out of five times a tiger came out, I'm going to make a pattern that that's what's happening, right?

Um,

I think

I think

I have empathy for them, really.

Like, when people, even like flat earthers and stuff, and they're like, you idiot, like, you know, they are not willing to look at evidence that goes counter to what they believe because they're incentivized to keep those beliefs.

They have a community, they have friends, belonging, they belong. And guess what? Like,

pretty much everyone listening to this, myself included, all have some beliefs like that. Just want that.
Well, and we have those, right?

Where it's like, if you can't tell me five things that you agreed with with Charlie Kirk, or take it the opposite way, that you agree with with like AOC, if you really think everything, like you've never actually listened to what they say, you just know they're the bad person on the other side, you're in the same camp.

Like you haven't investigated. truly what someone on the other side thinks, right? You know, I think there's an argument for religions, right?

Where it's like, if you have your religious belief, are there,

you know, you're really incentivized to keep those beliefs. It works for you.
And that's great.

But you can't be making fun of flat earthers and say they're morons and idiots because they're not willing to look at the truth. We all have elements like this in our life that serve us.

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You know one of the ones that I've seen recently, which I thought was really cool. You know what the fundamental attribution error is?

Yeah, what is, yeah, yeah, so somebody cuts you off in traffic because they're a dick. You cut somebody off in traffic, it's because you were late.
This sort of

attribution to motive and like

an inner sense as opposed to for us, our shortcomings are because of situation, circumstance.

Something that I noticed was an equivalent, but around people's parents called it the parental attribution error, which is it's kind of a rite of passage in pop psychology to

blame your parents for your anxious attachment style or your hypervigilance or your obsession or your depression or whatever it might be.

But unless you're prepared to lay at the feet of your parents your strengths as well,

you can't lay at the feet of your power. That's great.
Wow, that's great. I think that calls out a lot of people that

you want to be able to own your wins, but hand off your losses. And let's not forget that sometimes your wins and losses are just two sides of the same coin.

So yeah, you're hyper-vigilant, but that's your obsession to detail, which has allowed you to become a fantastic musician.

Yeah, perhaps you are.

overly concerned about upsetting other people, but that's made you a really great friend, which means that people really care about you a lot. Yeah.

And if you need a constant need for approval, like actually has motivated you to accomplish a lot in your life. Absolutely.
Your

feeling that nobody supports you has made you isolate yourself, which makes you a little bit lonely, but it's also meant that you're very self-sufficient so that you can work in solitude.

And you went and started a business. Like, you know, just keep on rolling.
That's one version of this, which is where the coin is the same. Yeah.

But at other times, you've just been given a bit of a mixed bag. I mean, like, this coin is kind of dark on both sides, but in the same bag as some that are light.

You know, your parents taught you something else as well.

And yeah, sure, some people's bags are a bit lighter or a bit darker than others.

But for the most part, if you're going to say my shortcomings are because of my parents, you have to say your strengths are too. And it's okay.

I don't mind if people go, no, everything is self-altered by me. I think it kind of denies behavioral genetics, which is a bit of a shame.

But everything is self-altered by me and nobody gets to tell me what I did.

Okay, that's fine. But you have to own your weaknesses too.
That means that your hypervigilance and anxious attachment and athlete's foot and daddy issues are your fault. Yeah.
As are your strengths.

Yeah. Or the inverse, which is everything is laid at the feet of the parent.
So yeah, parental attribution error. I love that.
I think that's great.

On the attribution era, it's interesting if someone cuts you off in traffic.

If someone does that in real life, stands in front of you, like in line, we're so much more willing to like forgive them or I guess give them grace and stuff. What is that?

You think you're just, you lose the anonymity and you like, you see the human in front of you? Oh, that's a good point. You know what I mean?

Like if someone cuts you off and you're waiting in in a queue and you're like, oh, excuse me. Oh, it's okay.
Like, you're a lot more patient than in a car, you're like, I'm going to kill your family.

Yeah, I'll fucking shoot you.

Well, a few things there. First off, humans still have not fully

gotten used to being in a three-ton missile that moves at, you know, multiples of the speed that we ever have before. Sure.

I'm a very comfortable driver. I'm sure you are too.

We're still very maladapted to doing that at that speed.

And when you're in a car, you're kind of in a bubble and it feels like nothing, you're standing still and the rest of the world's moving past. Yeah, relative.

And then when something happens, you're kind of reminded of the precariousness. So that's one part of it.

I think another part of it is the reason that we have anger, the reason that it's adapted is that before laws, I needed to have a way to say to you, you've crossed a line.

You have encroached on some sort of boundary that you shouldn't do. And my response to you is going to shock you into not doing it again.

The

externality of somebody cutting in front of you in line is

not great, but usually not life and death.

The difference kinetically, it's way more dangerous. But the final thing is that when somebody cuts in front of you in line, if they turn around and notice and they see you,

almost nobody has an issue. You have to be a real dick for somebody to cut in front of you, not knowing you were there or making some sort of a mistake, not didn't realize you were waiting.

And for you to still have a problem after they've said sorry and then stood behind you. Yeah, yeah.
But the same isn't true when driving. If someone flashes their hazards, you're still pissed.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It helps.
I mean, if someone does this, like, okay, but still, you, you suck. You know, exactly.

There's a little bit of you in the back of your mind that's like, oh, I'm going to keep an eye on that guy. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, I think that's probably right.

There's something about the disconnection and anonymity.

Because you see this online too, where there isn't the danger of driving a kinetic missile, where we're a lot quicker to make judgments if it's just some anonymous name and you're commenting anonymously well there's no uh collateral damage right you can say whatever you want like there's no repercussion yeah that jordan peterson says the problem with the internet is that the proximate price of being a prick has fallen to zero yeah

whereas in real life yeah um might get punched in the face exactly i like that

yeah i think Yeah, there is something too about like, I mean, you said anger where you, there's something about like if someone cuts in line, let's say 20 paces in front of you isn't that funny how like your

your sense of justice is just like that is not what we do and i that has to be evolutionary because it's like we have rules in this tribe we have rules in this tribe and if we don't all enforce them then bad things happen but it's so funny how some people just like we were at the airport recently and we had to make this flight actually to come back and film for a sesame street thing and there was there was lines that was like quadruple what they were because there was like a new policy and we literally had to cut to the front of the line like my partner's like she's very good at talking to people I was like oh gosh it's like that's the worst thing for me I'm a really

yeah but other people were cutting not as good as us because we didn't get booed and they were just like booing and yelling and like it was chaos it was primal wow because everyone's in this stressful situation but like you could just hear like it was just it just like deteriorated to like base human emotion watching somebody sprint through the airport is a special type of pain because we've all been there.

We've all been there. The connection got delayed, and the next thing,

they're holding the gate, but you're at 72 and it's 24. Yeah.

Yeah. I think that's why traveling is so stressful is the costs for mistakes are so high.
Right? It's like, I'll always, I mean, this is a life hack.

Whenever booking something that's got connections, if it's under 90 minutes, I know that the airport says that you can make it, but the increase in stress is just not worth it.

For me, the risk, anything less than 90 minutes, I won't do as a connection. I'll always have a 90-minute connection at an airport.
Is it too much? Yeah.

But the price is I maybe have to walk around and get a coffee. Always, though, if it's like an, if there's 10 flights in a day, it has to be a function of that, right?

I'll think about that a little bit more. But typically, I'm doing stuff that's a little bit more of a quirky route.
Yeah. I'm doing

international. Exactly.
Yeah.

But then, yeah.

Watching that we were on a flight the other day coming back from tour and it had been super delayed and it was real annoying and it was late and there were loads of people and it would have been the last flight out and we did that thing where everybody stood to one side and you just saw this stream of people.

Let me give you this one. The poverty parade on planes.
So there is a nine time increase in passenger violence on planes where economy has to walk past first.

Really? Nine times increase. Really? Yeah, it's huge.
That's fascinating. But past those assholes just on their laptops.
What are you reminded of? You're reminded of your place in the hierarchy.

This is status, right? You're reminded of the status higher. This is from Michael Easter's second book.
And yeah, The Poverty Parade, nine times increase in passenger violence.

And it's just on planes. That's what he calls it, the poverty parade.
That's what I called it. Yeah, yeah, I see.

And is it the violence is from the folks who are sitting in the back? Yep. But the ones in the front, at least, it's like nine times less.
Probably.

Fucking peasants behind me. Yeah, exactly.
I've made it. Yeah.

Lots of excitement around AI and stuff at the moment. One area that I, again, AR, VR, I don't mean to shit talk on the engineers.
I'm sure they're trying hard, but I've been disappointed.

Like, I'm a bit sad. I wanted super cool glasses.
I haven't got super cool glasses yet. AR is coming, though.
Like, AR is getting there. I think that's the future for sure.

And what will that look like? Something that can project up into a space so we could watch something 3D in front of? Is this like Tony Stark style stuff?

No, like, I mean, Google's and Meta's latest are pretty. Have you tried those on?

No.

A little bulky sterile, but getting there where it's like it will, you know illuminate the path you're getting directions it's pretty functional i mean there's that's the one with the little band that you can do that that you yeah yeah yeah yeah but like

it gives you pretty good like i'm going somewhere walking directions okay turn here it's like actually mapping it onto your real world it's decent i mean getting there also like real-time translations for like if you're traveling um

you know there's an argument there's a lot of if you didn't have to pull your phone out and you want to like hey show me a restaurant around here you know or even even talking to someone

there's a lot of like

where reminding the name of the people you're looking at right like at a party over the top yeah yeah the best assistant researcher ever yeah like yeah like there's a lot of use cases where i think it would be really people would find it very useful whether or not that's good for society that's a different conversation but like i think there that is that makes more sense to me than vr at this point well certainly the meta glasses i've got i've I've got two pairs in the house.

I bought two pairs as gifts this year as well, including the Oakley's ones, the wraparound one.

And being able to take a photo without having to get your phone out, being able to track what you're doing just to press a button and it hold and it do the thing

is,

oh my gosh. It is so wonderful.
I went to a gig in LA the other night at the Roxy. I saw President play.

500 people, real small, real intimate, and the stage is

three feet high. Yeah, yeah.
It's not high at all. And

there was a girl,

woman in front of me, 30s or something, and the entire show she watched through her phone. And this is so trite for me to say, there's that famous,

was it the

Champs de Lyse in Paris on New Year's Eve a couple of years ago? And it's just this single shot from the back, and it's just a sea of phones, which is, it is what it is.

But people want to take memories. They want to be able to recall this thing.

How much better would it be if you didn't have to sacrifice? And I think that's the best use case. I don't like the Meta, hey, Meta, tell me what I'm looking at.

Like, I know what I'm fucking looking at. I don't need you to do that for me.

But at the moment, those Ray-Bands, being able to take a photo, being able to press and hold and take a video up to three minutes now, they're really cool. Yeah, that is cool.
I know.

Like, for me, I've kind of had my own moment with this. Like, how many times have I ever gone back and looked at my, you know, fireworks on the 4th of July videos? Right.

and yet every year you'd be like no way right or like concerts are a great example like you never go back and look at those you just need one i think for those sorts of situations 100 where was i remind me what it felt like i can fill the rest in that's right you just need one that's 100 so anyway arvr like maybe it's getting there whatever whatever robotics yeah i think when you compare with ai um Robotics is a promise that everybody had expected.

Does this new home bot thing with the fucking knitted jumper as a, it's got like your jumper on as a

home assistant? And somebody put a video of it trying to close the dishwasher and said it looks like a guy on ketamine at an after party.

What's going on in the world of robotics? This is much closer to your yeah, that's right. I mean, look, AI still needs humans right now to like push buttons, especially when you say like AGI.

Like, once you have robotics, there's an argument that like

now humans are are truly redundant as like it makes sense that we're going into robotics i think it pairs naturally with ai

um

i don't know what it means i don't know how great it is for our species i was i'll i'll tell you this i don't want to say a name here but i was talking to someone who's like you know in silicon valley He said he was at a dinner at his house with like 10 other people who are like leaders in Silicon Valley with AI.

You would know half the names very well. They had a vote that said, by the year 2050, what's the chance our sun is covered in a Dyson sphere? Meaning, a Dyson sphere.
Type 2, Kardashiev. That's right.

It's a type, basically, it's basically a solar panel that goes all around the sun. So you capture all the energy.

And then you could use that energy then to populate the solar system in the universe, ostensibly. And of this group of folks,

eight of 10 said greater than 50% chance by 2050 our sun is covered. Really?

Fucking do it on Calci, dude. Put it on Polymarket.
Put your money where your mouth is. Don't give me your bullshit around the, I

don't understand.

No, no, but the point is to get there, you need robotics. Yeah, okay.
Like this is my point. Right, right.
This is the connection. Right, right.

Because you need robotics to, if you can make a million workers in, you know, 20 days, and then those workers make factories that make more, that's when you truly go crazy exponential.

So like the only way to get to that is a robotics revolution. So that does seem to be on the cusp, cusp, at least for some people.
Yeah.

And even if it's not get it up, do the Dyson Sphere, Cardi Shab 2 thing.

The point is, is that, again, going back, like society is at a pretty fundamental changing point if you can have, you know, the thinking machines and the doing machines who are going to be more specialized than us humans, who have all this like vestigial traits of millions of years of evolution that just aren't necessary for today's world.

Yeah. You know, we're walking around with appendixes and pangs.
Yeah. And stuff like that.
And like, yeah, coccyx and

toenails. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
Stupid stupid idea.

I it'll be interesting, man, if we can get to this stage where AI programs robotics, that's when we're. This is my point, right? And then robotics builds more robotics.
Right.

So you're turning the wrenches is now.

Bro, I had Elie Edzer on the show, and he was telling me about how one of the ways that a super intelligent general AI would be able to

accumulate compute power without taking it away from servers that people would realize is it could reprogram the leaves of trees. Whoa.
It's like

bio-trans computation or something. And he had this book, this series of books behind him on the biology of trees.
It's like, oh, well, it's a relatively simple process.

If you were to, you do this and then you do this and then you reprogram to this thing and then you reprogram this thing and then all of the trees are doing your compute for you.

And you're just using the trunks and the roots and you just draw up all of this power, and that would be the way, and it would just slowly seep its way into the biosphere. And before you know it,

the shrub in your back garden is working out how to kill you.

I do feel like anthropomorphizing robots.

I get the argument for making robots that looks like humans because the world is basically built for humans, but I think it's like a first cut, like trying to make that where you, I think it makes a lot more sense to make like factory robots, like robots who you could sell to a car manufacturer, that can move around their factory that could in one year save them the cost of 12 of your fleets of robots you're selling to like i feel like the winner of the robotics revolution will be the one who goes after manufacturing businesses first not homes for people who could afford it oh wow yeah that's a good that's a great point because how many people want need and can afford and those who can afford it already have a staff of people who do it's a person yeah because it's not that cheap i think that thing was maybe 500 bucks a month.

No. That's right.
And it doesn't

like, what's a cleaner? Like, to get a maid to come around is maybe, even for a good-sized home, 200 bucks. Okay, so you can get them every other week.
Yeah.

And you still have 100 bucks to save on this

robot archetype. Yeah, the addressable market is very small versus, hey, I'm going to make a robot that can wheel around your factory floor.

It is, by the way, its torso can stretch stretch eight feet to screw in that thing and then come down. Like make a specialized robot for that factory.

Still kind of probably looks like a human, but give it six arms because it's all its job is to drill in the six bolts on the bottom, right?

And then make those robots like that immediately will have a massive ROA for a company that has money to pay for it, right? I saw a new type of warehouse robot.

So instead of warehouses being built upward,

this begins the warehouse high and builds it low. So all of these things run over the top of like tubules that come down.

So imagine that you've got your warehouse and you don't stack shit from the bottom up.

You have the robots running over the top and they get stuff, bring it up to the top and then they run around here with like a little grid formation and below each grid.

So not only does it restock stuff, it also then goes and pulls it out.

And it was, I can't, it's some absurd space-saving efficiency.

This warehouse is eight times denser than a normal one because everything is just packed side by side. You don't need any space to run between the stock because the stock is the floor.

The whole floor is just stock. Oh, wild.
I see. Yeah,

I think the winner of the robotics,

the first big winner takes all the Nvidia of the robotics will be ones who address like factories first.

And then there'll be knock-on effects. I'll bootstrap it from there.
Then how do you perfect that for the home? Not the other way. I'm surprised we're starting with the home.

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That's drinkag1.com slash

modern wisdom. I guess it's just a sexy idea.

It's a cool thing. It's attention-grabbing.
But yeah, total addressable market is just, it's not, it's not there. Okay, for anyone who hasn't seen your Glitter Bomber series,

please explain that.

Well, like a lot of my ideas, people are like, where do you come up with your ideas? And it's like,

I don't know.

Like, my brain's just always on in the sense of like thinking of like oh that's a good idea right and so someone stole a package from my porch and i felt really sad have you had a package stolen for your porch no well actually maybe but i haven't known it's not it's very it's an american thing apparently apparently this doesn't happen a lot in other countries but you do really feel violated and this was like a three dollar I don't even know what it was, something from Amazon.

It doesn't matter. Right.
And at first, I was, the police obviously won't do anything about it. But then I was like, you know what? Like, I don't build the Mars Rover for heaven's sakes.

Like, I could probably do something about this.

So I designed a bait package, basically, that had four phones in it that could, I could track the phone. So I knew where the package went.

But they were also recording so it could upload that footage to the cloud. So even if they destroyed the package, I would have footage of the theft.

But more importantly, when you lift it off the lid, it had a cup that used centrifugal force to spray like a pound of the world's finest glitter.

And then to make sure we got the package back after like two minutes, it sprayed just an uncharitable amount of fart spray. So they were incentivized.

And then I played fake police chatter like, shh, package are,

you know, we have a report of like,

you know.

And so we always got the packages back, sometimes in better shape than others. And I don't know, I think it was, it just really struck a chord for a lot of people who have had the same thing.

To make a viral video, you just have to evoke a visceral response. Like that is the key to making a, that is, that is the key.
Like if you want to know how to, that's it.

So you have to feel vindicated. It has to make you feel, you know, it has to be funny, has to make you feel angry.

That's a trick that's used a lot these days and making people feel angry to get them to share. And so this one just, it checked a lot of those visceral response buttons.

And yeah, and so I did it for like, each year I would improve and go, eventually we had drones that came out and sprayed the glitter in the house, you know, and they opened the lid.

Each year I would like, as an engineering challenge, how can I take this to the next level?

And I did it for like, I think, six or seven years. Eventually went to San Francisco.
I had like fake luggage because cars get stolen from there all the time. And I would work with the police.

You know, anytime I got footage, I would,

I would, if the police wanted it, I'd give it to them. And also, this is a crazy fact.
Probably about half the people's faces are blurred. Half of them aren't.

And people will be like, well, how do you make that decision? If you're not blurred, you signed a release, which means they were willing to let me put their face on

every single criminal whose face isn't blurred in the glitter bomb. Where did the release form go to? I gave it to them because I would like to know the houses, right? They took it to their house.

So we would knock on the door and be like, okay, we got you.

Are you cool if we show you in a YouTube video? And you might be like, well, why would they agree to this?

And you just have to offer them the correct compensation, which in most cases was like a Starbucks gift card you're kidding no you you got people to admit to having their face on one of the biggest youtube channels in the world as a criminal yeah

by offering them a starbucks like by the way like a ten dollar starbucks gift card this wasn't like 200 wow wee but it's just what you'd find is just like

we value our reputation a lot And you think, you think other people have the same frameworks and think like you. But some of them are like, oh yeah, like, let's do this.

Well, I mean, you thought that you were going to get a parcel. You didn't.
You got sprayed in fart sprayed. Now you got a Starbucks, you know? Yeah, it's kind of a.

Game for the stars to land in the clouds.

Land in Starbucks.

Yeah, I mean, that's one of my favorite series that you've done. I thought it was so great.
And another one, your...

like scam phone call,

a broad

taking advantage of old people thing.

The relationship that you have with technology, you're obviously very pro-technology. It's something that you is your love.
It's something that you're working on.

You're trying to encourage other people to do their own.

Have you got, when you see things like that, when you see phone centers that are trying to scam old people out of money,

does that become conflicted for what technology sort of enables for you? I mean, at the end of the day, I think technology is amoral and it can be used for tremendous good.

It could be used for tremendous bad. And, oh, you hope the good outweighs the bad.

And and my job you know is to use some of the good to try and outweigh the bad and in that case literally that video was born i was making one of the glitter bombs and i got one of those like microsoft scam calls you know or like your car warranty is expired i'm like who's behind these things so eventually i worked with another youtuber jim browning we hacked into some of these scam centers in kolkata india So we got access to their system.

How did you access the security system? So their trick is that when they come to take over your computer, so you pretend you're an old, old, you know, some, I don't know what's going on.

And they're like, okay, ma'am, let me help you with your computer. Well, that's a two-way connection.
So when that happens, if you know what you're doing, you can remote into their computers.

So that's what Jim Browning does is he's very good at computers. And you don't just get access to their CTV, you get access to like their mainframe.
So we know exactly.

It's kind of a normal business, by the way. It's kind of boring.
They have like scam training. They have like HR, right?

They have like goals of how many scams you're going to do a month, like pizza parties. I was going to say, you know what's happening for lunch that week? Yeah, exactly.

It's kind of hilarious, but we'd see how much, you know, they're making, I think, like $30 million a year running three shifts 24 hours a day. They'd been doing it for a decade, three of these.

So we went there with, you know, our glitter bombs. First of all, I hired like eight people to work undercover for eight months just to learn, just to find out what the week would make.
To work there?

At a scam center, yeah.

I wanted to learn their weaknesses. And one of them, it turns out, is you can bring lunch boxes out onto the floor.

You can't bring phones, you can't bring anything else, but they let you bring your lunch and like a water bottle.

So we designed like a lunch box that we put like 100 cockroaches in, but then it had a ball screw and a remote timer on a trigger so the wall would move forward.

So basically, these cockroaches would start getting squished and then a door opened. So all the cockroaches would run out at once.
We had a smoke bomb in there. Of course, we sent them a glitter bomb.

And then we filmed it all in these CT, CCTV footage. And it's hilarious footage.
And, you know, my thing is like,

I could have made a PSA on what these scams are and how to avoid them. That wouldn't have evoked a visceral response.
That would have got 100 views.

But if I can wrap this in a story and entertain you and make you feel a lot of things, well, now you're going to share that video. And sunshine is a great disinfectant.

And eventually, effectively, that's what happened. We released this video.
It has like hundreds of millions of views now.

And

because what was happening is you had a few bad Apple police officers in these cities who are being paid off.

They didn't have that spotlight on them. But now it made it impossible to defend them because the Times of India is covering it.
All these people are up in arms and like protesting.

And all three of those scam centers got shut down. The top, I think there were like 18 officials arrested from this stuff.
There's real, real world impact. This is from a stupid YouTube video.

Do you know the Greek god Hephaestus? You heard of that? No. So he was the god of craftsmanship, fire, metal working and stuff.
He's kind of the

archetype of the tinkerer.

Yeah. Or Hephaestus.
And

he's the only Greek god that was crippled. So he's like a chubby guy and he sort of needed crutches and he needed a wheelchair.
And I think he was

betrothed or maybe even married to one of the most beautiful of the gods. And

the super chad god was sleeping with his wife behind his back and he knew that this thing was happening and he discovered them and he was heartbroken and it's kind of a tale as old as time that the nerdy tinkerer has his good-looking girl stolen by the sort of chad bully uh so he gets back at her and him and he designs this unbelievably strong cage glitter bomb

ah it could have been cockroaches uh this really strong cage that is positioned over the bed and he waits until they get down into bed and then this thing drops and he invites all of the other gods and all of the other gods come in and laugh at them.

And it's the, it kind of reminds me of your story that there's this sort of tinkerer who uses innovation and ingenuity to sort of righteously

even the scales. Yeah.

I love that. That's a good story.

Yeah, it's like, I don't know. It's this, that was so lovely to see because it's kind of like this, what can I do?

Like if I would have, if we would have got that information from the scan centers and given it to the police, nothing would have happened. Right.

But if I make a story that makes you feel something and evokes an emotion,

now suddenly, right, now suddenly something happens. And I think, I don't know, it's like a powerful example of like agency.

It's like, what can you do in your spot, in your position, you know, to affect the world? Best question about agency.

You're stuck in a third world jail and you've got 24 hours to get out and only one phone call. Who'd you ring?

Probably Jimmy Kimmel.

That's a good one. Like he is, he is, he is, we're good friends.
Like we vacationed together.

He saw one of my videos. I went on his show.
And since then, we've just had a friendship. And he's so loyal, but also connected that it would be Jimmy.
Who do you call?

I got some friends that are like special forces. Tim Kennedy would probably be pretty fun.

Evan Hafer from Black Rifle Coffee would be, and Handy Stumpf would also be interesting. Like, dudes that are, you know, 40s and 50s that would really probably revel in it.

They'd have a lot of, they'd really enjoy it. Yeah, it's a challenge.
Um, but it's just either this person doesn't need permission, they can think on their own feet, they'll be able to do it.

Oh, is this like them coming and actively rescuing you, or just like pulling the strings to make it happen? I guess both. Okay.
In a way, I mean, Jimmy's got to be involved.

He's going to have to project manage. Yeah, yeah.

Unless he hands it off to an an assistant in which case ring the assistant um but yeah it's just who's the highest agency person ah i see so it's a funny way to identify who the highest agency person i love it that's great yeah maybe it's jimmy yeah i but that's funny because you're probably somebody's and i'm probably people's in my life as well right i think i would be unfortunately i'm too busy sorry um that's right uh but yeah there's there's two groups there's one group that is if you want somebody to break you out of the third world prison who is it and then there's another one which i've got at least a few in my my life.

I think everybody needs somebody like this as well, which is if you want to go into business with your captors,

like if you want to not only have you be gotten out, but before you know it, somehow you now own the jail, and you've actually turned the jail into a really wonderful amusement park.

And you need a couple of people like that that can kind of. That's Jimmy Donaldson for me, Mr.
Bees. Of course.
So, yeah, the AAA. It's between the two Jimmies.

Yeah, if you want to launch a YouTube channel with your captors, go into

Jimmy. Okay, so your

engineering brain,

you're looking to apply engineering logic to some human problems as well.

What are the

thinking tools or heuristics that you try and apply when it comes to looking at human problems like

tolerances or failure budgets or like iterative testing or something?

Is there something that you realize, huh, in my daily life, I can apply this engineering principle here and it works out pretty well?

I think the engineering design process is something that's just so applicable for real life problems, which is just like you start with an objective. I want to get a rover to Mars, right?

I want to build a glitter bomb that thieves will take. That is your end goal.
Again, it kind of comes down to life gamification.

And I know I'm not going to get it right. I know there's a lot of questions I need answered.
I mean, step one is really just breaking it down.

If that's the end goal, here are the main four chunks that need to happen to accomplish that, right? I need to do some research. I need to do initial prototype.

I need to have a feedback loop and iterate a bunch. I need to do the final thing.
And I think that's how you launch a business. That's how you make a microphone like this.

This is how you build a garden in your backyard, right? It all, it starts with that.

that it's that same process and it it helps make things feel not daunting right because at the end of the day, if you're going to climb Mount Everest, it's just literally one step at a time, and people get overwhelmed.

They're just like, how do I get up there? That's so far. And so the engineering design process allows you to break it down into those bite-sized pieces.

And then as failure comes, quote-unquote, failure, you know, that's part of the process. And it's almost exciting.

It's more flavorful, right? Okay. And what about the reverse? What about

emotional intelligence skills like frustration, tolerance, or kindness, or humor, or collaboration? How important are they when it comes to doing the engineering thing?

Because I think a lot of people really love the idea of raw talent,

innovation being able to be enough. But I certainly know from hearing you speak about your time at Apple being kind of a shock to the system of how important communication and collaboration is.

Unfortunately, even engineering doesn't occur inside of a sterile box. It's not just input, process, output.
There's human psychology in here. So no, for sure.

I mean, that's what makes our species different than every species on the planet is our ability to collaborate at large scales and have shared goals.

And that happens through stories that usually are fictional, but that's part of, you know,

you share a vision. And if you can, and that is, you know, at Apple, I did find people were not only smart, maybe not quite as smart as as at NASA, but they were better communicators across the board.

And

that is almost, that's equally important because if you actually want to accomplish something meaningful, it can't be just by yourself. Like you need a team.

And if everyone's pushing in the same direction, incredible things happen. How do you get everyone to push in the same direction? They have to believe in a shared vision.
And

that

ability to convince someone

of something,

to understand your vision is a superpower. And you want to know how you do that? It's the same way you make a viral video.
You have to evoke a visceral response.

Sharing the facts and being like, well, if we build this, it'll be 20% faster in the processing speed, right? Nobody cares.

But if it's like, hey, if we build this, like that's going to connect people. And, you know, currently with Crunchlads, like that is our mission.

We want to reach as many brains as possible and infect them with this passion for learning and curiosity.

And we have 100 employees now and we are mission driven. And we get up and we're just like so stoked about what we're building and what we're creating.

And yeah, they're toys, which makes a great last minute Christmas gift, by the way. Crunchlabs.com.
Crunchlabs.com. But it's like you're learning and they're so fun.

First of all, they're so fun, but we hide the vegetables. And before you know it, you're learning all these really cool things, but you have this emotional connection to it, right?

It's, it's that same, we, you have to attach the learning to some emotion and some feeling.

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That's drinklmnt.com slash modern wisdom. Dude, look at Ken Burns' documentaries.

What's the Vietnam documentary series? Maybe 20 out, maybe 30 hours.

And

history in school for me wasn't that fun because of the way it was taught. So the same topic, displayed in two different ways

made all the difference. Yeah.
And that's actually what we're doing. This is something I'm only starting now to talk about.

We haven't talked a lot publicly, but it's like releasing, making a full school curriculum, third to eighth grade. It covers all the tricks I've learned on high vegetables on YouTube.

We're making like really exciting, cool science. It's got me, all your favorite YouTuber.
We just, Cristiano Ronaldo's in it.

It's, it's, it adheres to the standards. And it's going to cost us about $50 million to make.
And then we're going to make it free for all teachers forever.

And I feel like it's it's the most important work I'll do my whole life.

So basically, Crunch Labs is you productizing curiosity in a way. That's what you've tried to do.
You've tried to make a monthly box of curiosity.

You don't know what it's going to be on the other side. And then

you try to instill that into kids afterward by getting them to go through these experiments. Yeah, because I can't teach you.

My YouTube videos aren't going to teach you everything you possibly know, but like what I can be is a fire starter in your brain, especially for young kids because the clay isn't hardened. Okay.

So if what you're doing is trying to kickstart the curiosity,

what have you learned from watching kids interact with the experiments that you've done that schools don't understand? Like what do you wish that schools understood that you know?

Like every teacher will tell you,

like, I can't teach you if I don't have your attention. And I think they do a very bad job of getting kids' attention.

So for example, on this cool thing, class crunch lobs, we're calling it, is where we, when we're talking about electricity magnetism, I'm in front of an MRI machine. I put a watermelon in there.

I'm holding a 10-pound hammer, flip on the MRI machine. It just rips it from my hand and just obliterates this watermelon.

And that, those eyes right there, I love that. And guess what? I have your attention now.
And you're like, what the hell was that?

It's like, oh, well, there's these invisible fields called magnetic fields that are around us us all the time. And now let me tell you about them, right?

Versus like, here is a diagram of the Earth's magnetic field and a compass aligns with it. Right.

And like the curriculum writers, bless their heart, except not because they charge for it for these poor teachers who don't have the money to buy it. And it's really, really bad.

They never had to have a YouTube channel where they had to earn the attention. Yeah.
of adults. They're able to sort of dictate the attention.
You will listen to me. That's right.

And then if you don't, the class goes on anyway. The class goes on.
Like the kids can get up and walk out like they switch off the youtube video that's right

and so it's attention attention so i would say like

yeah like attention and the toys too just they're first and foremost they are fun like i'm not gonna make a boring if it's fun now we'll figure out how to attach the learning on to that so start with the attention and a lot of times that comes with fun and the same thing getting a visceral response like i'll make a video about a 15 ton jello pool which is really hard to do by the way why why because you've never made jello before.

You got to heat it up. You got to heat it up where it's almost well, and then you have to cool it down.
And so to do that at scale, we're like, how are we going to do that? There's nothing.

Or just make lots of little ones.

Yeah, but then it's not contiguous. Then it's not like you want to belly flop on it, right? Understood.

So what I did to find a refrigerator, I just found the right place in the country at the right time that I wanted to film this that got to almost refrigeration temperatures at night, but not cold enough to freeze, which happened to be where my brother lived in like Mapleton, Utah.

So we dug out a hole and then we had six 55 gallon drums that we boiled all of the gelatin in and then piped it through potential energy into the pool and over with layers over seven days.

And then finally we got it and we got that shot of a kid belly flopping on it. But the point is, is that video says 15 ton jello pool.
That is clickbait. You want to click on it.

And then pretty soon I'm teaching you about the scientific method in chemistry. So hiding those vegetables, sneaking in the learning once you're you're like stoked about the story.

Sick, man. What's this? What have we got? What's this? This is creativity kit.
So, this is just one of the things that we offer. It's the newest one.

So, we, you know, we had the build box, that was the original one. Then we had hackpack, and that's kind of robotics.
Right.

And then this one starts at age like six, where it really teaches the ideas of creativity. What's the state of like kids' toys at the moment? Because I remember Meccano.

Did you have Meccano over here? No. So Meccano was like metal Lego, I guess, but much more involved, way more complex.
Yeah. And that was, I found that fascinating.

You can make trucks and cars out of, there would be braces and bolts. It was really, it was sick.
Wow.

But

is that still, are you guys kind of really breaking through with it? You and Lego? Is that it for when it comes to constructing shit? I mean, this is like, we are currently,

we sell these as a script to, you know, direct to consumers, but I will say we are launching in like with retail products and stores like Target and Walmart in the STEM aisle.

The STEM aisle sucks. What's the STEM aisle? Like STEM is like science technology.
What is in there? Every Target and Walmart has either four or eight feet dedicated to like STEM-type toys.

And it's like the baking soda volcano or like

geode make grow a crystal. It's been the same.
It's stuff that's been the same for decades. 30 years.
It's just ripe for being disrupted.

And we have some, we have like some really, really cool stuff that is completely going to disrupt that aisle. I'm really happy to hear that.
Okay.

What about grown-ups who feel like the curiosity has been pruned out of them? Well, I mean, it's going to be harder for them to get the Crunch Lab subscription and feel that

excitement.

I don't know if that's true, though, because we have, again, it's now ages six to 106, where like hackpack is for it's kind of robot, even if you've never coded before, you can put it together.

It's a really fun build. And then we encourage you to like hack it and swap the it's Arduino based what's that Arduino is like a microprocessor like it's um

like a Raspberry Pi or Arduino oh yeah I know yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah so it's a simple form of like a Raspberry Pi uh so it's like the first one's a desktop robot that's you know you could control with a little remote but then we encourage people to go in and like tweak the code and make it really easy you don't have to it'll work out of the box but we want to like just make the next step that much easier.

So if you've always wanted to learn to code but never have, we'll hold your hand with Hackpack. It's going to be super fun and you're going to grow and learn.

And then hopefully you take that and do that to other parts in your life. Yeah, that is cool.
I think certainly one of the things that I've seen is people's time has got squeezed more.

We don't have much time to play or tinker because all of the additional hours of boredom that would have allowed you to do something a bit slower, a bit smaller, a little bit more quiet

has been squeezed out because there's a very attractive there's YouTube videos and podcasts

and you know games and social media and stuff which is all inputs right I feel like we are drowning inputs and sort of starved for outputs agreed right actually doing something with our own hands that time is now just like passively feed my brain and you can only learn haven't constructed anything on the other side even the biggest youtube channel in the world had it not have been for the fact that you did physical experiments like show me where your youtube channel is show me it what have you built yeah well kind of kind of nothing there's code and there's you know numbers on a screen and I think they kind of correlate to real humans that pressed a button.

But no,

I think that the opportunity to do something slow. One of my friends had a professional coach who was trying to teach him a little bit of humility and to be able to chill out.

And his

task for a month was to start doing something new, but he wasn't allowed to try and get better at it.

So he he was told that he had to try and, he decided to take up watercoloring. He's always wanted to paint.

And after he did it once, or a couple of times, and he really enjoyed it, he found that he wanted to go on YouTube and look up watercolor tutorials.

And then he was going to go and research what the best Reddit thread said about the specific brush he needed. And he, nope, nope, nope, I can't do that.
I'm just going to do it.

I'm just going to allow myself to do it.

And I thought that was so interesting. It was the first time I'd ever heard of anybody saying, I have this thing that I'm trying to do and I'm actively not trying to get better at it.

I did one version of that where it's like, I love chess and I found I wasn't playing chess because going back to internalizing failure, I felt like if I lost, that means something about me.

So I made a goal of like, I am going to play chess, but my goal, I'm going to try and win, but my real goal is to lose 10 times. Right.
Right.

And I'm not going to feel like I check that box until I've lost 10 games. And it really flipped it for me.
And then normalizing, I acclimated to losing.

And it was like, oh, wait, I'm back to loving this. And I don't attach these negative feelings to it because I won because I lost 10 times.
Have you looked at rejection therapy?

No, but it's basically this thing, right? 100 days of rejection.

100 days of rejection. My goal is to desensitize myself from the pain of rejection and overcome my fear.

Three criteria I've set for myself. One, ethical, two, legal.
Three, doesn't deny the laws of physics.

Rejection one, borrow $100 from a stranger.

Number two, request a burger refill.

Number 15, be a live mannequin at Abercrombie.

Number 32, get my own free room at a hotel. So the idea is he did all of these.

Number 36, trim my hair at a pet smart.

Hug a Walmart greeter, bike race at Toys R Us.

My only day at a new job, so so I can enjoy the job for a day,

buy a quarter of shrimp, name my own price at Dollar Tree,

change a coffee shop's Wi-Fi password,

try and fix a PC at the Apple store.

And what was this? What was day 100? Interview President Obama or try.

And I just thought, like, what a cool,

such a cool idea. That's so good.

Rejection therapy. But like, going back to just like making stuff, I would imagine we've evolved to be digging in the dirt and to be building and to be working with our hands.
Right.

And I do feel like there's probably some part of that.

You know, this is me being an armchair expert here, but like our record levels of depression may have to do with just like all these inputs that are so attractive that just lit us sitting in a chair as opposed to like building, doing stuff with our own hands and getting out and moving dirt around.

The pace that you're forced forced to

operate at, pace that your brain is forced to operate at, is really, really, really aggressive.

And I certainly know the times when I've been able to, and even think about what meditation is. Meditation is kind of like,

it's great and I love it and I've done it an awful lot, but it's a really unnatural way to try and achieve what we're doing. It's the same way as...

Our lives have become so convenient that we have to build a building where there's heavy things with special handles that you go into and pick up and put down in exactly the same place because your entire life is now bereft of you having to lift anything difficult.

Yeah. You know, even as an Amazon driver, you're probably lifting less than our ancestors would have done.
And your job is to lift things.

So we build this building that has stuff that you purposefully lift in very specific ways so that you then put them down again. And

meditation is kind of like going to the gym for slowing down because your life is so intense most of the time, you need to have this weird holiday from that

that's a portion of your day that is you doing something else that makes sense yeah and it's also like

it's crazy how hard it is to not think thoughts like you know in meditation i've dabble in a little bit my partner's like really big in it and i've been doing it more but it's amazing how much i suck at it you know just like going to the gym for the first time it's like wow i am not conditioned to do this it's wild how hard it is to not think and to clear your mind right?

And just like focus on the breathing. I find it incredibly difficult.
And it's certainly a muscle you have to build and a muscle that feels worth building once I try and do it and see the benefits.

Have you not,

you know, if you've been tinkering with some glitter bomb for hours and hours, is there not a

crossover toward a mindfulness practice with regards to that?

I mean, there's something about like hitting flow state, especially for writing. I still write all my own videos and it's really hard until it's not.
And then it just all pours out really quickly.

Right.

But no, I think the opposite is true where it's like, if I'm writing a thing or trying to solve a problem, it's like it's always on repeat and just in the back of my brain.

Like we could be having this conversation and I could have like, not a breakthrough, but it's like, oh, I'm going to try this as soon as I get home. You know what I mean? Yeah, you are right.
I mean,

certainly stuff that captures the front of your brain while the back of it's still thinking is lovely. I love doing the washing up.
It sounds like such a dumb thing, but doing the dishes for me is

so great.

I have

an unusually high volume of good ideas while I'm doing the dishes. It's my favorite chore.
Yep. Yeah.

And well, it's just driving. Another one.
I fucking love driving.

Happy to drive.

So do you listen to stuff? Are you listening to

your problem? Sometimes. Sometimes I'll be listening to stuff.
But other times, if I'm just thinking, it's a great place to. Yeah, but I guess that's my point.

You say, Hey, I'm not going to turn on the radio because when I'm being good, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I had a period where for about six months when I first started the podcast, I always put my phone in the trunk of the car

so I couldn't listen to anything. There was no iPods, no nothing.
And even if I was going to the gym and it was only 20 minutes away,

it sounds-I mean, what a revolution. You don't listen to something or even try and use your phone while you're driving.
Um, and you have this wonderful mini break from the world. world.

It's like the case for boredom, right?

Like, I feel like raising kids, it's like,

I want to give them like two presents for Christmas. And like, the goal is to be bored every day.
Like, that's where the creativity, I think that's a whole movement towards that now, right?

When again, it just, it's the opposite to all of these inputs. Like, cut those off and then what happens.
Have you noticed? I certainly have.

I'm not an avid AI user, but ChatGPT gets a good bit of daily use, you know, between 10 and 20 times a day, something like like that, probably.

For you, you mean? Yeah, yeah. Like, I need to sort this thing out.

How do I do this thing? One of the things I have noticed is now I'm beginning to get an aversion to having to overcome questions myself

because I can just go to ChatGPT and work out exactly what it is.

I haven't done this, but like similar stuff. If I had to write a difficult email,

I'm trying to say this to this person. And And as opposed to wrestling with the problem, it's kind of like having a team of staff on hand.

Instead of having to do the dishes, you just get the dishwasher or the maid to do it. Instead of having to put your clothes away, the assistant does it.

Yeah, I mean, I think this is the argument that we are becoming cyborgs. The fact, like, how many phone numbers you have memorized now?

Two through three. Right.
And and and 15 years ago, you know, 30 years ago, growing up, we had everyone's memorized. Like we don't need to because the information's there.

And obviously that was the case with Google. And I think this is just one more step in that direction.

And yeah,

these are an extension of our brain in some sense, right? As we learn to use them and work with them and adapt to them being part of them. It's reduced friction by such a huge margin now.

I think even with Google. you have to you had to do the reading for sure and i mean look at us talking about searching on google like it was fucking foraging for berries.
Like that's friction. Yeah.

I resonate with this so much. You're completely right.
Like even I needed to find like the right Christmas lights the other day and I found myself Googling. I hate this.

I was like, wait, why am I not using an LLM for this? I gave it exactly what I wanted. Sure enough, I had four websites.
I was like, oh, and now guess what? I'm never searching for anything.

I've now learned that behavior. Yep.
And now it's like, oh, now when I need to find something difficult, this is what I'm doing.

What'll come next will be Gemini integrated into Chrome. Yeah.
Atlas already exists for ChatGPT. So this will just become one form.
Yeah.

You must know about this. I might need to bleep this out.
You must know what the OpenAI products are, do you?

I have

probably a tiny bit more of a view than the average person, but I don't fully know.

But I think it's my guess.

What's his face on, right? The dude that did. Johnny Ive? Johnny Ive.
Yeah, yeah. And they said that releasing three products by the end of the year.
This year?

By something. Maybe it can't be the end of this year.
It can't be. Yeah, it'd be so.
But at some point. And they said that one of them has never been seen before and doesn't exist.

And somebody asked, is it a pin? And they said no.

My guess is it's just like a camera that can see the world and hear the world, but it's very minimal, however that is, whether it's a ring or it's a...

And then... If it's capturing all the information and visually could see stuff, it's like the world's greatest assistant, right? Because it remembers this conversation.

It remembers every conversation you have. It helps you follow up.
And then, like, do you have a personal assistant or someone like that?

What an unlock that was when you got one of those.

And so now everyone gets this of like, now when I want to buy those Christmas lights, to your point, it going agentic, I just have to say, hey, I'm looking for these kind of lights.

And then two minutes later, it's like, okay, here's, they'll be at your porch tomorrow morning at 8 a.m. Right.

Whereas if I have an assistant, I could tell that to the assistant and give them that problem. And they do the same thing.

Now imagine, but you still don't have the assistant with you everywhere. So, getting the context of your life,

my guess is that,

and I have like a

one or two slight clues that that's true that aren't in the public domain, but that would be my guess. Wow, wow, what do you like? What do you think it would be?

I was, I was gonna guess glasses because that would have made so much sense. Um, some kind of yeah, badge-type thing, or yeah,

yeah, just on your wrist, almost like a watch, but it's it's a camera and a microphone, Yeah, and it's just tracking everything at all times, and you set it down, it charges at night.

Yeah, so but you need a way for it to communicate back to you, which means it would need a screen or it's going to have to be audio instead of it.

It's going to be audio, just like an assistant, you know, you just talk to them and they're going to have to have Bluetooth and you're going to have to have headphones, so it's going to have to link them with some headphones.

Or it could just be through your phone, right? It could just be the sensors, the eyes and the ears, and then you talk to the phone, but it has all the info. Yeah.

I think, how do you feel about the future?

Because everyone that I speak to, whether it's like a Toby Yord, Nick Bostrom, Eliada Yukowski, Tristan Harris, you know, whoever it is that I speak to from that side of the fence, they have

vague despondency. They're like apocalyptic, but in a kind of

ephemeral way. Want to know what I think like the best case scenario is? Yes.
Have you heard the

idea of like, if you had 10 dogs in a house, if you have like 10 dogs in a house and there's a pile of food, those dogs and they're just on their own they're gonna fight over that scarce resource which is the food there's gonna be one big dog who's gonna be the number one but constantly fighting they're you know

wounded some are dying uh and that's not a great situation but they are eating because there's a big pile of food just some eat better than others Now, if a human goes into that house and you're like, okay, hey guys, I bought you 10 cages.

You're all going to be in the cages, but I'm going to give you food every day and all the water you need. You're going to be able to go go to the vet.
We're going to go on walks every day.

And they'll basically help distribute those resources.

Those dogs objectively, even the top dog are happier because the resources are being allocated in a way because there's someone who can kind of map the whole situation.

Our best hope is for like a benevolent overlord in this sense, someone who comes to the house.

and can help us balance the scarce resources or just create enough resources that they aren't even scarce.

But incentive, like, and the reason we do that for dogs is we think they're cute and we think they have value and we just have to hope the AI over there. Some sort of a value.
Oh, they're cute dogs.

Like, let's look after them and put them. Value in our species.
Well, you know, Bostrom's idea of the urn, and you pull out different technologies, and sometimes it's white and black.

Sometimes it's gray and it's kind of bad. And then every so often there's a black ball and the black ball is a true existential risk and it kills humanity.
Yeah.

Like if you could, if putting sand in your microwave was an A-bomb. Correct.
We'd be done.

we've read we've read the same stuff yeah yeah um so i kind of think about the same but instead of it being an urn where you're bringing out different technologies it's urn balls where you're bringing out alignments and

but it's inverted and there's only a very very small number of ways for it to be benevolent yeah but there's a really really small number of ways that you could align and they wouldn't all be the same there's not only one alignment that would make for a great world it's definitely not an infinite number neither there are way more ways ways to break something than to fix something or make it better.

That means that even if you just go by fucking proportion, like the likelihood that you don't get it right is pretty high.

And yeah, according to these guys that are way smarter than me and even you,

they

seem to think that it's on route. What's the best estimate that you've heard for the advent of AGI? I mean, the truth is nobody really knows.
So, but I don't know. I don't know.

I can't really answer that. I will say,

oh, hold on. I want to make a point.
You can cut this out while I'm thinking of this because I wanted to make a follow-up point of that, which is.

Oh, yeah. So I will say those who are the most optimistic about it are the ones who kind of have the most to gain.
Like, you look at Sam Altman and he's like, oh, it's going to be a perfect world.

You know, everything, AJ is going to be so great because, like, he's so heavily incentivized. Maybe some motivated reasoning.
Yeah. Because, like,

even if it's a 1% chance it is that amazing utopian case, in the new world, he's a god, right?

And in the 99% case, if I'm just assigning values to it, that bad things happen. Whether he does it or not, someone else is going to do it and the bad thing's going to happen.

So, like, of course, might as well roll the dice to be the guy. Might as well roll the dice.

What's that line about it's very difficult to make a man disbelieve something that his wage relies on him believing? Yeah, yeah, exactly, right?

He's incentivized to have this Pollyanna attitude.

Now, look, a very good friend of mine is Sam's coach and is the head of human culture at Open AI. And I trust him implicitly.
It's Joe Hudson who's been on the show time.

He is as fucking legit as they come, Joe. And he's such a good judge of character and he works with Sam.

And I've heard a couple of things from Sam with regards to his meditation practice and what he's done.

I'm like, I'm trying to square this circle where there definitely are some like really scary potential externalities coming from this thing.

There's just this bit of me where a few people that I really know and trust. So I have, I have glimmers.

Does he work for Sam? He did, but he had this trust. He had this news, but the way you face realized I don't even know how to believe in it.
Maybe, fuck, yeah, I'll use my own rule again.

Maybe, look, I'm trying to find a silver lining in the stream of shit here.

But yeah,

the one thing I think we both agree on probably is like, whether it doesn't matter what I think about it, it's going to happen.

There's like a small set of the humans that are driving this forward and you can't unring that bell.

So it's like, I'm not, I don't stay up at night because of it. You know what I mean? Like, I don't let it, I'm still just, you're on the roller coaster, right? We're all on the roller coaster.
Yeah.

You can try and do the Eliedza thing and ring the bell sufficiently loudly, but the only way that this works is if you're able to somehow put a global moratorium on all AI development.

And I just think that's not, that's not going to happen, which creates this weird like inverse arms race where everybody thinks, well, I'll do it, but I'll do it right. And if I get there first.

So yeah, if you do have this sort of Pollyanna

God complex attitude where no, no, no, no, we can do, we've got the engineer and the alignment and the word that, and you think, well, fucking what, dude? Yeah. I had a weird thought the other day.

We were hiking. i live in silicon valley we were hiking up we could see all the way to san francisco and then all the way down to silicon valley it's about a 50 mile stretch

and i was like what's crazy is like this 50 mile stretch of land

is sort of going to determine the future of humanity and our space and then my next thought was like if i'm a a government that's on the other side of this plank

Where do I want to put that A-ball? I mean, it's also probably one of the closest places to China, right? Yeah.

I didn't love that thought. And I'm like, oh, right.
That could, even if it just buys you four months, that could be the difference of being the first to hit AGI. And then that's everything.

Bro, there was a guy who I brought on the show. I can't remember his name.
I wish that I could. And he told me this story.

He wrote a really successful tech book a decade and a half ago, and then he wrote another one.

The opening story of this book is him being invited by a bunch of these tech leaders, billionaires, pre-Chat GPT, so maybe 2019, 2020, something like that.

And they sat down at this dinner, and there's sort of a weird atmosphere. It feels like there's kind of a holding pattern going on in the conversation.
He doesn't really know why.

And then sort of the whole room changes a little bit. And they say, right,

New Zealand or Greenland.

He's like,

what?

New Zealand or Greenland?

What do you mean? Well, for the bunker.

What are you talking about? Oh, the post-apocalyptic war bunker.

Is it more effective for us to have them in new zealand or is it in greenland yeah and what do you think about how we control the marines that work for us because what we're thinking is that we'll use shock collars and that we'll pay them in crypto but that the ledger will be associated with biometrics and if they

betray us if they try to do that then we can just kill them with the and he was like It's this sounds like an absolute movie scene. Yeah.
And

maybe he was making it up but it sounded yeah kind of like at that point and i've heard this like yeah new zealand because like they have everything you need to self-produce and there's all these reasons why it makes sense but it's like if like if that's what things have delve devolved to it's like i'm good like i had we had a great run like

put your hands up and put some more fucking crunch labs stuff together yeah yeah well just like

If we're in a world where just like everyone is like killing each other and it's just like total apocalypse, like, do you, what are you looking to survive for? Like, you come out of that bunker.

That was exactly what's left to live. I mean, that was the exact reason that he gave, which was, what do you think they're going to do with all that Bitcoin? Yeah.
Like, what are they spending it on?

Right. You have access to the food.

What is there that's left? Yeah. And it's almost like precarious human civilization is when you start to think about this.

Right. And well, it's also like even with the AI, where for the first time in human history, like generally the more money you made, it equated to the more employees you have, right?

As you made more money, you would hire more people so you could do more stuff.

And now, for the first time, there not only are they decoupled, but there's almost an inverse relationship where you could save a ton of money if you lay off all these people and now your profits are going to go way up.

And the question then becomes are these CEOs, and I've been in circles where people have told me about this, where they're like, This is awesome.

We're going to do all this, but then quickly they realize, like, but who's going to buy our thing? Because no one's going to have money because no one's going to be employed, right?

When you got onto UBI and there was a couple of studies done on UBI test cases, you get to look at these. Yeah.

Seems like mixed results, right? Yeah,

not

super positive.

And yeah, man, we may be,

this is the fear, I think, the fundamental fear that everybody has always had. This is what Cassandras are, that they're...
Seeing some future apocalypse and that nobody's listening.

And at each generation,

reading is going to ruin the youth. Television is going to ruin the youth.
And the ho the car will destroy the horse, and so on and so forth.

And at each level, we felt like it's apocalyptic, what's coming next, that it's going to be something that's really, really worth us saying you shouldn't do this.

But dude, this is a step-function difference. This is not a difference of degree.
It's a difference of kind. It is an entirely different world that we are moving toward.

And even if it isn't that one, it's the one that that enables. And it really does feel like sort of the

musical chairs and the music is slowing down to come to a stop now maybe the song on the other side of it is way better but it's definitely a different fucking song i think well this is i think one of the most plausible you know are you familiar with fermi's paradox

so it's like of all the nine reasons there could be the one i've always kind of and feels more and more plausible is just like by the time you develop the energy to use and the technology to go to other solar systems, there's, you've developed that, you've harnessed a lot of energy that then you could use against yourself or other people.

You have to assume life is always going to be competitive if it's evolving in other spots. So there's going to be competition built in and it's just a glass ceiling in civilizations.
And

as things get closer and closer, you realize like, oh,

maybe there is a glass ceiling effect. And that's what we're approaching.
There's a book. I tried to bring this guy on, Stephen Webb.
If the universe is teaming with aliens, where are they all?

And he's got 50 solutions to the Fermi paradox.

And I should still try and bring him on.

I was obsessed with that. That's like one of my favorite.
Just like, you're camping, you're looking at the stars and just like,

just to make your brain go like, it's crazy. Where is all the life? Yeah.
Well, what's that question? There's two answers to where are they? And they're both equally terrifying. Either.

there's nobody else out there or there is. Yeah.

And then, yeah, yeah, exactly. And we are like one of NASA's projects we're working on is like going to one of the moons that's, you know, Enceladus.
And the core is lava. What is that?

It's like a moon around,

I think, Jupiter or Saturn, but it has geysers of fresh water coming out the top. So the top is, obviously, it's really far away.
So it's frozen. It's cold.

The core is molten. And so at some point between that icy surface and the core, there's like a 70-degree ocean.
And life, we know, formed in water here on this planet.

And we've never found life exists that doesn't need water. So we're basically building something.
We're going to go out there.

We're going to drill into the ice, send a submarine down there, and see what eats it. And if, like, if there's life in that nice ocean out there,

it's fascinating and almost terrifying. You know, David Kipping from the Cool Worlds lab? He's in Cool Worlds on YouTube.
Bro, you would fucking

know Brian Cox.

So imagine Brian Cox,

15 years younger, big, like Chad Jaw, like young dude. And he got 72 hours on the James Webb telescope.
No way. Yeah,

it gets allocated to different projects. Obviously, it's like a shared resource.
And he looks for exoplanets. He looks for exoplanets.
And he's got this amazing YouTube channel, Assendich.

It's fucking sick.

And this is the sort of stuff that he talks about a lot on his channel. Oh, really? It's really, really good.

Well, this is the point, though, because if life exists twice in our own solar system, like that of it being. But then you get onto Robin Hansen's great filter hypothesis.
Have you heard that one?

Which is, I mean, it's one of the glass ceiling, the great filter. Oh, yes, yeah, yeah, yeah.
This is one of the nine examples, or very paradox explanation. Okay, yes.

Filter of the civilization. There's something.
There's something. But what you actually don't want to find is...

Life in our solar system. That's a very bad sign.
Agreed. Because it's just that the filter is in front of us, not behind us.
Yes. And so the filter could be our own doing.
That's the glass ceiling.

The filter could also be potentially, if this is what you're going to use.

They are aware of us. Dark forest.
But we're just, yeah, right. We're just not enough of a threat.
But as soon as we figure one or two things more out, they're like, all right. Yeah.

Is it nuclear energy? Is it type 2 Kardashev? Is it into

AI? Yeah. Right.
Fuck, that would be lame. Imagine if it's not.
Don't be lame. Totally.
What destroys us isn't AI itself, but the fact that you're not. Chat GPT.
Holy shit.

Well, These aliens come for us. There's SETI, but there's also Meti, right? Messaging extraterrestrial aliens.

And I had a dude on that wrote an entire book about that, but the history of it too. And there's been, since the beginning of time, a concern about how much bleed have we got from radio signals.
Yeah.

And what's the...

They're tracking the sphere of the first ever radio signals moving through space. Do you go, are you going to the fuck? How much? Remember the movie Contact? Do you remember that movie?

I didn't watch it.

Oh, it's great it's like from the we just i just re-watched it but the first signal they get back from the aliens is nazi uh it's it's hitler nah and it's because the the olympics from germany was the first like broadcast television signal that's gone out

so it was their way of saying like hey we hear you we're repeating this back to you and it's hitler

fuck

So, yeah.

Well, what an apocalyptic way to finish my life. Yeah, yeah.
Dude, I normally don't talk like that. No, you rule.

Um, I'm so happy for everything you've got going on: the Netflix, the Sesame Street, the Crunch Labs. Tell people what they should check out.
I mean, and you go to crunchlabs.com or just go.

I have a lot of, or just checking out the YouTube channel. If you like, if you're curious and you like to learn without feeling like you're learning, then we've got a lot of content there.

You're great, man. I appreciate it.
Thanks for having me.

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