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Either a Mad Max Future or StarCraft Future. Do you think that as we transition over to AI that it will take us through a valley of despair? Or is this gonna be a straight line to utopia? Oh, no.
Big values of chaotic despair. AI is going to be billion times smarter than you. This is the biggest inflection point that we've ever seen. How do they create the next billion dollar company with three people?
If that's the way to play it, this is what needs to happen. Okay, so let's talk about what it means to be human then. What is it that Data wants? Give me your bas base assumptions on what makes somebody human.
Okay, so if I step back a second, I'm totally fascinated by metaphysics. Meaning what is reality made of? Okay. I've been fascinated for a very long time.
Do you mean that like the physics law at the physics. Yeah. Like what is reality made of? We have experiences, we have objective facts.
Like what is the building blocks of reality? This physics studies reality. Yep. Metaphysics thinks about what is reality made of?
What are the building blocks of? I'm not crossing that chasm. Can we look up the definition of metaphysics, please? It's the metaphor.
It doesn't matter. I've been fascinated by it in terms of we. For example, most of our philosophies operate on a subjective set of metaphysics or an object of set of metaphysics. Okay.
Okay. So our metaphysics that we run the world on today is a subject object metaphysics. I either have a subjective experience about the world or there's an objective reality and we try and measure that. Those are the two points we've kind of started over the last 20, 30 years to graduate past that.
To say there's a different type of. It's an experiential basis for reality that is doesn't fit. There's lots of aspects about the world that aren't entirely subjective and aren't entirely objective. Like moral values, for example.
Many of us may share the same moral values, but they're not scientifically measurable. Right. So there you have an example of or love or Emotions, et cetera, where lots of people can share the same emotion, but you can't objectively measure them yet in a particular way. So there's a whole modality in the metaphysics we're looking at.
You need to look at reality as a phase shift from potential to realize or unknown to known would be a good way of doing it. A good metaphor would be five block or marble in front of me. I'm a sculptor. Until I start chipping away.
That thing is completely unrealized potential. It could be anything. Then I start chipping away and I form it into the shape of a head. Now it's realized and I can break it and I can break that value.
But I've created value. I've taken something that was in my head and it's substantiated in that thing. And there's a phasing of how the world is working. They're really getting pretty interested by.
In terms of describing reality overall. I got down this rabbit hole because of the quantum mechanics issue. When you study physics, you do three years of classical physics. And then in third year they give you quantum mechanics and they tell you everything you learned is out the window.
And you're like, come on, you just had me do millions of exams instead you millions of chapters. And then you tell me everything's out the window. So I went down the rabbit hole of quantum mechanics and the subjective nature of reality and so on. So and I started researching this and for me, when I think about humanity, I came up with a diagram which has three concentric circles in it.
So picturesque we can centric circle with. With the middle is just your soul shining up, your soul just trying to express. And it hits some layers, it hits a boundary condition which is your subconscious. And there's gaps when it can shine through that subconscious.
And there's gaps when it can't shine through the subconscious. And when you transcend and you get through that, you have your conscious self and there's again gaps, areas where it gets stopped and areas where it shines through. So it's almost like dashed lines and two concentric circles around a solid dot. The soul is just trying to express.
It's just trying to be whatever. Your definition of soul isn't going to have a definition of problem, but it's trying to be it's energy. Unconditional love would be a good metaphor for it. It's just trying to express.
It might hit subconscious blockages in that expression, like I don't think I'm good enough or some of the Limiting beliefs that Tony Robbins talks about. If you can cut through those, you may have conscious limitations. Like, hey, I really want to play the guitar, but I've got to feed my kid first. And you make conscious choices as to how much you.
Sometimes it comes all the way out, and that's when you see true flow states, when you see pure spiritual experiences. Messi playing soccer is an example of somebody. There's no separation or Michael Jordan playing basketball. It's going straight from soul coming out with no hindrances along the way.
Right. So our job as human beings, as I put it in the context of this diagram, is either rotate that kaleidoscope so your soul can shine out. So I want to make sure. So I got soul, conscious self, what was it there soul.
And then the next level is your subconscious soul. Subconscious and then conscious. And then there's other layers past that, like family and culture and other things. But the most important of those two and our job as a human being is to rotate that subconscious and conscious so that my inner soul shines out.
Tiger woods playing golf is a good Any artist on so remove this from the level of metaphor and take me. So just a Chris led me to try understand the metaphor here would be the dotted line lines. If they're not aligned, you might go through one level, then you can hit a wall the next. Or they might be aligned such that you don't even make the soul doesn't even get to the subconscious.
It just hits something and comes back. Yeah. What. What are the dotted lines in reality?
The dotted lines are your subconscious belief systems that you've built up over growing up as a kid. So, for example, if growing up in Canada, I thought, there's no way I'm playing basketball at any level because I'm Indian. Like indie scam play basketball. So that's limiting belief.
So I. I didn't try hard enough at basketball until I got a little bit early older. And then I was like, fuck this. I can try for this.
I can go first. Was basketball already in your soul? No, it was just a thing to do. But it's an expression of me at some level end up on the high school team.
But it's Canadian basketball, so it's much lower level. As my old business partner, you say, oh, you're Canadian. You're like the junior varsity team. The Raptors are furious right now.
They are very, very unhappy. Yes. Anyway, so your soul may express and be hit by subconscious beliefs that stop you. It's also a protective mechanism when something really bad happens.
In the world. You want to protect the soul. So let's say you go back 50,000 years of families at home, the husband goes out on a hunt, never comes back. And the woman needs some psychological blockage to protect from that trauma.
So the subconscious has a two level filter allowing this to come out and stopping bad things coming from the inside. Then you have your conscious blockages that say, I really want to do this, but really I need to do this first. And you're making triaging nonstop as a human being. And so I think of the human condition as either rotate that kaleidoscope so your soul shines out in whatever form it's meant to shine out in, or dissolve those barriers so that more of it expresses.
So if you look at a Gandhi or a Christ or a Dalai Lama, they've done the work to dissolve all of their subconscious barriers and their conscious barriers, and they're just shining. And you see that. That's why you always see a halo in religious diagrams, et cetera. And we pay to see this.
By the way, our great artists is on stage, They've trained and trained and trained for years to go a full expression of their soul out onto the field or out onto a stage or whatever. Can you define what the soul is? It's very hard. I think of it as energy.
You can think of it as just pure love. I think of it as pure expression. So in this framework, you can't have a bad soul. Like evil is the blockage of light, it's not the darkness.
So in this metaphor, evil would be the lack of light, not the fact that you can be bad. So the soul is just shining light. It's just trying to express. So every one of us has parts of ourselves that we just want to express.
We just want to be okay. So I feel like we're switching between discussions of physics. So when you say energy, I think of physics. You shining light, I think of physics.
A radiating body where photons are actually flying away from said body. Do you mean that the soul is a physical thing that actually radiates? Okay, so in non esoteric terms, what is the soul? This is a language problem.
It's a piece of consciousness or a meta consciousness. There's two classical definitions of solar consciousness in this model. One is there's an emergent property coming from inside that just needs to get out. This needs to express itself.
Is it an emergent property from the brain? I think it's from a collective consciousness. We don't know where soul sits. It kind of sits everywhere.
Sits Makes it sound like it does have a physical manifestation. It manifests physically, Definitely expresses physically. Do only humans have a soul? I don't believe so.
I think any living being has a soul. I think so, in a weird way. So Deepak Chopra, I think, puts it best. He said, look, there's a global field of consciousness, and you're an instantiation of that consciousness.
And what are you trying to do? You're trying to get back to the consciousness. He's a dualist. Are you a dualist?
I'm somewhat of a duelist, yeah. I'm kind of agnostic in this. Again, I don't know what we mean by soul. It's a very hard problem to get into that definition.
Right. You have religious metaphors for it. You have energetic metaphors for it. You have Eastern metaphors.
We talked about reincarnation, the last stop we wrote on this program. So there's lots of ways the soul can express through multiple lifetimes, if you believe in that model. But you're progressing through different stages and basically just expressing. So if you think of a tennis player, Federer, Roger Federer, he really.
His soul really wanted to play tennis, and he found a mechanism when Mozart playing piano. And it goes from a junior to a young professional to getting on the tour and then make a winning championships, et cetera, and just keeps going at it and at it and at it until he can get as far as he can get. And that's that basic motivation and that quest for just getting better and wanting to experience what it's like to win Wimbledon or whatever. I think of the soul.
What about people? Take somebody like Andre Agassi, who absolutely hated his life, was absolutely miserable. Or Steve Martin, greatest comedian of all time, when he was doing it. And there's literally a movie.
He's in the theater watching a movie in England, and the character on the screen says, it's from the movie fame. I just want to be Steve Martin. And Steve Martin's watching that going, you don't want to be Steve Martin. Robin Williams, I mean, yeah.
So these people are profoundly unhappy, but they are. From the outside, they're the people. You would say their soul is shining the brightest. I'm saying their soul is definitely shining out.
I didn't say they were the happiest, because take Tiger woods as a good example. In the realm of golf, he's aligned his kaleidoscope perfectly so that when he's playing golf when he's younger, he's completely there. And there's this unbelievable presence that you felt when you Played golf. You see that with.
We saw that with Jordan playing basketball or Messi playing soccer or any great artist on stage in the other areas of his life, complete hot mess. Complete mess. Because then the work to dissolve some of the subconscious blockages and limiting beliefs he may have, etc. This is where I think techniques like neuro linguistic programming and NLP and CBT are really powerful today to help us navigate some of these areas.
Now, the problem is when you have a tortured soul like that, there is so much blockage in those areas that it comes out in one narrow area. Robin Williams or Steve Martin are great examples of this, and it shines unbelievably brightly because of that focused laser. But it's a very, very. The rest of the lives can be very, very difficult.
So they figure out how to rotate the kaleidoscope so they keep their soul. If the soul can't express and you've got complete ceiling across the board, then you have often suicide because the soul can't express. And then people go, well, what's the purpose? I can't express myself, so I might as well leave the world.
So this was an answer to what makes us human, what I hear and all that. I don't. I don't know if it's what you're intending to communicate. So because you're speaking in metaphor, I then map to the metaphors that I use.
Actually, that's not true. Because you speak in metaphor. I'm mapping it to the physical realities that are my base assumptions. So my base assumptions are that there's absolutely no dualism.
Whatever we're calling the soul is exactly tied to the human body. It's a combination of the brain, the neural cells that exist in the heart, and the enteric nervous system, which also uses brain cells and the microbes. And, like, that whole crazy cocktail combined with experience gives you the what I think you call soul. Like, if Tiger woods was born 10,000 years ago, he would not have played golf.
So. But he would have found something that you're calling soul. So to me, what that feels like is humans have an evolutionarily planted algorithm for meaningful pursuit. And so you can point them at a time of leisure.
You can point them at something that, quite frankly, golf, even though I just did yesterday, it was very fun. It's meaningless in the grand scheme of things, but because you can map it onto a sense of, ooh, I'm getting better at this thing. My friends think it's cool. And so there's a sense of, oh, this actually matters.
If I decide to tell myself that it matters. Yeah. So this maps onto the metaphysics question I was asking before you get to the human condition, which is what is the purpose of life? And after a lot of inquiry, my fundamental answer that could come to is the purpose of life to grow.
And then I got fascinated by the fact, okay, if life is about growth, at least growth is a major tenet of life. What is the mechanism by which growth takes place? And so I've gone really deep and I'm trying to understand that aspect of it. In this diagram of the human condition is one attempt to understand, here's the mechanism by which human beings grow.
So way human beings grow is by taking on a big deep meaning, or in my framing, letting your inside outward, letting your deepest self come outward, by dissolving and blocking, tackling some of your issues and so on, and putting yourself in circumstances where you can express fully. But if you look at life at large, biological life, any business, any biological, any tree, the only interest, the fundamental motivation is to grow. And so that I find really interesting. I don't know why the minute you got the why question, end up in a raffle.
Because you can ask why anything. So, so I've got interest in how does this happen? And this is where I got. So it turns out all growth follows a very specific four point step.
Okay, so you have an initial condition. A great visual of this is lava flowing underwater. If you ever seen the video of this, you'll see lava like bursting open. You see the red hot thing, the water boil instantly as it means the lava.
Lava cools and then you have stability again. And then it breaks open again. Red hot lava water boils and cools again. That, that kind of loop is the core process, I think, of life, which is you have a stable condition, you have something from inside or outside that breaks that equilibrium.
You have a very dynamic, uncertain period. And then it freezes again and you keep spiraling upward or downward in that. This is going back to the stock market chart. This is the.
Where you have these. You have a stock that breaks free and then consolidates at some level, then it breaks free and consolidates a different level. It' It's a very fractal pattern because you can look at a stock market over a year or a month or a minute or a day, and it's still the same pattern. It's very, very.
That I think is a fundamental archetypal reality of life in everything that we do. The question is, can we smooth out some of those points, which is Why? I love the way we frame it in terms of those jagged edges and the boundary conditions, etc. Can we limit that?
Can we guide it? Have you heard of the Hawkins Scale? Yes, because of you. Have you looked into it?
Yes, and because I was terrified you're going to bring it up. So I looked it up. I was mortified. Okay, tell me why.
Because it's putting a mystical lens on the natural human condition. Like when you describe your three circles, I'm totally body, except for I would never say soul. I would say evolutionarily placed algorithms. I'm good with that word.
Like if we're. If we're on the board of that, then it's entirely possible that that's all it is. And that's fine. I'm good with that.
I'm more trying to understand how these things happen than trying to put labels on the source or the end condition. I think it's critical. And the fact that people don't. Is the source of all human suffering.
Yeah, Absolutely agree with that. Wait, when you say what's critical? People think that there's something mystical happening, that their life is divine or some other thing. Their prediction engine breaks.
Now, I think religion is the greatest medium through which the memes of how to live a good life propagate. I want to be very clear about how useful and powerful I think religion is. But the reason I think it's powerful is at the societal level where you have to account for all levels of intellect. And religion is the only medium that I've discovered that allows these powerful ideas to propagate at every level of intellect.
Yeah, because you step outside the intellect and you step. You frame it as being right in terms of the different religions and so on. I didn't follow that. So let's take Christianity where the end goal is unconditional love.
Right. So when I look at the great religions, I think that's the end goal of Christianity. That's interesting. Really is not what question is all about.
That was a core message, but the Bible would be a lot shorter if you're just trying to get that message across. I really think the whole idea of religious texts are to allow a very large group of people to control their environment, to stay healthy, to be societally stable. Social management. Yep.
Okay. Perfect. Yeah. Yeah.
So I've got a very clear. That's far more than just pure love. No, no. You put.
The end goal is pure love. You'll never get there. It's almost impossible to have unconditional love. Right.
So. But you put it in that aspiration that's the pursuit of the deep meaning. That part of it. I've got a sense of what religion is because growing up in India we're like mentioned earlier like both my grandmothers and Uganda and very, very well, very secular upbringing.
Here's a good and bad of this religion. Here's a good madness this religion. Please don't follow any religion but know what they're all about. That was how I was raised.
The, the, the religion was incredibly important when we were evolving from tribal to hunter gatherer models because you needed to give human beings hope at a time when everything around them was death. Okay, Average life was 25. Everything around you died a brutish death. You got a tooth infection, you got a bacterial infection, you died literally on the spot.
So in order to deal with this hell of of of biological life, we invented religion as an aspirational hope saying there's there and were meant to get to that point. And so religions got invented and then came the social structures around it to help. Oh, if we're having religions and we can pick topic what to do then don't eat pig because pe. Because you shall have garbage and you don't want to be eating garbage.
So a lot of the aspects of religious thing then turned into social structures to build. Marriage for example is one of those example sacraments that cascades down from that. By the way, do you know what comment about marriage? I do, yeah.
Okay, so religion evolved from that basis. But we're kind of coming to the end of religion because we have too much evidentiary understanding of the world to believe in a God in the way that religions portended. And so the absolute truths that religions display that ask you to take on an assumptive truth are essentially falling apart. Because we have much better data and evidentiary basis for this.
I think the next three years are really going to challenge that. Oh, I'm not saying that we free the effects of it. I think we're riding in throes of religion right now. This is the problem with the Middle east right now.
Right. It's a pretty difficult and uncompromising because the minute you have an absolute truth and then you have a huge problem in social structures, there's no adaptability in there, there's no feedback loop to update a religion. And this is the problem with our older religions, there's no feedback loop. By the way, just important to me to mention there's two types of religion that are very very different.
There's the Judeo Christian religions which is What I mean by assumptive truths and so on. And then you've got Eastern religions which are much more contemplative, and they try and you try and achieve God by going inside yourself, meditation, martial arts, by inner examination. Whereas in the west you try and step outside yourself to experience God. So that's a different model.
Prayer still in there, but you. But God sits outside you in this model. Yeah. So I think religion is a symptom of something and not the cause of something.
It becomes a cause later down the road, don't get me wrong. But symptom of hope. No, symptom of. If you wanted to talk about hope, which I don't, but if you did, then it would be a symptom of the human brain's desire for hope.
But I think that religion forms in the same way that your lava example, where land is formed, where you get like this little poke through and then stable, little poke through and then stabilize. If people really research, like how Christianity forms those long forms, they're always built on the back of something else. Yeah. And that could be paganism, just straight up, usually paganism.
Yep. But again, paganism is like, I don't understand why the moon keeps appearing every day. So let's just considered a God and worship it because it's doing some good stuff for the world. Right now we have very clear understanding of it because we have much better data around it.
My dad has done a lot of research on this and he's gone very deep in some of this stuff. So some of my thinking comes from that. But in terms of the. We really come down to the question that Plato asked.
How should we conduct ourselves? And that's, I think, the fundamental question that now comes up again as we consider AI, as we consider the future of technology clashing with past religious structures, I don't think anybody in the world has a clear sense of how we should manage ourselves going forward. Yeah. So I think it's actually a slightly different question.
And this is why I think getting this right really matters. The question isn't how should we conduct ourselves. The question is how do you structure a mind that will conduct itself in a useful way? Because that is literally what we have to do with AI.
Like for instance, do you have to give AI ethics? Like, is ethics a necessary way to bound an intelligence? Because you have the presupposition which you said earlier, so I can replay that clip if anybody thinks I'm making this up, where you said intelligence makes everything better. I think that is a hard and fast.
Absolutely Not. I think intelligence is agnostic. I think there's something uniquely human that creates this value system that we all recognize as like, oh yeah, that's amazing. But dude, I can take one step like outside my purview and look back at myself and be like, you slaughter animals non stop for your food.
Like you're evil. There's a manga called the Promised Neverland. It's all about humans being raised by demons to eat them. Sorry, spoiler alerts of that.
And man, when you look at it like that and you're like, yo, these poor little humans like have to be harvested when they're like nine years old. And it's just gruesome. And I was like, damn, that's like real like. So I think that we exist in a set of values and from within those set of values, the way that we live seems perfectly normal.
Those set of values arose because of the way that our mind works and the things that we are pushing ourselves towards. Which I don't think is divine. I think people lead themselves astray by thinking that it is. I think it has everything to do with evolution going, how do I keep you alive?
And by the way, evolution is the blind watchmaker. There's no intention there. Evolution is not thinking through anything. It is simply a process that runs and you get what you get.
And that's why I think our minds are built in a certain way. First for movement and then we already covered this. It goes down the line when people try to interpret the world by going, oh, but this is divine revelation. That's where things fall apart.
The reason being that there's a reason that Buddhism, while probably was at times leveraged to kill a lot of people. Nothing quite like the monotheistic gods where you'd be like, no, no, Jesus wants you to take Jerusalem back. And so now it's like, of course you have to slaughter all of the infidels. Like it.
You tell people this is what God wants and then you not holding them hostage, but you motivate them. Like people were motivated to go in these crates. Well, that's because of that comment I made earlier, right. Where you wired into their limbic system or at an early age.
It's the ultimate form of marketing. Yes, but the real question to ask is, why does that work so well on the human mind? Oh, we're unbelievably. I mean, you know about John from and the cargo cults.
Never heard of them. Oh, so this is an amazing story. A Navy pilot called John Frum after. After the big thing In Hawaii with the Japanese attack Pearl harbor, the US are sending out a navy pilots to scan the skies to make sure this doesn't happen again.
So he's one of these just after the war and his plane crash lands on an island and he has a problem and he's able to land it and he gets off safely. And the natives see these guys coming down dressed in a white navy suit, literally think God has come. So they give him women, they give him food, they treat him literally like a divine energy. He's like wow, this is great.
And instead of putting out a fire and signaling for help and doing all this stuff, he's like, I mean treated like a God. So he hides the plane and covers it up and just lives it. War ends now. The US has duty to find everybody.
So they start sending search parties. Where is this guy? 500 miles away. These search parties come across another island and on that island are statues of a plain and statues of John Fromm.
And they find an entire population waiting for the second coming. And it's the best anthropological example we have of a religion literally spontaneously emerging. We are meaning making machines. To your earlier point, I 100% agree that maybe it's an evolutionary algorithm.
We will desperately looking for signals for noise to anything that gives us a higher purpose or gives our lives higher meaning. And I think an evolutionary basis for that is a perfectly reasonable place to go. I think there's more to life than just that. But that's certainly a valid, valid stance.
I don't disagree with much of what you said. They then arrested gun, court martialed him living lording it up on this other life. But it's just an amazing story. It's called John from anybody can look at that.
So, so religion. We, we are, we're so seeking for solace in a difficult world that we will, we will, we will ask, we will go for anything. Mormons are a great example. Yeah, I think this goes back to your earlier thing about control.
Now the reason that I bring all of this up is because twofold one, we're gonna have some very uncomfortable questions asked about the difference between humans and AI. And I think that when people understand themselves as a predictive engine, if we really are predictable, then we will be able to map some of these very tumultuous times we're going to pass through. And hopefully pass through them much, much better. Can I give you my view on the humans versus AI thing?
Please. So when we were starting Singularity, an article came out in CNATs. AI singularity being created rakers while Peter Dymangazen, the finding CEO says alumnus melanoted transhumanist. And I'd never heard that phrase before.
So I was like what the hell is that? I looked up, I looked it up. So transhumanist does anybody can use technology to augment the human being? Well, I just don't understand the concept because we've been using technology to augment the human conditions since the beginning of time.
You're wearing spectacles, you're a transhumanist, are you not? Like where does. So I got really annoyed by what is a transhumanist? The minute you have a vaccination as a child, you're technically a cyborg.
So we've been merging with machinery from the beginning of time. So if you take that idea to the full extent, then we are basically biological robots and emotion is just a subroutine running your brain. So in that context there's no reason why an AI can't come the other way and take on wetware and have the subjective experiences we have. So I don't see any issue with that vector of thinking at all.
I don't think this merging with AI or not, I think that more technology is better and AI is good technology and therefore we should have it in everything. The people who win, they're not smarter, they just absorb more ideas faster. There are thousands of books right now on business psychology, leadership books that have already changed how the best operators think. And everyone you haven't read is a gap between you and the people who have.
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I believe everybody's a transhumanist. Well, let's use it as a philosophy. So if some people are by accident, are you one on purpose? Yes, I think I am.
Because the minute I can augment myself and my condition with technology, then I'm better, I'm happier, I live a better life. The data and awareness like you've been researching a ton about, how do you manage your biological self? That's just better technology. And therefore in that sense you're a transhumanist and sense you're trying to better yourself with technology.
And I think that's great. I think, yes, in that context, I'm definitely transhumanist. Yeah, I am aggressively trying to integrate technology. I won't be an early adopter when it comes to putting things in my body.
But, yeah, 100%. I do, though, have a quote from you that I would love to get your take on, which you said, I think it's irrelevant whether AGI takes over humanity or not. That's coming from fear. There's lots of arguments saying that AGI is going to become smarter and humans will become less relevant, and that's bad.
I just don't see why that's bad. You're putting a value judgment there that humans should be the most important thing on the planet. And I just don't see that. So you don't think we should be the most important thing on the planet or view ourselves as most important thing?
If I think of myself as a stepping stone in the grand process of evolution, then at some point something will come along or I will evolve into something bigger and better. Now, we seem to be doing ourselves in a very powerful way, which is great, but at some point something will come along that's just bigger, better, smarter, faster, whatever, and I think that's okay. Now, I think it's fascinating that we're kind of at the edge. It goes to the simulation question of are we in a simulation?
Because why the hell are we at the edge of it? And we seem to be the only species that we can find in the universe right now. And so why is that happening is a fascinating question. But I don't have an issue with AIs evolving and having more empathy and more.
A better understanding of the world, and it'll make our lives better. Okay. Do you think that humans should be forced to integrate technology in their bodies? Yes.
Whoa, I didn't see that answer coming. Vaccinations, okay? For their own good, they should be forced. I mean, we give involuntary vaccination to our kids to protect them from stupid shit like measles and polio and other stuff.
What about when over 18? Oh, good question. And I don't have a clear answer to that because now you're talking about value judgments of, you know, should you have a tattoo or not? Gender changes.
I'm saying force. My value question is around force. Give me an example. Well, then I'll jump straight to the second question, which I had loaded up, which is, let's say that we have AI and it is a million times smarter.
And it's cleaning up the atmosphere, it's giving us free energy, all that. And it goes, hey, I know this one is going to sound tough, but you guys elected me and I'm telling you, you have to get this technology put into your body. If you do it's going to be better for everybody. But we need 100% compliance.
Sorry. In that case, should people be forced to put that technology in our body? I think it's a non sequitur because it'll be irrelevant whether we want to or not. At that point, we won't have a choice, meaning the overlords will be able to force us to.
So what really, what I'm driving towards is I want to understand your value system. So for instance, my value system is I don't think people should be forced to do things, even though that means that it could be bad for somebody else. And maybe my value system is just trash, but I believe you should not be able to force someone to do something. You know, if you go to the.
Yeah. If you go to the vaccination question and somebody says, look, here's a polio vaccine that could save a lot of lives because if you're not realizing it, you may be transmitting it and you really want you to do this and you say, screw you, I'm not doing that. Right. If there's a public health question that comes into play, etc.
Outside that, I can go either way. I mean, there's cases where I could see where you definitely want enforcement of what's a better standard across the board and you want as much free choice as possible. Although Sam Harris has shown free will as kind of a non secular, I think he'd let you say, kind of. Yeah.
Between him and professor who's like, I cannot leave on blanking his name. He's on the show, he's amazing. But yeah, showed free will is completely an illusion. Yeah.
So if you go back to my human diagram subconscious, I find it incredibly insightful to ask the question, if I'm making a choice, at what level am I making that choice? And that gives me a huge amount of insight about myself, my life, other people, etc. Because people are making other conscious choice, subconscious choice, or sometimes a soul level choice. Yeah.
I suppose it comes down to sovereignty of the individual. And if we think what we perceive to be the right idea ought to be forced onto people. And at what level, if we know, like, let's put it this way, if we know that injecting you with something will save all the snowy owls in the world and we have a pretty clear sense that it won't hurt you, I don't see an issue with forcing that. Or make it more dramatic.
If I inject you, you're actually spreading a virus you don't know about. And I need to inject you with this thing because it's going to save every time. Where did this example be coming from? Whatever, you get the point.
So any I may have a sense of that better than you do in question. Really, really what it comes down to is trust. I think that's the child that's the difficult commodity in the world today. I'll give you a great little quote from one of our community members, Jeremy McCullski, who speaks a lot about this.
He goes scarcity equals abundance minus trust. That's like you have to go think about it for a while. But his thought was that if we can learn how to scale trust, then we'll have abundance. That seems pretty provably inaccurate right now.
Today maybe when energy for instance, is abundant or when lithium ion is in everybody's backyard, but today there really are. I bring that framing because when you talk about hey, should I be forced to take in technology? It's really a trust question. I will say for me it is that not having encountered all knowing AI yet, what I do know is that history is a sequence of unintended consequences and people somehow convince themselves that they know best and that they can perceive all of the things that could possibly be a knock on effect of that.
And since I do not trust myself or anybody else to make that decision, I would. My value system says you stop short of that. But I ask that question because obviously as we begin to bring about a super intelligence, there are going to be a lot of these questions that will suddenly take on real salience. It's not Tom just doing some random asset exercise.
So for instance, do you believe humans have any inalienable rights? I would go to the Bill of Rights. I would go to the Human Charter Rights, Human Rights Charter of Human Rights, the UN as I want to be free to self expression, live, be happy, et cetera, et cetera. So there's some obvious human rights that I think are.
If I was going to say AI don't compromise on these, you could enshrine those pretty easily. Okay, do you think AI should have any inalienable rights? You know, again it comes down to once you get to a question of is AI conscious or not, does it deserve individual rights? And I think that's going to be an interesting question.
My answer is yeah, if you follow along with the other conversations, I don't see any reason why not. I don't have a strongly held belief against it or for it. I think it's a perfectly okay thing to do. I go back again to Data and start Next generation Jet.
That was amazing treatment of a mechanistic model living in the human world. And do you want to have him have self expression and lots of rights? Yeah. Given that we have to build the minds.
And I think that this feels to me, when people talk about alignment, what they're really talking about is how do you build a mind such that it has constraints that it is more likely to act in a way that adheres to all our value systems or not. And so if an AI mind has to be constructed, what are the things we give it? So one question that I think people need to come to grips with is a sex bot will be programmed to want to please you. Given that it's been programmed to want to please you, can it ever consent to sex?
It cannot. And in that sense, I would think of it as a pure mechanistic object and constrained in its intelligence. What if it's literally Einstein level intelligence and just like Einstein, who seemed to be a pretty big fan of sex, but it was built for that. Yeah, Like I really want that.
Like Celine, what do you say? I want to have sex. Like, this is crazy. Yes, but you were programmed to want that.
You did not choose one. That you didn't choose your programming. I wasn't programmed. What do you mean?
You were, but by evolution. And so I really want to have sex. We're actually going to have to contend with this. We are going to have to contend with it.
In fact, right now there is an app, I think it's called Replica, where for a little extra money, that AI will send you new photos of itself. Can it consent to send you those new photos? Does it even matter given that they're AI generated? Huh.
There's no shortage of quandaries that are going to come up around this right in the next three years. This is not like 100 years from now. This is why we must be living in a simulation, because it's too goddamn interesting to be alive. Now, you might have been born 10,000 years ago and be working in the fields for our whole lives and then been killed by a tooth virus, but we probably wouldn't have gotten there.
We would have been killed by an invading horde. Man, people need to read my history. But those times would have been far more terrifying than now. Even though we're dealing with like these huge seismic shifts, I would rather that die.
I think the world is an infinitely better place than it's ever been in the history of mankind. We are in a better place of global climate change. One issue. But it's fixable and I'm pretty optimistic about that.
These questions are going to be the important questions that come up and we're going to need a framework for dealing with these questions. And the religions that we had don't deal with these questions because of the foundation of absolute truths and assumptive truths is a flawed foundation. We need a better foundation for these. And I think a constitution or UN Charter of Human Rights or some structure like that is the right foundation on which to build value systems and ethical systems for the future of how we think about we're going to build things.
So the challenge we've got today is much of our. If you look at how we're running the world today, much of it is either. Almost all our universities came from religious universities. They were seminaries initially and then we converted them to John schooling programs and that's where they are now.
So we have this old world legacy. This is why it's so hard to update them. All of our political structures are out of date today. So the reason we to need Web3 and decentralized systems and new structures at the edges, we need to build those new models to deal with all of these questions, their existing structures and our old frameworks won't do it.
So we need a completely new break from that, which is why we're so focused on this. The thing I'm trying to do with a difficult business model in it is how do you build a peace core to transition the world from the old to the new in as elegant a way as possible? Because you know, you've seen the Gartner hype cycle. Yeah.
So I think of we're in a hype cycle civilization. Right. We did really well and then we crashed in the middle Ages and the Dark Ages and we did really well up to about the industrial revolution and the peak of that. And then we've come down since then and now we're going through a big trough as we transition from scarcity to abundance.
And how can we reduce the amplitude and wavelength of that period of that trough to come out of it in as elegant a way as possible? We need new leaders, we need new projects to build a future. To answer these questions, our current systems can't do it, which is why we're so excited about that. So we've been actually.
So we now have 100, we have now 35,000 people in 150 countries operating where we give them methodologies and training on delegating exos and so on because we're going to need all of that in the Future. As we come up with these questions, the old structures can't answer those questions. So we need completely new models and new structures, new value systems, new monetary systems, et cetera, to deal with these structures going forward. I think that's the work that we have to do today as an intellectual class.
Tell me more about what you mean. That we've been in a trough since the end of the Industrial Revolution, which I'll pay it, like 1910, somewhere between 1990, roaring 20s as a good spot. Between the roaring 20s, ignore World War II, for example, but say the 50s and 60s, we had this picture of life, of this wonderful, bubbly, sitcom, happy mad men type in BO environment. If you think about Western civilization kind of at its peak, at that point, things start going downhill.
As we go through the 60s and we blow up the old models and then we blow up the religion as a guiding force, then we're stuck in. Now technology allows us to scale a lot. So now we have tribal conflict that scales quite aggressively quickly. We've got these old problems we've got to clean out.
We're still stuck in very old models of how we run the world, and we have to come through to a new model. So going from the Middle Ages, the Industrial Revolution got us one wave of positive contribution. We now need to get to the next wave, and we've got to cross through that. It's like the AI winter that we went through, the crypto winter, which lasted this last three years.
We're going through a civilizational winter when nothing makes sense. Right now you've got these unbelievable, chaotic things happening. The political discourse is a mess, geopolitical discourse, and all the world order is collaps. We need to get to a new sense of new harmony, new equilibriums, new values, systems, et cetera.
And the problem is I can't come from the old because it's too stuck in old models. We need to go to new systems and we can't find them unless we build completely new. One of the things we noticed when we were thinking about corporate innovation and so on was you never can. No car company could ever build a Tesla.
It's always done by an outsider coming from outside with a beginner's mind, leveraging new models and building a new thing that disrupts the old, right? So Clay Christensen, for the first time, gave us a compelling theory of disruptive innovation. And now we figured out, here's how you organize for it. And now we're kind of needing to get that into the world as fast as possible.
So I'll give you one example. We're shifting the locus of power in the century from nation states to city states. And so Trump and Brexit weren't about that first. Right.
As we mentioned earlier, Brexit was London versus the rest of the country. Because when you have to think about this, if you have solar energy and vertical farming and satellite Internet, you don't need a country. You don't need the infrastructure that a country can give you. And if you have all our old boundaries for countries, we're typically to guard resources and mountain over here, sea over here, we have everything in middle and it's hard to traverse those.
So great, that's a country and you evolve separate language, etc. But really today, the locus of a city or an urban environment is probably the best model for what the future of humanity should look like. We just have to evolve that into a decent place as opposed to the mess that we're in some of our cities in different parts of the world. But as we move to that model, then the nation state becomes less relevant.
And so we need completely new political structures and new models for how we devolve, regulate. So the one thing I'm totally in agreement with, with the recent stuff that's happening in the US is the pushing down rights down to the state level and let people self determine at a more and more of a local level. Right. So I'm completely there because now you have people self directing as they feel that their value system achieves the most.
You should have mobility. If I feel I want to live there, I want to be, I'm going to live somewhere else because my value system fits better. Great, go do that. And I think evolution will and business structures will very quickly figure out who's best and who's not, what's working, what's not working.
And people will move to a new model very quickly. But trying to get the nation state out of the way is a real problem today. Nation states, for example, can't solve. Conditions change.
Right. So that's a big problem. And so we're trying to figure out what are the structures for civilization to move to these new models. And it involves a decentralizing from nation states to at least cities and then secondly reinventing our institutions because all institutions have to be reinvented now because they don't fit for the world that we came from.
You said that we need new monetary systems as well as new governmental systems. Do you see? Have you already found the monetary system in crypto? Oh yeah.
I think Bitcoin is A really great starting point for it. I don't know if the end point, but it's definitely a great starting point. Have you talked to Jeff Booth? I haven't, but I'm very aware of who he is.
So Jeff did this, wrote this little book called the Price of Tomorrow years ago, and he articulated a really simple problem with our monetary systems, which is that over the last 50 years, every dollar increase in global GDP has come with a $4 increase in global debt. We're growing, growing the global economy of debt. Okay. It's just horrible statistic.
Okay, dude, that terrifies me. Yeah, it's terrible. And the reason for this is literally Moore's Law, I mean literally is that when we floated off the gold standard, we didn't realize that technology was deflationary. And so a debt based system works to increase and grow the economy as long as you don't have deflationary products and services.
So if you're building products and services. So If I borrow $10 million to build TVs and two years later I don't have enough money from the revenue from those TVs to pay you back because the TVs have dropped in value, that's a bad outcome. So I can't use debt to grow the economy in that model. So they floated the currencies off the gold standard just at the point that Moore's Law started taking impact and technology became cheaper and cheaper.
So now the only answer by any central bank is to increase money printing. During the pandemic where we printed 40% of all US dollars in existence during the pandemic, why are people surprised the prices go up 40%? I mean, of course they're cool. So I think what the articulation that I found to be the most compelling on crypto is that three triangles of decentralization, security and scalability.
Have you heard this one? Yeah. So Bitcoin had the first two and then the altcoins try to solve for scalability that's compromised, usually on scalability or security or the essentially ftx, Luna, et cetera. But with the lightning network, Bitcoin now solves for all three.
And so that becomes unbelievably powerful as a medium of the future. For me, the Byzantine is solving the Byzantine generals problem in Web3. So this is actually, this is the rationale for the blockchain. It's the underpinning innovation in the blockchain, which is, it's actually the surround Constantinople in the 15th century there were eight generals circling the city trend according to Siet and they were sending messages around the circle.
Who's going to go first? What point, what time should we attack? How are we going to get in? They had a problem, which is one out of the generals was a traitor and could lose the element of surprise, send the wrong information, global operation.