How Risk Taking, Innovation & Artificial Intelligence Transform Human Experience | Marc Andreessen

Intro & innovator psychology

00:00Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast where we discuss science and science-based tools [music] for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and opthalmology at Stamford School of Medicine. Today my guest is Mark Andre. Mark Andre is a software engineer and an investor in technology companies. He co-founded and developed Mosaic which was one of the first widely used web browsers. He also co-founded and developed Netscape, which was one of the earliest widespread used web browsers. And he co-founded and is a general partner at Andre Horwitz, one of the most successful Silicon Valley venture capital firms. All of that is to say that Mark Andre is one of the most successful innovators and investors

00:46ever. I was extremely excited to record this episode with Mark for several reasons. First of all, he himself is an incredible innovator. Second of all, he has an uncanny ability to spot the innovators of the future. And third, Mark has shown over and over again the ability to understand how technologies not yet even developed are going to impact the way that humans interact at large. Our conversation starts off by discussing what makes for an exceptional innovator as well as what sorts of environmental conditions make for exceptional innovation and creativity more generally. In that context, we talk about risk-taking. Not just in terms of risk-taking in one's profession, but about how some people, not all, but how

01:26some people who are risk-takers and innovators in the context of their work also seem to take a lot of risks in their personal life and some of the consequences that can bring. Then we discuss some of the most transformative technologies that are now emerging such as novel approaches to developing clean energy as well as AI or artificial intelligence. With respect to AI, Mark shares his views as to why AI is likely to greatly improve human experience. And we discuss the multiple roles that AI is very likely to have in all of our lives in the near future. Mark explains how not too long from now, all of us are very likely to have AI assistance. For instance, assistants that give us highly informed health advice, highly informed

02:09psychological advice. Indeed, it is very likely that all of us will soon have AI assistants that govern most if not all of our daily decisions. And Mark explains how if done correctly, this can be a tremendously positive addition to our life. In doing so, Mark provides a stark counterargument for those that argue that AI is going to diminish human experience. So, if you're hearing about and or concerned about the ways that AI is likely to destroy us, today you are going to hear about the many different ways that AI technologies now in development are likely to enhance our human experience at every level. What you'll soon find is that while today's discussion does center around technology and technology development, it is really

02:50a discussion about human beings and human psychology. So whether you have an interest in technology development and/or AI, I'm certain that you'll find today's discussion to be an important and highly lucid view into what will soon be the future that we all live in. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is however part of my desire and effort to bring zerocost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. And now for my discussion with Mark Andre. Mark, welcome. >> Hey, thank you. >> Delighted to have you here and have so

03:28many questions for you about innovation, AI, your view of the landscape of tech and humanity in general. I want to start off by talking about innovation from three different perspectives. There's the inner game, so to speak, or the psychology of the innovator or innovators. things like their propensity for engaging in conflict or not, their propensity for having a dream or a vision, and in particular their innovation as it relates to some psychological trait or expression. So, we'll get to that in a moment. The second component that I'm curious about is the outer landscape around innovators who they place them themselves with uh the sorts of choices that they make and also the sorts of personal relationships that

04:17they might have or not have. And then the last component is this notion of the larger landscape that they happen to find themselves in. What time in history? Uh what's the geography? Bay Area, New York, Dubai, etc. >> Sure. So to start off, is there a common trait of innovators that you think is absolutely essential as a seed uh to creating things that are really impactful? >> Yeah. So I'm not a psychologist, but I've picked up some of the concepts uh some of the uh some of the terms and so I've it was a great moment of delight in my life when I learned about the big five personality traits because I was like, "Aha, there's a way to actually describe the answer to this question in at least reasonably scientific terms."

05:00Um, and so I I think what you're looking for when you're when you're talking about real innovators, like people who actually do really creative breakthrough work, I think you're talking about a couple things. So, one is very high in what's called trade openness, right? Which is one of the big one of the big five. Um, which is basically just like flat out open to new ideas. Um, and of course the the nature of trade openness is trade openness means you're not just open to new ideas in one category. You're open to many different kinds of new ideas. And so we we might talk about the fact that a lot of innovators also are very creative people in other aspects of their lives, right? even outside of uh their their their specific

05:30creative domain. So that's important. But of course, just being open is not sufficient because if you're just open, you could just be curious and explore, right? And spend your entire life reading and and doing, you know, talking to people and never actually create something. So you also need um a couple other things. You need a high level of conscientiousness, which is another one of the big five. You need somebody who's really willing to apply themselves. And in our world, typically over a period of many years, right, to be able to to to accomplish something, great. You know, they they typically work very hard. um that often gets obscured because the stories that end up getting told about these people are, you know, it's just

05:59like there's this kid and he just had this idea and it was like a stroke of genius and it was like a moment in time and you know it's just like oh he was so lucky and it's like no like for most of these people it's years and years and years of of applied effort and so you need you need somebody with like an extreme you know basically willingness to defer gratification and really apply themselves to a specific thing for a long time. Um, and of course this is why there aren't very many of these people is there aren't many people who are high in openness and high in conscientiousness because to a certain extent they're they're opposed right traits. And so you need somebody who has both of those. Third is you need

06:30somebody high in disagreeableness which is the third of the big five. Um so you need somebody who's just like basically ordinary. Uh right? Because if they're not ordinary then they'll be talked out of their ideas by people who will be like oh well that you know because the reaction most people have no ideas is oh that's dumb. [snorts] Um, and so somebody who's too agreeable will will be easily dissuaded to to not pursue, you know, not pulling the thread anymore. So you need somebody highly disagreeable. Again, the nature of disagreeableness is they tend to be disagreeable disagreeable about everything, right? So they tend to be these very sort of iconoclastic, you know, kind of renegade characters. Um,

07:01and then there's just a table stakes component, which is they just also need to be high IQ, right? They just they just need to be really smart because it's just it's hard to innovate in any category if you can't synthesize large amounts of information quickly. Um, and so those are four like basically like high spikes, you know, very rare traits that basically have to uh have to come together. Um, you you could probably also say they they probably at some point need to be relatively low on neuroticism, which is another of the big five because if they're too neurotic, they probably can't handle the stress, right? So So it's kind of this this this dial in there. And then of course, if you're if you're if you're into like

07:33this the sort of science of the big five, basically, you know, these are all people who are on like the far out kind of point on the on the normal distribution across all these traits. And and then that just gets you to I think the the sort of hardest topic of all around this this this whole concept which is just there are very few of these people. >> Do you think they're born with these traits? >> Yeah. Well, so the they're born with the traits and then and then of course the traits are not, you know, genetics are not destiny. And so that the the traits are not deterministic in the sense of that, you know, just because they have those personality traits doesn't mean they're they're going to, you know,

08:02deliver great creativity. But like they need to have those properties because otherwise they're just not either going to be able to do the work or they're not going to enjoy it, right? I mean, look, a lot of these people are highly capable, competent people. You know, it's very easy for them to get like high-paying jobs in traditional institutions and, you know, get lots of, you know, traditional awards and, you know, end up with big paychecks and, you know, there there's a lot of people at, you know, big institutions that we we know you and I know well and I I deal with many of these where people get paid a lot of money and they get a lot of respect and they go for 20 years and it's great and they never create any

08:31[laughter] anything new, right? And so there's there's a lot of >> administrators. Well, a lot of them Yeah. a lot of lot of them end up in administrative jobs. Um, and that's fine. That's good. The world needs, you know, the world needs that also, right? The the the innovators can't run everything because everything, you know, the the rate of change would be too high. Society, I think, probably wouldn't be able to handle it. So, you need some people who are on the other side who are going to kind of keep the lights on and keep things running. Um, but but there is this decision that people have to make, which is, okay, if I have the sort of latent capability to do this, is this actually what I want to

08:59spend my life doing? And do I want to go through the stress and the pain and the trauma, right, and the anxiety, right, and the risk of failure, right? Right. And so do do I really want to once in a while you run into somebody who's just like can't do it any other way. Like they they just have to. >> Who's an example of that? >> I mean Elon Elon's the you know the paramount example of our time. And he and I I bring him up in part because he's such an obvious example but in part because he's talked about this um in in in in interviews where he he basically says like he's like I can't turn it off. Like the ideas come I have to pursue them, right? It's why he's like running five companies at the same time and like

09:31working on a sixth, right? Um uh is just like he can't he can't turn it off, you know? Look, there's a lot of other people who are probably had the capability to do it who ended up talking themselves into or you know, whatever events conspired to put them in a position where they did something else. Um, you know, obviously there are people who try to be creative who just don't have the the capability. And so there there's some ven diagram there of determinism through traits, but also choices in life. And then also, of course, the situation in which they're born, the context within which they grow up, the culture, right? What their parents expect of them and and so forth. And so you have to, you know, to kind of

10:04get all the way through this, you have to thread all these all these needles kind of at the same time. >> Do you think there are folks out there that meet these criteria who are disagreeable but that can feain agreeableness? You know, that can [laughter] >> for those just listening, Mark just raised his right hand. Um um in other words that they can sort of um phrase that comes to mind maybe because I can relate to a little bit. they um sneak up through the system, meaning they behave ethically as it relates to the requirements of the system. They're not breaking laws or breaking rules. In fact, quite the opposite. They're paying attention to the rules and following the rules until they get to a place where

10:41being disagreeable feels less threatening to their overall sense of security. >> Yeah. I mean, look, the really highly competent people don't have to break laws, right? Like it's it's the there was this there was this there was this myth, you know, that sort of happened around the movie The Godfather. And then there was this character My Lansky, you know, who's like ran basically the mafia, you know, 50, 60, 70 years ago. And there was this there's this great line of like, well, my Lansky had only like applied himself to running General Motors, he would have been the best CEO of all time. It's like, no, not really, right? Like the the people who are like great at running big companies, they don't have to they don't have to be mob

11:12bosses. They don't have to like break laws. They can, you know, they can they can do they can work they're they're smart and sophisticated enough to be able to work inside the system. you know, they don't need to take the easy out. So, I I don't think there's any implication that they have to, you know, that they have to they have to break laws. That said, they have to break norms, right? And and and specifically the the thing this is probably the thing that gets missed the most because the process of the process of innovating, the process of creating something new, like once it works, like the stories get retconed, um, as they say, um, in comic books. So, the stories get adapted to where it's like it was inevitable all

11:42along. You know, everybody always knew that this was a good idea. You know, the person has won all these awards. Society embraced them. And it's if if invariably if you if you were with them when that was when they were actually doing the work or if you actually get a couple drinks into them and talk to them about it, it'll be like no that's not how it happened at all. They faced a wall of skepticism just like a wall of basically social, you know, essentially denial. No, this is not going to work. No, I'm not going to join your lab. No, I'm not going to come work for your company. No, I'm not going to buy your product, right? No, I'm not going to meet with you. And so they they they they get just

12:11like tremendous social resistance. they're they're they're not getting positive feedback from their from from their social network the way that more agreeable people need to have. Right? And this is why this is why agreeableness is a problem for innovation. If if you're agreeable, you're going to listen to the people around you. They're going to tell you that new ideas are stupid, right? End of story. You're you're not going to proceed. Um and so I I would put it more on like they need to be able to deal with they need to be able to deal with social discomfort to the level of ostracism. Um or at some point they're going to get shaken out and they're just going to quit. Do you think that people

12:40that meet these criteria do best by banding with others that meet these criteria early or is it important that they form this deep sense of self like the ability to cry oneself to sleep at night or you know lie in the fetal position worrying that things aren't going to work out and then still get up the next morning and get right back out there. >> Right. So Sean Parker has the best line by the way on on on uh on this. He says, uh, you know, being a being an entrepreneur, being a creator is like, uh, you know, getting punched in the face like over and over again. He said, eventually you start to like the taste of your own blood. And I love that line because it makes everybody like massively uncomfortable, right? But it

13:15gives you a sense of like how basically painful the process is. If you talk to any entrepreneur, you know, who's been through it about that, they're like, "Oh, yeah, that's exactly that's exactly what it's like." So, so, so there is this there is a big individual component to it. But look, but look, it can be very lonely, right? Um and it'd be especially you know very hard I think to do this if if nobody around you is trying to do anything even remotely similar right and if you're getting just universally negative responses like I you know very few people I think have very few people have the ego strength to be able to survive that for years. So I do think there's a huge advantage and and this is why you you do see clusters.

13:46There's a huge advantage to clustering, right? And so you have and and you know throughout history you've had this clustering effect, right? You have, you know, clustering of the great artists and sculptors in Renaissance Florence. You know, you had the clustering of the philosophers of Greece. You had the clustering of tech people in Silicon Valley. You have the clustering of creative, you know, arts, movie, TV people in Los Angeles, right? And so forth and so on, you know, for, you know, there's always a scene, right? There's there's there's always like a nexus and a place where where people come together, um, you know, for for these kinds of things. So generally speaking, like if somebody wants to work

14:14in tech and innovate in tech, they're going to be much better off being around a lot of people who are trying to do that kind of thing than they are in a place where nobody else is doing it. Having said that, the clustering has it can have downsides. It can have side effects and and you put any group of people together and you do start to get group think even among people who are individually very disagreeable. Um and so these same clusters where you get these very idiosyncratic people, they do have fads and trends just like every place else, right? And so they get they get they get wrapped up in their own social dynamics. And the good news is the social dynamic in those places is usually very forward-looking, right? Um

14:47and so it's usually it's usually like, you know, it's I don't know it's like a herd of iconoclass looking for the next big thing, right? So iconoclass looking for the next big thing. That's good. The herd part, right? That's what you got to be careful of. So even when you're in one of these environments, you have to be careful that you're not getting sucked into the group think too much. When you say group think, do you mean excessive friction due to pressure testing each other's ideas to the point where things just don't move forward or are you talking about group think where people start to form a consensus or the um self-belief that gosh we are so strong because we are so different. Um what do you can we better define group

15:19think? >> It's actually less either one of those things both happen. Those are good. Those are good. Uh the part of group think I'm talking about is just like we all we all basically zero in we we just end up zeroing in on the same ideas, right? In Hollywood there's this classic thing. It's like there there are years where all of a sudden there's like a lot of volcano movies. It's like why are there all these volcano movies and it's just like I don't there was just something in the just right there was just something in the air you know look tech Silicon Valley has this you know there there are moments in time where you you'll have these it's like the old thing like what's the difference between

15:49a fad and a trend right? you know the fed fed is the trend that doesn't last right um and so you know Silicon Valley is subject to fads and both fads and trends just like any place else right in other words you take smart disagreeable people you cluster them together they will act like a herd right they they will end up thinking the same things unless they try very hard not to >> you've talked about these personality traits of great innovators before um and we're talking about them now you invest in innovators you try and identify them and you are one so you can recognize these traits Here I'm making the presumption that you have these traits. Indeed you do. Um we'll just get that out of the way. Um

Fakes vs. real founders

16:27have you observed people trying to feain these traits? Um and are there any specific questions or um behaviors that are a giveaway? Um that they're pretending to be the young Steve Jobs or that they're pretending to be the the young Henry Ford. um pick your list of other other names that qualify as uh authentic legitimate innovators. Um we won't name names of people who have tried to disguise themselves as true innovators, but what are some of the um uh the the litmus tests and uh I realize here that um we don't want you to give these away to the point where they're uh lose their potency. But if you could share a few of those good we're actually pretty open book on this. So um so yeah, so so first of all, yes. So there are

17:11people who definitely try to like come in and basically present as being something that they're not and they've you know like they've read all the books they will have listened to this interview right they they will they you know they study everything and they they construct a facade um and they come in and present as something they're not I would say the amount of that varies exactly correlated to the NASDAQ um [laughter] right and so when stock prices are super low like you actually get the opposite when stock prices are super low people get too demoralized and people who should be doing it basically give up because they just think that whatever whatever the industry is over the trend is over whatever it's all hopeless um

17:40and So you get this flushing thing. So nobody ever shows up at a stock market low, right? And says like, "I'm the new I'm the new I'm the new next big thing." Um uh and and and does and and doesn't really want to do it because because there are higher status the kinds of people who do the thing that you're talking about, they're they're fundamentally oriented for social status. They're they're trying they're they're trying to get the social status without actually without actually the substance. And there are always other places to go get social status. So, so after 2000 the joke was um so you know when I got to Silicon Valley in '93 94 the valley was dead. We can talk about that. By 98 it was roaring and you had a

18:13lot of these people showing up who were you bas you basically had a lot of a lot of people showing up with with such kind of stories. 2000 the market crash. By 2001 the joke was that um there were these terms B toC and B2B and in 1998 they meant B TOC meant um business to consumer and B2B meant business to business which is the two different kinds of business models for internet companies. By 2001, uh, B to B2B meant back to banking. Uh, and B TOC meant back to consulting, right? Which is the high status people who the people oriented to status who showed up to be in tech. We're like, "Yeah, screw it." Like, "This is over. Stick a fork in it. I'm going to go back to, you know, Goldman Sachs or go back to Mckenzie,

18:49you know, where I can where I can where I can be high status." And so you you you get this flushing kind of effect that happens in a in a downturn. Um that said on a on a in a big upswing yeah you you get you get a lot of you get a lot of people showing up with with a lot of um you know with a lot of uh you know kind of let's say public persona without the substance to back it up. Um so the way we stress that I can actually say exactly how we test for this which because it's it the test exactly addresses the issue in a way that is impossible to fake. Um and and it's actually this it's actually the same way homicide detectives try to find out if you if you if you're if you actually if you're innocent or whether you've killed

19:21somebody. It's the same it's the same tactic. um which is you you ask increasingly detailed questions. Um, right. And so, you know, the way a homicide cop does this is, you know, what were you doing last night? You know, oh, I was at a movie. Well, which movie? You know, d which theater, [snorts] you know, okay, which seat did you sit in? You know, okay, what was the end of the movie? [laughter] Right? Like, right. And you you ask increasingly detailed questions and people have trouble at some point people have trouble making up and things just fuzz into just kind of obvious [ __ ] And basically fake founders basically have the same problem. They have a con they're able to relay a conceptual theory of what they're doing that

19:54they've kind of engineered. Um, but as they get into the details, it just it just fuzzes out. Whereas the the the true people that you want to back that can do it, basically what you find is they've spent five or 10 or 20 years obsessing on the details of whatever it is they're about to do. And they're so deep in the details that they know so much more about it than you ever will. And in fact, the best possible reaction is when they get mad, right? Um, which is also what the homicide cops say, right? What you actually want is you actually want the you basically want the emotional response of like, I can't believe that you're asking me questions this detailed and specific and picky. and [snorts] they kind of figure out

20:26what you're doing. Um, and then they get upset. Like that's good. That's perfect, right? But but but they they have, you know, but then they have to proven themselves in in the sense of like they have to be able to answer the questions in in in great detail. >> Do you think that people that are able to answer those questions in great detail have actually taken the time to systematically think through the ifands? >> Yeah. of all the possible implications of what they're going to do and they have a specific vision in mind of how things need to turn out or will turn out or do you think that um they have a a vision and it's a no matter what it will work out because the world will sort of bend around it. I mean in other words do

21:02you think that they place their vision in context or they simply have a vision and they have that tunnel vision of that thing and that's going to be it. Let's use you for an example um with Netscape. I mean, that's how I first came to know your name. Um, when you were conceiving Netscape, did you think, okay, there's this search engine and this browser and and it's going to be this thing that looks this way and works this way and feels this way. Um, did you think that and also think about, you know, that there was going to be a gallery of other search engines and it would fit into that landscape of other search engines or were you just projecting your vision of this thing as this unique um and

21:44special um brainchild? >> Well, I'm let me give the general answer and then we can talk about the specific example. So, the general answer is what what entre entrepreneurship, creativity, innovation is what economists call decision-making under uncertainty, right? And so, both parts are important. decision-m like you're going to make a ton of decisions because you have to decide what to do, what not to do and then uncertainty which is like the world's a complicated place right and in mathematical terms the world is a complex adaptive system with feedback loops and like it's really I mean it's it's extreme you know Isaac Azimov wrote the you know that in his novels he he wrote about this field called psycho

22:16history right which is the idea that there's like a supercomputer that can predict the future of like human affairs right and it's like we don't have that >> not [laughter] yet not yet we'll >> get to that later we certainly don't have that Um and so you're just dealing, you know, military uh commanders call this the fog of war, right? You're you're just dealing with a situation where the number of variables are just off the charts. It's all these other people, right, who are inherently unpredictable making all these decisions in different directions and then the whole system is combinatorial, which is these people are colliding with each other, influencing the decisions. And so I mean, look, the

22:48most straightforward kind of way to think about this is it's just it's amazing. Like anybody who believes in economic central planning, it always blows my mind because it's like it's just like try opening a restaurant. like try just opening a restaurant on the corner down here and like 50/50 odds the restaurant's going to work and like all you have to do to run a restaurant is like have a thing and serve food and like and it's like most restaurants fail, right? And so and restaurant people run restaurants are like pretty smart like they're you know they're they usually think about these things very hard and they all want to succeed. Um, and it's hard to do that. And so to start a tech company or to start an

23:17artistic movement or to or to fight a war, like you're just going into this like basically b conceptual battleground or military terms, real battleground where there's just like incredible levels of complexity, branching future paths. And so there there's nothing it's it's, you know, there's nothing predictable. And so what we look for is basically the the the sort of the really good innovators, they've got a drive to basically be able to cope with that and deal with that. And they they basically do that in two steps. So one is they try to pre-plan as much as they possibly can and and and we call that the process of navigating the we call the idea maze right and so the idea maze basically is I've got this general idea and it might

23:51be the internet's going to work or search or whatever and then it's like okay in their head they have thought through of like okay if I do it this way that way this third way here's what'll happen then I have to do that then I have to do this then I have to bring in somebody to do that here's the technical challenge I'm going to hit and they've got in their in their heads as best anybody could they they've got as complete a sort of a map of possible futures as they could possibly have and and This is where I say when you ask them increasing detailed questions, that's what you're trying to kind of get them to kind of chart out is, okay, how far ahead have you thought and how much are you anticipating all of the

24:20different twists and turns that this is going to take. Okay, so then they start on day one. And then of course what happens is, you know, now they're now they're in it. They're in now they're in the fog of war, right? They're in future uncertainty. And now that idea maze is maybe not helpful practically, but now they're going to be basically constructing on the fly day by day as they learn and discover new things and as the world changes around them. And of course it's a feedback loop because they're going to change you know if their thing starts to work it's going to change the world and then the fact the world is changing is going to cause you know their plan to you know to change as well. Um and so yeah the great the great

24:48ones basically they they course correct you know they the great ones course correct every single day. You know they take stock of what they've learned. Um uh you know they they modify the plan. Um the great ones tend to think in terms of hypothesis right like a scientific sort of mentality which is they tend to think okay I'm going to try this like I'm going to go into the world. I'm going to announce that I'm doing this for sure, right? Like I'm going to say like this is my plan and I'm going to tell all my employees that I'm going to tell all my investors that and I'm going to put a steak in there on this my plan and then I'm going to try it, [snorts] right? And even though I sound like I have complete certainty, I know that I

25:17need to test to find out whether it's going to work. And if it's not, then I have to go back to all those same people and I have to say, well, actually, we're not going left, we're going right. And they have to run that loop thousands of times, right? And they had, you know, to get through the other side. And this this led to the creation of this great term pivot, which has been very helpful in our industry because the the word when I was when I was young, the word we used was [ __ ] Um, [snorts] and pivot like sounds like so much better, [laughter] sounds like so much more professional. But yeah, you like make mistakes. It's just it's just too complicated to understand. You course correct, you adjust, you evolve. Often

25:48these things, at least in business, the businesses that end up working really well tend to be different than the original plan. But that's that's part of the process of a really smart founder basically working their way through reality, right, as as as they're executing their plan. >> The way you're describing this has parallels to a lot of models in biology and the practice of science. Um, you know, random walks, but that aren't truly random. Pseudo random walks in biology, etc. But one thing that uh is becoming clear from the way you're describing this is that I could imagine a great risk to early success. Mhm. >> So for instance, somebody develops a product, people are excited by it. Um they start to implement that product,

26:25but then the landscape changes and they don't learn how to pivot to use the um less profane version of it, right? They don't learn how to do that. In other words, the uh and I think of everything these days um or most everything in terms of reward schedules and dopamine reward schedules because that is the universal currency of reward. Um and so when you talk about the Sean Parker quote of um learning to enjoy the taste of one's own blood, that is very different than learning to enjoy the taste of success. That's right. >> Right. It's about internalizing success as a process of being self-determined and less agreeable, etc. In other words, building up of those five traits >> becomes the source of dopamine perhaps

Intrinsic motivation & risk-taking

27:07in a way that's highly adaptive. So on the outside we just see the product the end product the iPhone the MacBook the Netscape etc. But I have to presume and I'm not a psychologist um but I have done neurohysiology and I've uh studied the dopamine system enough to know that what's being rewarded in the context of what you're describing sounds to be a reinforcement of those five traits rather than oh it's going to be this particular product or the company's going to look this way or the logo is going to be this or that. That all seems like the peripheral to um what's really going on that great innovators are really in the process of of establishing neural circuitry that is all about reinforcing the me

27:49>> and the process of being me. >> Yeah. Yeah. So this this goes to Yeah. So this is like extrinsic versus intrinsic motivation. So the the Steve Jobs kind of Zen version of this, right? Or the sort of hippie version of this was the journey is the reward, >> right? He always he always told he always told his employees that is like look like you know everybody thinks in terms of these big public markers like the stock price or the IPO or the product launch or whatever he's like no it's it's actually the the process itself is the point right and and and if you to your point if you have that mentality then that's that's an intrinsic motivation not an extra exttrinsic motivation and so that's a kind of intrinsic motivation that can

28:21keep you going for a long time another way to think about it is competing against yourself right it's like can I get better at doing this right and can I prove to myself that I can get better um there's also a big social component to this and this is one of the reasons why Silicon Valley punches so so far above its weight as a place. Um there's a psychological component which is also goes to the comparison set. Um so a phenomenon that we've observed over time is the leading uh tech company in any city uh will aspire to be as large as the previous leading tech company in that city but often not larger right because they sort of they have a model of success and as long as they beat that level of success they've kind of you

28:56know checked the box like they've made it you know and and then they but then in contrast you're in Silicon Valley and you look around and it's just like Facebook and Cisco and Oracle and you know tulip Packard and >> gladiators. Yeah. And you're just like looking at these, you know, giants and and and you know, many of them are still, you know, Mark Zuckerberg's still, you know, going to work every day and like trying to trying to do, you know, like and and so like these people are like, you know, the role models are like alive, right? Right. And they're like right there, right? And it's so clear like how much better they are and how much bigger their accomplishments are. And so what what we find is young

29:26founders in that environment have much greater aspirations, right? Right? Because they just again maybe it's at that point maybe it's the social status maybe there's there's an extrinsic component to that but or maybe it helps calibrate that internal system to basically say actually you know no the opportunity here is not to build a local you know which we call local maximum form of success but let's build to a global maximum form of success which is which is something as big as we possibly can. Um, ultimately the great ones are probably driven more internally than externally when when it comes down to it. And that is where you get this phenomenon where you get people who are, you know, extremely successful and

29:57extremely wealthy who very easily can punch out and move to Fiji and just call it and they're still working 16our days, right? And so obviously something explains that that has nothing to do with external rewards. And and I think it's it's it's an internal thing. >> I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of our sponsors, Athletic Greens. Athletic Greens, now called AG1, is a vitamin mineral probiotic drink that covers all of your foundational nutritional needs. I've been taking Athletic Greens since 2012. So, I'm delighted that they're sponsoring the podcast. The reason I started taking Athletic Greens and the reason I still take Athletic Greens once or usually twice a day is that it gets

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31:13road, in the car, on the plane, etc. And they'll give you a year supply of vitamin D3 K2. Again, that's athletic greens.com/huberman to get the five free travel packs and the year supply of vitamin D3 K2. I've heard you talk a lot about the inner landscape, the inner psychology of these folks and I appreciate that we're going even deeper into that today and we will talk about the the landscape around whether or not Silicon Valley or New York whether or not there are specific cities that are ideal for certain types of pursuits. I think there was an article written by Paul Graham some years ago about um the conversations that you overhear in a city will tell you everything you need to know about

31:50whether or not you belong there uh in terms of your uh professional pursuits. Um, some of that's changed over time and now we should probably add Austin to the mix. Um, because it was written some time ago. Um, in any event, I want to return to that, but I want to focus on an aspect of this intrinsic versus exttrinsic motivators in terms of something that's a bit more cryptic, which is uh, one's personal relationships. You know, if I think about the um catalog of innovators in Silicon Valley, some of them like Steve Jobs had complicated personal lives, romantic personal lives early on, and it sounds like he worked it out. I don't know. I didn't uh I wasn't their uh couple's therapist, but you know, he um

32:30when he died, he was in a marriage that for all the world seemed like a happy marriage. Um you also have examples of innovators who have had many partners, many children with other partners. Elon comes to mind. Um, you know, I I don't think I'm disclosing anything that isn't already obvious. Um, those could have been happy relationships and just had many of them. But the reason I'm asking this is you can imagine that for the innovator, the person with these traits who's trying to build up this this thing, whatever it is, that having someone or several people in some cases, um, who just truly believe in you when the rest of the world may not believe in you yet or at all, >> could be immensely powerful. And we have

33:14examples from cults >> that um, uh, embody this. We have examples from politics. We have examples from tech innovation and science. Uh, and I've always been fascinated by this because I feel like it's the more cryptic and yet very potent form of allowing someone to build themselves up. It's a combination of inner psychology and exttrinsic motivation because obviously if that person were to die or leave them or um cheat on them or you know pair up with some other innovator which we've seen several times recently and in the past it can be devastating to that person. But what are your thoughts on the role of personal and in particular romantic relationship as it relates to people having an idea and

33:56they're feeling that they can really bring that idea to fruition in the world. >> So I it's a real mixed bag. You have lots of examples in all directions and I think it's something like it's something like something like following. So first is we talked about the personality traits of these people. They tend to be highly disagreeable. >> Doesn't foster a good romantic relationship. >> Highly disagreeable people can be difficult [laughter] to be in relationship. >> I may have heard of that once or twice before. friend may [clears throat] have given me that example. >> Yeah. Right. And you know, maybe you just need to find the right person who like complements that and is willing to, you know, there's there's a lot of

34:23relationships where like you it's always this question about relationships, right? Which is do you want to have the same personality, you know, growth profile, the same behavioral traits basically as your partner or do you actually want to have, you know, is it is it an opposites opposites thing? And you know, look, I'm sure you've seen this. There are relationships where you'll have somebody who's highly disagreeable who's paired with somebody who's highly agreeable. And it actually works out great because one person just gets to be on their soap box all the time and the other person is just like, "Okay, right. [laughter] It's fine, right? It's fine. That's good. Um, you know, you put two disagreeable people

34:48together, you know, maybe sparks fly and they have great conversations all the time and maybe they come to hate each other, right? And so, um, so anyway, so these people, if you're going to be with one of these people, you're fishing out of the disagreeable end of the pond. And and again, when I say disagreeable, I don't mean, you know, these are these are normal distributions. I don't mean like 60% disagreeable or 80% disagreeable. The people we're talking about are 99.99% disagreeable, right? So these are ordinary ordinary people. So so part of it's that and then of course they have the other personality traits, right? they're they're, you know, super conscientious. They're super driven. As

35:17a consequence, they tend to work really hard. They tend to not have a lot of time for, you know, family vacations or other things. You know, they're not they then they don't enjoy them if they're forced to go on them. And so, again, that kind of thing can fray at a at a relationship. So, so there there's a so there's a fair amount in there that's loaded. Like somebody who's going to partner with one of these people needs to be signed up for the ride. Um, and that's that's a hard thing, you know, that's a hard thing to do or or you need a true partnership of two of these, which is also hard to do. So, I think that's part of it. Um and then look I think a big part of it is you know people achieve a certain level of

35:46success um and you know either in their [laughter] own minds or you know publicly um and then they start to be able to get away with things right um and they start to be able it's like well okay you know now we're rich and successful and famous and now I deserve you know and and this is where you get into I I view this now in the realm of personal choice right you get in in this thing where people start to think that they deserve things um and so they start to behave in you know very bad ways um and and then they blow up their personal worlds as a consequence and maybe they regret later and maybe they don't, right? It's always a always a question. Um, so yeah, so I think there's that. Um, and then I don't know like yeah,

36:19some people just need maybe the other part of it is some people just need more emotional support than others. And I don't know that that's a big I don't know that that tilts either way. Like I know I know some of these people who have like great loving relationships and seem to draw very much on having this kind of firm foundation to rely upon. And then I know other people who are just like their personal lives are just a continuous train wreck and it doesn't seem doesn't seem to matter like professionally. they just keep doing what they're doing. And and and maybe there's a maybe we could talk here about like, you know, whatever is the personality trait for risk-taking, right? Like some people are so

36:48incredibly riskrone that they need to take risk in all aspects of their lives at all times and and if if if part of their life gets stable, they find a way to blow it up. Um and that's some of some of these people you could describe in those terms also. >> Yeah, let's talk about that. Um because I think um risk-taking and sensation seeking is something that fascinates me um for my own reasons and in my observations of others. Um does it dovetail with these five traits in a way that can really serve innovation in ways that can benefit everybody? The reason I say to benefit everybody is because there is a view of how we're painting this picture of the innovator as this like really cruel person. Um but oftentimes what we're

37:31talking about are innovations that make the world far better for billions of people. >> Yeah, that's right. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. And and by the way, everything we're talking about also is not just in tech or science or or in business. It's also everything we're also talking about is true for the arts, >> right? So, you know, the history of like artistic expression is, you know, you people with all these same kinds of traits. >> Well, I was thinking about Picasso and his and his regular turnover of lovers and partners and he was very open about the fact that it was one of the sources of his productivity uh slashcreativity. Uh he wasn't shy about that. Um I I suppose if he were alive today, it might

38:01be a little bit different. He might be judged a little differently. >> Right. Or that was his story for you know behaving in a pattern that you know was very awful for the people around him and he didn't care. Right. >> Right. Maybe they left him. >> Yeah. Like you know who knows, right? So so so you know this puts and takes to all this. Um but um but no. Okay. So I have a theory. So here here's a theory. This this is one of these. I keep a list of things that will get me kicked out of a dinner party. Um at topics at any given point in time. >> Do you read it before you go in? >> Yeah. I just I yeah so I I I [laughter] have it on on auto recall so that I can I can get out of these things. But um so

38:31here here's the thing that can get me kicked out of a dinner party. Um uh especially these days. Um so uh think of the kind of person where it's like very clear that they're like super high to your point there is somebody who's super high output in whatever domain they're in. They've done things that have like fundamentally like changed the world. They've brought new whether it's businesses or technologies or art you know works of art um uh you know entire schools of of creative expression in some cases to the world. And then at a certain point they blow themselves to smitherines, right? And they do that either through like a massive like financial scandal. They do that through a massive personal, you know, breakdown.

39:02They do that through some sort of public expression that causes them a huge amount of problems. You know, they say they say the wrong thing, maybe not once, but [laughter] several hundred times and blow themselves to smitherines. Um and and and there's this, you know, there's this kind of arc. There's this moral arc that people kind of want to apply which it's like the Icarus, you know, the the you know, flying too close to the sun and, you know, he had it coming and he needed to keep his ego under control and you get kind of this, you know, kind of this this this this judgment that applies. Um so I have a different theory on this. So the term I use to describe these people and a lot of and by the way, a lot of

39:33other people who don't actually blow themselves up but get close to it, um which is a whole another set of people. um uh I call them martyrs to civilizational progress right so so work backwards civilizational progress so look the only way civilization gets moved forward is when people like this do something new right because civilization as a whole does not do new things right groups of people do not do new things right these these things don't happen automatically like by by by default nothing changes the only way civilizational change on any of these axes ever happens is because one of these people stands up and says you know no I'm going to do something different than whatever everybody else has ever

40:08done before. So th this is the this is progress. Like this is actually how it happens. Sometimes they get lionized or awarded. Sometimes they get crucified. Sometimes the crucification is literal. Sometimes it's just you know symbolic. But like you know they are those kinds of people. Um and then and then and then murders like when when they go down in flames like they have and again this is where it really screws the people's moral judgments cuz everybody wants to have the sort of super clear story of like okay he did a bad thing and he was punished. And I'm I'm like, "No, no, no, no, no." He was the kind of person who was going to do great things and also was going to take on a level of risk and

40:43take on a level of sort of extreme behavior such that he was going to expose himself to flying too close to the sun, wings melt, and crash to ground. But but but it's a package deal, right? The the the reason you have the Picassos and the Beethoven and all these people is because they're willing to take these extreme level of risks. they they they are that creative and original not just in their art or their business but in everything else that they do that they will set themselves up to be able to fail psychologic you know a psychologist would probably or psychiatrist would probably say you know maybe you know to what extent do they actually like have a death wish do they do they actually you know at some point

41:13do they want to punish themselves do they want to fail that I don't know but you see this they they they deliberately move themselves too close to the sun and and and you can you can see it when it's happening because like if [snorts] they get too far from the sun they deliberately move back towards it right you know they they come right back and they they they want the risk Uh, and so anyway, like I I I yeah, so martyrs to civilizational progress, like this is how progress happens. When these people crash and burn, the natural, you know, inclination is to judge them morally. I tend to think we should basically say look like and and I don't even know if this means like giving them a moral pass or whatever, but it's like

41:45look like this is how civil civilization progresses and we need to at least understand that there's a self-sacrificial aspect to this that that may be tragic and and often is tragic, but it it is it is quite literally self-sacrificial. Are there any examples of great innovators who um were able to compartmentalize their risk-taking uh to such a degree that they had what seemed to be a morally impeccable life >> in every domain except in their business pursuits? >> Yeah, that's right. So, some people are very some people are very highly controlled like that. Um some people are able to like very narrowly and I I don't really want to set myself an example in a lot of this, but I will tell you like

42:23as an example like I I I will never use debt in business. Uh, number one, you know, number two, like I have the most placid personal life you can imagine. Number three, I'm not I'm the last person in the world who's ever gonna do an extreme sport. I mean, I'm not even gonna go on the sauna on the ice bath. Like, I'm not I'm not doing any of this. Like, I don't doing any I'm not telesking. No obligation. I'm not I'm not on the Titan. I'm not, you know, I'm not going down to see the Titanic. >> Goodness, you weren't. >> I'm not doing any of this. I'm not doing any of this stuff. I have no interest. I don't play golf. I don't ski. I I have no interest in any of this stuff, right? And so like there are ex and I know

42:52people like this, right, who are very high achievers. It's just like, yeah, they they're they're they're completely segmented. They're extreme risktakers in business. They're completely button down on the personal side. They're completely buttoned down, you know, financially. They're, you know, they they're scrupulous with following every rule and law you can possibly imagine. But but they're still fantastic innovators. And then I know many others who are just like they've their life is on fire all the time in every possible way. And whenever it looks like the fire is turning into embers, they figure out a way to like relight the fire, right? um and they just really want to live on the edge. And so I I think that's maybe I

43:24think that's an independent variable. And again, I would apply the same thing. I think the same thing applies to the arts. Um you know, classical music as an example. Like I think Bach was, you know, as an example, one of the you know, kind of best you musicians of all time, had just a completely sedate personal life. You know, never had any aberant behavior at all in his personal life. You know, family man, tons of kids, apparently, you know, pillar of the community, right? Right. And so like if Bach could be Bach and yet not like burn his way through, you know, 300 mistresses or whatever, you know, maybe you can too. >> So in thinking about these two different categories of innovators, those that

Elites, the public & cancellation

43:56take on tremendous risk in all domains of their life and those that take on tremendous risk in a very compartmentalized way, um I don't know what the percentages are. Uh but I have to wonder if in this modern age of the public being far less forgivable, what I'm referring to is cancel culture. Um, do you think that we are limiting the number of innovations in total like by just simply frightening or eliminating an enormous category of innovators because they don't have the confidence or the means or the um strategies in place to regulate. So they're just either bowing out or they're getting crossed off. They're getting canceled one by one. >> So do you think the public is less tolerant than they used to be or more

44:39tolerant? Well, the systems that uh I'm not going to be careful here. I think the um the large institution systems, yes, are not tolerant of what the public tells them they shouldn't be tolerant of. Um and so if there's enough noise, there's enough noise in the mob, I think institutions bow out. And here I'm referring not just to univer they essentially say okay the let the cancellation proceed or they and maybe they're the maybe they're the gavvel that comes down but but they're not the the lever that got the thing going. And so I'm not just thinking about universities. I'm also thinking about advertisers. I'm thinking about um the big movie houses that um cancel a film that a given actor might be in

45:22because they had something in their personal life that's still getting worked out. I'm thinking about people who um are in a legal process that's not yet resolved, but the public has decided they're a bad person, etc. >> My question is, are we really talking about the public? I I agree with your question, and I'm going to come back to it, but I I'm so I'm going to examine one part of your question, which is, is this really the public we're talking about? And and I would just say exhibit A is who is the current front runner for the Republican nomination? Um, today the public [laughter] at least on one side of the political aisle seems very on board, right? Um, number two, like look, uh, you know, there's a certain

45:59musician who like, you know, flew too close to the sun, blew himself to smitherines. He's still hitting all-time highs on music streams every month. The public seems fine. >> Like I I think the public might I I would argue the public is actually more open to these things than it actually maybe ever has been. >> Um, and we could talk about why that's the case. I think it's a it's a differentiation and this is what what your question was aiming at but it's a differentiation between the public and the elites and so so so I my view is everything that you just described as an elite phenomenon and actually the public is very much not on board with it >> interesting and and and so what's actually happening is the division

46:32what's happened is the public and the elites have gapped out the the the public is more forgiving of of of what previously might have been considered kind of eper extreme behavior um right Scott Fitzgerald there are no second acts in American lives it turns out completely wrong turns out their second acts, third acts, fourth acts. Apparently, you can have a limited number of acts. The public is actually up for it. >> Yeah. I mean, I think of somebody like Mike Tyson, right? I feel like he's every, you know, his life exemplifies um everything that's amazing and great and also terrible about America. >> If we took Mike Tyson to dinner tonight at any restaurant anywhere in the United States, what would happen?

47:06>> He would be loved. >> Oh, he would be like he would the outpouring of enthusiasm and passion and love >> would be incredible. Like it would be unbelievable. This this is a great example like it just like the and again I'm not even going to draw more I'm not even going to say I agree with that or disagree with that of just like we I think we all intuitively know that the public is just like 100% like absolutely like he's a legend like he's a legend he's a living legend he's like a cultural touchstone absolutely and you see it when he shows up in movies right he shows I remember the I mean the big breakthrough where I figured this out with respect to him because I don't really follow sports but when he showed

47:37up in that it was that first hangover movie and he shows up and you know it was I was in a theater and like the the audience just goes bananas crazy they're so excited to see him. >> Yeah, he evokes delight. I always say that Mike Tyson is the only person I'm aware of that can wear a shirt with his own name on it and it somehow doesn't seem uh wrong. In fact, it just kind of makes you like him more. >> Yeah. >> Um it's it his ego feels very contoured in a way that uh he knows who he is and who he was and and yet there's a there's a humbleness woven in maybe as a consequence of all that he's been through. I don't know. Um but yeah, people love Mike. >> Publicly loves him now. Exactly. Now, you know, if he shows up to like lecture

48:16at Harvard, right, like I think you're probably going to get a different reaction. >> I don't know. I don't know. I mean, David Simon, you know, the the guy who wrote The Wire, gave a gave a talk at Harvard and um and it sounded to me based on his report of that um which is very interesting. In fact, um that people adore um people who are connected to everybody in that way. Like I feel like everybody loves Mike from from above his status, the sides, below his status. He's just sort of he he occupies this this halo of of love and adoration. >> Okay. All right. Yeah. >> Um Yeah. And then look, the other side of this is the is is the elites. And you kind of alluded to this, the institutions. So So basically, it's like

48:56the people who are like at least nominally in charge or feel like they should be in charge. >> Yeah. I want to make sure we uh define elite. So you're not necessarily talking about people who are wealthy. You're talking about people who have authority within institutions. So the ultimate definition of an elite is who can get who fired, right? Like that's the the ultimate test. Who can get who fired, boycotted, blacklisted, ostracized, like when push prosecuted, jailed, like when push comes to shove, right? I think that's always the question. Who can destroy whose career? And of course, you'll notice that that is heavily asymmetric when they when these fights play out. Like there's very clear which side can get

49:28the other the other side fired and which side which side can't. Um and so yeah, so look, I think we we live in a period of time where the elites have gotten to be extreme in a number of dimensions and and I think it's characterized by for sure extreme group think, um extreme sanctimonyy, um extreme, you know, moral, you know, I say dojon, um you know, extreme, you know, this this weird sort of modern Puritanism, um and then an extreme sort of morality of like punishment and terror against their perceived enemies. Um but but I wanted to I wanted to go through that because I actually think I actually think that's a very different phenomenon. I think what's happening at the elites is very different than what's happening in the

50:00in the population at large. And then of course I I think there's a feedback loop in there which is I think the population at large is not on board with that program. Right? I think the elites are aware that the population is not on board with that program. I think they judge the population negatively as a consequence. That causes the elites to harden their own positions. That causes them to be even more alienating to the population. And so they're, you know, they're in sort of an oppositional negative feedback loop. Um and yeah, it's going to be and you know it's but again it's a sort of question. Okay, who who can get who fired? And so, you know, elites are really good uh at getting like normal people fired, ostracized,

50:32banned, you know, hit pieces in the press, like whatever. Um, you know, for normal people to get elites fired, they have to really like band together, right? And really mount a serious challenge, which mostly doesn't happen, but but might be starting to happen in some cases. >> Do you think this um power of the of the elites over um stemmed from social media sort of going against its original purpose? I mean, when you think social media, you think you're giving each and every person their own little reality TV show, their own voice. And yet, um, we've seen a dramatic uptick in the number of cancellations and firings related to immoral behavior based on things that were either done or amplified on social media.

51:14>> It's almost as if um the public is holding the wrong end of the knife. >> Yeah. So the way I describe it, so so I so I use these two terms and they're somewhat interchangeable, but elites and institutions and and they're they're somewhat interchangeable because who runs the institutions? The elites, right? And so it's it's a it's a sort of a self-reinforcing thing. Um and you know institutions of all kinds institutions everything from you know the government bureaucracies companies nonprofits foundations NOS's you know tech companies you know on and on and on like you know people who are in people who are in charge of big complexes and that that carry a lot of basically power and influence and capability and money

51:48as a consequence of their positional authority right so you know the head of a giant foundation may never have done anything in their life that would cause somebody to have a high opinion of them as a person but they're in charge of this you know gigantic multi-billion dollar complex and have all this power of the results So that's just to define terms at least institutions. Um so it's actually interesting. Uh Gallup uh has been doing polls on the following on the question of of trust in institutions which is sort of a therefore proxy for trust in elites. Uh basically since the early 1970s um and what you find and and they do this across all the categories of big institutions you know basically

52:21every everyone I just talked about a bunch of others big business small business banks newspapers broadcast television um the military police. So they've got like 30 categories or something. And basically what you see is almost all the categories basically started in the early 70s at like 60 or 70% trust and now they've basically almost across the board they've just done had a complete basically linear slide down for 50 years basically my my whole life. Um and you know they're they're they're now bottoming out. You know Congress and journalists bottom out at like 10%. [laughter] Right? Like the the two groups everybody hates are like Congress and journalists. Um, and then it's like a lot of other big institutions are like

52:5920 in their 20s, 30s, 40s. Actually, big business actually scores fairly high. Tech actually scores quite high. The military scores quite high, but basically everything else has really caved in. And so, so this is sort of my fundamental challenge to everybody who basically says, and you you didn't do this, but you you'll hear this the simple form of this, which is social media caused the current trouble. And let's call this an example. Collapse in faith and institutions and and elites. Let's call that part of the current trouble. Um everybody's like well social media caused that. I was like well no social media social media is new right in the last you know social media is effectively new practically speaking

53:32since 2010 2012 is when it really took off. Um and so if the trend started in the early 1970s right and has been continuous then we're dealing with something broader. U and and and and u Martin Gur uh wrote I think the best book on this called the revolt of the public where he goes through this in detail and and he he he does he does say that um social media had a lot to do with what's happened in the last decade. But he says is yeah if you go back you look further it was basically two things coinciding. Uh one was just a general change in the media environment and in particular in the 1970s is when you started to and especially in the 1980s is when you started to get um specifically talk radio

54:05>> which was a new outlet. Um and then you also started you also got cable television. Um and then you also by the way it's actually interesting in the 50s60s you had paperback books which was another one of these which was an outlet. So you you you had like a fracturing of the media landscape that started in the 50s through the 80s and then of course the internet like blew it wide open. Having said that, if the elites and the institutions were fantastic, you would know it more than ever [laughter] because information is more accessible. And so the other thing that he says and I agree with is the the public is not being tricked into thinking the elites and institutions are bad. They're they're they're learning

54:35that they're bad, right? And and and the mystery and therefore the mystery of the Gallup poll is why those numbers aren't all just zero, right? which is, you know, arguably, you know, in a lot of cases where they should be. >> I think one reason that, >> oh, and by the way, he thinks this is bad. So he and I have a different view. So here's where he and I disagree. He thinks this is bad. So he's he basically says you you can't replace elites with nothing. You can't replace institutions with nothing. If if if because what you're just left with is just going to be wreckage. You're going to left with a completely basically, you know, atomized out of control society that has no ability to marshall, you know, any sort

55:05of activity in any direction. It's just going to be a dog eat dog awful, you know, world. Um, I have a very different view on that which we could which we could talk about. >> Yeah, I'd love to I'd love to hear your views on that. >> Yeah. The the quick question I was going to ask before we go there is I think that one reason that I and many other people sort of reflexively assume that social media caused the the demise of our faith and institutions um is well first of all I wasn't aware of this um uh lack of correlation between the the decline in faith and institutions and and the rise of social media but secondarily that we've seen some movements that have um essentially rooted themselves in tweets in comments

55:49in posts that get amplified and those tweets and comments and posts come from everyday people. In fact, I can't name one person who initiated uh a given uh cancellation or movement because it was the sort of dog piling or mob um adding on to some person that was essentially anonymous. So I think that for many of us we we have the bot to use neuroscience language is sort of a bottom up in a perspective. Oh, you know, someone sees something um in their daily life or experiences something in their daily life and they tweet about it or they comment about it or they post about it and then enough people dogpile on the accused that um it picks up force and then the elites feel compelled um obligated to cancel somebody. Um that

56:34tends to be the narrative. And so I think the logical conclusion is oh you know social media allows for this to happen whereas normally someone would just be standing on the corner shouting or calling lawyers that don't have faith in them and you know you got the like the Aaron Brachovich model of a you know um you know that turns into a movie but that's a rare case of this lone woman who's got this idea in mind about how um big institution is is doing wrong uh or somebody is doing wrong in the world and then can leverage big institutions excuse me but the way that you describe it is that the elites are um are leading this this shift. >> So% >> so what is the role of the public in it? I mean I mean just to give it a concrete

57:12example um >> if for instance no one um tweeted or commented a meto or no one tweeted or commented about um some ill behavior of some I don't know university faculty member or um business person would the elite have come down on them anyway? >> Oh yeah. So what's happening? So what would which I based on what I've seen over the years um is is it's it's it there is so much astrourfing right now there there are entire categories of people who are paid to do this um some of them we call journalists um some of them we call activists some of them we call you know NGO you know nonprofits some of them we call university professors some of them we call grad students like whatever they're paid to do this you know re I don't know if

57:55you've ever looked into the misinformation uh industrial complex there's this whole universe of basically these funded groups that basically do quote unquote misin you know quote unquote min information and and they're constantly mounting these kinds of attacks. They're constantly trying to jin up this kind of basically panic to cause somebody to get fired. Like >> so it's not a grassroots. >> It's the opposite of grassroots. No, almost always when you trace these things back, it was a it was a journalist. It was an activist. It was a it was a it was a public figure of some kind. >> Um these are entrepreneur there there's these are entrepreneurs in a in a sort of a weird way. Like they're they're

58:26basically they're they're paid to their job mission calling in it's all wrapped up together. like they're true believers, but they're also getting paid to do it. Um, and there's a giant funding I mean there's a very large funding complex for this coming from, you know, certain high-profile people who put huge amounts of money into this. >> Is this well known? >> Yes. Well, so I mean it is in my world. So this is what the social media companies have been on the receiving end of for the last decade. Um, is it's this it's it's basic basically a political media activism complex with very deep pockets behind it. And you've got people who basically literally people who sit all day and watch the TV network on the

58:59other side or watch the Twitter feeds the other side and they wait. They they basically wait. It's like every politician, this has been the case for a long time now. Every every politician who goes out and gunk speeches, you'll see there's always somebody in the crowd with a camcorder or now with a phone recording them. And that's somebody from the other campaign who's paid somebody to just be there and like record every single thing the politician says. So that so that when a Mitt Romney says whatever the 47% thing, they've got it on tape and then they clip it and they and they try to make it viral. So th this stuff is and again like look like these people believe what they're doing. I'm not saying it's even dishonest. Like

59:27these people believe what they're doing. They think they're fighting a holy war. They think they're protecting democracy. They think they're protecting civilization. They think they're protecting whatever it is they're protecting. Um but but they and then they know how to use the tools and so they they know how to they know how to try to jin up the outrage. And then by the way, sometimes it works in social cascade. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes they cascade, sometimes they don't. But if you follow these people on Twitter, like this is what they do every day. They're constantly trying to like light life is fire, right? I assume that it was really bottom up, but it sounds like it's sort

59:57of a mid level and then it and that it captures the elites and then the thing takes on a life of its own. >> By the way, it also intersects with the trust and safety groups at the social media firms, right, who are responsible for figuring out who gets promoted and who gets banned right across this. And you'll notice one large social media company has recently changed hands and has implemented a different kind of [laughter] set of trust and safety. and all of a sudden a different kind of boycott movement has all of a sudden started to work that wasn't working before that and and another kind of boycott movement is not working as well anymore. Um and so there's like for sure there's an intermediation happening like

1:00:27look the stuff that's happening in the world today is being intermediated through social media because social media is the defining media of our time. Um but there are people who know how to do this and and and do this for a living. So so no I I very much view this as a I I view very much the like cancellation wave like this whole thing. It's it's a it's a it's it's an it's an elite phenomenon. Um and when it appears to be a grassroots thing, it's it's it's it's either grassroots among the elites, which you know is possible because there's, you know, a fairly large number of people who are like signed up for that, you know, that particular crusade. Um but there's also a lot of astroturfing that's taking place inside

1:00:59that. The question is, okay, at what point does the population at large get pulled into this and and maybe there are movements at certain points in time where they do get pulled in and then maybe later they get disillusioned. And so then there's some question there. And then there's another question of like, well, if the population at large is going to decide what these movements are, are they going to be the same movements as that the elites want? And are the elites how are the elites going to react when the population actually like fully expresses itself, right? And so there's and like I said, there's a feedback loop between these where the more extreme the elites get, they tend to push the population to more extreme

1:01:27views on the other side and vice versa. So it ping pongs back and forth. And so yeah, this is yeah, this is our world. >> Yeah, this explains a lot. Um I want to make sure that I >> Taibbe. So M Shelonberger, Matt Taibbe, a bunch of these guys have done a lot of work just if you just look into what's called the misinformation industrial complex, >> you'll find a network of money and power that is really quite amazing. >> I've seen um more and more Shelonburgger showing up, right? Um >> and he's just look on this stuff he and he and Ta just they're literally just like tracking money. I it's just like it's it's very clear how the money flows in including like a remarkable amount of money out of the government,

1:02:03>> you know, which is of course like in theory very concerning. >> Very interesting. >> The government should not be funding programs that take away people's constitutional rights and yet somehow that is what's been happening. >> Very interesting. >> Yes. >> I want to make sure that I hear your ideas about why the uh decline in confidence in institutions and is not necessarily problematic. Um, is this going to be a uh total destruction, burning down of the forest that will lead to new life? Is that your view? >> Yeah. Well, so this this is the thing. And and look, there's a question if you're there's a couple questions in here, which is just like how how bad is it really? Like how bad are they,

1:02:41>> right? And I I you know, I think they're pretty bad. Uh a lot of them are pretty actually bad. Um and so so so that's one big question. And then yeah, look, the other question is like okay, if an institution has gone bad or a group of elites have gone bad, like can can it's this wonderful word reform, right? Can can can they be reformed? And everybody always wants to reform everything and yet somehow like nothing ever quite ever gets reformed, right? Um and so people have been trying to reform, you know, housing policy in the Bay Area for decades. And you know, we're not building building fewer houses than ever before. So somehow reform movements seem to lead to more just just just more bad

1:03:11stuff. But anyway, yeah. So if you have an existing institution, can it be reformed? Can it be fixed from the inside? Like what's happened in universities? Like there's a lot of there are professors at Stanford as an example who very much think that they can fix Stanford. Like I don't know what you think. It doesn't seem like it's going in productive directions right now. >> Well, I mean, there are many things about Stanford that function extremely well. I It's a big institution. It's certainly got its issues like any other place. Um, they're also my employer. Mark's giving me some interesting looks. He wants me to get a little more vocal here. Um, no, no, you don't. No, no. I I mean, I think that um to put you on the

1:03:42spot. >> Yeah. I mean, one of the things about being a researcher at a big institution like Stanford is well, first of all, it meets the criteria that you described before. You know, you look to the left, you look to the right or anywhere above or below you and you have excellence, right? I mean, I've got a Nobel Prize winner below me whose daddy also won a Nobel Prize and there is scientific offspring is likely to win. I mean, you it it inspires you to do bigger things than uh than one ordinarily would no matter what. So, there's that and that's great and that persists. Um there's all the uh bureaucratic red tape about trying to get things done and how to implement decisions is very hard. Um and

Institutions & alternatives

1:04:17there are a lot of reasons for that. And then of course there are the things that um you know many people are aware of are there are uh public accusations about people in positions of great leadership and that's getting played out and it's and the whole thing becomes kind of overwhelming and a little bit opaque when you're just trying to like run your lab or live your life. And so I think one of the reasons for um this lack of reform that you're referring to >> is because um there's no position of reformer, right? So deans are dealing with a lot of issues. Provis are dealing with a lot of issues. Presidents are dealing with a lot of issues and and then some, uh, in some cases. And so, um, you know, we don't have a dedicated

1:04:54role of reformer, someone to go in and say, "Listen, there there's just a lot of fat on this and we need to trim it or we need to create this or do that. There's there just isn't a system to do that." Um, and that's I think in part because um, universities are are built on old systems and you know, it's like build it's like the New York subway. It's still it's amazing it still works as well as it does and yet it's got a ton of problems also. >> Yeah. >> Well, look so so so the point the point we could we could debate the the universities specifically but the point is like look if you do think institutions are going bad and then you have to make it number one you have to figure out if you think institutions are

1:05:25going bad. The population largely does think that then at the very least the people who run institutions ought to really think hard about what that means. But people still strive to go to these places. And I still hear from people who like, for instance, did not go to college are talking about how a university degree is useless. They'll tell you how proud they are that their son or daughter is going to Stanford or is going to UCLA or is going to Urbana Champagne. I mean, it's almost like to me that's always the most um you know, shocking contradiction is like, yeah, like these institutions don't matter, but then when people want to hold up a card that says why their kid is great, it's it's not about how many push-ups

1:05:59they can do or that they started their own business most of the time. It's they're going to this university and I think, well, what's going on here? >> So, do you think the median voter in the United States can have their kid go to Stanford? >> No. >> No. >> No. And and >> do you think the median voter in the United States could have their kid admitted to Stanford even with perfect SAT? No, no, no. [laughter] It in this day and age, the competition is so fierce that it requires more. >> Yeah. So like, so first of all, again, we're dealing here. Yes. We're dealing with there with a small number of very elite institutions. People may admire them or not. U most people have no connectivity to them whatsoever. In the

1:06:33statistics, in the polling, universities are not doing well. The population at large, yeah, they may have fantasies about their kid going to Stanford, but like the reality of it is they have a very very collapsing view of these institutions. Um so so anyways this this actually goes straight to the question of alternatives then right which is like okay if you believe that there's collapsing faith in the institutions if you believe that it is merited at least in some ways um if you believe that reform is effectively impossible then you are faced and we could debate each of those but like the population at large seems to believe a lot of that um then there's a question of like okay like can can it be replaced and if so

1:07:06like are you better off replacing these things basically while the old things still exist or do you actually need to basically clear the field to be able to have the new thing exist? The universities are a great case study of this because of the student because of how student loans work, right? And and the way student loans work is to to be able to be a to be to be an actual competitive university and compete, you need to have access to federal student lending because if you don't, everybody has to pay out of pocket and it's completely out of reach for anybody other than, you know, a certain class of either extremely rich or foreign students. Um, so you need access to federal student loan facility. To get

1:07:35access to the federal student loan facility, you need to be an accredited university. >> Guess who runs the accreditation council? I don't know >> the existing universities, >> right? So, it's a it's a it's a it's a it's a it's a it's a selfundaing machine. Like they they decide who the new universities are. Guess how many new universities get accredited, right, each year to be able? >> Zero. >> Zero, right? Um and so as long as that system is in place and as long as they have the government wired the way that they do and as long as they control who gets access to federal student loan funding, like of course there's not going to be any competition. Like of course there can't be a new institution

1:08:08that's going to be able to get to scale. Like it's not possible. And so if you actually wanted to create a new system that was better in the you know I would argue dozens or hundreds of ways it could obvious obviously be better if you were starting today um it probably can't be done as long as the existing institutions are actually intact. Um and this is my counter to to Martin which is like yeah we look we we we if we're going to tear down the old there may be a period of disruption before we get to the new but we're never going to get to the new if we don't tear down the old. When you say counter to Martin, you're talking about the author of Revolt tool to the public. >> Martin Gary. Yeah. What Martin Guri says

1:08:37is like look, he said basically um what Martin says what Martin says is as follows. Um the elites deserve contempt. Um but the only thing worse than these elites that deserve contempt would be no elites at all. Right. Um and and because and he basically says on the other side on the other side of the destruction of the elites and the institutions is is nihilism. You're basically left with nothing. And and by the way, there is a nihilistic streak. I mean there's a nihilistic streak in the in the culture and the politics today. there are people who basically would just say, "Yeah, just tear tear the whole system down, right? And there without any particular plan for for what follows." And so you

1:09:09you I I think he he makes a good point and that you want to be careful that you actually have a plan on the other side that you think is actually achievable. But but the the but again the counterargument to that is if you're not willing to actually tear down the old, you're not going to get to the new. Now what's interesting of course is this is what happens every day in business, right? So like the entire way like how do how do you know that the capitalist system works? The way that you know is that the old companies when they're no longer like the best at what they do, they get torn down and then they ultimately die and they get replaced by better companies. >> Yeah. I haven't seen a Sears in a while.

1:09:40>> Exactly. Right. And we know what's what's so interesting is we know in in capitalism and market economy, we know that that's the sign of health, right? [laughter] That's the sign of how the system is working properly, right? And in fact, we get actually judged by antitrust authorities in the government on that basis, right? It's like the best defense against antitrust charges is no, people are like coming to kill us and they're doing like a really good job of it. Like that that's how we know we're doing our job. And in fact, in business, we are specifically it is specifically illegal for companies in the same industry to get together and plot and conspire and plan and have things like these accreditation bureaus. Like we we

1:10:11would get if I created the equivalent in my companies of the kind of accreditation bureau that the universities have, I'd get straight to federal prison and a trust violation Sherman act straight to prison. People have been sent to prison for that. So in the business world, we know that you want everything subject to market competition. We we know that you want creative destruction. We know that you want replacement of the old with with superior new. It's just once we get outside of business, we're like, oh, we don't want any of that. We want we want basically stagnation and log rolling, right? And in you know, and basically, you know, institutional, you know, incestuous like, you know, entanglements

1:10:40and conflicts of interest, you know, as far as the eye can see. And then we're surprised by the results. >> So let's play it out um as a bit of a thought experiment. So let's say that um one small banding together of people who want to start a new university where free exchange of open ideas um where unless somebody has you know egregious behavior, violent behavior, you know, truly sexually inappropriate behavior against somebody, you know, that committing a crime, right? They're allowed to be there. They're allowed to be a student or a faculty member um or administrator. and let's just say this um accreditation bureau allowed student loans for this one particular university or let's say that there was an

1:11:20independent source of funding for that university such that students could just apply there. They didn't need to be part of this you know this elite accredited group which is sounds very mafial like frankly um not necessarily violent but certainly coercive in this in and uh in the way that it walls people out. Um, let's say that then there were 20 or 30 of those or 40 of those. Do you think that over time that model would overtake the the existing model? >> Is it interesting that those don't exist? >> Remember the Sherlock Holmes the dog that didn't bark? >> It is interesting those don't exist. >> Right. So there's there's two possibilities. One is like nobody wants that which I don't believe. Um and then

1:12:02the other is like the system is wired in a way that will just simply not allow it. >> Right. And you did a hypothetical in which the system would allow it. And my response to that is no, of course, the system won't allow that. >> Or the people that band together, you know, have enough money or or get enough resources to say, look, we can um you know, we can afford to give loans to, you know, 10,000 students per year. You know, 10,000 isn't a trivial number when thinking about the size of a university and um and you know, they most of them hopefully will graduate in four years and there'll be a turnover. And um do you think that the great future innovators would tend to orient toward that model um more than they currently

1:12:37do toward the traditional model? I I mean what I'm trying to get back to here is how do you think that the current model thwarts innovation? Um as well as maybe some ways that it still supports innovation. Um certainly cancellation and the the risk of cancellation from the way that we framed it earlier is going to um discourage risktakers um of the category of risk takers that take risk and every every domain that really like to fly close to the sun and sometimes into the sun, >> right? Or are doing research that is just not politically >> right. Yeah. Looking into issues that you know right that um that you know we can't even talk about on this podcast probably without without causing a distraction of what we're actually

1:13:16trying to talk about. That gives up the whole game right there. >> Exactly. Yeah. [laughter] Um so the uh you know I keep a file and it's a written file um because I'm afraid to put it in into electronic form of all the things that I'm afraid to talk about publicly because I come from a lineage of advisers where all three died young and I figure if nothing else I'll die and then you know I'll make it into the world and you know when I'll say 5 10 years um 20 years and uh if not you know I know with certainty I'm going to die at some point and then we we'll see where all those issues stand. In any event, um, >> is that list getting longer over time or shorter? >> Oh, it's definitely getting longer.

1:13:48>> Isn't that interesting? >> Yeah, it's get it's getting much longer. I mean, um, there are just so many issues that I would love to explore on this podcast with experts and, um, that I can't explore just bec even if I had a panel of them because of the way that things get sound bited and segmented out and taken out of context, it's like the whole conversation is lost. And so fortunately there are an immense number of equally interesting conversations um that I'm excited to have. Uh but it is it is a little disturbing. >> Do you remember Lysenkoism? >> Uh no. >> Oh so Len so famous in the Soviet history of the Soviet Union this is a famous thing. So there was a genet geneticist named Lysenko. Um

1:14:28>> that's why it sounds familiar but I'm not I'm not calling to mind. >> Well he was the guy who did uh he did communist gen genetics. Um the field of genetics. The Soviets did not approve of the field of genetics because of course they believed in the creation of the new man and you know totally equality and genetics did not support that. Um and so if you were doing like traditional genetics you were you know going to be you know at the very least fired if not if not killed. Um and so this guy Leno stood up and said oh I've got Marxist genetics right I've got like a whole new field of genetics that basically is politically compliant. And then they actually implemented that in the agriculture system of the Soviet Union

1:15:00and it's it's the origin of one of the big reasons that the Soviet Union actually fell which was they ultimately couldn't feed themselves. So create a new notion of biology as it relates to genetics, >> politically correct biology, right? And so and so and they they not only created it, they taught it, they they mandated it, they required it and then they implemented it in agriculture. Um interesting. So so yeah, so it's it's I I never understood there's a bunch of things in history I never understood until the last decade and that's one of them. >> Well, I censor myself at the level of deleting certain things, but I don't contort what I do talk about. So I tend to like to play on um lush open fields.

1:15:32Yeah. >> Uh just makes my life. This go this goes to the rot this goes to the rot and I'll come back to your question but like this goes to the rot in the existing system which is we we've by the way I'm no different I'm just like you like I'm not I'm trying not to light myself on fire either but like the the rot in the existing system and by system I mean the institutions and the elites the the rot is that the set of things that are no longer allow I mean that list is like obviously expanding over time um and like that's a real like historically speaking that doesn't end in good places >> is this group of a particular generation that we can look forward to the time when they eventually die off.

1:16:03>> It's sort of the boomers plus the millennials. So, >> got a while. >> Good good news, bad news. >> I mean, Gen X is weird, right? Gen I'm Gen X. Gen X is weird because we we kind of slipped in the middle. We're we're kind of we were kind of the um I don't like I don't know how to describe it. We were the kind of non-political generation kind of sandwiched between the boomers and the millennials. >> Gen Z is a very I think open question right now which way they go. I could imagine them being actually like much more intense than the millennials >> on all these issues. I could also imagine them reacting to the millennials and being far more open-minded. >> We don't know which way it's going to go

1:16:33here. >> It's going to go. It might be different groups of them. >> I mean, I'm Gen X also. I'm 47. You're >> 5050. Yeah. >> Right. So, more or less same. So, grew up with some John Hughes films and so where the the jocks and the hippies and the punks and the were all divided. They were all segmented, but then it all sort of mish mashed together a few years later. Um, and I think that had a lot to do with um, like you said, the sort of a-political um, aspect of our generation. >> We just knew we the Gen X just knew the Boomers were nuts, right? Like all the I mean, this is the canonical, right? The one of the great sitcoms of of of the era um, was Family Ties, right, with the character Michael P. Katon.

1:17:09>> And he was just like this guy is just like, "Yeah, my boomer hippie parents are crazy. Like I'm just going to like go into business and like actually do something productive." Like there was something like iconic about that character in our culture. And you know, people like me were like, "Yeah, obviously you go into business, >> you know, going to like political activism." And then, you know, it's just like, man, that came whipping back around with the next generation. Um, so just to touch real quick on the university thing. So, look, there are people trying to do, and I'm actually going to do a thing this afternoon with the University of Austin, which is which is which is which is one of these. And

1:17:34so, there are people trying to do new universities. Um, you know, I I like I say, it's certainly possible. I hope they succeed. I'm pulling for them. I think it'd be great. I think it'd be great if there were a lot more of them. >> Who founded this university? >> Uh, this is a whole group of people. I don't want to um freelance on that because I don't know originally who the idea was. >> University of Austin, not UT Austin. >> Yeah. So, this is not UT Austin. It's called it's called University of Austin or they call it I think it's UAT or what is it? UATX. >> Um and so um and it's a lot of very sharp people associated with it. Um and um then they're they're they're going to try to very very much exactly like what

1:18:06you described. They're going to try to do a new one. I would just tell you like the wall of opposition that they're up against is profound, right? Um, and part of it is economic, which is can they ever get access to federal student lending? And I, you know, I I hope that they can, but I I I, you know, it seems nearly inconceivable the way the system's rigged today. >> Um, and then, you know, the other is just like they're going to they already have come under, I mean, any any anybody any [laughter] anybody who publicly associates with them who is in traditional academia immediately gets lit on fire, right? And there's like, you know, cancellation campaigns. Like, so they're up against a wall of social

1:18:34ostracism. >> Wow. >> Um, they're up against a wall of, you know, press attacks. um they're up against a wall of um you know people just like doing the thing pouncing on any anytime anybody says anything they're going to try to like burn the place down. This reminds me of like like um Jerry Springer episodes and Heraldo Rivera episodes where um you know it's like if a teen listened to um you know like Danzig or Marilyn Manson type music or Metallica that they were considered a devil worshipper like we right now we [clears throat] just laugh right we're like that's crazy right people listen to music with all sorts of lyrics and ideas and looks and and like that's crazy. Um, but you know, there were people

1:19:13legitimately sent to prison. I think it was the West Memphis three, right? These kids out in West Memphis that looked different, acted different, were accused of murders that eventually it was um made clear they clearly didn't commit, but they were in prison because of the music they listened to. I mean, this sounds very similar to that. And I remember seeing bumper cigars, free the West Memphis 3, and I thought this was some crazy thing. you look into it and this isn't uh it's a little bit niche but um I mean these are real lives and there was a active uh witch hunt for people that looked different and acted different and yet now we're sort of in this inverted world where um on the one hand we're all told that we can express

1:19:53ourselves however we want but on the other hand you can't get a bunch of people together to take classes where they learn biology and sociology and econ in Texas wild >> yes also So the you know the simple explanation is it's this is puritanism right? So this is the original American pur puritanism that just like works itself out through the system in different ways at different times. You know there's this phenomen there's a religious phenomenon in America called the the great awakenings. There's just there there will be these periods in American history where there's basically religiosity fades and then there will be this snapback effect where you'll have this basically this you know frenzy

1:20:26basically of religion. You know in the old days it would have been you know tent revivals and people speaking in tongues and all this stuff. Um and then in the modern world it's it's you know it's it's of the form that we're living through right now. Um and so yeah, it's just basically these waves of sort of American religious and you know remember like religion in our time religious impulses in our time don't get express you because we live in we live in more advanced times right we live in scientifically informed times and so religious impulses in our time don't show up as overtly religious right they show up in a secularized form >> right which of course conveniently is is is therefore not subject to the first

1:20:57amendment separation of church and state right as long as the church is secular there's no problem right and so but but we're we're acting out these kind of religious scripts over and over again and we're in the middle of another religious frenzy. >> There's a phrase that I hear a lot and um I don't necessarily believe it, but I want your thoughts on it, which is the pendulum always swings back. >> Yeah. Not quite. >> Well, so that's how I feel too because, you know, I'll take that. >> Take any number of things that we've talked about and um you know, gosh, it's so crazy, you know, the the way things have have gone with institutions or it's so crazy the way things have gone with social media or it's so crazy fill in

1:21:34the blank. And people will say, well, you know, the pendulum always swings back like like the like it's the stock market or something. >> You know, after every crash, there'll be an eventual boom and vice versa. >> By the way, that's not true either. Right. >> Right. >> Most most stock markets we have, of course, survivorship. It's all survivorship. Everything is survivor. It's all everything you just said is obviously survivorship bias. Right. So, if you look globally, most stock markets over time crash and burn and never recover. >> The American stock market hasn't always recovered, >> right? I was referring to the American stock market. >> Yeah. right >> globally. But the reason everybody refers to the American stock market is

1:22:06because it's the one that doesn't do that. [snorts] The other 200 or whatever [laughter] that crash and burn and never recover. Like let's go check in on the, you know, an Argentina stock market right now. Like I don't think it's coming back anytime soon. >> Yeah. My father is Argentine and immigrated to the US in the 1960s. So he would definitely agree with that. >> Yeah. Like it doesn't come. It doesn't come, you know, like when when their stocks crashed, they don't come back. Um so and then you knowism like the Soviet Union never recovered from lysencoism. It never came back. It led to the end of the country. you know, literally the things that took down the Soviet Union were oil and and wheat and the wheat

1:22:36thing. You can trace the crisis back to lysencoism. Um and so, um yeah, no, look, I pendulum always swings back is true only in the cases where the pendulum swings back. Everybody just conveniently forgets all the other circumstances where that doesn't happen. One of the things people you see this in business also, um people have a really hard time confronting really bad news. >> I don't know if you've noticed that. Um I think like every doctor who's listening right now is like, "Yeah, no shit." But like like there are situ you see it in business there are situations that it's Star Trek remember Star Trek the Kobayashi Maru uh simulator right so the big lesson to become a Star Trek captain is you had to go through the

1:23:11simulation called the Kobayashimaru and the point was there's no way to it's a no-win scenario right and then the and then it turned out like Captain Kirk was the only person to ever win the scenario and the way that he did it was he he went in ahead of time and hacked the simulator right it was the only way to actually get through and then there was a debate whether to fire him or make him a captain so they made him a captain um and like you know problem is in real life like we we you do get the Kobayashi Maru on a regular basis like there are actual no-win situations that you can't work your way out of and as a leader you can't ever comp to that right because you have to like carry things forward

1:23:41and you have to look for every every possible choice you can but like every once in a while you do run into a situation where it's really not recoverable and at least I found people just like cannot cope with that and so and so what happens is they basically then they basically just like exclude it from their memory that it ever happened. I'm glad you brought up simulators because I want to make sure that we talk about um the new and emerging landscape of AI, artificial intelligence. Um, and I could try and uh smooth our conversation of a moment ago uh with the this one uh by creating some clever segway, but I'm not going to except I'm going to ask is there a possibility that AI is going to remedy some of what we're

1:24:22talking about? Um let's make sure that we earmark that for discussion a little bit later. But first off, because some of um the listeners of this podcast might not be as familiar with AI as perhaps they should be. We've all heard about artificial intelligence. People hear about machine learning, etc. But um it'd be great if you could define for us what AI is. Um people almost immediately hear AI and think, okay, robots taking over. I'm going to wake up and I'm going to, you know, strapped to the bed and my organs are going to be pulled out of me. um that robots are going to be in my bank account. They're going to kill all my children and um dystopia um for most um clearly that's not the way it's going

1:25:04to go. Um if you believe that machines can augment human intelligence and human intelligence is a good thing. So um tell us what AI is and um where you think it can take us both good and bad. >> Yeah. So, so, so there was a big debate when the computer was first invented, which was in the 1930s, 1940s. This people like Alan Turing and John von Norman and these people. Um, and the big debate at the time, um, was because they knew they wanted to build computers. They they had the basic idea. Um, and you know, there had been like calculating machines before that and there had been like there had been these looms that you basically programmed with punch cards and so there was like a there was a prehistory to computers that

1:25:43had to do with building sort of increasingly complex calculating machines. So they were kind of on a track, but they knew they were going to be able to build they call a general purpose computer that could basically you could program in the way that you program computers today. Um but they had a big debate early on which is should the fundamental architecture of the computer be based on either a like calculating machines like cash registers and looms and right and other things like that or should it be based on a model of the human brain? Um and they actually had this idea of computers modeling the human brain back then. Um and this was this concept of so-called neural networks. Um, and it's it's

1:26:14actually fairly astonishing from a from a research standpoint. The original paper on neural networks actually was published in 1943, right? So so so they didn't have our level of neuroscience, but like they actually knew about the neuron and they actually had a theory of like neurons interconnecting and synapses and information processing in the brain even even back then. Um, and a lot of people at the time basically said, you know what, we should basically have the computer from the start model after the human brain because like if we could if the computer could do everything that the human brain can do, like that would be the best possible general purpose computer and then you could have it do jobs and you could have

1:26:43it, you know, create art and you could have it do all kinds of things like humans can do. Um, it turns out that didn't happen um in our world. What happened instead was the industry went in the other direction. It went basically in the model of the calculating machine or the cash register. And I I think practically speaking that kind of had to be the case because that was actually the technology that was was practical at the time. Um but but that's the path. And so what what we all have experiences with up to and including the iPhone in our pocket is computers built on that basically calculating machine model not the human brain model. And so what that means is computers as we have come to understand

1:27:16them you know they're basically like you know mathematical sants you know at best right so they're like they're really good at like you know doing lots of mathematical calculations. They're really good at executing these extremely detailed computer programs. They're hyper literal. Um, one of the things you learn early when you're a programmer is as a pro as the human programmer, you have to get every single instruction you give the computer correct because it will do exactly what you tell it to do. And and and bugs in computer programs are always a mistake on the part of the programmer. >> Interesting. >> You never blame the computer. You always blame the the programmer because that that that's the nature of the thing that

1:27:47you're dealing with. >> One down score off and the whole thing >> Yeah. Yeah. And it's the it's the programmer's fault. Um, and if you talk to any programmer, they'll agree with this. will be like, "Yeah, if there's a problem, it's it's my fault. I I did it." I can't blame the computer. The computer has no judgment. It has no ability to interpret, synthesize, you know, develop an independent understanding of anything. It's just it's literally just doing what I tell it to do step by step. So, so for 80 years, we've had this just, you know, this very kind of hyperliteral, you know, kind of kind of model computers. These are called uh technically these are what are called vonoyman machines based after the

1:28:16mathematician John vonman. They run in that way and they've been very successful and very important and our world has been shaped by them. But there was always this other idea out there which is okay, how about a completely different approach which is based based much more on how the human brain operates. Um or or at least our our kind of best understanding of how the human brain operates, right? Because those aren't the same thing. Um it basically says, okay, what what if you could have a computer instead of being hyperliteral, what if you could have it actually be conceptual, right? Um and creative and able to synthesize information, right? and able to draw judgments and able to, you know, uh,

1:28:49behave in, um, you know, in ways that are not deterministic, but are rather um, you know, creative, right? And and so and and and and the applications for this, of course, are endless. And so, for example, the self-driving car, the only way that you can make a you you cannot program a computer with rules to make it a self-driving car. You have to do what Tesla and Whimo and these other companies have done now. You have to use AI, right? You have to use this other architecture. uh and you have to basically teach them how to recognize objects in images at high speeds the same way basically the same way the human brain does and so those are those are so-called neural networks running inside >> so essentially let the machine operate

1:29:22based on priors you know we we almost clipped a uh a boulder going up this particular drive and so therefore this shape that previously the machine didn't recognize as a boulder it now introduces to its catalog of boulders is that is that >> yeah we've got a good good example or let's even make it even even starker for self-driving car um there's something in the road, is it a small child or a or a plastic shopping bag being blown by the wind? >> Very important difference. >> If it's a shopping bag, you you definitely want to go straight through it because if you deviate off course, you might, you know, hit, you know, you're going to make a fast, you know, it's the same it's the same challenge we

1:29:56have when we're driving. Like you don't you don't want to swerve to avoid a shopping bag because you might hit something that you didn't see on the side. If it's a small child, for sure you want to swerve, >> right? Um and so, but it's very but like in in that moment and you know, small children come in different like shapes and descriptions and are wearing different kinds of clothes. They might tumble onto the road the same way a bag would tumble. >> Yeah, they might look like they're tumbling. And by the way, they might not be they might be wearing a Halloween mask, right? So the face they might not have a recognizable human face, right? And it might or it might be a kid with, you know, one leg, right? You definitely

1:30:22want to not hit those, right? Like so. So you you can't this is what basically we figured out is you can't apply the rules-based approach of a Vanoyman machine to basically real life and expect the computer to be in any way understanding or resilient to change to to basically things happening in real life. And this is why there's always been such a stark divide between what the machine can do and what the and what the human can do. Um and so basically what's happened is in the last decade that second type of computer, the neural network based computer has started to actually work. U it started to work actually first interestingly in vision >> recognizing objects and images which is why the self-driving car is starting to

1:30:54work. Um >> face recognition face recognition. I mean, when I was started off in visual neuroscience, which is really my original home, um, in neuroscience, the idea that a computer or a camera could do face recognition better than a human was like a very low probability event. Um, based on the technology we had at the time, based on the understanding of the face recognition cells and the fusifform gyus, now you would >> be smartest to put all your money on the machine. Yeah. You know, you want to find faces in airports, even with masks on and you know, at profile versus straight on machines can do it far better than most all people. I mean, there these super recognizers, but even they can't match the best machines. Now,

1:31:3610 years ago, what I just said was the exact reverse, >> right? That's right. >> Yeah. >> All right. So, fa faces, handwriting, um, right? Um, uh, and then voice, right? Being able to understand voice. Um, like if if you use just as a user, if you use Google Docs, it has a built-in voice transcription. They have sort of the best industry leading kind of voice transcription. If you use voice transcription in Google Docs, it's breathtakingly good. You you just speak into it and it just like types what you're what you're saying. >> Well, that's good because in my phone, every once in a while, I'll say, "I need to go pick up a few things." And it'll say, "I need to pick up a few thongs." And so, um, Apple needs to get on board

1:32:08uh, whatever the voice recognition is that Google's using. >> Maybe it knows you better than you think. Um, [laughter] so >> that was not the topic I was avoiding discussing, you know. >> No. So, that's on the list, right? That's on your your list. Um so um so look there there's actually this there's there's a reason actually why Google's so good and Apple is not right now at that kind of thing and it actually goes to actually the it's actually an ideological thing of all of all things um uh Apple does not permit pooling of data um for any purpose including training AI whereas Google does um and and Apple's just like stake their brand on privacy and among that is sort of a pledge that they don't like pull your

1:32:41data um and so all of Apple's AI is like AI that has to happen like locally on your phone um whereas Google's AI can happen in the cloud Right? It can happen across pool data. Now, by the way, some people think that that's bad because they think pooling data is bad. But but that that's an example of the shift that's happening in the industry right now, which is you have this separation between the people who are embracing the new way of training AIs and the people who basically for whatever reason are not. >> You um excuse me. Um you you say that some people think it's bad because of privacy issues or they think it's bad because of the a reduced functionality of that AI. >> Oh no. So you're you're definitely going

1:33:12to get So so um so there's three reasons AI has started to work. One of them is just simply larger data sets um larger amounts of data. So so so specifically the reason why objects and images are now the reason machines are now better than humans at recognizing objects, images or recognizing faces is because modern facial recognition AIs are trained across all photos on the internet of people, billions and billions and billions of photos, right? Unlimited number of photos of people on the internet. Um attempts to train facial recognition systems 10 or 20 years ago, they'd be trained on, you know, thousands or tens of thousands of photos. So the input data is simply much more vast, >> much larger. And this is the reason to

1:33:47get to the conclusion on this. This is the reason why chat GPT works so well is chat GPT, one of the reasons chatgpt works so well is it's trained on the entire internet of text. And the entire internet of text was not something that was available for you to train an AI on until it came to actually exist itself, which is new in the last, you know, basically decade. So in the case of face recognition, I could see how having a much larger input data set would be beneficial if the goal is to recognize mark injuries in space because you are looking for signal to noise against everything else, right? But in the case of chat GPT, when you're pooling all text on the internet and you ask chat GPT to say um construct a paragraph

1:34:24about um Mark Andre's prediction of the future of human beings over the next 10 years um and the uh likely to be most successful industries give chat JPT that if it's pulling across all text, how does it know what is authentically Mark Andre's text? Because in the case of face recognition, you have a um you've got a standard to work from a a verified image versus everything else. Um in the case of text, um you have to make sure that what you're starting with is verified text from your mouth. So, um, which makes sense if it's coming from video, but then if that video is, um, deep faked, all of a sudden what's true, your your your valid Mark Andrees is of question and then everything chat GPT is

1:35:14producing that is then of question, >> right? So, I would say there's a before and after thing here. There's like a before there's like a before chat GPT and after GPT question, right? Because the existence of GPT itself change changes changes the the answer. So before chat GPT, so the reason the version you're using today is trained on data up till September 2021. It's they're caught off by the train their training set up till September 2021 almost all text on the internet was written by a human being. Um and then most of that was written by people under their own names. Some of it wasn't, but a lot but a lot of it was. And why you know it's from me is because it was published in a magazine under my name or

1:35:45it's a podcast transcript and it's it's under my name. And and generally speaking, if you just did a search on like what are things Mark Anderson has written and said, 90 plus% of that would be would be correct. And there look, somebody might have written a fake, you know, parody article or something like that, but like not that many people were spending that much time writing like fake articles about like things that I said. Right. >> So many people can pretend to be you. >> Exactly. Right. And so generally speaking, you can you can kind of get your arms around the idea that there's a corpus of material associated with me or by the way, same thing with you. There's a corpus of of YouTube transcripts and

What AI is

1:36:12other your academic papers and talks you've given and you can kind of get your hands around that. And that's that's how these systems are trained. They they take all that data collectively. They put it in there and and that's why this works as well as it does. And that's why if you ask chat GPT to speak or write like me or like you or like you know somebody else it it will actually generally do a really good job because it has that it has all of our prior uh text in it in its training data. Um that said from here on out this gets harder and of course the reason this gets harder is because now we have AI that can create text and we have AI that can create text at industrial scale. >> Is it watermarked as AI generated text?

1:36:45>> No. >> How hard would it be to do that? >> I think it's impossible. Um I think it's impossible. There are people who are trying to do that. This is a hot topic in the classroom. I was just talking to a friend who's got like a 14-y old kid in in in a class and there's like these recurring scandals like every kid in the class is using chat GPT to like write their essays or to help them write their essays. Um and then the um uh the the teacher is using one of there's a tool that you can use that it purports to be able to tell you, you know, whether something was written by Chad GPT, but it's like only right like 60% of the time. And so there was this case where this student wrote an essay where their

1:37:16parent sat and watched them write the essay and then they submitted it and this tool got the conclusion incorrect and then the student feels outraged because he got unfairly cheated, but the teacher is like, "Well, you're all using the tool." Then it turns out there's another tool that basically you feed in text and it actually um it sort of uh it's it's a it's called they call it a summarizer, but what it really is is it's a cheating mechanism to to basically um just shuffle the words around enough so that it sheds whatever characteristics were associated with AI. So there's like a an arms race going on in educational settings right now around this exact question. I I don't I don't think it's possible to do there are

1:37:47people working on the watermarking. I don't think it's possible to do the watermarking. And I think it's just kind of obvious why it's not possible to do that, which is you can just read the output for yourself. It's it's really good. How are you actually going to tell the difference between that and something that a real person wrote? >> And then by the way, you can also ask chat GPT to write in different styles, right? So you can tell it like, you know, write in the style of a 15-year-old, right? you can tell it to write in the style of, you know, a non-native English speaker, right? Or if you're a non-native English speaker, you can tell it to write in the style of an English speaker, uh, native English

1:38:15speaker, right? And so, the tool itself will help you evade. So, I I I I don't think that I think there's a lot of people who are going to want to distinguish, right, quote, real versus fake. I I think those days are I think those days are over. >> Genie's out of the bottle. >> Genie's completely out of the bottle. And and by and by the way, I actually think this is good. This doesn't map to this doesn't map to my worldview of how we use this technology anyway, which which we can come back to. Um, so there's that. So, so, so there's that. So, and and then there's the problem therefore of like the so-called deep fake problem. So, then there's the problem of like deliberate basically manipulation. And that's like, you know,

1:38:45one of your one one of your many enemies, [laughter] one of your increasingly long list of enemies like mine. Um, who basically is like, "Wow, I know how I'm going to get him, right? I'm gonna I'm gonna I'm gonna create I'm gonna I'm gonna use it to create something that looks like a Hebrewman transcript, and I'm gonna have him say all these bad things or a video." >> Or a video or a video. I mean, Joe Rogan and I were deep faked in a video um I don't want to flag people to it. I won't so I won't talk about what it was about, but um where it for all the world looked like a conversation that we were having and we never had that specific conversation. >> Yeah, that's right. So that's going to happen for sure. And so there there's so

1:39:21what there's going to need to be is there's need to be basically registries where basically you you like in your case you will you will um submit your legitimate uh content into a registry under your unique cryptographic key right and then basically there will be a way to check against that registry to see whether that was the real thing. And I think this needs to be done for for sure for public figures. It needs to be done for politicians. It needs to be done for you know music. >> What about taking what's already out there and being able to authenticate it or not? In the same way that um many times per week I get asked is this your account about some a direct message that somebody got on Instagram and I always

1:39:54tell them look I only have the one account this one verified account. Although now with the advent of pay-to-play verification makes it a little less potent as a you know security blanket for um knowing if it's not this account um you know then it's not me. But in any case, these accounts pop up all the time pretending to be me. And I'm I'm, you know, relatively low on the on the scale, not not um not low, but relatively low on the scale to say like a um you know, like a Beyonce or something like that who has, you know, hundreds of millions of followers. So, um, is there a system in mind where people could go in and and verify text? You know, click yes or no, this is me. This is not me. And even there, there's

1:40:34the opportunity for people to fudge to eliminate things about themselves that they don't want out there by saying no, that's not me. It wasn't I didn't actually say that or create that. >> Yeah. No, that's right. And so, yeah, so technologically, this is actually pretty straightforward. So, the way to implement this technologically is with public key, what's called public key cryptography, which is the basis for how, you know, cryptography information is secured in the world today. Okay. And and so basically what you would the implementation form of this would be you would like you would pick whatever is your most trusted channel and let's say let's say it's your YouTube channel as an example where just everybody just

1:41:00knows that it's you on your YouTube channel because you've been doing it for 10 years or whatever and it's just obvious >> and you would just publish like in the about me page on YouTube you would just publish your your your public cryptographic key that's unique to you >> right and then anytime anybody wants to check to see whether any piece of content is actually you they go to a registry in the cloud somewhere and they basically submit they basically say okay is this him and then they can basically you to see whether somebody with your public key you had actually certified that this was something that that you made. >> Um now who runs that registry is an interesting question. Um if that registry is run by the government we

1:41:33will call that the min M ministry of truth. I think that's probably a bad idea. Um if that registry is run by a company um we would you know call that basically the equivalent of like a credit bureau or something like that. Maybe that's how it happens. The problem with that is that company now becomes hacking target number one, right, of every bad person on earth, right? Because you can, you know, if anybody breaks into that company, you know, they can they can they can fake all kinds of things. >> Yeah. They own the truth, >> right? They own the truth, right? And and by the way, insider threat also their employees can monkey with it, right? So you have to really trust that company. Um the third way to do it is

1:42:01with a blockchain, right? And so this with the crypto blockchain technology, you could have a distributed system, basically distributed database uh in the cloud that is run through a blockchain and then it it it it implements this cryptography and the certification process. What about quantum internet? Um is that another way to encrypt these things? I know most of our listeners are probably not familiar with quantum internet, but um put simply, it's a way to um secure communications on the internet. Uh let's just leave it at that. Um it's sophisticated and we'll probably do a whole episode about this at some point, but maybe you have a succinct way of describing quantum internet, but um that would be better

1:42:33and if so, please please offer it up. But is quantum internet going to be one way to secure these kinds of um data and resources? maybe in in in the in the future, years in the future. We don't yet have working quantum computers in practice. So, it's not it's not currently something you could do, but maybe maybe in a decade or two. >> Um, tell me, I'm going to take a stab at defining quantum internet in one sentence. It's a way in which if anyone were to try and peer in on a conversation on the internet essentially um would be futile because of the way that um uh quantum internet uh changes the way that the communication is happening so fast and so many times in any one conversation. It's essentially

1:43:08changing the translation or the language. so fast that there's just no way to keep up with it. Is that more or less accurate? >> Yeah, conceivably. Yeah. Not. Yeah. Not yet, but yeah, someday. >> So, going back to AI, you know, most people who hear about AI are afraid of AI. >> Um, um, well, I I think most people who aren't informed, >> this goes back to our elites versus masses thing. >> Oh, interesting. Well, I heard you say that, um, you know, um, and this is from a really wonderful tweet thread that we will link in the show note captions that that you put out um, not long ago. and that I've read now several times um and that everyone really should take the time to read it. Probably takes about um

1:43:4620 minutes to read it carefully and to think about each piece and it's I highly recommend it. Um but you said um and I'm quoting here, let's address uh the fifth the one thing I actually agree with which is AI will make it easier for bad people to do bad things. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. Well, so so yes. So um well so so so yeah. So, so first of all, there is a general freakout happening around AI. I think it's primarily, it's one of these, again, it's an elite driven freakout. I don't think the man in the street knows knows cares or feels one way or the other. I think it's just not a relevant concept, and it's probably just sounds like science fiction. Um, so there there's there's I think there's there's

1:44:20an elite driven freakout that's happening right now. Um, I think that elite driven freakout has many aspects to it that I think are incorrect, which is not surprising. I would think that, given that I think the elites are incorrect about a lot of things, but I think they're very wrong about a number of things they're saying about AI. Uh but that said, look, it's a it's a this is a very powerful new technology, right? This is like a new general purpose like thinking technology, right? So like what if machines could think, right? And what if you could use machines that think and what if you could have them think for you? There's obviously a lot of good that could come from that. Um but also people, you know,

1:44:51criminals could use them to plan better, you know, crimes. Um you know, terrorists could use them to plan better terror attacks and so forth. And so these are going to be tools that bad people can use to do bad things for sure. Um I can think of some ways that AI could be leveraged to do fantastic things like um in the realm of medicine um an AI pathologist perhaps can scan 10,000 slides of hisytologology and find the one microtumor cellular aberration that would turn into a full-blown tumor. Whereas the um even mildly fatigued or well-rested human pathologists, as great as they come, might miss that. >> Right. >> And perhaps the best solution is for both of them to do it. And then for the human to verify what the AI has found

1:45:38and vice versa, >> right? That's right. >> Right. And that's just one example. I mean, I can come up with thousands of examples where this would be wonderful. Um >> I give another one by medicine. Um so you're talking about some analytic result which is good and important. And the other is like the machines are going to be much better bedside manner. >> They're going to be much better at dealing with the patient. And we already know there's already been a study there's already been a study on this. So there was already a study done on this um uh where um there was a a study team that scraped thousands of medical questions off of an internet forum and then they had real doctors answer the questions and then they had basically

1:46:10GPT4 answer the questions and then they had another panel of doctors score the responses. Right? So there were no patients experimented on here. This was a test contained within the within the medical world. And then the the the the panel of the judges the panel of doctors who are the judges scored the answers on both factual accuracy um and on bedside manner um on empathy. Um and the GPT4 was was equal or better on most of the factual questions analytically already um and it's not even a specifically trained medical AI um but it was overwhelmingly better um on empathy. >> Amazing. >> Right. Um and so and and you know I don't think yeah I don't do you do you treat patient do you treat patients

1:46:48directly in your work? You don't. Yeah. You don't we do we run clinical trials, right? >> Um but I don't I don't do any direct clinical. >> So I I know I have no direct experience of this, but from the surgeons I from like if you talk to surgeons or you talk to people who train surgeons, what they'll tell you is like surgeons need to have an emotional remove from their patients in order to do a good job with the surgery. The side effect of that and by the way, look, it's a hell of a job to have to go in and tell somebody that they're going to die, right? Or that they have so they're never going to recover, they're never going to walk again or whatever it is. And so there's a there's sort of something inherent in

1:47:16that job where they need to keep an emotional reserve from the patient, right, to be able to do the job and it's expected of them as professionals. The machine has no such limitation. Like the machine can be as sympathetic as you want it to be for as long as you want it to be. It can be infinitely sympathetic. It's happy to talk to you at 4 in the morning. It's happy to sympathize with you. It's and by the way, it's not just sympathizing you in in the way that oh, it's just lying, you know, it's just making up words to lie to you to make you feel good. It can also sympathize with you in terms of helping you through all the things that you can actually do to improve your situation, right? And so, you know, boy, like if you be, you

1:47:48know, can you keep a patient actually on track with a physical therapy program? Can you keep a patient on track with a nutritional program? Can you keep a patient off of drugs or alcohol, right? And if they have a machine medical companion that's with them all the time that they're talking to all the time that's infinitely patient, infinitely wise, right? Infinitely loving, right? and and it's just going to be there all the time and it's going to be encouraging and it's going to be saying, you know, you did such a great job yesterday. I know you can do this again today. >> Cognitive behavioral therapy is an obvious fit here. These things are going to be great at CBT and that's that's already starting. You can already use

1:48:19Chat GPT as a as a CBT therapist if you want. It's actually quite good at it. And so so there's there's a universe here that's it goes to what you said. There's a universe here that's opening up which is what what I believe is it's it's partnership between man and machine, right? It's it's a symbiotic relationship, not an adversarial relationship. And so that exactly the doctor is going to pair with the AI to do all the things that you described, but the patient is also going to pair with the AI and and I think it's I think I think this this partnership that's going to emerge is going to lead among other things to actually much better health outcomes. I >> mean, I've relied for so much of my life

1:48:51on excellent mentors, >> right? >> Um from a very young age and still now >> um in order to make best decisions possible with the information I had. um and rarely were they available at four in the morning sometimes um but not on a frequent basis and they fatigue like anybody else and they have their own stuff like anybody else baggage events in their life etc. Um what you're describing is a sort of AI coach or therapist of sorts >> that hopefully would learn to identify our best self and encourage us to be our best self. And um when I say best self, I don't mean that in any kind of pop psychology way. I mean, I could imagine AI very easily knowing, you know, how well I slept the night before and what

1:49:35types of good or bad decisions I tend to make at 2:00 in the afternoon, uh, when I've only had 5 hours of sleep or maybe just less REM sleep the night before. It might encourage me to take a little more time to think about something. >> Yeah. >> Might give me a little, uh, tap on the wrist through a device that no one else would detect to um, you know, refrain from something. You know, >> it's never going to judge you. >> It's never going to be resentful. It's never going to be upset that you didn't listen to it, [laughter] >> right? It's never going to go on vacation. >> It's going to be there for you. Like I think this is the this is the way people are going to live. It's going to start with kids and then over time it's going

1:50:06to be adults. I think the way people are going to live is they're going to have a Exactly. friend, therapist, companion, mentor, coach, teacher, right, assistant. And that that that that or or by the way, maybe multiple of those. It may be that we're actually talking about six like different personas interacting, which is a whole another possibility, but they're going to have a committee. Yeah. Yeah. Committee. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Actually different personas. And maybe by the way, when there are difficult decisions to be made in your life, maybe what you want to hear is the argument among the different personas. Um, and so you're just going to get you're just going to grow up. You're just going to have this in your life and

1:50:36you're going to always be able to talk to it and always be able to learn from it and always be able to help it make, you know, and like it's just it's going to it's it's going to be a symbiotic relationship. It's going to I think it's be much better way to live. I think people are going to get a lot out of it. >> What modalities will it include? So, I can imagine um my phone has this um engine in it uh this AI companion and I'm listening in headphones as I walk into work and it's giving me some um not just encouragement, some warnings, some um thoughts that uh things that I might ask Mark Andre today that I might not have thought of. Uh and so on. Um I could also imagine it having a more human form. I could imagine it being uh

1:51:13tactile, having some haptic, so tapping to remind me so that it's not going to enter our conversation in a way that that it interferes or distracts you, but I would be aware. Oh, right. Um, you know, things of that sort. I mean, how many different modalities are we going to allow these AI coaches to approach us with? And is anyone actually thinking about the hardware piece right now? Because I'm hearing a lot about the software piece. Uh, what does the hardware piece look like? >> Yeah. So, the entrep this is where Silicon Valley is going to kick in. So the entrepreneurial community is going to try all of those, right? And by the way, the big companies and and and startups are going to try all those. And

1:51:46so there's obviously there's big companies that are working, you know, the big companies that have talked about a variety of these including, you know, heads-up displays, AR, VR, you know, kinds of things. Um, you know, there's lots of people doing voice, you know, the voice thing is voice is a real possibility. It may just be an earpiece. Um, there's a new startup that just unveiled a new thing, um, where it's actually they actually project. So you'll have like a pendant you wear on like a necklace and it actually like projects like literally it will like project images like on your hand or like on the table or on the wall in front of you. So like maybe that's how it shows up. Um yeah, there are people working on

1:52:16so-called haptic or touch based uh kinds of things. There are people working on actually picking up uh nerve signals like out of your arm. Um right to be able to um uh to be able to uh there's um people there's you know there's some science for being able to do basically like subocalization. Um so maybe you could pick up um you could pick up that way uh bone conduction you know um so yeah these are all going to be tried so so so that's one question is the physical form of it and then and then the other question is the software version of it which is like okay what's the level of abstraction that you want to deal with these things in like do you like right now it's like a question answer paradigm so called chatbot like

1:52:52ask question get an answer ask a question get an answer like well you want that to go for sure to more of a fluid conversation you want to build up more knowledge of who you are and you don't want to have to explain yourself the second time and so forth And then you want to be able to tell it things like, well, remind me this, that, or you know, be sure and tell me when x. >> Um, but then maybe over time, more and more, you want it actually deciding when it's going to talk to you, right? Um, and when it thinks it has something to say, it says it and otherwise it stay silent. >> And and normally, at least in my head, unless I make a concerted effort to do otherwise, I don't think in complete sentences. Um, so presumably this these

1:53:26AI um these machines could learn my style of fragmented internal dialogue and I'll maybe I have an earpiece and I'm walking in and and I start hearing something but at some you know advice etc. Um encouragement discouragement um but at some point those sounds that I hear in an earphone are very different than seeing something or hearing something in the room. We know this based on the neuroscience of musical perception and language perception. Hearing something in your head is very different. And I could imagine at some point that the AI will cross a precipice where if it has inline wiring to actually control neural activity in specific brain areas and I don't mean very precisely even just stimulating a little more prefrontal

1:54:10cortical activity for instance through the earpiece. You know a little ultrasound wave now can stimulate prefrontal cortex in a non-invasive way that's being used clinically and experimentally. um that the AI could decide that I need to be a little bit more um contextaware, right? Um this is something that uh is very beneficial for those listening that are trying to figure out how to navigate through life. It's like you know know the context you're in and know the catalog of behaviors and words that are appropriate for that situation and not others. And um you know uh this would go along with agreeableness perhaps, but strategic agreeableness, right? Context is important. Um there's nothing diabolical about that. context is

1:54:48important, but I could imagine the AI recognizing, ah, we're entering a particular environment. I'm now actually going to ramp up activity in prefrontal cortex a little bit in a certain way that allows you to be more situationally aware of yourself and others, which is great unless I can't necessarily short circuit that influence because, you know, at some point the AI is actually then controlling my brain activity and my decision-m and my speech, right? I think that's what people fear is that once we cross that precipice that we are giving up control to the artificial versions of our human intelligence. >> Yeah. And look, I think we have to decide and you we we collectively and we as individuals I think have to decide

1:55:27exactly how to do that. And and this is the big thing that I believe about AI. There's just a much more I would say practical view of the world than a lot of the panic that you hear is just like these are machines. They're able to do things that increasingly are like the things that people can do in some circumstances. But these are machines. We build the machines. We decide how to use the machines. >> When we want the machines turned on, they're turned on. We want them turned off. they're turned off. Um and so yeah, so I I think that's absolutely the kind of thing that the individual person should always be in charge of. >> I mean, everyone was and I have to imagine some people are still afraid of

1:55:53crisper of gene editing. >> Um but gene editing stands to revolutionize our treatment of all sorts of diseases. Um you know, inserting and deleting particular genes in adulthood, right? Not having to um recombine in the womb a new a new organism is an immensely powerful tool. Um and yet the Chinese scientist who did crisper on humans, this has been done actually did his posttock at Stanford with Steve Quake then went to China did crisper on babies mutated um something I believe it was the HIV one of the HIV receptors I'm told it was with the intention of augmenting human memory. It had very little to do in fact with um limiting susceptibility to HIV per se to do with the way that that receptor is involved

1:56:35in human memory. um the world demonized that person. We actually don't know what happened to them. Whether or not they have a laboratory now or they're sitting in jail, it's unclear, but in China and elsewhere, people are doing crisper on humans. We know this. Um it's not legal in the US and um other countries, but it's happening. Um, do you think it's a mistake for us to fear these technologies so much that we back away from them and end up 10, 20 years behind other countries that could use it for both benevolent or um malevolent reasons? [clears throat] >> Yeah. So there's always and you know look the details matter. So it it's technology by technology, but I would say there's there's two things. There's

1:57:15you always have to think in these questions I think in terms of counterfactuals and opportunity cost, right? And so so [laughter] crisper is an interesting one. Crisper, you manipulate the human genome. Nature manipulates the human genome [laughter] >> like in all kinds of ways. >> Yeah. When you pick a spouse and you have a child with that spouse, you're doing genetic recombination. >> You are really you are quite possibly you know if you're Genghaskhan you know you're determining the future of you know humanity right by those like like yeah nature I mean look mutations like so this is the old this is the old question of like basically you know this is all state of nature state of grace like you know basically is nature good

1:57:51and then therefore artificial things are bad. Um, you know, which is kind of shock. A lot of people have like ethical views like that. Um, uh, I'm always of the view that like nature's a [ __ ] and wants us dead. Like nature's out to get us, man. Like nature wants to kill us, right? Um, like nature wants to like evolve all kinds of like horrible viruses. Nature wants to do plagues. Nature wants to like do, you know, weather, you know, like nature nature wants to do all kinds of stuff. I mean, look, the original nature religion was the original religion, right? Like that was the original thing people worshiped. And the reason was because nature was the thing that was out to get you, right? um before you had scientific and

1:58:21technological methods to be able to to be able to deal with it. So, so, so the idea of not doing these things to me is just saying, "Oh, we're just going to turn over the future of everything to nature." And I don't think that that there's no reason to believe that that leads in a particularly good direction or bad, you know, that that that's not a value neutral decision. Um and then the related thing that comes from that is this always this question around what's called the precautionary principle. Um which shows up in all these conversations on things like Crisper. um which basically is this it's this principle that basically says the inventors of a new technology should be required to prove that it will not have

1:58:52negative effects before they roll it out. Um this of course is a very new idea. This is actually a new idea in the 1970s. Um it's actually invented by the German Greens the 1970s. Um before that people didn't think in those terms. People just invented things uh and rolled them out. And we got all of modern civilization by people inventing things and and rolling them out. Um the German Greens came up with the precautionary principle for one specific purpose. I'll bet you can guess what it is. >> Uh, >> it was to prevent >> famine. >> Nuclear power. >> Oh, [snorts] it was to shut down attempts to do civilian nuclear power. Um, and if you fast forward 50 years later, you're like, "Wow, that was a big

1:59:28mistake, right?" Um, so what with what what they said at the time was you have to prove that nuclear reactors are not going to melt down >> and cause all kinds of problems. And of course, as an engineer, can you prove that that will never happen? Like you can't like you can't rule out like things that might happen in the future. Um, and so that that philosophy was used to stop nuclear power. By the way, not just in Europe, but also in the US and around much of the rest of the world. If you're somebody who's concerned about carbon emissions, of course, this is the worst thing that happened in the last 50 years in terms of energy. We we actually have the silver bullet answer to unlimited energy with zero carbon

1:59:58emissions, nuclear power. We we choose not to do it. Not only do we choose not to do it, we're actually shutting down the plants that we have now, right? In California, we just shut down, you know, the big plant. Germany just shut down their plants. Germanyy's in the middle of an energy war with Russia, right, that we are informed as existential for the future of Europe. >> But unless the risk of nuclear um power plant uh meltdown has increased, and I have to imagine it's gone the other way. Yeah. >> Um what is the rationale behind shutting down these plants and not expanding >> because nuclear is bad, right? Nuclear is icky. Nuclear is nuclear. Nuclear has been tagged. >> It just sounds bad. Nuclear.

2:00:31>> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Go nuclear. >> Nuclear. Well, so what what happened? >> We didn't shut down postal offices and you hear go postal. So what what happened was so so nuclear technology arrived on planet earth as a weapon, right? So it arrived in the form of the first thing they did was in the middle of World War II. The first thing they did was the atomic bomb they dropped on Japan and then and then there were all the debates that followed around nuclear weapons and disarmament and there's a whole conversation to be had by the way about that because there's different views you could have on that and then it was in the like 50s and 60s where they started to roll out civilian nuclear power and then there were there were me

2:00:59there were accidents there was like you know three mile island melted down and you know and then Chernobyl you know melted down in the Soviet Union and then even recently you know Fukushima melted down um and so you know there have been meltdowns and so I think it was a combination of it's a weapon um it is sort of icky scientists sometimes say the ick factor. Um right. Um it sort of it's you know it's radioactive. It glows green you know and by the way it becomes you know becomes like a mythical fictional thing and so you have all these movies of like horrible you know super villains powered by like nuclear energy and all this all this stuff. >> Well the intro to the Simpsons right is the nuclear power plant and the

2:01:32three-eyed fish and the you know all all the negative implications of this nuclear power plant run by um at least on the Simpsons idiots. Um and that is the you know uh the dystopia where people are unaware of just how bad it is >> and who owns the nuclear power plant right this like evil you know this evil capitalist right like so it's like connected to like you know capitalism right um and >> so we're blaming Matt groaning for the demise of a particular >> he certainly didn't help >> no he didn't >> right um but it's literally this amazing thing where if you're just like thinking if you're just thinking like rationally scientifically you're like okay we want to get rid of carbon this is the obvious

2:02:08way to do it so so okay fun Richard Nixon um uh did two two things that really mattered on this. So one is he defined in 1971 something called project independence uh which was to create a thousand new state-of-the-art nuclear plants, civilian nuclear plants in the US by 1980 and to get the US completely off of oil uh and cut the entire US energy grid over to nuclear power electricity cut over to electric cars the whole thing like detach from carbon. Um you'll notice that didn't happen. Um why did that not happen? Because he also created the EPA and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission which then prevented that from happening, right? Right. And the Nuclear Regulatory Commission did not authorize a new

2:02:42nuclear plant in the US for 40 years. >> Why would he hamstring himself like that? >> You know, he got distracted by [laughter] >> Yeah. He had by by Watergate in Vietnam. Um >> Yeah. I think Ellberg just died recently, right? The guy who released the Pentagon papers. Yeah. So, you know, it's complicated, >> but it's Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. It's this thing. Yeah. He didn't, you know, he left office shortly there after. He didn't have time to, you know, fully figure this out. I don't know whether he would have figured it out or not. You know, look, Ford could have figured it out. Carter could have figured it out. Reagan could have figured it out. any of these guys could have figured it out.

2:03:10It's like the most obvious, knowing what we know today, it's the most obvious thing in the world. The Russia thing is the amazing thing. It's like Europe is literally funding Russia's invasion of Ukraine by paying them for oil, right? And they can't shut off the oil because they won't cut over to nuclear, right? And then of course what happens, okay, so then here's the other kicker of what happens, right? Which is they won't do nuclear, but they want to do renewables, right? Sustainable energy. And so what they do is they do uh solar and wind. Solar and wind are not reliable [snorts] because it sometimes gets dark out and sometimes the wind doesn't blow. And so then what happens is they fire up the

2:03:40coal plants, right? And so the actual consequence of the precautionary principle for the purpose it was invented is a massive spike in use of coal. >> That's taking us back over a hundred years. >> Yes. Correct. That is the consequence of the precautionary principle. Like that's the consequence of that mentality. And so it's a failure of a principle on its own merits for the thing it was designed for. And then, you know, there there's a whole movement of people who want to apply it to every new thing. And and and and this is the hot topic on AI right now in in Washington, which is like, oh my god, these people have to prove that this can never get used for bad things. >> Sorry, I'm hung up on this nuclear

2:04:12thing. And and um I wonder uh can it just be renamed? I mean, seriously, I mean, there is something about the naming of things. We know this in biology, right? I mean, um you know, uh Lamarian evolution and things like that are bad. These are bad words in biology. But we had a guest on this podcast. So did Rashavei who's over in Israel who's shown you know inherited traits but if you talk about his Lamarian then it has all sorts of negative implications but he's the his discoveries have important implications for everything from inherited trauma to treatment of disease. I mean there's all sorts of positives that await us if we are able to reframe our thinking around something that yes indeed could be used for evil,

2:04:52>> right? >> Um but that has enormous potential and that is in agreement with nature, >> right? This fundamental truth that um at least to my knowledge no one is revising in any significant way anytime soon. So what if it were called something else? >> Instead of nuclear, it's it's called um you know sustainable, right? I mean, it's amazing how marketing can can shift our perspective of robots, for instance, or um anyway, I'm sure you can come up with better examples than I can, but uh is there a uh good solid PR uh firm working from the nuclear side? >> Thunberian. Greta Thunderberg. Um oh, Thumbergian. >> Then like if she got if she was in favor of it. Yeah. >> Which by the way, she's not. She's dead

2:05:34set against it. >> She said that >> 100%. Yeah. ba based on >> based on principles. >> The prevailing the prevailing ethic in environmentalism for 50 years is that nuclear is evil. Like they won't consider it. There are by the way certain environmentalists who disagree with this and so Stuart Brand is the one that's been the most public and he has impeccable credentials in the space and he wrote this >> polar catalog. >> Polar catalog guy. Yeah. And um he's written a whole bunch of really interesting books since and he he wrote a recent book that goes through in detail. He's like yes obviously the correct environmental thing to do is nuclear power. Um and we should be we should be implementing project

2:06:04independence. We should be building a thousand. We should specifically we should He didn't say this, but this is what I would say. We should hire Charles Ko. [laughter] We should hire KO Industries, right? And they should build us a thousand nuclear power plants, right? And then we should give him the Presidential Medal of Freedom for saving the environment. >> And that would put us independent of our reliance on oil. >> Yeah. Then we're done with oil. Like we're just think about what happens. We're done with oil. Zero emissions. We're done with the Middle East. We're done. We're done. We We're not [clears throat] drilling We're not drilling on American land anymore. We're not drilling on foreign land. like we

2:06:32have no military entanglements in places where we're drilling. We're not, you know, despoiling in Alaska. We're not nothing. No offshore rigs, no nothing. We're done. And you basically just you build state-of-the-art plants engineered properly. You have them just completely contained when there's nuclear waste. You just entomb the waste, right, in concrete. So it it it just sits there, you know, forever. Um it's just very small, you know, footprint, you know, kind of thing. Um and you're just done. And so this is like the to me it's like scientifically, technologically, this is just like the most obvious thing in the world. Um it's a massive tell on the part of the people who claim to be pro-

2:07:02environment that they're not in favor of this. >> And if I were to say um tweet that I'm pro nuclear power because it's the more sustainable form of power. If I hypothetically did that today um what would happen to me in this >> cryptofascist, you know, [laughter] interesting >> dirty evil capitalist, you know, monster, how dare you? >> I'm unlikely to run that experiment. I was just curious. That was what we call a Gdankan experiment. Experiment in Earth. >> You're a terrible Andrew. You're a terrible human being. Wow, we we were looking for evidence that you're a terrible human being and now now we know it, right? And so this is a great example of of the I I gave Andrew a book on the way in here with this. My

2:07:37favorite new book is the title of it is when reason goes on holiday. [snorts] Um and this is a great example of it is that the people who are who the people who simultaneously say they're environmentalists and say they're anti-uclear power. Like the positions just simply don't reconcile. But that doesn't bother them like at all. So be clear, I predict none none of this will happen. >> Amazing. Uh I need to learn more about nuclear power. Long coal. >> Long coal. >> Long coal. Invest in coal >> because you think we're just going to revert. >> It's the energy source of the future. >> Well, because it can't be solar and wind because they're not reliable. So, you need something >> if it's not nuclear, it's going to be

2:08:11either like oil, natural gas, or coal. >> And you're unwilling to say bet on nuclear because you don't think that um the socopolitical elitist trends that are driving against nuclear are likely to dissipate anytime soon. >> Not a chance. I I can't imagine. It would be great if they did, but the that that they are the the powers that be are very locked in on this as a position. And look, they've been saying this for 50 years. And so they'd have to reverse themselves off of a bad position they've had for 50 years. And [clears throat] >> people really don't like to do that. >> One thing that's good about this and other podcasts is that young people listen and they eventually will take over. >> Yeah. And by the way, I will say also

2:08:47there are nuclear entrepreneurs. Um so there are actually a b there are a bunch on the point of young kids, there are a bunch of young entrepreneurs who are basically not taking no for an answer. um and they're trying to develop and in particularly there's people trying to develop new very small form factor uh nuclear power um plants um with a variety of possible use cases. Um so you know look maybe you know maybe they show up with a better mousetrap and people take a second look but we'll see >> or just rename it. Um [laughter] so my understanding is that you think we should go all in on AI with the constraints that we discover we need in order to rein in safety and things of that sort. Not unlike social media.

2:09:25>> Yeah. >> Not unlike the internet. >> Not unlike what we should have done with nuclear power. >> Mhm. Yeah. >> And in terms of the um near infinite number of ways that AI can be envisioned to harm us, how do you think we should cope with that um psychologically? You know, because I can imagine a lot of people listening to this conversation are thinking, okay, that all sounds great, but there are just too many whatifs that are terrible, right? You know, what if the machines take over? Or what if you know I'll the silly example I gave earlier but um you know what if one day I could log into my um you know hard earned bank account and it's all gone right >> you know my the AI version of myself

2:10:01like ran off with someone else and with all my money right [laughter] my AI coach abandoned me for somebody else after it learned all the stuff that I taught it >> it took off with somebody else >> stranded [snorts] you know and it has my bank account numbers like this kind of thing right >> you could really make this scenario horrible if you kept going. [snorts] >> Yeah. Um well, we can throw in a benevolent example as well um to counter it. But um it's kind of fun to think about where the human mind goes, >> right? >> Yeah. So, first I I say we got to separate the real problems from the fake problems. And so there's a lot a lot of the science fiction scenarios I think are just not real. And the ones that you

2:10:39decided as an example, like it's not that's not what's going to happen. And I can explain why that's not what's going to happen. So you should there's a set of there's a set of fake ones. The fake ones are are ones or the ones that just aren't I think technologically grounded that aren't rational. It's the AI is going to like wake up and decide to kill us all. It's going to like yeah, it's going to develop the kind of agency where it's going to steal our money, you know, money and our spouse and everything else, our kids. Um like that's just that's not how it works. Um and then there's also all these concerns, you know, destruction of society concerns and this is, you know, misinformation, hate speech, deep fakes,

2:11:06like all that stuff. U which I I don't think is a real is actually a real problem. Um and then there's a people have a bunch of economic concerns around um you know, what's going to take all the jobs and all all those kinds of things. We could talk about that. I don't think those are those are those are I don't think that's actually the thing that happens. But then there are two actual real concerns that I actually do very much agree with and one of them is is what you said which is um bad people doing bad things and there's there's a whole set of things to be done inside there. The big one is we should use AI to build defenses against all the bad things, right? And so for for example, there's a concern AI is going

2:11:38to make it easier for bad people to build pathogens, right? Design pathogens in labs, which you know, bad people, bad scientists can do today, but this is going to make it easier easier to do. Well, obviously we should have the equivalent of an operation warp speed operating, you know, in perpetuity anyway, right? But then we should use AI to build much better bio defenses, right? And we should be using AI today to design like, for example, full spectrum vaccines against every possible form of pathogen, right? And so so defensive mechanism um hacking you can use AI to build better defense tools, right? And so you should you should have a whole new kind of security suite wrapped around you, wrapped around your

2:12:09data, wrapped around your money where you you're having AI uh repel um attacks, uh disinformation, hate speech, deep fakes, all that stuff. You should have an AI filter when you use the internet where it, you know, you shouldn't have to figure out whether it's really me or whether it's it's a madeup thing. You should have an AI assistant that's doing that for you. >> Oh yeah. I mean, these these little banners and cloaks that you see on social media, like this has been deemed misinformation that, you know, if you're me, you always click, right? Because you're like, what's behind the scrim? And then um or this is a I don't always look at the the this image is is gruesome type thing. Sometimes I just

2:12:43pass on that. But if it's something that um seems debatable, of course you look >> well. And you should have you should have an AI assistant with you when you're on the internet. And you should be able to tell that AI assistant what you want, right? So, yes, I want the full I want the full experience to show me everything. Um, I want it from a particular point of view, and I don't want to hear from these other people who I don't like. I, by the way, it's going to be my 8-year-old is using this. I don't want anything that's going to cause a problem, and I want everything filtered and and and AI based filters like that that you program and control are going to work much better uh and and be much more honest and straightforward

2:13:12and clear and so forth than than what we have today. So, so anyway, so so basically what I want people to do is think every time you think of like a risk of how it can be used, just think of like, okay, we can use it to build a counter measure. And the great thing about the countermeasures is they can not only offset AI risks, they can offset other risks, right? Because we already live in a world where pathogens are a problem, right? Um we ought to have better vaccines um anyway, right? Uh we already live in a world where there's cyber hacking and cyber terrorism. There already live in a world where there is bad content on the internet and we have the ability now to build much better AI powered tools to

2:13:40deal with all those things. I also love the idea of the AI physicians. >> Um, you know, getting decent health care in this country is so difficult even for people who have means or insurance. I mean, the number of phone calls and weights that you have to go through to get a referral to see a specialist. I mean, it's absurd. Like I mean, the process is is absurd. I mean, it makes one partially or frankly ill just to go through the process of having to do all that. I don't know how anyone does it. Um, and granted I don't have um the highest degree of patience, but I'm pretty patient and it drives me insane um to even just get a remedial care. But um so I can think of a lot of um benevolent uses of AI and I'm I'm

2:14:23grateful that you're bringing this up and uh here and that you've tweeted about it in that thread. Again, we'll refer people to that and that you're thinking about this. I have to imagine that in your role as investor um nowadays that you're also thinking about AI quite often um in terms of all these roles. Um and so does that mean that there are a lot of u young people who are really bullish on AI and are going for it? >> Yeah. >> Okay. This is here to stay. >> Yeah. >> Okay. >> Yeah. Oh yeah. Big time. >> Okay. Unlike crisper which is sort of in this liinal place where biotech companies aren't sure if they should invest or not >> in in uh in crisper because it's unclear whether or not the governing bodies are

2:14:59going to allow gene editing. >> Right. >> Just like it was unclear uh 15 years ago if they were going to allow gene therapy. But now we know they do allow gene therapy and amunotherapy. Okay. >> So, there is a fight. Having said that, there is a fight. There's a fight happening in Washington right now over exactly what should be legal or not legal. Um, and there's quite a bit of risk, I think, attached to that fight right now because there are some people in there that are being telling a very effective story to try to get people to either outlaw AI or specifically limit it to a small number of big companies, which I think is potentially disastrous. Um, by the way, the EU also is like super negative. You know, the EU has

2:15:31turned super negative on basically all new technology. So, they're moving to try to outlaw AI, which if they succeed, >> outlaw AI. flat out don't want it. >> But that's like saying you're going to outlaw the internet. I don't see how you can stop this train. >> And frankly, they're not a big fan of the internet either. So like they're I I think they regret the EU has a very especially the EU bureaucrats, the people who run the EU in Brussels have a very negative view on a lot of modernity. [laughter] >> But what I'm hearing here, you know, calls to mind things that I've heard people like David Gogggin say, which is, you know, there's so many um lazy, undisiplined people out there that nowadays it's easier and easier to

2:16:05become exceptional. I've heard him say something to that extent. It almost sounds like there's so many countries that are just backing off of um particular technologies because it just sounds bad from the PR perspective um that you know it's creating great lowhanging fruit opportunities for people to barge forward and countries to barge forward if they're willing to embrace this stuff. >> It is but number one you have to have a country that wants to do that. Um and and those exist and there there are countries like that. Um but and then the other is look they they need to be able to withstand the attack from uh stronger countries that don't want them to do it right. So like EU like the EU has you

2:16:39know nominal control over like what whatever it is 27 or whatever member countries. So like even if you're like whatever the Germans get all fired up about whatever like Brussels can still in a lot of cases just like flat out basically control them and tell them not to do it right. And then the US I mean look we have you know we have a lot of control over a lot of the world >> but it sounds like we sit somewhere sort of in between like right now people are developing AI technologies in US companies right so it is happening >> yeah today today it's happening but like I said there's a set of people who are very focused in Washington right now about trying to either ban it outright um or trying to as I said limit it to a

2:17:12small number of big companies um and then look China's got a whole the front of this is China's got a whole different kind of take on this right than we do and So they're of course going to allow it for sure, but they're going to allow it in the ways that that their their system wants it to happen, right? Which is much more for population control um and to implement authoritarianism. Um and then of course they they they are going to spread their technology and their vision of how society should run across the world, right? So we're we're back in a cold war dynamic like we were with the Soviet Union where there are two different systems that have fundamentally different views on on issues, you know, concepts like freedom

2:17:44and and individual choice and freedom of speech and so on. Um, and you know, we know where the Chinese stand. We're still figuring out where we stand, >> right? There are a lot of So, I'm having a lot of schizophrenic I'm having specifically a lot of schizophrenic conversations with people in DC right now where if I talk to them in China, it doesn't come up. They just like hate tech, they hate American tech companies, they hate AI, they hate social media, they hate this, they hate that, they hate crypto, they hate everything, and they just want to like punish and like ban and like they're just like very very negative. But then if we have a conversation a half hour later and we talk about China, then the conversation

2:18:14totally different. Now we need a partnership between the US government and American tech companies to defeat China. It's it's like the exact opposite discussion, right? >> Is that fear or competitiveness >> on China specifically >> on on in terms of the the US response in Washington when you know you bring up these technologies like you know I'll lump crisper in there. Things like crisper, nuclear power, AI, it all sounds very cold, very dystopian to a lot of people >> and yet there are all these benevolent uses as we've been talking about. And then you say you raised the issue of China and then it sounds like this big you know dark cloud emerging and then all of a sudden you know it's we need to

2:18:50galvanize and and develop these technologies to counter their effort. So is it fear of them or is it competitiveness or both? Well, so without them in the picture, um you just have this basically it's it's there's an old bedin uh was a saying is me against my brother, me and my brother against my cousin, me and my brother, my cousin against, you know, the world, right? Like so so with it's it's actually it's evolution in action if the way I think would think about it is if there's no external threat, then the conflict turns inward. >> Um and then and then at that point there's a big fight between specifically tech and then I was just say generally politics and and my interpretation of that fight is it's a fight for status.

2:19:26It's fundamentally a fight for status and for power, which is like if you're in politics, you like the you like the status quo of how power and status work in our society. You don't want these new technologies to show up and change things because change is bad, right? Change threatens your position. It threatens your, you know, the respect that people have for you and your control over things. Um, and so I think it's primarily a status fight, which we could talk about. Um, but the the China thing is just like a straight up geopolitical us versus them. You know, like I said, it's like a cold war scenario. And you know, look, 20 years ago, the prevailing view in Washington was we need to be friends with China,

2:19:58right? And we're going to be trading partners with China. And yes, they're a totalitarian dictatorship, but like if we trade with them over time, they'll become more democratic. In the last 5 to 10 years, it's become more and more clear that that's just not true. Um, and now there's a lot of people in both political parties in DC who very much regret that and want to change to much more of a sort of a cold war footing. Are you willing to comment on Tik Tok and technologies that emerge from China that are in um widespread use within the US? Like how much you trust them or don't trust them? I can um go on record myself by saying that early on when Tik Tok was released, we were told as Stanford faculty that we should not and

2:20:35could not have Tik Tok accounts nor WeChat accounts. >> Right. >> So start with there are a lot of really bright Chinese tech entrepreneurs and engineers who are trying to do good things. I'm totally absolutely positive about that. So I think the many of the people mean mean very well. >> But the Chinese have a specific system [snorts] and the system is very clear and unambiguous. >> Um and the system is everything in China is owned by the party. It's not even owned by the state. It's owned by the party. It's owned by the Chinese Communist Party. So the Chinese Communist Party owns everything and they control everything. By the way, it's actually illegal to this day. It's illegal for an foreign investor to buy

2:21:08equity in a Chinese company. There's all these like basically legal machinations that people do to try to do something that's like economically equivalent to that. But it's actually still illegal to do that. The chi Chinese have no intention. The Chinese Communist Party has no intention of letting foreigners own any of China. Like zero intention of that. And they they they regularly move to make sure that that doesn't happen. So so so they own everything. They control everything. So >> sorry to interrupt you, but people in China can invest in American companies essentially all the time. >> Well, they can subject to US government constraints. There there is a there is a US government system that attempts to

2:21:39mediate that called CPHAS. Um and there are more and more there are more and more limitations being put on that. uh if you can get through that approval process then legally you can do that whereas the same is not true with respect to China um and so um so so they just have a system and so if you're if you're the CEO of a Chinese company it's not optional if you're the CEO of bite dance or CEO of 10centent it's not opt your relationship with the Chinese communist party is not optional it's required and what's required is you are a unit of the party and you and your company do what the party says and when the party says we get full access to all user data in America you say When the party says you change the

2:22:15algorithm to optimize to a certain social result, you say yes. Right? So, so it's just it's whatever it's whatever it's whatever Xiinping and his party cadres decide and that's what's gets implemented. If you're the CEO of a Chinese tech company, there is a political officer assigned to you who has an office down the hall. Um, and at any given time he can come down the hall, he can grab you out of your staff meeting or board meeting and he can take you down the hall and he can make you sit for hours and study Marxism and Xi Jinping thought and quiz you on it and test you on it. Wow. >> And you'd better pass the test, right? So, so it's like a straight political control [laughter] thing. And then, by

2:22:48the way, if you get crossed with them, like, you know, so when we see um uh tech founders getting called up to Congress for um you know, what looks like interrogation, but it's probably pretty light interrogation compared to what happens in other countries. >> Yeah, it's it's a it's a it's state it's state power. They they just they just have this view of top down state power and they view it's that their system and they view that it's necessary for lots of historical and moral reasons that they've defined and that's how they run and then they've got a view that says how they want to propagate that vision outside the country and they have these programs like belt and road right um that basically are intended to propagate

2:23:21kind of their vision worldwide um and so they are who they are like I will say that they don't lie about it right they're they're very straightforward >> they give speeches they write books you can buy Xiinping speeches he goes through the whole thing they have they have their tech 2025 plan talk about you know this is like 10 years ago So their whole AI agenda, it's all in there. >> And is there a goal that you know in 200 years, 300 years that China is the superpower controlling everything? >> Well, yeah. Or 20 years, 30 years or two years, three years. Yeah. >> Well, they got a shorter horizon. >> I mean, look, they're Yeah. They're they're I mean, if if you're it's you know, I don't know, everybody's a little

2:23:53bit like this, I guess, but yeah, if you're they want to win. Mhm. >> Well, the the crisper in humans example that I gave earlier was interesting to me because first of all, I'm a neuroscientist and they could have um edited any genes, but they chose to edit the genes involved in um the attempt to create supermemory babies, >> right? >> Which presumably grow into supermemory adults. Um and whether or not they succeeded in that isn't clear. Those babies are alive and presumably by now walking talking as far as I know. Whether or not they have super memories isn't clear, but um China is clearly unafraid to augment biology in that way. Um and I believe that that's inevitable. That's going to happen elsewhere. Um

2:24:40probably first for the treatment of disease, but at some point I'm assuming people are going to augment biology to make smarter kids. I mean, people um not always, but um often will select mates based on the traits they would like their children to inherit. So this happens far more frequently than could be deemed uh bad because either that or people are bad because people do this all the time. Selecting mates that have physical and psychological and cognitive traits that you would like your offspring to have. >> Crisper is a more targeted approach. Of course, you know, the reason I'm kind of giving this example and and examples like it is that I feel like so much of the way that um governments and the and

AI companions & medicine

2:25:17the public react to technologies is to just, you know, take that first glimpse and it just feels scary. >> Um you think about the old Apple ad of the, you know, 1984 ad. I mean, there was one very scary version of the personal computer and computers and robots taking over and everyone like automatons. And then there was the Apple version where it's all about creativity, love, and peace. And it had the pseudocychedelic California thing going for it. Again, great marketing seems to convert people's thinking about technology such that what was once viewed as very scary and dangerous and dystopian is like an oasis of opportunity. >> So why are people so afraid of new technologies? So, this is the thing I've

2:26:02tried to understand for a long time because the history is so clear. Um, and the history basically is every new technology is greeted by what's called a moral panic. Um, and so it's basically this like hysterical freakout of some kind that causes people to basically predict the end of the world. And you go back in time and actually this historical sort of effect, it happens even in things now where you just go back and it's ludicrous, right? And so you mentioned earlier the satanic panic of the of the 80s and you know the concern around like heavy metal music, right? Before that, there was like a freakout around comic books, you know, in the 50s. There was a freakout around jazz music in the 20s and 30s. You know,

2:26:34it's devil music. Um, you know, there was a freakout, the arrival of bicycles caused a moral panic in the like 1860s, 187. >> Bicycles. >> Bicycles. Yeah. So, there was this thing at the time. So, bicycles were the first um they were the first very easy to use personal transportation thing that basically let kids travel between towns um uh you know, quickly um without any overhead, you know, to take care take care take care take care take care take care take care take care take care take care take care of a horse, just jump in a bike and go. Um and so it was there was a historical panic specifically around at the time young women um who for the first time were able to venture outside the confines of the town to

2:27:04maybe go have a boyfriend in another town. Um and so the magazines at the time ran all these stories on this phenomenon medical phenomenon called bicycle face. And the idea of bicycle face was the exertion caused by pedaling a bicycle would cause your face your face would grimace and then if you were on the bicycle for too long your face would lock into place and then right and then [laughter] right and then you would be you would be unattractive and therefore of course unable to then you know get married. >> Um uh cars there was a moral panic around car red flag laws. There were all these laws that greed the the automobile. Automobile freaked people out. So there are all these laws if in the early days of the automobile um in a

2:27:39lot of places you had to um you would take a ride an automobile uh and automobiles they broke down all the time. So it would be you only rich people had automobiles be you and your mechanic [laughter] in in the car right for when it broke down and then you had to hire another guy um to walk 200 yards in front of the car with a red flag. Um and he had to wave the red flag and so you could only drive as fast as he could walk because the red flag was to warn people that the that the car was coming. And and then and then in I think it was Pennsylvania, they had the most draconian version which was uh they were very worried about the cars scaring the horses. Um and so there was a law that said if you saw a horse coming um you

2:28:15need to stop the car, you had to disassemble the car and you had to hide the pieces of the car behind the nearest hay bale, >> wait for the horse to go by >> and and then you could put your car back together. So So anyways, just example, there's electric lighting. there was a panic around like whether was this going to like completely ruin you know this is going to completely ruin like the romance of the dark and it was going to cause you know you know a whole new kind of like terrible civilization where everything is always brightly lit so there's just like all these examples and so it's like okay what on earth is happening that this is always what happens and so I finally found this book that I think has a has a good model for

2:28:45it is called men machines in modern times and it's written by this MIT professor like 60 years ago so it it predates the internet um but it uses a lot of historical examples and what he says basically is he says There's there's actually a three-stage response. There's a three-stage societal response to new technologies. It's very predictable. He said stage one is um basically just denial. Uh just ignore like we just like don't pay attention to this. Nobody takes it seriously. We just like there's just a blackout on the whole topic. Um he says stage uh that's stage one. Stage two is rational counterargument. Um so stage two is where you line up all the different reasons why this can't possibly work. It

2:29:19can't possibly ever get you know cheap or you know this that you know it's not fast enough or whatever the thing is. And then he says stage three he says is when the name calling begins. Um so he says stage three is like when right right so when they failed to ignore it and they failed to argue society out of it. >> I love it. >> They move to the name calling. Right. And what's the name calling? The name calling is this is evil. This is moral panic. This is evil. This is terrible. This is awful. This is going to destroy everything. Like don't you understand like you know all this you know this is just like this is this is horrifying and you you know the person working on being reckless and evil and you know all all

2:29:51this stuff and you must be stopped. and and he said the reason for that is because basically fundamentally what these things are is they're a war over status. Um it's a it's a it's a war over status and therefore a war over power and and then of course ult ultimately money but but status human status is the thing and so and because what he says is what what is the societal impact of a new technology? The societal impact of a new technology is it reorders status in the society. So the people who are specialists in that technology become high status and the people who are specialists in the previous way of doing things become low status and generally people don't adapt. Right? Generally if you're the kind of person who is high

2:30:25status because you're you're you're an evolved adaptation to an existing technology, you're probably not the kind of person that's going to enthus enthusiastically try to replant yourself onto a new technology. >> And so and so this is like every politician who's just like in a complete state of panic about social media. Like why are they so freaked out about social media is because they all know that the whole nature of modern politics has changed. the entire battery of techniques that you use to get elected before social media are now obsolete. Obviously, the best new politicians of the future are going to be 100% creations of social media >> and podcast and podcast. >> And we're seeing this now as we head

2:30:55towards the next presidential election that podcasts uh clearly are going to be featured very heavily in that next election because long form content is a whole different landscape. >> So, this is exact. So this is the this is so so Rogan Rogan's had like what like he's had like Bernie, he's had like Tulsi, he's had like a whole series of >> RK most recently and that's created a lot of >> controversies. But also my understanding he's I'm sure he's invited everybody. I'm sure he I'm sure he'd love to have Biden on. I'm sure he'd love to have Trump on. I'm sure he >> You'd have to ask him. I mean I think that um you know every podcaster has their own ethos around who they invite on and why and how. Um, so I certainly

2:31:30can't speak for him, but um, >> but I have to imagine that any opportunity to have true long- form discourse that would allow people to really understand people's positions on things, >> I have to imagine that he would be in favor of that thing. >> Yeah. Or somebody else would, right? You know, some some other top podcast would, right? And so so there's a if my point Exactly. I totally agree with you, but my point is if if you're a politician, if you're if you're let's say a legacy politician, right? You have the option of embracing the new technology. You can do it anytime you want, right? But you you don't they're not they won't like they won't do it. And why won't they do it? Well, okay, first of all, they want

2:32:06to ignore it, right? They want to pretend that things aren't changing, you know? Second is they want like have rational counter arguments for like why the existing campaign system works the way that it does and this and that and the existing media networks and like here's how you like do things and here's how you give speeches and here's the clothes you wear and the tie and the thing and the pocket square and like you've got your whole system. It's how you succeeded was coming up through that system. So you've got all your arguments as to why that won't work anymore. And then and then we've now proceeded to the the name calling phase, which is now it's evil, right? Now it's evil for somebody to show up in, you know, on a

2:32:33on a stream, god forbid, for three hours and actually say what they think, right? And it's going to destroy society, right? So it's exactly right. It's like it's it's a it's a classic example of this pattern. And anyway, so Morrison says in the book, um, basically this is the forever pattern. Like this will never change. This will this is one of those things where you can learn about it and still nothing the entire world could learn about this and still nothing changes because at the end of the day it's not it has it's not the tech that's the question it's it's the reordering of status. >> Um I have a lot of thoughts about the podcast component. Uh I'll just say this because I want to get back to um the

2:33:07topic of innovation of technology. Um but on a long form podcast there's no um safe zone. you know, the person can get up and walk out, but if the person interviewing them, and certainly Joe is um the best of the very best, if not the most skilled podcaster in the entire universe at continuing to press people on specific topics when they're, you know, trying to bob and weave and wrigle wrigle out. He'll just keep, you know, either drilling or alter the question somewhat in a way that forces them to finally come up with an answer of some sort. And I think that probably um puts certain people's cortisol levels through the roof um such that they just would never go on there. >> I think there's another deeper question

2:33:52also or another question along with that which is how many people actually have something to say [laughter] >> real substance like how many people can actually talk in a way that's actually interesting to anybody else for any length of time. >> Like how much substance is there really? And like a lot of historical politics was to be able to manufacture a facade where you honestly as far as I you can't tell >> like how how deep the thoughts are. Like even if they have deep thoughts like it's it's kept it's kept away from you. They would certainly never cop to it. >> It's going to be an interesting next what is it about uh you know 20 months or so um leading into the next election. >> Panic and the name calling have already

2:34:25started. So yeah it's >> yeah I was gonna say this list of three things denial um you know uh the counterargument and name calling. It seems like with AI um it's already just jumped to numbers two and three. >> That's correct. >> Right. We're already at two and three and it's kind of leaning three. >> Yes. >> Yeah. That's correct. >> Well, so AI is unusual just because um it had So new technologies that take off, they almost always have a prehistory. They almost always have a 30 or 40 year history where people tried and failed to get them to work before they took off. AI has an 80-year prehistory. So it has a very long one. >> Um and then it it it just it all of a sudden started to work dramatically well

2:35:00like seemingly overnight. And so it it went from basically it as far as most people were concerned it went from it doesn't work at all to it works incredibly well in one step and that almost never happens. And so and so I actually think that's exactly what's happening. I think it's actually speedrunning this progression just just because if you use midjourney or you use GPT or any of these things for five minutes you're just like wow like obviously this thing is going to be like the obviously in my life this is going to be the best thing ever. Like this is amazing. There's all these ways that I can use it and then it and then therefore immediately you're like oh my god this is going to transform

2:35:28everything. Therefore >> step three. Mhm. Right. Straight to the name calling. Exactly. >> In the face of all this, uh there are innovators out there. Maybe they are aware they are innovators. Um uh maybe they are already starting companies or maybe uh they are just some uh young or older person who has these five traits in abundance or doesn't but knows somebody who does and is partnering with them in some sort of idea. Um, and you have an amazing track record at identifying these people. Um, I think in part because you have those same traits yourself. I've heard you say the following. Uh, the world is a very malleable place. If you know what you want and you go for it with maximum energy and drive and

2:36:14passion, the world will often reconfigure itself around you much more quickly and easily than you would think. That's a remarkable quote um because it says at least two things uh to me. One is that um you have a very clear understanding of the inner workings of these great innovators. We talked a little bit about that earlier, these five traits, etc. But that also you have an intense understanding of the world landscape. And the way that we've been talking about it for the last hour or so is that it is a really intense and kind of oppressive landscape. You've got countries and organizations and elites and uh journalists that you know that are trying to not necessarily trying but are suppressing the innovation process.

2:36:59I mean that's sort of the the picture that I'm getting. So it's like we're trying to innovate inside of a vice that's getting progressively tighter. And yet this quote argues that it is the the person the boy or girl man or woman who says well you know what that all might be true but my view of the world is the way the world's going to bend or I'm going to create a dent in that vice that allows me to exist the way that I want or you know what I'm actually going to uncurl the vice the other direction and so um I'm at once picking up a sort of um pessimistic glass half empty uh view of the world as well as a glass half full view. And um so tell me about that and and tell if you would could you tell us about that from the perspective

2:37:45of someone listening who is thinking, you know, I've got an idea and I know it's a really good one cuz I just know. I might not have the confidence of extrinsic reward yet, but I just know there's a seed of something. Um what does it take to foster that? and um how do we foster real innovation in the landscape that we're talking about? >> Yeah. So part is I think you just I think one of the ways to square it is I think you you as the innovator need to be signed up to fight the fight, right? So and and again this is where like the fictional portrayals of startups I think take people off course or even scientists or whatever because they the when when there's great success stories they get kind of pritified uh after the

2:38:22fact um and they made they get made to be like cute and fun and it's like yeah no like if you talk to anybody who actually did any of these things like no there was it was just like these things are always just like brutal exercises and just like sheer willpower and fighting you know fighting fighting forces that are trying to get you. So, um, so, so part of it is you just, you have to be signed up for the fight. And this kind of goes to the conscientiousness thing we're talking about. We also, my partner Ben uses the term courage a lot, right? Which is some combination of like just stubbornness, but coupled with like a willingness to take pain >> um, and not stop um, and, you know, have people think very bad things of you for

2:38:55a long time uh, until it turns out, you know, you hopefully prove yourself prove yourself correct. Um, and so you have to be willing to do that. Like it's it's a these are it's a contact sport. Like it's these aren't easy roads, right? It's a contact sport. So, you have to be signed up uh for the fight. The advantage that you have as an innovator um is is that at the end of the day, the truth actually matters. Um and all the arguments in the world, the classic Victor Hugo quote is there's nothing more powerful in the world than an idea whose time has come, right? Like >> if if it's real, right? And and this is so just pure substance. If the thing is real, if the idea is real, like if it's a legitimately good scientific

2:39:32discovery, you know, about how nature works, if it's a new invention, um if it's a new work of art, and if it's real, you know, then you you you do at the end of the day, you have that on your side. Um and all of the people who are fighting you and arguing with you and telling you no, they don't have that on their side, right? It's not like they're showing up with some other thing and they're like, "My thing is better than your thing." Like, that's not the main problem, right? The main problem is like, "I have a thing. I'm convinced. Everybody else is telling me it's stupid, wrong, it should be illegal, whatever the thing is, but at the end of the day, I still have the thing, right? And so, so, so at the end of the day,

2:40:05like, yeah, the the truth really matters. The substance really matters if it's real. It's really, I give you an example. It's really hard historically to find an example of a new technology that came into the world that was then pulled back. >> And, you know, and we could, you know, nuclear is maybe maybe an example of that, but even still, there are still, you know, nuclear there are still nuclear plants like running today. Um, you know, that that that still exists. Um, you know, I would say the same thing as scientific like at least I may as you don't know I don't know of any scientific discovery that was made and then people like I I know I know there are areas of science that are not politically correct to talk about today

2:40:38but every scientist knows the truth like the truth is still the truth. I mean even the geneticists in the Soviet Union who were forced to buy into lenoism like knew the whole time that it was wrong. Like that I'm completely convinced of. >> Yeah. They couldn't delude themselves especially because the basic training that one gets in any field establishes some core truths upon which even the crazy ideas have to rest and if they don't as you pointed out um things fall to pieces. I would say that even the technologies that um did not pan out and in some cases were disastrous but that were great ideas at the beginning are starting to pan out. So the example I'll give is that most people are aware of the Elizabeth

2:41:16Holmes therronos debacle [clears throat] to put it lightly you know analyzing uh what's in a single drop of blood as a way to analyze hormones and disease and antibodies etc. I mean that's a great idea. >> I mean it's a terrific idea as opposed to having a flammus come to your house or you have to go in and you get tapped with a you know and they're pulling vials and the whole thing. there's now a company um born out of Stanford that is doing exactly what she sought to do except that at least the courts ruled that um she fudged the thing and is that's why she's in jail right now. Um but the idea of getting a wide array of markers from a single drop of blood is an absolutely spectacular idea. The

2:41:59biggest challenge that company is going to confront is the idea that it's just the next Theronos. But if they've got the thing >> and they're not fudging it as it apparently Theronos was, >> um I think um everything will work out. Allah Victor Hugo. >> Yeah. Exactly. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. Because who wants to go back? Like when if they if they if they get to the work if it's real, >> it's going to be like this is the thing. The the opponents the opponents, they're not bringing their own ideas. [laughter] Like they're not bringing their oh my idea is better than yours. Like that's not what's happening. They're bringing the silence or counterargument, right, or name calling. >> Well, this is why I think um people who

2:42:37need to be loved probably stand a um reduced chance of success. >> Um and maybe that's also why having people close to you that do love you and allowing that to be sufficient >> can be very beneficial. This gets back to the idea of partnership and family around innovators. Um because if you feel filled up by those people local to you, >> Yep. you know, in your home, then you don't need people on the internet saying nice things about you or your ideas because you're good and you can forge forward. Um, another question about innovation is the teams that you assemble around you. And you've talked before about um the sort of small squadron model um you know sort of David and Goliath uh examples as well where

2:43:19you know a small group of individuals can um create a technology that frankly outdoes what a you know a giant like Facebook might be doing or what um any other large company might be doing. There are a lot of theories as to why that would happen, but I know you have some unique theories. Um why do you think small groups can defeat large organizations? >> So the conventional explanation is I think correct and it's just that um large organizations have a lot of advantages but they just have a very hard time um actually executing anything because of all the overhead. So large organizations have combinatorial communication overhead, right? The the number of people who have to be consulted, who have to agree on things

2:44:01gets to be staggering. The amount of time it takes to schedule the meeting gets to be staggering. You know, you get these really big companies and they have some issue they're dealing with. And it takes like a month to schedule the premeating to like plan for the meeting, which is going to happen two months later, which is then going to result in a post meeting, which will then result in a board presentation, which will then result in a planning offsite. Right. So they're >> I thought I thought academia was bad, but what you're describing is giving me hives. Kafkovka was Kafka was a documentary. Yeah. Like this is this is Yeah. So it it's just like these these are I mean look you'd have these

2:44:28organizations at 100,000 people or more like you're you're more of a nation state than a than a than a than a company. Um and you've got all these competing internal you know it's the Bedwin thing I was saying before. You've got all these internal like at most big companies your internal enemies are like way more dangerous to you than anybody on the outside. >> Can you elaborate on that? >> Oh yeah. Yeah. your big compet the big compet at a big company the big competition is for the for the next promotion right and and and the enemy for the next promotion is the next executive over in your company like that's your enemy the other the competitor on the outside is like an abstraction like maybe they'll matter

2:44:58someday whatever I got to beat that guy inside my own company right um and so the internal warfare is at least as intense as the external warfare um and so yeah so it's just I mean this is just all the you know this iron law of all these big big bureaucracies and how they function so if if a bureaucracy ever does anything productive I think It's like a miracle. Like it's like a miracle to the point where there should be like a celebration. There should be parties. There should be like ticker tape parades for like big large organizations that actually do things like that. That's great because it's like so it's so rare. It doesn't happen very often. So anyway, so that's the conventional explanation. Whereas

2:45:30look, small companies, small teams, you know, there's a lot that they can't do because they can't you they're not operating at scale and they don't have global coverage and you know, all these kind of, you know, they don't have the resources and so forth. But at least they can move quickly, right? Um they can organize fast. they can have a, you know, if there's an issue today, they can have a meeting today. They can solve the issue today, right? And everybody they need to solve the issue is in the room today, right? So, they can just move a lot faster. Um, I think that's part of it, but I think there's another deeper thing underneath that that people really don't like to talk about that takes us back full circle to where we

2:45:58started, which is just the sheer number of people in the world who are capable of doing new things is just a very small set of people. Um, and so you're not going to have a hundred of them in a company or a thousand or 10,000. You're going to have three, [laughter] eight or 10 maybe. >> And some of them are flying too close to the sun. >> Some of them are blowing themselves up, right? Some of them are. So IBM, I actually first learned this at so my first actual job job was at IBM when it was and when when IBM was still on top of the world right before it caved in in the early 90s and so when I was there it was 440,000 employees which and again if you inflation adjust like today for that same size of business inflation

2:46:33adjusted, market size adjusted it would be it's equivalent today of like a two or three million person organization. It was like a It was a nation state. Uh there were 6,000 people in my division, you know, and we were next door to another building that had another 6,000 people in another division. So, you just you could work there for years and never meet anybody who didn't work for IBM. The first half of every meeting was just IBM introducing themselves to each other. Like it it was just mindboggling in the level of of complexity. But they were so powerful um that they had uh at at four years before I got there in 1985, they were 80% of the market capitalization of the entire tech industry. Right? So, so they were at a

2:47:06level of dominance that even, you know, Google or Apple today is not even close to right at the time. So, that's how powerful they were. And so, they had a system and it worked really well for like 50 years. They had a system which was most of the employees in the company were expected to basically rig follow rules. So, they dressed the same, they acted the same, they did everything out of the playbook, you know, they they were trained very specifically. Um, but they had this category of people they called wild ducks. Um, and this was an idea that the founder Thomas Watson come up with, wild ducks. And the wild ducks were they often had the formal title of an IBM fellow and they were the people

2:47:38who could make new things and there were eight of them and they got to break all the rules and they got to invent new products. They got to go off and work on something new. They didn't have to report back. Um they got to pull people off of other projects to work with them. Um they got, you know, budget when they needed it. They they reported directly to the CEO. They got whatever they needed. He supported them in doing it. and they were glass breakers and you know they showed the the one in Austin at the time was this guy Andy Heler and he would show up in you know jeans and cowboy boots and you know amongst an ocean of men in you know blue suits, white shirts, red ties um and put his cowboy boots up on the table [snorts]

2:48:13and it was fine for Andy Holiday to do that and it was not fine for you to do that right and so they very specifically identified we have an we have an we have like a like almost like an aristocratic class within our our company that gets to play by different rules. Now the expectation is they deliver right they they their job is to invent the next breakthrough product but we IBM management know that the 6,000 person division is not going to invent the next product. we know it's gonna be a crazy Andy Heler in his um in his cowboy boots. And so I I was always like very impressed like and again like ultimately IBM had its issues but like that model worked for 50 years right like worked incredibly well and I I think that's

2:48:47basically the model that works. Um and so but it's a paradox right which is like how do you have a large bureaucratic regimented organization whether it's academia or government or business or anything that has all these rule followers in it and all these people who are jealous of their status and don't want things to change but then still have that spark of of of creativity. I would say mostly it's impossible [laughter] like mostly it just doesn't happen. Those people get driven out right and and in tech what happens is those people get driven out because we will fund them. >> These are the people we fund. Right. I was going to say I I gather that you are in the business of finding and funding

2:49:22the wild ducks. >> The wild ducks. That's exactly right. And and actually this is actually to close the close the loop. This is actually I think the simplest explanation for why IBM ultimately caved in and then HP sort of in the 80s also c you know these IBM and HP kind of were monol they were these incredible monolithic incredible companies for 40 or 50 years and then they kind of both caved in in the 80s and 90s and and I actually think it was the emergence of venture capital. It was the emergence of a parallel funding system where the wild ducks or in HP's case their their superstar technical people could actually leave and start their own companies. And again, it goes back to the university discussion we're having

2:49:53is like this is what doesn't exist at the university level. >> This certainly does not exist at the government level. >> And until recently in media, it didn't exist until there's this thing that we call podcast. >> Exactly. Right. Exactly. Right. >> Which clearly have picked up some um some momentum. And I I would hope that these other wild duck models will um will uh move quickly. >> Yeah. But the one thing you know, right, and you know this, like the one thing you know is the people on the other side are going to be mad as hell. >> Yeah. They're going to Well, I think um they're past denial. Um the counterarguments continue. Um the name calling is prolific. >> Name calling is fully underway. Yeah.

2:50:28>> Yes. Well, Mark, we've covered a lot of topics, but as with every time I talk to you, I learn oh so very much. So, I'm so grateful for you taking the time out of your schedule to talk about all of these topics in depth with us. You know, I'd be remiss if I didn't say that it is clear to me now that you are hyper realistic about the landscape, >> uh, but you are also intensely optimistic about the existence of wild ducks. >> Yes. and those around them that support them and that are necessary for the implementation of their ideas at some point >> and that also you have um a real rebel inside you. So that is oh so welcome on this podcast and it's um oh so needed in uh these times and every time. So on

2:51:14behalf of myself and the rest of us here at the podcast and especially the listeners, thank you so much. >> Thanks for having me. >> Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Mark Andrees. If you're learning from andor enjoying this podcast, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. That's a terrific zerocost way to support us. In addition, please subscribe to the podcast on both Spotify and Apple. And on both Spotify and Apple, you can leave us up to a five-star review. If you have questions for me or comments about the podcast or guests that you'd like me to consider hosting on the Huberman Lab podcast, please put those in the comment section on YouTube. I do read all the comments.

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