The "Curiosity Premium"

Aravind Srinivas, PhD, is the co-founder and CEO of Perplexity AI, creator of the AI-powered search and answer engine Perplexity.

https://www.perplexity.ai

This video is sponsored by BetterHelp. Visit https://BetterHelp.com/JRE

Transcript

Joe Rogan podcast. Check it out. >> The Joe Rogan Experience. >> TRAIN BY DAY. JOE ROGAN PODCAST BY NIGHT. All day. >> Good to see you. >> You too. Thanks for having me. >> My pleasure. >> Yeah. >> How many podcasts have you done? >> I don't know. I don't know the count, but maybe tens. >> Well, when we were talking, we were talking in the lobby. I was like this good dude would be a good guess because we were talking about ancient Hindu scriptures where you were talking to me about something that sounds like a nuclear bomb. >> Yeah. >> And I was like oh >> the brahmastra >> I need to know more about this. >> Yeah. So um the brahmastra is part of the mahabarat. >> I mean you've talked about Mahabharat in a bunch and >> Yeah. Yeah. So the mahabharat is one of the two Hindu epics. The other one is Ramayan. But Mahabarat's more interesting. It's more complicated. It's like a lot of different stories interled together. And um the brahmastra is the equivalent of the hydrogen bomb. >> And how is it described? >> It's described as a weapon of like mass destruction going to inhalate like human population. Should not be used at any cost. There's like a moral contract. Like you you clearly have to be like, you know, violating so many things at at a deeply moral level to even like wield it. And um it's not actually it's not actually accessible to most warriors. There's probably like two warriors in the world in in in in that era who were allowed to use it. And um and it and it has to be passed through special access like a teacher has to like pass it on to you the secret to use it almost like a new think of it as like the equivalent of a nuclear code, right? And um Arjuna had it uh this this this uh particular character in Mahabharat called Arjuna. Um he was allowed to use it. Um and then this other person was this basically Arjuna had a teacher named Dona and um Dona had a son named Ashwatama and um Ashwatama was always jealous of Arjuna. Arjuna was not Drona's son but he was his model disciple and so Drona passed on the secret of the brahmastra to him and um um Drona's son also wanted it but because it was his son he also passed on the secret to his son even though the son wasn't as good as Arjuna and at there was the during the war Arjuna and fought on the opposite sides it it's it's just you know circumstances and uh and and and his and his dad died Asham was that the teacher died in the war and so the son got mad and like unleashed the brahmastra and uh Lord Krishna had to come and save save the planet to not not get that destruction force. >> How old is the Mahabraata? >> Um again it's there's a lot of different opinions on this so I don't actually know for sure. My understanding is is at least 1,500 to 2,500 years old. Like like,500 years ago is the minimum. 2,500 years ago is the maximum. So it happened in some period in in that thousand-y year time frame between that. And um there's still like it's it's still unclear if like a lot of it is just like you know been mythologized. Um and what actually happened was just a war between kins. Uh there were two groups of people. the Panda and the Kawas and um you know each side thought they were fighting for their own rights and justice but um at the end of the day you can crudely understand it as like essentially fight for the kingdom. Um, basically there were like there there was a previous generation and two brothers and they and both the brothers had a bunch of kids and those kids were waring to get the next in line and um that ended up being like a massive war and a bunch of other allies fought on each sides and um um so many amazing weapons were used as part of the war and a lot of these weapons are like extremely like like described an extreme level of detail that is pretty in incredible like the there's a lot of detail around like targeted weapons so you could precisely identify a target and just shoot at that. Um and then uh >> does it explain like what the weapon is? >> Yeah. So there's one weapon called the Dastra where you can just specifically target any any particular person or group and it would just automatically direct itself and do it almost like a semi-autonomous weapon. And then Lord Krishna had this um weapon called the sudan chakra. It's basically a discus and then you can just release it and it'll go and specifically identify somebody and chop up their head and come back to your you right. It it self-directs itself. So my what I was amazed by is how um interesting it is in terms of um all the autonomy in the weapons semi- autonomy or autonomy where the weapons could just be directed at people or like directed at you know a group of soldiers and it would just go and do its job and come back to the wielder and um um there were so many different astras wunastra nagastra remastra is obviously the ultimate the the hydrogen bomb equivalent and all of these are described in a lot of detail and like who has access to it and of course it's it's mythologized. So it's described as this like these arrows in your like back of your uh shoulders, but you could you could understand it as like you know somebody having just access to a lot of weapons and then um whoever was powerful would go capture and colonize and like gain power and um essentially a a fight between a group of cousins. That that that that's the bottom line of that story. Now, if we think of history as this linear progression from caveman to us, Yeah. and we hear about autonomous weapons that were written in the Mahabraata somewhere around 2,000 plus years ago, we go, well, a mythology. >> Yeah. >> But if not, if there's been some sort of rise and fall of civilization, if there has been catastrophic, >> whatever it is, asteroid impacts, shifting of the poles, whatever it is, >> it's caused great disasters. You can imagine that these people are remembering a time where there was some sort of very advanced civilization. And this is what they're describing. Like if you knew for a fact that there had been a great advanced technologically advanced civilization when we have >> evidence that they had some technology like the pyramids of Giza and stuff like how did you do that? I don't how there's some technology involved, right? >> Yeah. >> But we don't have evidence of the technology. But if we did, if we knew, you would look at the Mahabat and go, "Oh, this is history." They're just explaining it in a kind of crude contemporary way for the time. Arrows instead of, you know, semi-autonomous drones with exploding heads on them. >> Yeah. >> I mean, that's what we have now. All those things that they're describing, hydrogen bomb, semi-autonomous and autonomous drones. I mean, they have they have autonomous fighter jets now. like they don't need people anymore. Like this we're we're in that area right now. So when you read about something like that from the Mahabarata, you go like okay what what was really going on? >> Exactly. Yeah. I mean that that's always been my fascination with with with those epics and uh the level of detail with which they described all these weapons and who had access uh different levels of access the status required to have access and um uh how it was used in the wars um different formations of the soldiers like they had all these like crazy formation structures like forming the army like a lotus forming the army like a um you know there something called a chakra vuha like a like literally like it has to have concentric circles. So you cannot like actually get into the innermost circle without going through the outer circles and then you can get killed by each of the flanks whenever you're trying to enter in. And the secret of how to actually break into these vuhas, vuhas means formations, u was only known to a few people. And um it it's it's it's it's incredible like you could say, okay, like somebody had to be extremely um skillful to have that sort of like visualizations and imaginations of describing a story like that. And and obviously like Tl Keen has done an amazing job with a lot of the rings, you know, and creating so much detail at the same time like a lot of it actually coming through in real life in some form. Again, not exactly the same weapons but similar style makes you wonder was there actually something around then and uh people have tried excavations in all these areas. There's like two main areas in the Mahabarat. how Singapore was the name of the kingdom and people have done excavations around there and have like found some artifacts that might date back to those years. But uh there are also some details that are described in the epics that don't quite align with reality. For example, all the men, all the main warriors in in that era were described as like very tall, very big um 7 8 ft, whatever, you know, I don't even know exact numbers, but um but um his studies by archaeologists also say that people who lived in those years in in those regions were probably not more than 6 ft tall. So it's it's not clear exactly like what happened, what was correct, what was not correct. And you know, we just have to keep probing more. But I find the idea fascinating to think of like what could have existed in sacred texts that was only partially communicated to the next generation and having a lot of like reinterpretations. Another thing that is very interesting to think about is Vic math. So um the basically Vic math is like a branch of mathematics that you know some people in India are grown up learning like I I I read it myself too and uh some people actually practice it just to be sharper at mental math for doing their exams like GMAT and things like that GRE and um um it has like a line in the Vedas that says oh like one from the last digit two from the first digit whatever you know so many different ways of multly multiplying two different numbers like 97 * 96. Oh, like subtract the last two digits, put it in the right, multiply the first digits, put it in the left. That's that's the result. And um then you you wonder like, oh wait, the Rigveda is so old. It's as old as it's is the oldest sacred text out there. How is it describing computation? That feels >> right, >> very unreal. Like do they actually know or understand advanced forms of computation even back in those days? And um >> and how old is rig beta? >> Um I don't exactly know how old it is. >> Why don't we put that in perplexity? >> Yeah, let's do that. >> Let's find out. >> Yeah. >> Yeah, it is technically the oldest sacred text out there. >> And so what's interesting is I wonder how old the stories were by the time they were written down. like how much of it is relayed person to person for years and years just like the Bible before it's ever actually written down. Scholars usually date the composition of the Rigveda to about 1500 to,200 B.CE. So its oldest layer is roughly 3,200 3,700 years old today. Like I if there really was like every uh ancient culture has a story of a flood. every everyone they all have an apocalyptic >> marbar had the same thing >> was it >> Marbarat had the same thing where there was a big like almost like a tsunami like thing I don't exactly know what it was called but that was the collapse of Lord Krishna's kingdom Daraka after the war a lot of people died but some people survived and even those who survived got wiped out by a calamity or or like some kind of like a um fight among themselves and um most of the people who participated in that era actually died. >> Here it is. The primordial, how do you say it? Manu. >> Yeah, >> Manu flood. Classic Hindu great flood myth where the righteous king Manu is warned by a divine fish about an imminent doge that will destroy humanity. He builds a boat, loads it with his family. It's like knowing the ark. It's the same thing with seeds and animals. ties it to the horn of the god in fish form which towes the boat to safety until the waters recede and the world is repopulated. >> They all have the same story. Yeah. That's what's really crazy. >> There is a there is a concept in um Hindu uh philosophy called the yugas. >> Mhm. >> I'm reading a book about it right now. >> Yeah. Yeah. So uh there's like different yugas and yugas are like thousands of years and the concept is that the yugas keep cycling around and so like uh we are in the kal yuga right now and before that was a dwara yuga that's when most of mahabharat happened and before that there was a traa where the ramayan happened and before that there was another yuga. >> What is next after kal yuga? >> It no there is nothing next after kaluga. It goes back to the first one. I forget the name of the first yuga >> because the what the interpretation that I'm reading is that we're not in Kalyuga anymore and that Kalyuga ended in the 1900s and Dwaper Yuga started then. >> No, no, we are in Kaluga right now. >> 100%. >> So why do people have different interpretations? Like there is there is that true? Yeah, there's like a guru interpretation. There's like one specific guru I see >> that has this interpretation that Kaliuga ended in the 1900s. Okay. >> And that we're moving on. Interesting. >> Yeah. But I don't know who's right because it's it's an enormous cycle, right? The cycles of humanity. >> Yeah. Thousands of years. Thousands of years. And uh >> so >> yeah. So these are the four yugas. Um and um >> so why do people have different interpretations? What? Let me tell you the book I'm reading. >> Yeah. >> Uh see if this book is discredited. Young Jamie, it is um it's by a guy named uh David uh Steinowitz Stein Steinmets. David Steinmets and the book is called the Yugas. Interesting. >> Yeah. I mean the the problem is when someone's got their own interpretation or some guru's interpretation, it doesn't totally align. It's hard to know who's right and who's wrong. >> Yeah. >> Keys understanding our hidden past, emerging energy, age, and enlightened future. >> Yeah. So that go back up to that again. So this is in the description. See what it says that where it says in 1894 an Indian sage gave us an explanation not only for our hidden past but for the trends of today and for future enlightenment. So there's like one guy's interpretation that this guy is going off of. >> I guess the difference might be that um he thinks the yuga cycle is 24,000 years whereas I think it's probably much longer than that. >> Yeah. >> Um >> four yugas together is 4,320,000 years. >> You know what's really nutty? >> Yeah. One of the really nutty things is um both in the ancient Sumerian texts and in some of the ancient Egyptian texts, there's depictions before the flood of people who reigned for thousands of years as kings. >> Yeah. >> And it's common. It's not It's And it's also they're referenced multiple times in different scripts that are from different parts of uh what was Sumera at the time. Yeah, >> it it's really weird because they take it as established history once it gets to a certain age once they get into like whatever the age is where they can verify that this person was the king for a certain period of time. But it's all in the same text as people that reigned for 6,000 years. >> Yeah. >> It's it's really one just wipes out the whole thing. >> Yeah. And um I mean this is also somewhat like tangentially related to um um the firmy paradox >> you know like if if you assume all these things are happening on earth itself that entire civilizations are getting wiped out >> um you and and like we always wonder you you've explored this topic the most um and um where are the aliens >> right >> and um there are different arguments that like okay like the reason we I haven't quite found that is because the great filter exists and uh there is like one entertaining theory that um I like just for the sake of entertainment is um almost all civilizations end up advancing technologically a lot and um either a calamity wipes them out or like they build some misalign AGI and then AGI wipes them out and um and because of that um they never actually like end up being visible to Or the other theory is that like they're like um we haven't quite built the woyman probes to actually go find them. And um both of them are plausible and um it it you know the there's there's no clear way to like know unless we actually like send out enough probes. >> This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. We've come a long way with mental health, but there's still work to be done. Better Help's 2026 State of Stigma report surveyed 2,000 Americans revealed that 85% of Americans believe getting support is wise. Yet 74% say society discourages people from doing so. One thing that can help is to have more open conversations about mental health struggles and encourage people to seek out help, not judge them. And you know what else helps? Better help. They make connecting with a professional therapist simple, and it actually works. Their live sessions have an average rating of 4.9 out of five. Don't let stigma stand in the way of support. Start therapy with BetterHelp. Sign up and get 10% off at betterhelp.com/jre. That's betterhp.com/jre. There's a bunch of possibilities. I mean there's almost too many to count but there's the possibility that they are observing and that they don't want to interfere and that we are on some sort of a evolutionary cycle cycle of cultural evolution civilization evolution. >> Yeah. >> And one of the things about this the the crazy ages that comes from the Samrian text and from um the ancient uh the hieroglyphs that depict the uh zeppet uh how do you say it? Zepetti. No. How am I saying that? What is that text that ancient uh remember we talked about it with Zahias and he denied its existence? Zepte, is that it? Either way, you're dealing with these kings that reign for thousands and thousands of years. Well, you know, David Sinclair is in the middle of this research now that's they're working on life extension drugs like that are actionable. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. That's it. Zepte. >> Yeah, I've heard of that. >> Um, so these, but this is what's so weird. If they look at hieroglyphs, they get to a certain point and they're like, "Oh, Kufu, he was real. This guy was real. All these people were real." >> Yeah. >> But then they get back to these guys that reigned for thousands of years and they go, "Oh, that was horshit." >> But but why is it that all these people have these stories that align with this timeline that's pre flood? >> It's all like the same story. Yeah. And then if you're talking about these ancient Hindu scriptures that are discussing technology that seems remarkably similar to technology that we have today. >> Yeah. The manas or flying cars basically >> and probably what we're going to have 100 years from now or whatever it is or or we could have gone that way in the past. >> And it's very entertaining to think of like let's say something happens to us, right? I don't want anything to happen to us, but let's say something happens to us. Would people really believe you were like launching reusable rockets, >> right? Or making FaceTime calls to people in Australia? >> Yeah. >> Yeah. Like even fundamental things like all we're doing today. >> Um I think it's all like incredible. Like there's there's a lot of things that could be just technological ideas or maybe people actually had it and the knowledge of it was lost and it's not been documented. It's not been passed along and so we are skeptical if they ever had it. >> Yes. And so we end up reinventing it in different forms again and again again and we keep cycling through this process. >> Well, it also could be that this is the natural progression of human curiosity. The human curiosity and ingenuity always moves into these very particular ways like what's the best way to defeat my enemies. Yeah. If we're always going to be territorial primates, we're always going to want to defeat our enemies. We're always going to protect ourselves from being invaded. So we're going to make better in and just with technological innovation, it just goes down the same path. Oh, we figure out bullets. Oh, we figure out nuclear bombs. Well, we figure out well, we don't even have to use an actual plane. We can use an autonomous drone and that delivers it. And then scale upwards and onwards and AI and and then also life extension. So, if these people were able to make the pyramids like you know there there's a lot of speculation as to the timeline of the pyramids, but let's just say they really built it 2,500 BC. Let's just say back then. What the were they using? Like what were you What did you do? How did you get these stones down from the mountains that were 500 miles away? >> How about this one? >> How about that one? Yeah, we were going to get to that for sure. There's a ton. No, thanks. It's good to good as any. How about these temples that they find in India that are carved entirely out of one piece of stone? What did you do? How did you do that? How long ago did this happen? How many of them were buried and then they had to uncover them and then like figure out like what is this? Who made it? There's no timeline. No one really knows. There's no evidence of tools that were capable of doing this kind of work back then. And they're huge and beautiful and perfect. And they have like acoustic properties and the geometry is fantastic. Yeah. >> It's nuts, man. >> It's not just that. All of these temples were actually just built uh not just they were specifically the locations for them were picked out so that you get the right uh seismic vibrations over there in terms of like uh proximity to the ocean, the gravitational waves from the sun and the moon. People actually made that level like look at this man. Imagine the undertaking of carving that temple out of the side of a giant piece of rock. >> Yeah. >> You screw up one thing and it's over. >> There's no simulations. You just have to like build it. >> Well, what did they have? This is the question. Like imagine today if we had to do this. Look, it's possible. This is a possible endeavor. It can be done. >> Yeah. But imagine what kind of technology would we we have to need to map it out to make sure that it was all precise that it all align. I mean it's precise within like millimeters from point to point and everything is done out of one piece of stone. Like what did they do? Was it chisels? Did you do that with chisels? That's crazy. How many times you have to sharpen your chisel? That's nuts. Or do you have something completely different? Because some of the more intricate ones, see if you can find these. Some of the crazy ones inside these temples, there's sculptures that are three-dimensional and they're carved like inside of the sculpture. So, there's like an outer area and then there's these all these openings and then inside it's highly detailed. Like, how'd you even reach in there? >> It just says they use chisels and hammers and I don't think that's possible. and careful geometric planning planning. >> People trying to do that. They see like this is how much work someone could do in like 12 hours with a a hammer and they get nowhere, let alone like perfect and looking good. >> Yeah, it's nuts, man. And there's a lot of evidence of stuff like that all over the world, which is really weird. You have the stuff in Peru like Saki Huan when you look at these stones and it looks like they're melted into place and they're 900 tons. Like what did you do? >> Yeah. How did you even get it up there? >> How'd you where'd they get it? How'd you get it there? How'd you align it perfectly? Built in only 18 years. How do they know that? >> How do they know that? Cuz it's uh attributed to one king. >> Yeah. >> So, King Krishna the 1 756 to 773 CE. Maybe. I mean, how do you know though? >> Yeah. They said the archaeologist said it would have they calculated it would take them 100 years to do it. Yeah. >> Yeah. I mean, this is where like, you know, >> I don't know. >> Different historian accounts are all like muddled up, you know. >> Uhhuh. Well, it's a real problem. History is a real problem. >> But yeah, it goes back to like the thing you were saying, right? You know, what is one thing that's common across all these different ages is human curiosity. So, I mean, that's something that, you know, I would love to get your take on this. Um like I've been toying with this idea called a curiosity premium which is the most effective people the most successful people have always been the most curious people the ones who have been good at asking the best questions and they tend to do better in every aspect of their life and uh you're you're a good example of that. So that's why I would love to get your take on this. And the reason I believe that is because um long-term people who continuously ask questions tend to do better. They make more money. They have a higher quality of life. They're happy. They have more compounding relationships. People find them more interesting. And so they compound their relationships over time. And so uh naturally they end up succeeding. But their spirit of inquiry, their intrinsic curiosity doesn't actually stop once they succeed. It only they just channelize it even more. And so that's why it keeps compounding. And I would argue that like it's the only quality, it's the only like quality that makes us really human, you know, in this world where >> we can seek a lot of information, get information way faster than ever before. It feels like that's that one universal human quality that's existed since ancient time since the oldest text. Like in fact in in the Riga um you're explicitly encouraged to seek wisdom more than wealth. And it's not just an idea specific to Hinduism. That specific idea exists in the Bible. It exists in the Quran. Exists in the Torah. It's not that seeking wealth is admonished by religious texts. It's actually that it's more important to seek wisdom. And um you know like you can that why I said you're a good example of that is like sure you have a very very large podcast but the way you're running it is like you're just curious about a lot of things and asking a lot of questions and I think that's that one quality that's very important. So um and I feel like it's the oldest thing is the only thing that we've known since ancient time being curious. >> Well I I I think it's stimulating to people and genuine curiosity is stimulating to other people. when when someone is genuinely curious about something, I become curious about it. I think it's contagious. >> And I think that it's it's also an authentic quality. And I think there's there's something about really wanting to know something and being interested in something. And if you're curious, generally, you're going to ask more questions about something so you have a deeper understanding of it. So if you're trying to do whatever you're trying to do, a sport, a game, you you'll probably get better at it because you're more curious because instead of just assuming things, you'll ask more questions. You'll reexamine things. It's genu it's it's one of the most important human qualities. And to me, it's one of the most attractive human qualities. It's always been. When I meet curious people, I'm always interested. I'm always like like, "Tell me what you're curious about." And I'll tell you what I'm curious about. Let's talk. You know, it's it's um and this podcast started out genuinely because of well, it was a lot of just talking with friends, >> but it also led into like one of my very first guests, actual guests, was Graham Hancock. >> Mhm. >> And it's just cuz I was curious because I had read Fingerprints of the Gods and I'd seen him talk. I'd seen speeches and I'm like, I want to know like what do you know? What do you think's going on? And uh he's another guy incredibly curious and absolutely fascinated with his his takes on ancient history. He has been talking about this subject a long time. And when he first when he first wrote Fingerprints of the gods, I think that came out in like I want to say it was like 97 or 98 or something like that. And I remember reading it and so many of my friends, you know, educated friends like this is horshit. Why are you paying attention to this? More and more and more as time goes on, it's been proven that he's correct. The timelines shifted back and from the publication of that book, the discovery of Gobecletepe and the surrounding area, >> like it's like, okay, now we realize, well, there was some crazy going on at the very least 11,000 years ago. So, we pushed civilization back 5,000 years. >> So, like, and this is just what we found now. And we keep finding things. Keep digging. Keep looking. And then you see the stuff that they're finding underneath the pyramid with this radio tomography where they're looking under the pyramid that it seems that there's structures under the py. You've seen that stuff. >> I haven't seen that. >> I had the scientist that's involved in it. He's an Italian guy, Filipo Bondi, and he came on the podcast. Wonderful accent. Almost as good as yours. >> It was uh amazing. uh but he's describing the use of this stuff and that they've used it successfully on known areas in uh pyramids and other structures and they can det in for in fact >> they um there's a in Italy there is a uh particle collider that is underneath a mountain >> and using this technology which is satellite based technology they get an accurate description of this particle collider that's I think it's 1,200 meters underground. Like how how far is that thing underground? We'll find out. But it's like deep under stone. And they find that they they can get an accurate like they can actually give you the dimensions of this particle collider. They have like an image of it. And this same technology is showing that there's these columns underneath the pyramid in various places that are 20 m wide and they have coils around them. They don't know what the hell they are. And they the whole structure of this thing, it's not small. It goes almost a kilometer into the ground. There's like this enormous like bottom of it. And it seems like it's something that's constructed. And so they're like, "Okay, well, the pyramid is crazy. It's crazy enough, but if there's something underneath it that's a man-made or someone made it that's a kilometer deep into the ground, like what the are we even talking about?" Like, who made this? What What did they have? >> 1.2 km in >> 1.2 kilometers into the mountain. >> That's nuts. It's a half a mile in it plus into the mountain. >> And this thing can see through all that and get this accurate depiction of this particle collider. And it's showing with multiple scans, not just one, multiple scans and different technology, the same exact images, the same exact structures underneath this immense 2,300,000 stone structure that almost perfectly aligns to true north, south, east, and west. Like what? What was going on? Don't tell me police. Don't tell me copper tools. Like what the was going on? Something crazy. And I have a feeling our simplistic explanation of it is just doing no one any justice. It's doing no service to history. It's doing no service to our understanding. They've got to be a little bit more open in the fact that they are perplexed. >> And not just perplexed by stuff like this. This is a 3D print of an actual vase that exists in Egypt that they found that is they found it in tombs of the old kingdom. This thing was somehow another it's made with diorite. So it's incredibly hard stone and made to like a thousandth of a human hair in and it's Yeah. like crazy dimensions >> like the way the the precision of it and wasn't turned on a lathe because it has handles. >> Yeah. >> So you look at the handles on the side. Well, you can't carve the and those are perfect, too. Like the alignment of everything and it's like you just look at it. Oh, it's a vase. No big deal. But no, it's kind of crazy. Like how did they cut that out? There's also these there's all these core marks in some of the stones that they find in Egypt and they've analyzed the amount of revolutions per minute that you would have to go through to be able to cut through something and leave these lines and not defies explanation. Like what is this? This is crazy. This is not sand and copper and just rubbing things. No, this is some insane technology that we don't understand. There's scoop marks out of the bottoms of some of these stones. It's like what? What the is this? How'd you scoop rock? Like what? It looks like ice cream. Like they just went like what are they doing there? There's so many questions. >> What tools did do they even have to do all these things? >> They had copper. I mean there's there's some evidence that they had some iron and then I think Tuton Common had a dagger that was actually made from meteorite which is interesting. you know, like when they could find meteorites and make things out of them, it was very valuable, obviously. But the just the sheer volume of work that they did there, it's you if like you look at the temple in man, you look at all the the three major pyramids, you look at all the different temples and all the construction and the older you go, the deeper into the sand they go, the more complex these things are, which is even weirder. Yeah. >> So it seems like civilization after civilization just they would there was probably a rise and fall with their technology as well. >> Absolutely. I think it's it's it's just incredible that none of this knowledge was properly documented ever. And uh it's a whole like line of work to just go understand like how to even rebuild these things leave alone how did they build it. >> Well think about what we're doing right so all of our knowledge is essentially stored on hard drives and paper. Mhm. >> Those are the the two things that are going to deteriorate the quickest. >> Maybe we should like take a dump of the internet and >> put it on a rock, >> go preserve it somewhere so that Yeah. >> even if our our civilization is wiped out and all the data centers are like gone or whatever, >> right? >> Whoever comes next can go figure it out. Well, I mean, then you've got to always assume that even if they found a hard drive that they would like, how long would it take for them to backineer what we did and figure out what these ones and zeros actually mean? >> Yeah. >> That what is which is one of the most bizarre and fantastic accomplishments of modern civilization is that like >> this is a terabyte. >> Yeah. >> Which is nuts. >> Yeah. >> Like I don't know what your first computer had. I don't remember. Definitely not not even a gigabyte probably. >> No, like a few hundred megabytes was your hard drive. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. I mean, I remember when they first came out with gigabytes, I was like, "This is nuts." >> Yeah. You remember like when Gmail launched and gave everybody like free email storage, unlimited email storage, and the bottom sliding bar would just keep increasing in terms of the total allowed size. >> Yeah. >> And that was nuts to me. And Yeah. And and uh I think yeah we take it for granted that we have like infinite RAM and infinite hard disks and nobody has to worry about like you know you back in those days you would worry about like taking too many photos on your phone. >> Right. >> Right. And then you have to go delete all the old ones or bad ones. >> Yeah. You'd run out of storage on your phone. >> Yeah. And then you would have to buy like an external hard drive to keep storing things. >> Keep transferring stuff from your phone to the hard disk. >> I remember the old Android phones. You get a SD card. You could slip one of those in there and you could store images on that so you could >> save space. >> Yeah. >> And all that stuff is so vulnerable. It's so vulnerable. And again, if a completely alien society had to come down and find our hard drives and they went a totally different path of technology. They'd have to backineer, reverse engineer everything that we did, try to figure out, you know, what what what are we using? What operating system? How's the operating system work? Is it Unix? Is it Linux? Is it like what is it? How do they do it? It would be a nightmare. >> They would need an advanced AI to like figure it all out for them, >> right? >> Yeah. >> Yeah. And so, uh, that's just if the hard drive survive, right? So, if there's some massive flood, cataclysm, whatever, some some horrific thing that damages all of our electronics, which is totally possible, >> you know, just some solar flare, some intense, >> you know, >> or just just just another lab leak, >> right? Yeah. Just time, a lab leak in time. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> It's nuts. And it we could go back to zero real quick and we would basically be like preppers and hunt. hard to reverse engineer everything again. >> It would be almost impossible. >> Which is why I'm really fascinated by the flood the post flood timeline because if these people like Graham Hancock and a lot of these other folks that have speculated that there was probably a very advanced civilization that went in a completely different direction many thousands of years ago. If you look at like the emergence of like Sumere and you know Mesopotamia and that area which a lot of people attribute to be the earliest known civilization that's around 5,000 plus 6,000 years ago rightly. >> So the flood's like 11,000 years ago >> plus. So you're looking at like 5,000 years of what? >> That's not even that long in the grand scheme of things. >> No, not to the earth but for people pretty long. Like think of how long it took us to get our together. Yeah. >> It took thousands and thousands and thousands of years of people probably being monsters. Just being the the worst of the worst. And that that's probably the only way they survived. There's probably a lot of cannibalism. There's a lot of murder. >> There was a lot of like horrific going on for 5,000 years until people slowly but surely figured out agriculture again. Yeah. >> Started building walls. Everybody relaxed a little. got some solid weapons to keep people away so you could work on math. And then next thing you know, civilization emerges again and it goes right, you know, goes right back onto the cycle. And then you start reading in the the Rig Va about stuff that happened thousands of years. You go, wait, what the is this? Like what happened? >> Yeah. >> And that's my belief. Yeah. I think there was something going on on Earth many many many thousands of years before established beginnings of history that was very bizarre and probably technology that went in a completely different direction than what we're doing now with combustion engines and circuits and all the different things that we use. They probably figured out some other kind of technology. >> Exactly. >> Yeah. >> Which is totally possible. And it's it's amazing like it's amazing to think of like what if we could rediscover all of that again. And >> yes, well I would love to be able to I would love to just have a w if I could choose one window in time to go back to see what it would look like. I would 100% pick ancient Egypt while they're building. >> Mhm. The pyramids. >> Yeah. >> Show me what the was going on. >> Yeah. >> There's just just put me in a big hamster wheel. There's a big plastic bubble where no one could see me. Just let me violate space and time and exist there for just a few minutes. Just let me look. I think that would be the most insane thing that you could see about humans in human history. >> Yeah. >> I just I want to know what they knew, what they had, what they used. >> Look, this thing Petra is same time period at least attributed to 7,000 roughly BC. >> Jesus. And they, you know, how would you do that? >> How? >> The details of all those car carvings is just insane. >> Insane. >> Yeah. >> And what in 7,000 BC? What are the tools? What the hell were you using? How did you make a temple out of the side of a mountain? Look at the size of it, man. The size of those columns. >> It would be hard to do anything like this even today. >> It would be incredibly difficult. insanely time consuming. >> Oh. Uh yeah, the Caliosa Temple, by the way, I uh I don't have it up right now, but the uh in 1650 or so, someone sent a thousand people to try to destroy it, and after three years of doing nothing, they stopped. They barely made a dent on a couple statues. >> Yeah. A lot of times when invasions happen in India, like >> they tried really hard to it up and couldn't. >> Oh, wow. >> That's crazy. >> That's very robust. That's a great way to describe it. It's just there's so much of that stuff that's so interesting because it's so undeniable. It's so undeniable in its scale. So undeniable in its complexity and the the planning and the the the understanding that you you had to have a a deep knowledge of geometry, of measurement, of you had to have accurate Yes. everything. sturdiness like resist like calamities like earthquakes. If you had that floods, what tools are you using? >> Yeah. >> Like how are you doing this? >> Yeah. >> How are you coordinating all these people and getting them to do stuff? And >> I mean sure conditions must have been way harsher. Like I'm sure people didn't really have a choice but to do these things because back in those days like the only way you could take care of your food and clothing and shelter is like you commit yourself as a labor laborer to the state to the kingdom. But you could also ask like how what gave them the initiative or drive to go do these things. >> Yeah. Well, that description is perhaps of a later time. We don't even really know what civilization was like when these were constructed. >> Yeah. the the real the real problem is the material science. The real problem is like you there's a lot of things that you have to have to make those things. It's not as simple as a sculpture like Michelangelo making a sculpture out of something that's like fairly easy to carve into as far as far as stone goes. You know, this is the scale is imp it's so undeniable that like something something some piece of our understanding is missing. Yeah. Yeah. I mean it it it like looking at all this like everyone should just be like a lot more humble, right? Like like we don't actually know that much like the what we know is like so little like like whatever like the same thing as what Socrates said. What we know is very very little. >> And the only thing we we should all strive to be is just be curious. And um I think there's a lot of tendency for people to like think like oh like we have all this advanced technology we're so amazing like look at us. And it's like, wait, hold on. Like, you don't even understand what happened thousands of years ago. And uh there's so much out there to just go and explore and learn and like get better at understanding more. >> What is this place? >> This is Yeah, this is unreal. >> This is called the Ora Caves. Timeless wonder carved in stone. >> They're all I think it's all like kind of the same area. >> Yeah, it's it's the same Allora cave in the Shiva Temple that you saw. >> Look at that. My god. Look at this stuff. It's insane. And again, there's no steel back then. >> It's actually really symmetrical. It It's It's not even like uh in Can you go back to the f the first one with with the symmetrical top? Yeah. >> Look at the symmetry at the top. This is >> It's nuts. >> It looks like that mall in uh New York they made where the World Tra >> Yeah. But way more robust. I mean, how what what did what were you they you this is the thing is like the material science aspect of it. >> Yeah. >> It's like you don't have the ability to do Look at that top one. Go to that top one again. The one that you just had, Jamie. >> Yeah, that one. >> Look at that's crazy, man. I mean, I am just blown away when I see stuff like that. My mind just starts racing and I just think, how did you do this? Who who was involved? How was it planned? How was it so symmetrical? What were the tools? Like what were the tools, man? If you don't have steel, >> you don't have what are you using? How'd you do that? I >> mean, most of it is done with stone, clearly, right? So, >> I guess I guess I doubt it. I bet they had something else. I bet they had something else that over time eroded just like metal would today. I mean, if you left a shovel outside today and you came back to that same spot 500 years from now, there's nothing. That shovel's gone, right? >> Yeah. >> And you've got to assume that these many thousand-year-old temples that were carved out of a mountain, whatever tools they used probably got absorbed by the earth. And the only thing that's remaining, >> it's giving me a weird thought. Like when they make a big building downtown though, they only bring the crane in for a temporary period of time. And there's only so many cranes on the planet currently, too. So, >> Right. >> True. >> You take it and you move it, you go take it to the next spot. >> Yep. Yeah. True. >> Yeah. I don't know. >> Yeah. Especially something like this, like if they had heavy equipment and machinery and whatever the they were using, they probably moved it and then moved it out and then it probably rotted away and now it's gone. If there was machinery. If there wasn't, like there must have been something else. Some other kind of like some technology that we haven't even imagined. Yeah. >> But it's like their their commitment to art too was so fascinating cuz these aren't just structures. They're incred. >> Yeah. Intensely beautiful. >> Intensely ornate. >> Yeah. >> So it's not it's not just that they wanted to build like a functional structure that good architecture. No, it's this it's a fascinating artwork and it's so intricate. There's so many different features and so many different images of of different people and beings and animals and elephants. And >> there's one more temple like you could pull out like it's called the Tangar temple. >> Oh, I've seen that one too. Yeah. Yeah. >> That was done more recently in the in the age of the Cholas and um it's um it's pretty incredible. >> When did they do that one? >> Um I don't know the exact number but more recent than the other ones that you saw. >> All of them are nuts, man. And then there's stuff like that all over the world. Whoa. >> This was done as a as a project by the king um to to basically make a name for himself. >> Wow. That's incredible. Is that multiple pe pieces of stone or did he carve that whole thing out of stone too? >> Probably multiple pieces. >> So that's actually like construction. >> Yeah. >> Not like removal. The other ones are it's essentially a a giant sculpture. Wow, it's so pretty. Look how geometric it is, too. >> That's what amazes me. Like, they didn't actually have all these simulations and CAD tools and all these things, >> right? >> And uh >> what year was this made, Jamie? >> Does it say it's just so incredible how much of this stuff exists where it's really baffling? Like I just found out recently that the Aztecs didn't build those temples that they found them. >> Really? >> Yeah. They found like the Tinoitlon. They they call it the place where the gods were born. >> Mhm. >> The Aztecs found it and uncovered it. And then on the when uh was it Tano Chitlan or uh Tioto which whichever one it was on the consecration day when they were done with like whatever they were doing with it to celebrate they killed somewhere between 20,000 and 80,000 people in 4 days. >> Damn. >> Not exactly the mindset of the type of people that would construct something like that, >> you know. So those are the people that found it and it might have been sitting there for a thousand years and then they came along and said, "Oh, this is cool. Let's live here." Okay. Well, what was the society that lived there before them? And where are they and what happened and how' they do this and why' they do it and why did they have it aligned with the constellations? Like what were they doing? Yeah, it's some some of the some of the calculations are pretty pretty amazing, like how they timed it, how they positioned it, how they cared about planetary positions and stuff like that. Sure, like some of it could even be pseudocience, but whatever. I think just the level of like calculations they were making back in those days without, you know, powerful computers is just outstanding. >> It's just nuts and it doesn't make sense. It's like okay they're making it without powerful computers. So what are they using? >> I mean at one point the word computer just meant a human >> right >> like human beings would be doing the calculations. That was their only job like to like multiply two numbers or like to to make some astronomers were actually the first mathematicians. The term mathematician and astronomer were used synonymously at one point. >> Really? >> Yeah. >> Why is that? Why why most of the stars and math? >> Yeah. Because like studying the stars involved making a lot of geometry calculations and um um that was kind of actually one of the first set of mathematicians in India. People like Arya Bata Bascara all these guys were actually astronomers too. They were not just mathematicians. M >> and um Arya was earlier to like like the idea of using zeros and then um he had a lot of like contributions in geometry and he was doing all this like just because he was interested in astronomy. >> Isn't there evidence of Pythagore theorem in ancient is it ancient Samrian? Is it >> it's some anc something something that predates Pythagoras. >> Interesting. My my theory is that even though it was not formulated as a pythogan theorem like I'm sure people had to understand concepts of sign ss and cosiness and like you know whatever is the right angle for the right incline to get this right level of like geometry you need to you needed to have some implicit understanding of it to build these kind of structures. There's no way you could do it without that. >> Yeah 100%. and and you have to have incredible measurement tools like not just the actual mathematics. >> Okay. The oldest known evidence of Pythagoran theorem dates from old Babylonian clay tablets from about 1900 to600 B.CE roughly 1,000 years before Pythagoras. Isn't that wild? like how how Clay Tabots often cited uh used what we now call the Pythagorean theorem to complete to compute rather the di diagonal of uh rectangles and squares including an excellent approximation. Look at this. This is nuts, man. Vadic ritual text explicitly states the rule equivalent I don't know how to say that. What is that? A A B square C= C^ square for the diagonal of a rectangle that includes numerical examples predating or roughly contemporary with classical Greek mathematics. So completely different parts of the world. >> Yeah. >> And they're coming up with the same stuff. >> Exactly. Because they're all curious. That's it. >> Yeah. They're all curious and eventually all curiosity leads to truth or some form of it. I would argue that anything anything that's of impact in the world has only been done by curious people. In hindsight, we label those people as successful, as smart, or rich, but the common trait across all of them has been like curious. >> Well, that's certainly a powerful trait. And people that aren't curious are not fun. >> Yeah, they're not interesting. So, because of that, they don't attract other smarter, interesting people. and therefore they won't be able to do something very meaningful in the world. >> So it's it's it's it's kind of like um um it's less about and and it applies to your personal relationships and personal life too. It's not just about professional success like you'll have a more fulfilling life with your wife or your kids if you're a more curious person. You ask them more questions. You you you take interest in them, right? So that's that's the one quality everybody wants in personal relationships is like taking interest in them and like actually understanding them better or like being curious about common things and um so it's not just that you know being curious leads to success. It's more that people around you want you to be successful if you're curious because um you will have more compounding and fulfilling relationships. >> I would agree with that. Yeah. I'd say it's one of the more more important qualities of human beings. I mean it's led to everything that we have today. All curiosity has led to all of our architecture, math. Yeah. Everything. Art, everything. >> The transistor, like you know the story of the transistor. >> Yeah. >> So Bell Labs was basically employing as many like like history adjusted as many telephone engineers back then as the number of software engineers today. But only three people cared enough to question whether you should use these really hot giant vacuum tubes for amplifying telephone signals. So vacuum tubes were very big, power hungry and uh very hot and so they were not fall tolerant and it's very expensive and so three people questioned the need for that and came up with the idea of the transistor to to to amplify current and that that was the Nobel Prize winning discovery and not just that it was useful to amplify telephone signals. It basically led to the rise of modern computing and we wouldn't have an iPhone like this today if if not for those three people. Do you know what the tinfoil hat conspiracy theory about transistors is? >> No. >> It that they are back engineered from the Roswell crash along with fiber optics. >> Any more? >> So, uh, we read this on the podcast. Remember Jamie? There's the two scientists that were attributed. There's this one scientist that said they weren't even remotely exceptional guys and that they gave them the credit for this so that they didn't have to reveal the true nature of where this technology came from. >> I see. Interesting. >> So again, tinfoil hat securely on our heads. This is not something I believe. >> Okay. >> This is just something that's fun. Um there's a few inventions that came out of that time period roughly after 1947 >> that are weird and one of them is fiber optics and one of them is a transistor and these are supposedly attributed to back engineering programs. >> So the Roswell crash, I don't know if you ever paid any attention to it. It's a real weird one because the cover of the Roswell Daily Record said that the government has a crash disc that landed in the desert. Bunch of witnesses, bunch of people saw it. >> It's also people that saw um supposedly saw physical bodies of these creatures and a supposedly uh again, who knows what's true, but Truman went to the site. He visited it and then the planes, two separate planes were flown to Wright Patterson Air Force base uh which was uh I think it was just right base back then. I don't think it was right Patterson but they they flew them out and the idea was this material was so important they didn't want to risk one plane crashing. So they flew it in two different planes and that this stuff has always been known to be stored at Wright Patterson Air Force Base. That's what everybody always talks about. And then a lot of it was moved to Bell Labs. And wow, >> there was a company called the American Computer Company. And back in the day, the American Computer Company was just like it was a consumer website where you could go and say, "Oh, I need a Windows computer that does this, that, and the other thing." And you could just put in whatever your specs were, and they would build it for you. But they had a whole section of their website dedicated to Bell Labs and back engineered UFO technology and all they talked about in this one like whoever ran it was like a cook. I don't Is that still around >> that website? >> Yeah. American computer company. Is it still around? >> Interesting. >> So this is like the 1990s I think. So you're saying your your your theory I mean not that you believe in it but your theory is that uh the transistor was not like invented it was known and it was given to the >> there's apparently a giant leap between the first ideas of the transistor and then what it what actually came about and how much money had to be spent to create it off of this leap. This was this >> assertion by these scientists that were trying to examine this. The thing about Bell Labs is there's a military base right outside of Bell Labs and they say, "Well, that military base is to guard New York City." But New York City is quite a flight away, but Bell Labs is right there. >> Yeah. >> And they were working on some deep dark at Bell Labs for sure because I've had a bunch of people on that were talking about uh remote viewing exercises that they were doing out of Bell Labs. You know, we've had a bunch of people that came on and and talked about various programs that were going on that were like top secret programs that were happening that were being run through Bell Labs. Like there's some weirdness to that place. Like real weirdness. >> Interesting. >> Yeah. And it's fun. Yeah, >> the idea that like >> you know that >> it it it definitely feels very disconnected like okay like you were using all these vacuum tubes um and then suddenly you're like okay like what if we just use semiconductors okay that there's definitely a pretty far drift from what you're doing currently to what you're supposed to do >> and um um and also the the the idea of the first transistor and what ended up being used in chips the junction transistor are quite different too. So they're like big leaps in terms of what the core idea was. It's not an incremental change. Um the way I thought about it was like okay that's like tens of years of work and that's why they made a big change and so if you actually looked into the individual milestones they had maybe it would have looked pretty different. But your um conspiracy theory is pretty interesting. Like >> it's always fun. >> Yeah. Um and and also there's just too many stories of this and David Grush has you know on oath said that they there are back engineering programs and he was read into these and that they've been around for a long time but >> this is the assertion of that movie the age of disclosure that the real problem is that they have misappropriated funds and lied to Congress and so they come out and tell you okay we do have this program well guess what everybody goes to jail because you guys are a bunch of liars and uh you've been stealing money and you've been doing whatever you want to do with this money. I don't know like how much how much oversight is there on back engineering UFO programs, you know? So, probably a lot of people get in trouble. A lot of people go to jail. On top of that, these things are all being done by weapons manufacturers, right? Like where are you going to bring them to? Well, you're going to bring them to Loheed Martin or you going to bring them to, you know, Rocket Dine or it's going to be someone that does that kind of work. Yeah. You're not going to do it on your It's not going to be like we'll do it. No, you're going to have to bring it to people that already make spaceships or bring it to people that already make jets. >> Yeah. >> And so they have a massive competitive advantage over any other company that's doing it. So then there's other companies that also had contracts with the United States government they can sue. And so he lays out all the problems with disclosure. And their assertion is that the only what we need if we really want to find out the truth is we're going to need widespread amnesty for all these people that were involved. Mhm. >> My problem with that is that's what I would say too. If I had been stealing money for decades and decades, I'd be like, I we need amnesty and I'll tell you where all this stuff is. I'm like, how do we know what this stuff is, whether or not these are just top secret military programs with advanced propulsion technology that's unavailable to the public and they're going to say that is aliens and they backgineered this and they did that. Like, they clearly don't want to tell people. They don't want people to know. I think a large part of it is probably because they could get in trouble. But I think also a large part of it is because it's fun to keep secrets from people. >> Yeah. >> Especially when you're the government. Why tell them? those people. >> Yeah. them. They don't even know UFOs are real. >> Meanwhile, you know, we're going into a bunker in the middle of the mountain and we're remote viewing. You know, it's it's probably there's probably a lot of fun involved in having access to information that most people would kill for. >> Yeah. I mean there's so much information that um we just we just don't have access to. >> Which brings me to this question with it seems like one of the things that's happening with uh both with AI and with technology in general is that you have more and more access to information and more and more answers to questions than ever before. >> Yeah. >> At a certain point in time there's going to be no bottleneck. >> Yeah. >> And we're going to know everything about everything. So, how is anyone in government going to keep a secret? How is any corruption ever going to be possible? Is at a certain point in time all of it will get uncovered? Like, it's much more difficult to commit murder now with DNA evidence, right? Back in the 1800s, like I didn't see nothing. I wasn't there. And then you're free. Like, now they do your fingerprints. Now, they get your DNA. Now, there's flock cameras. There's like more and more and more. It's harder to get away with things. Yeah. >> Ultimately, there's going to come a time where there's so much data and so much information and you could run all your questions like there's an AI fact checker for politicians now. Yeah. >> So, while a politician is giving a speech, you can run an AI fact checker and in real time it will tell you whether or not these people are full of This it seems like the direction is there's not going to be anybody full of in the future because it's not going to be possible. >> Yeah. I mean the government still would have access to things that we human beings wouldn't have access to like like like regular people um and um particularly defense related weapons related like for example u when they did the uh ven venezuelan thing >> um I don't think people in Venezuela even understood like what even those weapons were >> I don't think we did they were described as like yeah they were described as something the the literal words used were like alien like technology. So we even we didn't know that um the United States had access to uh that quality of defense technology until that incident happened. So there are obviously going to be secrets right especially the highest stakes things um I would say like building frontier AI models is similar to that. Um, of course, as more and more models are getting open source, I think the knowledge is diffusing, but still, uh, the the true amount of details you need to actually train a really amazing frontier reasoning capability model is still not like widely diffused. So, I my my things my my my hypothesis is that um, whatever is extremely high stakes will still not be widely diffused. It it's it it'll at least there'll be enough structures in place to keep it secret. >> Forever. >> Not forever, but for a while. >> For a while. >> Yeah. >> That's the thing. >> Long term. Sure. Like things do get out and people understand. >> It feels like long term is what I'm looking at. Like look, when we're looking at history, we're talking in these like when we're looking at all these different temples and all these different things, we're talking about thousands and thousands of years >> and thousands of year time span in between each individual one. >> With our world, we're talking about massive change in 200 years. Like this country is 250 years old. Think about how kooky that is. >> Yeah. >> That is a blink of an eye in history. >> But do we do we understand everything that happened in the United States? >> No. >> Exactly. So there are still some details that are >> sure >> hidden from us like we we don't fully understand everything right >> for now. >> Yeah. >> But my question is as time goes on 250 years from now is it even possible to keep any secrets from anybody >> and and is that a good thing? It might be a good thing. It sounds horrible to people because they're like, "Oh my god, what about privacy?" >> Right. But also what about lies? >> Yeah. >> No more lies. Like everyone's going to know what you're thinking. Everyone's going to know everything people do all the time. >> Yeah. I mean, if you're a true surveillance state, obviously there are no secrets, >> right? >> Um except about the government itself. >> That's the problem. >> Yeah. >> Does it bottleneck with the government or does it get to a point where there you can't even have government secrets? Because as technology evolves and as human civilization evolves, secrets will be less and less not just necessary but secrets. Secrets will be problematic because they'll be an impediment to knowledge. There'll be impediment to understanding the true >> the true scope of what the world is like the true nature of all of our various moving parts. >> Yeah. May as long as the human quality the intrinsic human quality of curiosity and truth seeekingness which is you know universal. that's existed ever since we known human beings. If that continues and that continues to be the case, then people will have enough incentives to figure out the truth. >> Yeah. >> And and they if something is actually hard to get to, it only motivates you more to actually go and find it. >> For sure. But so my question is where does this all go? you know, and you obviously work in AI and when you think about AI and when you think about just technology in general and you extrapolate, you just take it from here and you just plotted out like what is a possible scenario of 250 years from now? Like what does it even look like? What does the United States look like at 500 years old? >> It's very hard to know. I I I'll be very honest. I I I think it's very hard to know even 5 years from now how it's going to look like. >> That's crazy. >> Yeah. Five years ago was like >> five years ago whoever is at the top most in AI I'm I don't even consider myself like that but whoever is at the most frontier level of decision-m in AI 5 years ago I don't think they predicted the exact state we are in today nobody did if they did they would have already procured all the compute and like you know manufactured all the chips bought out all the fabs they would have done all that right just this counterfactual everyone's like bottleneck by not having enough comput and like we have we don't have enough chips, we don't have enough power. These are all the problems that if you invite anybody in AI and ask what is the bottleneck in AI today and everybody would say power. I think Jensen was here and he said the same thing, right? >> Yeah. >> But okay, like if you predicted this exact state 5 years before, wouldn't you have secured enough power and started building more power plants yourself and start getting permits and like started like planning out capacity? No. Nobody did that. >> No. Everything is reactive to the demand that we're having today. So, >> and that's just 5 years. >> Yeah, that's just 5 years. So, when you ask me to predict 250 years, like I just have to honestly say I don't know. >> Do you ever sit back and think about it though? What it could be? >> I do think about it. So, there are like lot of fun. I I I I use perplexity a lot for these kind of things. Um especially this new feature computer inside it. And um one one one this is just for hypothetical scenarios. Let's say there is an AGI, right? And I I've seen you ask a lot of people about this and um and um a lot of conventional answers is like, oh, like we'll just become managers of the AIS, don't worry. >> But um if if the price of cognition is the price of compute, managing an AI is also pretty much doable by the AI itself because it's the bottleneck is not like unique cognition capability there. So the value of the society will automatically shift to what is scarce and uh fundamentally what has been scarce is like asking like highquality questions about things. Okay like what if like we just completely spend all our time understanding the past like that's an interesting endeavor. It was not cool before but it'll it'll become cool again. Um and like we usually used to view like archaeology or history as not something that's like worth having a career in because it doesn't pay well. But what if it actually starts paying you a lot more now that like actual knowledge works being done by AIS and like it's all mundane and all the price of that is basically at zero, >> right? And archaeology would be one of the few things that it wouldn't have access to because it doesn't have the actual ground. It can't get into the ground and do the scans and >> No, let's say we have like robots to go do that. >> Mhm. >> But but you're still going to be the one probing, right? >> Because you have incomplete information all the time. Even the idea of like okay let's go explore this particular area let's go understand better or let's let's go try to reverse engineer that let's go try to build this again oh how would it be if we wanted to do the same thing on the moon there are like so many interesting projects to work on for us as long as we are we stay curious and we stay interested in like a lot of things that we've done before and trying to understand like civilization that I'm not really concerned about like what things we get to do we might be doing a lot more cool things for what it's worth like I I don't know if anybody will be like coming and telling you that, oh, it's so cool to like open an Excel sheet every day and make financial models, right? Compared to like >> there's got to be somebody out there that likes that. >> I mean, there's something about like the task you do and and and what you get paid for, like what is the job title, blah blah blah. And some people associate their personal worth with like where they work at and how much they get paid. And I think that that thing is going to collapse in in a in a in a world where like the price of all that cognition is going to be the price of compute. >> What do you think happens to people if a large percentage of jobs get replaced by AI? >> I think they'll find new things. We've always gravitated towards things that are scarce because that's where the value lies. And so if if um you know have you one one interesting analogy is um have you do you the Gulf States where there's an abundance of resources and they export their resources to other states and that pays for the whole state. You know how like they they offer everybody um free electricity, subsidized health, subsidized education and like no taxes. When I first went to Dubai like in um almost like 20 years ago, um they told me like people don't pay taxes here and nobody pays for electricity here and uh education is like super cheap. And I was like, wait, how is that real? and and um and uh and and the way that's real is that I mean of course Texas also has no taxes and you know any well-run state can do this but the way it's happening is that because the government provides you all these things it becomes a rontier state like you offer political acquisitions to the state and u what ended up happening is citizens there expect the state to find them jobs expect the state to take care of like job displacement for them so they don't worry. So, it made them a little more lazy. So, that's not a good future to have where u some people talk about AI subsidies and AI dividends that that that get paid to everybody. I think we need to do some form of that, but that that in entirety won't solve the problem, >> right? Well, the thing about PE human nature is sort of undeniable. And if you give people the ability to be lazy, a large percentage of people will take that. >> That's right. >> A large percentage won't though. >> Yeah. There's going to be enough people that are inspired to do something and they say, "Okay, well now my basic needs are taken care of. Let me pursue my actual interest and find purpose in that." Because that's a lot of people find purpose in whatever their occupation is. Yeah. >> And if we can shift that to finding purpose in what your actual interests are and then really pursuing something, whatever it is in that, then you'll still have meaning in your life. >> And we've keep coming back to the cur it keeps coming back to staying curious. >> Yes. and and and finding value in your relationships, your your the family, uh caring for each other. Um if you ask a lot of retired people, actually retired people is a good demographic to understand what would happen, what what are things people find meaning in after like work's taken off them. And all majority of the answers are always like family, caring, you know, personal like like relationships and uh community like these are the things retired people keep doing to like you know keep themselves active and wake up every day and have something to look for. So all those things will become even more important at a time when like work itself doesn't mean much. >> Mhm. >> Doesn't mean humans won't be status seeking. I think we'll still be but status is not going to come from whether you're working at you know like a particular famous bank or a tech company or whatever. It'll be driven by like um how interesting you are. Are you interesting to talk to? When I can talk to an AI like despite that are you still interesting to talk to? Are are there certain things I get out of talking to you that completely change my perspective about like bunch of things or is it just fun to hang around you? um can we have a compounding relationship together? And and I think again it goes goes back to like you know being curious about things. >> Well, this is best case scenario, right? Worst case scenario is civilization upheaval, chaos, civil war, >> and it's possible. It's possible even without an AI, >> right? >> Exactly. >> Look, we've gotten real close to it a couple of times. >> Exactly. >> Yeah. So and and and and and we did not need an AGI like scenario for a civilizational collapse in the past as you clearly seen, >> right? >> A calamity can just take out all of us, wipe out everything. >> Sure. Especially natural ones. >> Yeah. That's why I'm not a big fan of like everybody claiming that um the AI is going to, you know, kill us or like a AGI is going to destroy humanity and like it's too dangerous and we all need to stop doing these things, but at the same time continuing to build data centers and continuing to make money. you you you have to have one consistent position. My position is that um whether AI or not, I think being curious is going to serve you really well. Um I think it's going to help you have a better life. And um there are two paths to curiosity. One that can kill it and one that can supercharge it. In my opinion, the one that kills curiosity is algorithmic feeds. like >> the the brain rot that you're fed every day with just, you know, just continuous doom scrolling. >> That's bad. >> Um, and the one that can supercharge it is AI. Okay. Like now that you could just ask whatever you want if everybody has like a pull it up Jamie for them, you know, >> right? >> And and that's amazing. So, okay. So, all you have to do is be curious about a lot of different things and and of course talk to interesting people. um engage in interesting activities together. If money is no longer an issue, you can fund passion projects yourself. You don't have to like require government funding or right >> venture funding. >> Like what if you just wanted to build a mini cave yourself, okay? Like you find a piece of land somewhere. There's a lot of land in America. >> Uh way more land than we know what to do with it. And um and and and surely we can build a lot of interesting things there. Well, that's a good glass half full scenario. And one of the things that I keep coming to is this whole idea of people working and making money and having careers and having portfolios and bank accounts and all. This is all very recent in human history. Yeah. Very very recent. Very recent. It's very recent. But we've become accustomed to this as a way of life. And we >> and Microsoft Microsoft built this concept of a knowledge worker because they wanted to sell more office software. >> Really? >> Yeah. Like like this whole idea of putting a PC on every desk and and making you like glue to the PC was their that was Bill Gates vision. Put a PC on every desk. >> That wizard. What a what a incredible accomplishment because boy did they nail it. >> Yeah. So it was not about making computing like beautiful or anything in the way like Steve Jobs envisioned it, >> right? It was just about comput sell more software, sell more computers because that way you can sell more software >> and and if you sell more software, you become rich and and and and the company just was a machine that was just, you know, built it's essentially a large sales machine that's built to sell software and and and uh and uh now they sell cloud, but whatever like that that that's essentially the uh the reason that like you know we all got trained to use software. ware people went and did tutorials on how to use Excel, how to use Word, how to use all these email tools and then now that became the upskilling you needed to go work at a different companies and then write code and like whatever, right? So that if that part is going to be done by an AI, it's not necessarily a bad thing because this is not actually the way you feel like real purpose and fulfillment in your own life. If if you were never exposed to that, whatever you had as the intrinsic curiosity in you, that that's probably what you should be doing. >> Yeah. There could be a completely new way to live life >> where we're not >> dependent upon labor for basic needs and but then it's going to be incumbent upon people. They're going to have to figure out a way to be either self-starting or we're going to have to expose people to things that going to excite their curiosity and make that a mandate. >> Yeah. It it has to start from schools. >> Yeah. >> And um as long as we keep rewarding people for having answers instead of asking interesting questions, it's it's going to be a difficult change. Like in schools, you're always rewarded for being smart based on whether you have answers to like 20 different questions. Like who cares? Like all those 20 questions can be answered by AIS. Um, have you ever like flipped the script where you say, "Okay, like I'm going to the smartest person in the room is the one who asks the most interesting questions." >> Okay. Like what what kind of students can you cultivate based on that? >> Like imagine if the room had no pressure to always know the answer, >> but the freedom to ask a a lot of questions, >> right? Because sometimes when someone asks a question, it'll it'll make you pause and go, I never even thought of that, but that's it. Like that's the question. Yeah. >> And it takes a com I mean so many people have so many different perspectives which is one of the more interesting things that I've experienced doing this podcast is I get to talk to so many different people and >> they vary so widely. There's so many different ways of looking at the world and so many different ways of engaging with the world and so many different things that people are fascinated with that they spent their entire life studying and and pursuing. It's like you get this rich tapestry of the human experience that's just I would have never been exposed to this many people. Yeah. >> And in turn I've been able to expose these people to all these other folks that are just listening and watching right now. And it's incredible. And it's such a for me it's like the perfect job. I've never had a job that more aligns with my own personality as much as this because I've always been that kid like shut the up with all the questions. I've always been that kid. That that's the system, right? It's not it's not your fault, >> right? >> Like it's actually the reason you're successful now is the exact thing that people told you to shut up about in the past, >> right? >> Yeah. >> Don't you know, hey, you you you know, stop bothering my lecture, you know, asking all these unrelated questions. It's it's mainly a frustration of the teacher that they don't have the answers to you, >> right? Or >> Sure. >> and and and um and now that that bottleneck is gone. We did this experiment with with one one instructor at MIT who taught the introduction to biology class where uh he came and told us that he's going to give perplexity to all the kids all the students and um they would use it as part of the lectures. So so instead of fighting AI, you just give AI to everybody and let them ask whatever questions they want and they can actually use it in the exams too. >> So wow. So how do you even design questions for an exam u in in such a world is maybe you just encourage people to pose a question that AI can't answer right now and that becomes your research project and you turn everybody into a scientist fundamentally like there's this belief that scientists have to go through a rigorous PhD and like you have to get you know accredited by like an amazing university to be that sure but uh anyone who's curious can be a scientist. The only thing that's required to be a good scientist is intellectual humility to understand that you could be wrong about things. Things that everyone takes for granted. You could still question them. And when you when you're presented with new evidence and new data, you're willing to change your mind and you're willing to operate with ambiguity and uncertainty about the world. That's that's basically all the qualities you need to be a scientist. And you can run your experiments, you can gather data, you can gather evidence, and you can consult people, you can bring in experts and talk to them. And and as long as you're uncovering more and more about the world, you are a scientist. You don't need a PhD to feel that you're, you know, allowed to be a scientist or not. And I think that's the most important um quality we need uh to inculcate in our kids, the upcoming generation, so that they all feel more liberated. Okay. Like finally I don't have to memorize this textbook or these lecture materials and like I don't have to feel bad if I get like 12 out of 20. Okay, who cares? Like AI is always going to get 20 out of 20. That's not what you're meant to be like good at. Of course, master the foundations, the basics. Great. But your job is to actually pose interesting questions. >> Yeah. And the intellectual, excuse me, intellectual humility is so important because one of the things that was really weird about the whole COVID pandemic was that we weren't supposed to question science. >> Yeah. >> It was like that or when Fouchy said if you question Anthony Fouchy, you are questioning science. >> That's because they try to assign credibility through their degrees. >> Yes. >> Through their affiliations, >> appeal to >> but not through the scientific method. >> Right. Anybody should be allowed to ask questions as long as they are open to new evidence. >> Yeah. >> And that's the most important quality of a scientist. >> Well, the scientific method alone, I mean, it's one of the most important things that we can use to try to figure out what's real and what's not real. And as soon as someone says don't use it. >> Yeah. >> So, don't question. Well, wait a minute. And then there was this an actual government push to silence questioning and legitimate researchers were kicked off of Twitter because they didn't back the narrative. >> Yeah. >> Like this is all anti-science. This is not this is not you're questioning science. Well, science demands questioning. >> Yeah. >> It's what it is. >> Yeah. When you don't understand something, the the best thing you can do is ask all possible questions, >> right? Right? And so curbing that is almost like a way of saying, "Look, I'm going to tell you what happened. You need to believe in my worldview and I'm not open to new perspectives." >> I wonder if anybody has used AI to try to map out possible scenarios for where technology leads human civilization and what could be done to mitigate the problems and push it in the proper direction. like have a bunch of different models of how this could play out. >> Yeah. I mean, uh I I try to do that for fun, but I haven't done it in a serious enough way to have like a proper answer to that, >> right? >> But, uh I think like, you know, um a lot of things that we are doing today will not be considered needed or valuable. I and and and maybe a little bit of taking our own lessons from the past. I don't know if you when you grew up as a student, did you have to like be good at mental math like multiplying arbitrary numbers? Was that considered a sign of smartness or remembering people's phone numbers or something? >> Well, you had to because there was I mean you had little address books. That's what we used to carry around like a little I had a little address book that I keep on my desk. Yeah, >> it's a little tiny thing with everybody's number and name. That's the only way I knew people's numbers. >> And I remembered a bunch of them like all my friends. I had all my friends. I don't have any of my friends numbers remembered. Yeah. Yeah, maybe my wife and my friend Eddie. I have two numbers in my head. >> But But was there a time when people thought somebody was smart based on how good their memory power was? >> Oh yeah, definitely. >> But would you would you say that now? >> Well, people are impressed if you know things now. You know, I have a bunch of like weird information obviously that I've gathered through so many years of doing this podcast and just so many years of being curious. You know, like sometimes even my own daughter is like, "How the do you know that?" I'm like, "This is what I do." Like that's my thing. Yeah. You know, I pay attention to stuff. Yeah. >> But yeah, I mean, memory itself is always very impressive. And someone has an excellent memory. Yeah. And can pull up facts of the past. We automatically equate that to intelligence. >> Yeah. I I I think it's impressive, but it's not necessarily a sign of being intelligent, right? Like I think it's just a look You have a very fast lookup table in your head. That's great. It's very valuable. Um, but I still think like being smart is all about posing the most interesting questions. >> Also, the decisions that you make and whether or not you self-correct when you make mistakes. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. All those things. >> Exactly. So, when you when you have an amplifier to your intelligence like an AI all the time where lookups is essentially something you can delegate, um, reasoning for decision-m is something you can delegate. But posing the right questions to gather the right data and then forming your own judgment based on what it reasons and comes up with and finally having the courage to make the decision. That's still you. That agency, that intrinsic curiosity to ask the right question, the scientific intellectual humility to like, you know, gather new evidence, always questioning your beliefs, that that is still you. And so um I feel like that is essentially what would be considered smart in the ages to come if somebody's like a you know like a proxy scientist or whatever like no more uh doesn't have to go to like MIT or Harvard and get a PhD to be a scientist or to be considered a scientist because all scientific literature is open and like it's accessible to everybody and you you can cons you can even take a paper written by an expert and and use an AI understand it deeply ask a lot of questions and maybe even disprove what they claim to be true. That's the whole peer review process, right? The peerreview process is all about questioning somebody's paper. And um that's why like you know what whatever you said happened in the co days is is wrong. Like you should be allowed to ask questions about even eminent scientists work. It's okay. Like if you're dumb and you had had the wrong questions, sure, you're going to learn from that. the it's worse than not being allowed to ask the question. >> Yeah, agreed. It's going to be interesting to see what the future of education looks like. Like how valuable are degrees when essentially AI is going to be able to do the majority of whatever work you need done on variety like >> how how good are they right now at uh just law like you could ask questions pretty pretty amazing right? >> Yeah. >> How good are they at mathematics? Perfect. Like how good are they at coding? Way better than people. >> Yeah. And at a certain point in time, it's going to be interesting that like what is education now? Is education just providing you with information because that information is readily available. Or is education teaching you how to think? >> Yeah. >> Teaching you how to pursue your interests and be curious and have intellectual humility and understand what you know, what you don't know. >> I think that that's what it should be. I still think institutions will preserve their brand value because there is a certain aspect of education that's outside of learning which is just having access to other curious and intelligent people. >> Sure. Community. >> Yeah. And and brands attract good communities, peer groups, blah blah blah. >> Mhm. >> But the actual process of learning itself has to change and and and what you're rewarded for has to change. So fundamentally everything you know flows down is downstream of the incentive, right? So if the incentive is to score the highest on the exam based on answers, you're not really changing much. If you need to change that process, you need to change the process of what do you reward a student? Like what is A+ or A, >> right? >> That that that's where we need to start at. >> Well, it's also the we you know, we talked about this the other day that the education system in this country was designed to make workers and that's what they did when they first started doing it and the turn of the >> curriculum was designed around that. Yeah. Well, >> in India, it's still the case, by the way. >> Really, >> even if you're a computer, even if you go into a computer science degree, >> I don't know if it's still the case. I shouldn't misspeak, but at least when I was there and for many years after the first two years, you just spend learning hardcore electrical and mechanical engineering. You would learn like welding, using lathe machines. You would you you would um have to like go and like do workshops, carpentry, uh a lot of these things. It was fun. >> I would think there's be a lot of value in that. So, so in hindsight, I actually think it was fun to learn soldering and like how to like make circuits on red boards and learn to circuit boards. >> But, um, if somebody was just interested in some, you know, just writing code, let's say, back then, all this is kind of like pointless to learn, but you had to go through it to be qualified as an engineer. M >> so um and and and the reason the curriculum was designed that way is because that's what the labor force was required back then to build like oil factories and like all these things. So you had to learn mechanical engineering, you had to learn fluid mechanics, whatever. But um I think that that that should also change because if if if the way like you do work changes then what you're trained for in college should also change. And u it's much harder to change these things. You know pe people are much slower. they're scared to do changes. Disruption is always like looked down upon and um so I think we let's at least start at the incentive structure uh right from the schools, right from the colleges like let's not like reward people based on like how much they know. >> Well, if it seems like in the future when things do radically change and they seems like they're inevitable, they're going to radically change. Universities and schools are going to be rewarded for having developed thinkers that are able to adapt to this new world. >> That's right. >> Yeah. So, they're going to have to figure out how to adjust their curriculum. >> Yeah. >> Because the the tools are so spectacular now that just this idea of just memorizing information is it's not that's not what you're going to need to get by in the future. >> It's not. And and I I guess like one proxy different schools use is like maybe if more entrepreneurs arise out of your school, you probably u created a lot of independent thinkers. >> Mhm. >> Um because they are like willing to take a fresh perspective towards a problem, >> right? and and build their own thing from scratch. And and fundamentally that's what America America's always been about is you know some the American dream of coming here and like having your own idea and still be taken seriously by a bunch of people. The whole idea of venture capital Olympics this year or like family and friends around this whole idea of just having your friends help you to bootstrap a business and then turning it into a success and success doesn't mean like multi-billion or 10 billion or whatever, right? As long as it pays you enough that you don't have to work for somebody else and you can live a fulfilling life and you can just go explore your passions, that's success. That's actually a better success than >> creating a company based on what other people want you to do and then hating your job for it. >> Yeah. And having a yacht and being miserable and working every day. >> And that's why I said like not the the the smartest or the richest people are not always the ones who have the most fulfilling lives. The most curious people have the most fulfilling lives because they have better relationships. They're actually able to sit and look at something and, you know, be curious about it instead of like being worried about what's going on. >> What What did the American dream What was it to you when you weren't in America? Like what what is it like over like what is how is it discussed? Well, um to me like I always thought America is the only country where you can come here and um have an idea and people listen to you and uh and and and encourage you to go pursue it. The risk-seeking culture is just incredible here. Everybody everywhere else you kind of are like either explicitly or implicitly are forced to defer to authority. Okay, like go and ask the permission of this person, go and ask the permission of that person or get their approval or get their insight or sure you can get their cons you can consult everybody out there but if you have a thought that challenges what they believe in this country still encourages you to like go pursue it >> and um so yes like when I came here obviously you know Google was the number one company that everybody wanted to work in but it's also the same country where it allows you as a new person to start a new idea that challenges one of the biggest companies in in in in this own country and actually wants it. People actually want new ideas and um and then you can consistently see that there are like always going to be more and more new ideas and new companies to be created here. And so that spirit of like questioning is is encouraged a lot here. And and it it happens in academic research. I started off as an academic even there um a lot of ideas when I had it um and I would share it with people um you know people actually give you very honest feedback about things but they don't stop you from working on anything and and that's fantastic because that's that's very fresh it's very liberating >> and that's not anywhere else >> I would say it's not >> it's not in India >> it's a simplification to say it's not anywhere else But um >> it's not as encouraged. >> It's not as encouraged. The incentive structures are not quite there and uh ability to like be taken seriously for some crazy ideas is is is why America is still at the top. >> But it's crazy to me that if the American dream is so compelling and so many people come here for it, why doesn't the rest of the world sort of adopt those values? >> It's hard, you know, like a lot of it is cultural. like America was was was born was made from from like you know a piece of land essentially right um and u a lot of ideas that we built here a lot of industries that we built here were were all like created here from nothing and that required you to like go take bold risks I think Jeff Bezos said this in some um podcast that where else would you like be able to go raise like a few million dollars for an idea that has like 5 to 10% chance of working and then fail at it and still go and raise another few million for your next idea. No, nowhere else. People are willing to like people who get rich here actually want to encourage and be part of somebody else's crazy journey because it's hard to pursue all crazy bets yourself. >> Mhm. So it's an ecosystem and once something becomes an ecosystem there's network effects. So it's very hard to copy that elsewhere. >> And so your value is measured in your curiosity and your willing to work your willingness to work on whatever it is. Yes. That is your pursuit. Yes. And then eventually adjusting and learning and >> catching fire with one of them. >> Correct. And and and you have to work hard like I I you know like I I I I'm a big believer in intense hard work. I think uh not nothing great can be accomplished by being soft and so all this like recent push for you know having a lot of work life balance this and that sure if you have work life bal if you if that's what you want and I think there are certain jobs that would give you that but when you're trying to do something from scratch when you're trying to create something from nothing it's not meant to be easy >> right >> there are some sacrifices that have to be made and you're signing up to be part of that experience that that that surreal joy you from doing something that's felt almost impossible to achieve and and uh and you're not doing you're not like staying up late or waking up early because you're getting paid more. Maybe you might not get paid anything. Maybe this whole thing goes to nothing, but that that experience you're getting of being part of something that feels very hard to achieve is what you're signing up for to be part of. >> Yeah. And if you're not, find something else. >> It's fine. Respect that. Nothing wrong with that. >> Exactly. and and and and the country has enough jobs to provide for all kinds of like needs, right? And and everybody goes through different phases in their life. Sometimes they feel a little lazy or like disillusioned. Okay. And and so um what I like about this country is that there's lot of curious people here. There's a lot of like so many different people, you know, like whether they use AIS or not AIS, they're all like finding meaning in like so many interesting projects. Well, obviously I don't know any other country really because I was born here, but the people that do talk to me about what the American dream is like from another country, they're the most passionate and the most supportive of this this idea, this experiment in self-government and this this the >> just the whole idea that the country operates on that anybody can chase their dream that you can if you have a dream and you're willing to work hard, you could actually do it in this country. >> That's right. >> Yeah. That's, you know, it's most the people that are most passionate about that idea often times are people that come from somewhere else where that wasn't available >> and and it's not just like, you know, people coming from one particular country or another. It's it's it's the attitude. It's the the way the system works and rewards you to like be bold and take bets against established players. It's okay, right? It's okay to like be an upstart, a challenger. And people love that like underdog and I and I think you know that's fantastic like and and that culture is continuing. Yes, there are like multi-trillion dollar companies here and they're all going to become even bigger but people still want the young hungry person to also be successful. >> Yeah. Well, they they love disruptors. >> Yeah. >> And people love underdogs in this country. >> Yeah. It's it's it's it's universal. It's not specific to technology, >> right? Like I'm sure everybody would love underdog story that wants to go against like Coca-Cola or Pepsi or something too. >> Sure. Yeah. >> Oh, in sports it's our favorite thing. >> In sports. Yeah. >> We don't like when the guy who's supposed to win wins. We love when the guy who's not supposed to win triumphs. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> The underdog story. >> Yeah. That's a very uniquely American story >> to me. That's what this this this country is. I mean, sure, there's a lot of obstacles and challenges just like every other country. There are things here that are challenging, but it's one thing that has consistently stayed true. >> One of the big fears that people in America have uh about technology in particular is that without being aware that this was going to take place. Everybody gave up their data. Everybody gave up their data and didn't recognize it was a commodity. That in turn made these corporations immensely wealthy and powerful. And then >> they have the ability to shape narratives >> and that that concerns people because using their ideological position as leverage to try to push that through technology that has immense control and influence over people. and that we didn't see technology and corporations as having that much control over how society views itself and how we interact with each other. >> And there's a real real concern that these companies got so big and have so like there's a guy named Robert Epstein who's done a lot of work on um narrate or curated search engine results and how much that can have you read seen any of his stuff? >> I think I've seen this. Yeah. how much that can affect elections, how much that can affect people's perceptions on any societal issue that's coming up. >> Yeah. >> And it's concerning. It really is because they do curate search results. It's not simply, you know, you just run it out there and you get this is the data. No, you get, you know, if you look for specific political figures, depending upon where they fall in the right or left spectrum and depending upon which way the company forms the the the corporation forms falls rather, you'll get different results and that sucks. You know, that's >> it's very concerning that people don't recognize they don't they don't have the ability to see how that is dangerous for all of society. >> Yeah. to have that kind of power and wield it in that way where you're not being honest about accurate objective information. You're pushing particular ideologies. >> Yeah. So I think it's kind of like u this is almost an effect of the asymmetry that exists between the amount of AI power that centralized systems and centralized companies have and the amount of AI power as you as a sovereign individual has. So when you don't have the AIS to just go judge for yourself like what you should be reading and fed, you're obviously like under the influence of what you know whatever big tech company's controlling the information for. But when you have access to all those AIs, you can actually just customize what you want to see by telling the AI like, "Hey, this is what I think you should actually question and tell me." Until now, you never had that power for yourself. you're finally getting it, >> right? >> And eventually we'll we'll be able to have our own LLMs, like our own models that we would be able to host in our own hardware. We don't have to rely on like one centralized model given to us by like any specific um model company and u using that you can shape it to your your beliefs your custom you know your your your custom data and and um so when you're consuming a search result you can actually ask that AI that you control and you run so nobody can shut off access to it to tell you like hey like can you actually like give me a contrarian perspective on this or like Can you tell me if these search results are actually biased? So, I think we need to give individuals more sovereignty with more access to their own AIS that they own and run on a piece of hardware they own themselves. And this is the whole like this is going to be leading to the whole rise of local AIS. So, as AI models like today, they're very power and efficient. They're running on large data centers. that in in a year or two from now whatever capability that exists in the most power hungry data centers will be you it'll be possible to run it in some box that you own may not really yeah >> it's already happening >> it's already happening that like there are like interesting hardware projects like the Apple Mac Mini Nvidia DGX where you can actually host a reasonable size model and and put it in a box and have it run and you don't have to pay for all the tokens it it it produces you. You just have to plug it into your power core and it works. >> I know Duncan, my friend Duncan Trussell, he does that. >> Yeah. And and and today the capability of that model that can run locally is not quite there. So you would still prefer to use something that runs from the data center. But eventually this is going to be a spectrum. There's going to be some percentage of tasks that you you would start delegating to this local system. It'll be a hybrid model. And over time, it could end up being the case that you could buy something that feels like a refrigerator for your home, which is your own AI box, and host a model that you control. So nobody can arbitrarily shut off access to it one day. And then you can you can have that be your weapon against what the big tech wants you to be fed or believe in. M so >> this is the only way we can fight this because they have far more computing power far more data far more algorithms than you so the only way you can fight that is you have something you own yourself and with the rise of open-source models open source LLM you can just and and and and progress in local hardware and and both Apple Nvidia Intel they're all doing amazing work here you could potentially change the future and give people more power and this may not be as expensive those people think >> well that's a good solution because I I've always wondered like is are these searches like using Google is that going to be irrelevant one day because you already can just ask your phone like I most of the time if I want to have an answer for something I just ask perplexity it's like what is it and instead of like having to sift through all these Google searches yeah >> and try to figure out what it's showing me first and get to page three where it's what I really want to know I can get the accurate information, then follow-up questions are instantaneous. >> Yeah. And and and and even the models that are running the Plexity app today, they're all in the cloud. Eventually, you'll be able to do that on on a box that you own. You can still you can still use the front end the UI of the app, but you can control the compute that runs on on on piece of hardware. You you may ask why why do I care? Okay. Like what if some someday like the data center gets taken off like Iran was bombing data centers, >> right? >> Or like what if someday like the government decides that model is no longer available. >> You you want some control over like like what models you can run and like you can you may even want to shape it to like your context that you never want to be living on any data center >> and and and and uh I think that's where I believe the individual gets more sovereignty against big tech. And um that's how like we fight the surveillance or like centralization of power. >> Yeah. And c certainly pushing narratives. Um what do you think happens with social media because social media and as you were talking about before like algorithms like it's one of the biggest problems in terms of the way people view the world. >> Yeah. I'm curious what you think like you know like my my opinion is that it's not good for the kids. >> It's terrible for them. >> Yeah. But I think they should have some exposure to it because I think it's good to know that it's a thing. And I think children are fairly resilient and they learn. But the anxiety levels of kids is much higher than ever before. Suicidal ideiation's higher, self harm. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. I'm a little my belief is that um when you're just fed of feed and and and and the algorithm of the social media company decides what you're going to see next, it it curbs your curiosity. And I I don't I don't think things that curb human curiosity should be encouraged. >> Yeah, I agree. And so if the app is designed in a way where it asks you what you're interested in and helps you to come up and find things that that are very related to what you're interested in, >> right? >> That's awesome. But that's not how it works. It it's literally like it starts with something, you start doom scrolling and then start showing you what you just scroll and then you end up in an echo chamber. And and that's not that's not necessarily good. >> Well, you can get trapped. Yeah, you can get I'm in a trap of schizophrenics lately on Instagram, which is mostly schizophrenics, like people that tell they're the rightful president of the United States and like you tell the guy hasn't showered in days and you know, and if you have a phone, you can create an account and you just start uploading nonsense and then for whatever reason, I've watched a couple of them. So now they just keep showing them to me >> and it's full of AI slop right now. like a lot of AI like it's not even clear >> and it's not labeled also clearly whether it's been made with AI or not so often so essentially it's leading to a complete loss in in in trust where when I see something I don't even know if it's real anymore >> right and it's going to get worse >> yeah it's going to get worse to the extent that you're you're going to like your default would be that this is AI and then like you're going to have to go through multiple layers to finally verify if it was Um and um and even like verified accounts post a lot of AI stuff. So it's not it's not about like whether the account is verified by Meta or some or or whatever, right? So I think um fundamentally I I'm I I I feel like okay the way I think about it is what are pieces of technology if did not exist uh would would be a really bad thing for the world and what are pieces of technology did not exist wouldn't even matter. And and I feel like social media is more towards a second. >> Yeah. >> Like you know uh searching for information and answering questions and like getting you know AIs to like do things for you uh help you learn new things faster all that stuff is some we need more of that but um because it supercharges our curiosity whereas like brain rot feeds with AI slop doesn't actually supercharge our curiosity. It actually curbs our curiosity. And so if we believe that if we believe in the curiosity premium idea uh we need to encourage things that supercharge our curiosity and discourage things that curb our curiosity. Do you anticipate a time where we recognize the dangers of algorithms and there is some discussion to either curb them or allow people to have control over them in a real meaningful way like you could dictate maybe through AI even that there's an AI interface to your algorithm that understands your particular emotional needs your curiosity like only show me this is what I'm interested in carpentry and basketball games show me those I don't want I don't want to see who's getting divorced. I don't give a about this. >> Yeah. >> So, here's the thing. You can still customize on most of these social apps. You know, if you it'll be deeply buried somewhere in the settings somewhere and you can you can go and say stuff. But the reason it's buried is because once you you always have to say it or like it's the starting entry point for your experience there, your engagement time would go down because once you consume the content that you really want, you you would go back to your work, which is what you really need to be doing, >> right? >> But that doesn't help them sell more ads, >> right? And so the in incentives are not align and and so Elon has this really good metric he talks about where it's like uh total amount of unreged minutes spent on the app should go up. >> That's a good question. >> It's hard to measure. It's hard to measure. >> It's more like a in spirit the right metric. >> But this metric is also why it's hard to make money on ads if you care about this metric. which is why X doesn't really make a lot of money on ads compared to, you know, Instagram or YouTube, >> right? >> Because uh you're kind of like optimizing for interestingness like but doesn't mean X has everything, right? There's a lot of chaos, there's a lot of memes, there's a lot of like um weird going on there as well. But u in general, social media is not necessarily like great for people. I think it's terrible for people, but it also provides you with a way better understanding of what's going on in the world than has ever existed before. >> X particularly >> X particularly >> because it's um it's a place for like discourse. It's it's a textbased app more than a video based app, >> right? So um naturally like people tend to engage in discussions and debates and you know there's a lot of curious debates going on there and a lot of interesting viewpoints expressed by people. So I think in terms of the unreged minutes is actually one of the better social media apps. But apps that are purely based on like video or or or images and largely video these days I think that's just you know just trying to get your eyeballs in time. >> Yeah. Those are the mind numbers. Yeah, >> they just numb your mind. >> I mean, it's depressing when you go into a metro and you just see people just scrolling through their feed. Nobody >> Everybody doing it. You look the entire car, everyone's doing it. >> It's just insane. >> Yeah. It's weird. Yeah. >> I I always say that if there was a drug that existed that made people stare at their hand for six hours a day, everybody would be like, "Get that out of here." >> But that's essentially what we're doing cuz like most of what people are looking at most of the time, they don't even remember. >> Yeah. >> They're just scrolling through this thing. >> It's brain rot. It's brain rot. It it curbs your curiosity. >> Yeah. >> I mean, Apple has these settings in different apps. Have you Have you tried this where you can set the timer for every app? >> No, I just use discipline. I don't I don't engage very much anymore. I very I I dip my toe into X every day for a few seconds. I go, what's everybody mad at? What's going on? Who stole this? Who how much corruption's here? Who got killed there? Okay, bye. And then I just check out. I I don't want to do it. >> And um Instagram to me is just nonsense. It's I just look at that every now and then for nonsense and occasionally something interesting. >> Really? YouTube is my main go-to thing. Yeah. >> Because YouTube is my most unreged minutes. >> Yeah. >> YouTube for me is always interesting. There's always like some cool thing on Cosmology. There's some I watch fights on YouTube. I watch professional pool matches. That's what I do for the most part. I that's where I really like find my actual interests and fulfill my curiosity. >> Long form content is what human mind should be trained to consume more of. Whether it's books, whether it's like, >> you know, like 30 minute videos explaining something. >> Mhm. >> And and you you you need to train your mind to actually complete it. That's actually the biggest problem with the younger generation. more they're in the reals experience short form video. >> Uh they're unable to actually like complete like long videos anymore. >> That's true. But also at the same time the rise of podcast is happening. >> Yeah. >> And it's great. It's great. >> So there's it's not it's not universal. It's like there's a lot of people that don't find fulfillment and all the doom scrolling and all the nonsense and they they really do want >> Yeah. I'm I'm particularly just focused on the younger generation. I'm sure like people like us can adapt to like okay let's say maybe I have a temporary addiction to social apps and we can >> but a lot of the young people are the people like I meet kids like at the mall that are 11 that listen to my podcast. >> Really? >> Yeah. >> Wow. >> I know it's nuts. They go I love your podcast. I'm like who lets you listen? Get out of here. >> No, I'm always joking around about it. Like it's really cool. >> But no, there's a lot of like particularly like young boys that come up to me all the time that are interested in it. That's amazing. >> I love it. I love it because then they're going to get exposed to some interesting ideas and it'll also encourage them to have those kind of conversations with each other, >> right? >> Yeah. >> Who Who's podcast do you listen to? >> I love Tim Dylan's. He's probably my favorite because it's the most accurate and also satirical and hilarious view on everything that's going on in the world in terms of like war and world news and culture And he's my favorite. He was just on here yesterday. I love that guy to death. He's so funny. He's so crazy. It's like his mind works in such a unique way and it's developed cuz his podcast is different where he very rarely has guests. >> So most of the time it's just him ranting and his producer laughing and he's the best ranter that's ever lived. I don't think there's anybody that's even close. He's the goat. Like there's like I don't think there's any argument. Every comedian agrees like as far as like just the ability to just sit in front of a microphone and rant. Like Bill Bird does it well. He's good at it. There's a few other guys that are good at it. No one's as good at it as Tim. He's the most consistently entertaining. And then for just mind, not mindless, but like to escape. I listen to a lot of archery shows and hunting shows where they're talking about different tactics in hunting or different >> techniques in archery, new equipment, and new innovations. >> Archery is an interesting thing because every year bow manufacturers make a better bow. and like tiny little engineering changes of these bows. Like it's a weapon that's been around for who knows how many thousands of years. But what the >> And you're able to feel those improvements. >> Oh yeah. Yeah. You feel the difference. Every year Hoy put puts out a new bow and every year I'm like, "Motherfucker, they did it again. It's better." So just tiny changes, less vibrations in the hand, more balance in the shot, you know, more forgiving in terms of uh accuracy. I love that stuff. So I get really fascinated by engineering, really fascinated by uh automotive engineering. I'm really interested in like that's another thing where like every year people figure out how to make a car that can hold more G's on a skid pad that can get around a track quicker. Like every year they're battling to see who can get around the Nurburg Ring quicker. And what are they doing? They're adding horsepower, increasing suspension travel and and uh suspension tuning rather and making them more compliant or making them stiffer and and making them more adjustable and then like tire compounds and I'm just interested in anything that where someone's working on something and getting better at something or getting new information. I love history podcasts. I listen to a bunch of history podcasts. >> So that's most of the time when I'm if I'm listening to something, I either want to be entertained or I want to be educated. >> Educational. Yeah. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> And that's entertaining. >> Yeah. >> What about you? What kind of stuff do you listen to? >> I mean, I listen to your stuff. I listen to Lex. There's this guy. Um I mean, you know, you might you had him on like Rick Rubin, of course. >> Sure. Yeah. Love that guy. >> Yeah. Yeah. He's he's awesome. I listen to his stuff. Um and um I mean I also watch like some interesting videos about you know concepts I don't understand. There is this YouTube channel Veritasium. You should check it out. >> What is it called? >> Veritasium. >> How do you spell that? >> V E R I T A S E U M. Veritasium. >> What does it mean? >> Um I think >> is that someone's name? >> No. Veritas just means like seeking truth kind of thing. >> Oh. Um, is it this channel 20 million subscribers? >> Yeah. Yeah. >> Okay. >> 20.9 million subscribers. >> Obviously, a lot of people agree. >> So, they make all these very interesting videos about like um stuff that, you know, you would be curious about, but you never actually bothered to ask that or learn more about and um explain some of the most underderstood companies u or like phenomena. And um I just love watching it, you know. I'm I'm This is kind of like my idea of doom scrolling. Like I like I like watching like 20 videos at once. >> Yeah, I am going to subscribe to it right now. >> It's pretty cool. >> Veritassium. There it is. Got it. Subscribed. Bam. >> And explains all these like fun concepts that are, you know, you take it for granted like, okay, why is Google Maps really fast? Like, okay, it'll tell you what's going on, how the data is used across so many different people at once and all these different >> CIA's new tech doesn't make sense. Exactly. >> We were just talking about that yesterday. We were doubting it. You know, the heart murmur thing, do you know about that? >> No. So, the pilots that were downed in uh Iran, >> they said that they have this technology that allows them, I think they could use it up to 70 miles and they can detect a very unique heart rate. Like your heart rate is different than my heart rate. They could know it's you. You could be hiding in the mountains and they could find you from 70 miles away with this technology. >> Wow. >> A lot of people like >> beams or waves or something. >> Well, it's called what is it called? Quantum magnetometry. Is that what they call it? I think that's what it was. Remember we looked it up yesterday. I think they're using the word quantum and not explaining what they're doing, like how they're doing it. And you're like, "Okay, is that real or is this some invented horseshit to cover the fact that they have some very sophisticated satellite imagery where they can have a a detailed map of literally the entire surface of the world. They know exactly where people are, but they don't want our enemies to know that they have this capability. So, they're making up something. >> I see. >> That was my suggestion yesterday that like maybe they're full of cuz the whole thing seems nuts. What is it called? >> You got it. >> Is it's quantum magnetometry. >> Sure. >> Okay. What does that mean? You tell me. >> I don't know >> exactly. Yeah. So, this guy, he's saying it doesn't make sense. Yeah. And a lot of people say it doesn't make sense. Like it doesn't seem to vibe with anything that we know that we can do. magnettometry. Yeah. >> Yeah. >> First time hearing it. >> See the pull up the decry this description the uh official description of what this stuff is capable of. So this is supposedly some very advanced CIA tech that allowed them to locate this down pilot. >> Interesting. >> Maybe. Or maybe there's something else going on. Or maybe there's some other methods that they use that they don't want the enemy to know about. Maybe some beacon these guys have on them. Yeah. I guess what's the incentive for CIA to actually describe how their technology works? >> Yeah. Zero. >> Why would they tell you that? >> Yeah. >> Why would they tell you they even have that? That's crazy. >> Yeah. >> And then Jamie had a good point. >> The capability is insane. Detecting your heart rate 70 miles away is just how insane. >> Yeah. How? And the when they throw the word quantum in things, I was h what happened with that White House announcement. Sorry, I keep >> the quantum computing. >> Yeah. the the remember there's Q news coming soon and then they like at the bottom Q sounds for quantum. >> Oh, I see. >> Is that what it is? >> I thought they just announced a bunch of investments in a bunch of quantum companies. >> Maybe that's it. >> Taking a Yeah, IBM was getting some funding or whatever. >> So, uh this quantum magnetometry, can you uh pull up a description of what it is? >> Sorry, I started looking up the >> Sorry, I know I was asking you too many questions at the same time. Quantum sensor help rescuers. >> Yeah. So this is it. >> Ghost murmur. >> Yes, that's what it's called. >> Purported surveillance technology utilizes long range quantum magnetometry. What is that? Quantum magnetometers measure extremely faint magnetic fields including the body's natural electromagnetic signals by tracking changes in the energy states of atoms or subatomic particles. What technology reportedly uses microscopic defects in synthetic diamonds. When illuminated by a laser, these centers are hyper sensitive to tiny magnetic fluctuations. >> The heart signal, while human heartbeats produce a magnetic field, is extremely weak around 50 to 100 pico teslas and typically degrades over very short distances. So the G ghost murmur deployment, they reportedly used Ghost Murmmer during a mission in southern Iran to pinpoint the location of a down American airman using uh hiding rather in dense mountainous terrain by mounting these quantum sensors into a helicopter. The system purportedly registered the pilot's heartbeat from afar. Okay, does that sound like horshit? I mean, not it doesn't sound full of but like basically the part that sounds surprising to me is how they're able to deal with all this like distance and attenuation across the distance, >> right? >> And all this interference and they claim to use AI for that, but nothing is really described on how they use it, >> right? So, if they're not describing how they use it, why are they even telling us they have it? >> Why? >> So, like there there's a lot of skepticism on it. >> Yeah. Laws of physics. Physicists point out that the heart's magnetic field is a million times weaker than the Earth's. Detecting it at a range of miles rather than centimeters defies currently published peer-reviewed physics. Alternative explanations suspect that while quantum sensors were likely on board, they were probably tracking the radio waves of a survival beacon, the metal in the pirate pilot's equipment or using traditional thermal, infrared, and radar capabilities rather than detecting a raw heartbeat via magnetic fields. I as I do remember seeing a different part of a when that story happened back in April. Someone did report on like one of the military websites that there was a survival beacon that they used to track them >> and that the whole quantum member stuff is like nonsense. >> Yeah, I saw that too. >> No one wants to report that cuz it's not fun, >> right? >> No, the ghost murmur thing is awesome fun. And if that is real, like boy, >> you can imagine a world a 100 years from now where that is real. So, it's exciting. >> Oh, yeah. 100 years is a long time for this to be real. >> Yeah. 100 years they probably got it down pat. Then that's the problem. You can't hide from the robot dogs from black mirror. >> Yeah. >> You know. >> Yeah. >> Do you ever while you're working in AI, do you ever wonder like is this the downfall of humanity? Is this a good thing to be worked on? Did you ever have like doom moments? um not on specific things I'm working on, but in general um I do worry about like how much you know you you you obviously want to like stay in charge and you know be in control of your experience. Um still be the one driving change and have a lot of agency for yourself. So I do worry that like it's all about like making sure everybody's upskilled and understanding like where the future is headed and not being like um fed only like dangerous apocalyptic messages and uh because it's very essential that human beings retain their agency and staying curious, right? Like so if if that stops being the case, if you start subscribing to the vision that okay, your jobs are done, you don't really have any meaning in the world and we'll pay you some dividends and you just sit at home and chill, that is that is not a good thing. So and and and I feel like there are not enough voices in AI that are actually saying anything different to that. And I like like when Jensen was here, I think he was a little different. I think he tried to give a more positive uh version where he said okay like the the radiologist thing if okay all radiologists can take away you know they start doing different kind of work so I think we need to start looking at like okay like okay first of all guys relax you have a lot of you have one premium skill your curiosity so let's figure out ways to channelize that let's change the way work is done at companies let's change the way educational institutions run let's change the incentive structure structures and and let's help you build new ideas on new companies and explore things that are not even being considered and the government should obviously like you know support all these initiatives. So that's what needs to happen more. But what's happening actually right now is um okay like hey guys you're all losers. You're going to lose your jobs and and and don't blame me >> because I'm I told you so. Right. >> And um and and and and still give us money because we're still going to do it anyway. And so that that's what's happening more and I think uh we should stop doing that. That that's my opinion. Well, it is. The problem is it's kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy. And if you tell people that they're going to be a loser and you're going to their life is over, they're going to think that way instead of giving them an understanding of like, look, this can open up new doors for you. This can >> and anytime there's any sort of disruptive technology, there's always the the fear that it's going to go badly. Yeah. >> This was the case with >> the locomotive. This was the case with uh when the printing press was invented. >> Yeah. By the way, like I I I I did some research on this where um and the industrial revolution happened. Um people got new ideas. Um okay, like for example u when the industrial revolution happened um who came up with the idea of a steel plow John Deere. Until then we were using wooden plows to like for farming. No farmer complained that hey like we need fewer farmers now because steel plow is able to do it more effectively. No one complained. You actually had more farms and more productivity, more crop yields, and you're happier. >> But isn't that just a regular tool as opposed to AI? >> Sure, AI AI is different. It's not overnight going to become something that's capable of just running an entire multi-trillion dollar company on its own. There are a lot of things that AIs cannot do. There's a lot of tacid knowledge in every company that AIS don't quite understand. And there's a lot of new directions that you can just start working on that AI are not well equipped to do because it doesn't have full knowledge about it and the knowledge about it is yet to be captured and some of that requires like humanto human work and collaboration. So we obviously have to gravitate towards what is scarce. When AI makes the current labor that's considered scarce because that's where the money is going in commodity then we have to gravitate towards what is scarce and the only way to do that is to seek things that we don't know about which is only something we can discover through our curiosity. There's nothing else. Whatever we don't quite understand well, whatever we don't know how to do well yet, even with the current capabilities of AI, uh that's where we should pull our labor and workforce into. So, it needs more responsible messaging and that's not quite happening right now. I think it needs responsible messaging and then in the future what it needs is like real direction in terms of like letting people find their curiosity and find these paths of interest and find something to do with themselves >> that doesn't involve whatever their previous occupation that's irrelevant now. >> Mhm. That's true. I think like passion for people is something that not a lot of people would be able to answer out of the out of the box. Like if you go and ask them what is your real passion and and and and the only thing they have known in life is to just climb up career ladders and make more money. >> That's going to actually take them a while to even discover. >> And um >> which is why it's so important to get kids off on the right start. >> Yeah. That's that's the hope. That's that's our hope for the future is the kids the kids are born curious. they don't need to change themselves to be curious, >> right? >> The adults who probably already are like because of this knowledge work thing um who kind of curb their curiosity and try to fit into the existing system, it might be a little hard for them to adapt. But the kids, I think they don't have this problem. So I'm I'm actually optimistic about the future long term because the future is all centered around like whoever is like very young today. What do you think about this idea that universal basic income is going to be required? >> Some form of it is good. Some it's like a dividend. I almost think of it as a dividend. If a lot of spend that most companies are currently doing today on like payroll, which is paying a knowledge worker for a certain task. Think of knowledge work is basically taking information and transforming it into an artifact, right? And it's it's messy and complicated. Let's assume that's being done by AIS. So obviously companies will start spending more on compute instead of payroll. It's just a reallocation of like spend or budget similar to like what happened in advertising industries where most of your advertising budgets went to like television and like billboards and then now it's starting to go to Google and Instagram and YouTube and all that. So um when that happens um obviously like the AI companies are going to make a lot of money and uh people who helped be part of creating it or like either directly or indirectly would want to have some role to play in that ecosystem and a good way to involve them is through giving them some ownership in the company. So as shareholders you if you get dividends from the profits generated by the AIS it's not a bad thing but but that's that shouldn't be the only thing >> right so this is similar to like people that live in Alaska they get a check because >> correct >> Alaska Alaska get Alaska does this and it's not a bad thing as long as they are doing some other things >> right >> alongside >> it could lessen the burden >> correct >> yeah and and and if people are interested in still being part of the AI industries they go do things that AIs are not able to do today. And that's that's been the case before like when industrial revolution started um the the United Kingdom actually started like like projects around building railroads and that gave a lot of people who are in the cottage industries new jobs. So there are going to be a lot of new projects to just okay like what if we want to reimagine the government itself where the government runs largely on AI. >> Yeah was that was my next question. >> Yeah. So then we need people for that. >> Yeah. >> Because this is a legacy industry. It's not it's not about the capabilities not being there. It's about working through the legacy and bureaucracy to like actually deploy and implement this inside the most like like largest institutions in the country and uh that's going to need a new set of skilled workers to go do that. So some people who might be working at Microsoft or something today might actually end up working for the United States government because uh Microsoft may not need them especially for like you know internally deploying AI or selling AI to their customers but the government needs them and and and if the government can pay them well and it's a fulfilling job to find some meaning for like doing something good for the country it's not a bad thing. So I I I think like just like in the industrial revolution where we had new projects because the demand for AI was so big, we're going to start seeing some new projects being created in AI as well when the capabilities advance enough that they can replace knowledge workers. >> That's the rosy scenario. >> It's not as rosy like real world is messy. A lot of things are still done through trusting other human beings. Nobody's like blindly trusting AIs. AI still make a lot of mistakes. I know a lot of people are hesitant to the idea of AI running government and I get it. But also look at what the people are doing. Look at how much corruption there is, how much fraud and waste. Imagine if all fraud, waste, and corruption was instantaneously eliminated. >> Yeah. >> I mean, that was what Elon tried to do with Doge, right? >> Right. >> And and then I think the bottleneck there was just discovering how slow it is to do things. It's not he's not used to running that slow. >> Yeah. Yeah. And uh >> also how much resistance because there was so much grift. >> Correct. Yeah. So >> honestly like more than AI the government is running a lot of legacy software stack because a lot of these legacy enterprise companies just have created these multi-deade or like year contracts that are hard to get out of. And the way they do that is to sell it at a much larger discount. And like you know like if you're on on like a specific OS, you're not allowed to change this for like 10 years. You have to use the same set of software. All this uh people you hired only know to use that tool. So it takes time to actually change and implement new things. Leave alone AI. Just if you just wanted to like move everybody from Windows machines to like Mac machines, good luck with that. It's going to take a lot of time. That's the state of the the system. And so that has nothing to do with technology. And so to do things in such messy systems, you still need people. You still need people to navigate all these changes. Um it's not about the capability of technology. It's more about how the system is structured. And that's why I still feel there will be new jobs that maybe the you know there's a lot of new projects to be done. Maybe some good leader actually wants to change the system and is willing to be patient about it. like you know over a 5 to 10 year horizon if you take 10 years to actually like run majority of the government processes on AIS it may seem slow to you today but in the grand scheme of things it's actually good for the country and that's still going to need a lot of nice engineers to go work on these projects so they're not going to lose all their jobs there's going to be some displacement there's going to be some new projects there's going to be new priorities but it'll it'll keep going the system will keep going because that's just how historically things have When you think about the future of AI and you think of this >> the so when you think about AGI in particular you think about something that could potentially make better versions of itself >> self-replicating >> yeah and then how far does it go like >> yeah so that is the uh that is the ultimate form of I think some people in Silicon Valley have started calling that as ASI so when you see the word ASI I being thrown around like people kind of think of ASI as an AGI that can recursively self-improve itself. So that's going to be un going to be no limits to how smart it can get, >> right? >> And um I used to think that ASI is bottlenecked by power because you need a ton of compute for this model to keep on training itself and running its own rollouts and collecting data and then going and updating itself. But you could imagine that once the algorithm is correct, the ASI could be tasked with just making itself more efficient to where improvement doesn't just mean capability improvement. Improvement could also mean power efficiency and um that way the as recursive safe ASI that is improving itself also makes itself more compact and more efficient and it can run on less compute. So that would be the ultimate project in AI. Think of it as almost as the last project in AI is basically cracking recursive self-improvement. Once you crack that, you don't have anything else to work on. Um in practice, I think what's going to happen is um because information is so muddled and fragmented and living in disjoint systems just the way we have constructed our messy real world. It's going to be hard to point even a recursively self-improving AI at some metric and say go improve this or like go reduce inflation by 5%. That would be awesome if you can task an AI to do that. If that's the job of the government to just reduce inflation, have a deflationary effect on society and make make goods and services a lot more abundant and efficient. It's going to have to deal with a lot of messy legacy systems. If the task is to go improve the health care, we're good luck. Like who's going to deal with all the compliance of actually implementing these changes inside hospitals? Most hospitals are still using legacy software because that's the the software provider has lobbyed the government in a way where only they're allowed to do that. >> God, what a stupid bottleneck. >> Exactly. So, a lot of the bottlenecks in in in in actually having AIS just take over and massively improve the human society and our hospitals, our legal systems, our government systems where most of the payroll is going into. is just bottlenecked by a lot of compliance and regulation. And so that's why I feel we human beings are still necessary to effect the change because these laws and and and regulations were built for us. >> And it also seems like we have to demand that those systems be usurped. >> Sure. 100%. And we need the help of AIS to rewrite all these laws. >> It's going to be humanly impossible to go and change one specific line here and there, >> right? And then you're going to have a bunch of these software companies that are lobbying to try to stop that from happening. And yeah, >> it's it's that's why like this messiness and this need for getting all people on the same page and actually steering the society in a positive way. Our jobs will probably be more steered towards that problem solving at a different level of abstraction. maybe more need for EQ, more need for actually like understanding differences of opinion and still like a leadership quality, ability to understand people and ability to convince people. These these these are the skills that and will be even more important in a world where like actual work can be done by AIS but affecting the change in in our society in our country still needs human beings because the systems are messy. >> It's a weird world we're in right now. >> Yeah. >> It's never been weirder. That said, there's a lot of things that that can still go wrong when you give power so much power to u you know like specific companies and uh they deploy all these bots and then um anybody can use them in weird ways. You don't even know if like you're talking to a real person anymore, >> right? >> They're like people who just run AI responses and chat with like 500 people at once and that's like a whole business. And so, um, I think it's it's gonna it's going to take a lot of adjustment. >> Well, the another piece of adjustment that a lot of people are coming to grips with is that this is a new part of our conversation. And that in 2020, like when I first moved here, AI was never discussed. >> It was not a thing. >> Yeah. >> I mean, we knew about it. We knew about AI, but it wasn't like you it wasn't >> a huge part of the cultural discussion of what the future holds for us. >> And now it is. Now, It is central. Yeah. >> And in that short amount of time in just six years, it really makes you wonder because we know how technology progresses exponentially like what it's going to look like 6 years from now. >> Yeah. The 2028 like like you're definitely my prediction is 2028 election debates are going to be largely about AI. >> Wow. >> Yeah. AI energy crisis the power power people are going to care about all these things. because it AI is no longer a thing that is new. It's part of all our lives. Everyone's using some form of AI in in some ways and uh it's not as dangerous as people thought. It's it's it's an amazing tool for like doing work and asking questions and learning things and all these things >> when used correctly. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> Can also be used incorrectly. Uh >> like everything >> like everything. So it's far more powerful that incorrect usage can cause serious damage like like for example people kids who are using AIS for like companionship >> right >> crazy things are happening there crazy things are happening >> not good >> yeah it's it's even it's it's as dangerous as >> or probably more dangerous than social media >> and uh it's also scary that social media companies want to build more of these kind of like companionship apps because they know that okay their only job was to get you engaged more and that's the only way to sell more ads and make more money. And clearly companionship is a way to get you engaged more. >> Yeah. >> And so that's dangerous. If if ads start being part of like AI chats. >> Yeah. >> Because then if that that ends up working then all these chat bots are just going to be secants that just tell you stuff that you you you want to hear. It's also it's an indistinguishable indistinguishable faximile to a real person. Like they communicate like a real person, right? >> So you really think you have a relationship with this, >> right? And and and and it it truly um screws with your mind. It's hard to like decouple and like it takes a lot of time to recover if you want to like you know unplug and um so the business model incentives are not well aligned to humanity. Did you see that um AI companion that they developed that was at the Consumer Electronic Show in Vegas this year? >> Which one? >> It's like a hot Asian lady. >> I see. Yeah. Yeah. These are these are the weird kind of projects that are going on. >> Yeah. It's a hot Asian lady that talks to you. >> Yeah. >> And you know, she talks to you through AI. And right now it's just a kind of a crude sort of robot. But >> yeah, >> you could see where it's going. >> You can see where it's going. >> X Machina. >> Yeah. It's going >> Yeah. >> Right there. >> Yeah. Yeah. That movie was >> amazing. >> Quite far ahead of it time. >> Really? >> Yeah. >> That was It's one of my top 10 favorite movies of all time. >> It's underrated actually because people like reviews on online say it's not as good, but I liked it. I >> I loved it. >> I thought it was fantastic. >> I like it better than her. >> Yeah, her I lost her after a while. I shut it off. >> It lost my attention. I'm sure it's good. It was the wrong time for me to watch it. >> But X Machin, I've seen it like five times. I love that movie. >> It's just so >> I don't want to give anything away, but it's it's so incredible and so bleak and so >> Yeah. >> in the relationship that he has with the the hot one. >> Yeah. Yeah. >> You believe it. You're like, I >> I'd be right there with him. You know, it's too confusing to our system to have something that looks exactly like the thing that you desire that is actually interested in you. It just happens to be all your data about stuff. >> Yeah. Knows too much about you. Knows how to pull your strings. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> But listen, man, very fascinating discussion. I'm glad we did it. Thank you very much. >> Thank you so much. >> And thanks for having an awesome platform. Perplexity has been great. We really love using it here at the show. It's It's made the show more interesting. It's cool. >> Thank you. It's very fulfilling because like we we want the app to be used by curious people like that. Like we want to lift the ceiling of what our our our population can be, you know? Not everyone is like fully curious all the time, but we're all born with it. So, at some point in time, the system curbs it from us. So, there should be more apps that get us back to what we're naturally good at. >> Yeah, it's a fascinating tool for technology or for curiosity rather because >> to be able and it's seamless the way we use it on the show cuz there's always a question. Yeah, there's always it comes up so often like throw it in perplexity. Let's find out what's up. >> It's always been great for us. So, thank you. >> Thank you so much. >> All right. My pleasure. Bye everybody.