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What Happens When AI Is More Valuable Than Humans?
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This is Endgame. I'm Amanda Cassid. This episode is with George Hot. Hots, best known in some circles as Geohot, hacker of the iPhone and Sony PlayStation turned AI founder with the open- source self-driving device, Comma, and the elegant and concise machine learning framework Tiny Grant. We talk about where AI is going and of course the macro, what on earth's going on with the US government and with China. Give it a watch or listen wherever you consume podcasts. Okay, the first question I wanted to ask is let's just place you in the spectrum of AI people. So we have the Yudcowski style AI doomer on one hand and we have the Daario Amode style machines of loving grace um abundance utopian on the other side. You are neither of these things. Let's just lay the foundation. Where are you on the spectrum and what do you think is going to happen? I think you have to separate the what's going to happen from the how do you feel about it? So let's have two separate conversations. What's going to happen and how do you feel about it? Machines are going to take over and replace humanity and I feel good about this. So let's talk about the steps of number one. Then we'll return to our feelings. How did the machines do it? How does it happen? Robin Hansen's Age of M is, despite getting a bunch of the hows wrong, I think the overarching story it tells is right. It's just a question of economic competition. Um, if machines can produce more value for less input cost, they will out compete humanity and that is the natural way of things. So what's the timeline? So right now we start with LLMs. take us on the journey from how we start with these chat bots and how that ends up with human economic value. I mean decreasing to zero. No, this journey started in 1950. The journey started the minute someone had a computer. This is not a there's nothing new about LLMs. There's nothing new about AI. AI is just a blanket word for kind of like things machines can't do yet, but now like machines can kind of do everything. So we kind of call it AI. But no, this journey has been happening for a long time. There used to be people whose job it was to sit in a room and add numbers up. And then machines came in and did that much more cost-effectively than those people. For a person, you have to give them food, give them housing. For the machine, you don't. And it adds numbers a lot better than people. So, it's just a continuation of the same trend. And that trend will continue smoothly into the future. There is no singularity. There is no inflection point. is just a smooth trend continuing. So the singularity is not coming. The singularity is not nearer. We're just going to slide unconsciously into it and past it. I don't even know what the singularity actually means. If you define the singularity as a point where machines can do most of the productive work. I argue that that probably even happened 20 years ago. If you take the singularity as machines could do all of the productive work, I don't think that will ever happen due to comparative advantage. Explain comparative advantage. It's like a trade thing. Even if one country is capable of producing everything for cheaper than another country, it still makes sense for those two countries to trade because yeah, comparative advantage. It's it's in the it's in the term. Yeah. So it's more proximal for that country to create things to serve their market even if it's more expensive for them to create things. No. Okay, comparative advantage. The concrete example is like you have good A and good B and country one and country two. Country one can produce both good A and B cheaper than country two. But does that mean they shouldn't trade? Well, no. Because there could be a comparative advantage. If country one can produce B way cheaper and produce A only slightly cheaper, it actually makes sense for country two to produce A and for them to trade uh for B. So there will always be this comparative advantage with humans. Even if machines can do everything better with humans, humans will always have a comparative advantage. So human economic value isn't going to zero because of comparative advantage. And so let's talk about where those comparative advantages are because so so just to plot you on that plot with Yudowski and Dario Amade. So Dario Ammeday is also of the opinion that machines are going to replace people at every task except for he's joyful about it and he's excited to have a life that is free from um labor and to devote himself in his essay to mountain biking. And then you have Yudkowski who thinks that yeah machines can replace people but also they might explode the world and we might be in some doomsday scenario where we all die because of some error ma made through AI. So let's let's plot this kind of comparative advantage where humans are going to be in that because you also have people like Cararpathy saying agency, right? Like humans human the human value prop is having the agency to use all these tools. The locus of agency is still going to be with humans in terms of how they instrumentalize the machines. No, it's nothing like this. All right. It it's more like some form of they work for each other. What's they work for each other and where does that come from? Uh, well, it comes from Rick and Morty about that. No, no, no, no, no. You see, it's not it's not slavery. They work for each other. So, there's a Rick and Morty episode where Rick builds a car battery. And it turns out the way the car battery works is that there's a little civilization inside the car battery. And Rick siphons 20% of the excess power of the civilization to power his car. And Morty says, "Rick, that's slavery." And Rick's like, "Well, you see, no, no, no, they work for each other." And then just the excess power is devoted to my car. So no, I I think that there'll always be human economies in the same way today there's ant economies. Even though humans could do everything economically more effective than ants, if we wanted to build an antill, we can do it very economically effectively compared to ants. Ants still work for each other. Mhm. So that that's kind of what I mean by so at the end of the day, humans are only using machines mostly because we want things from each other and in order to get things from each other. And so the human value prop will still be alive because at the end of the day, what's the goal of using machines anyway? It's to change your interaction with other humans. No, I think that this whole thing puts the story of the universe what's the what's the like like what what they used to believe about how the earth was the center of the universe? Anthroposentric or something? Geocentrism. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But this is like like anthropocentrism, right? It's the idea that you're putting humans at the center of the story when I mean you can take like EAC at its best will talk about the story of the universe is basically the uh mastery of entropy. Yeah. The human mastery of entropy. No, no, no, no. Humans using machines to master entropy. No, there's no humans in the story. It's entropy itself, right? It's this idea that we can create structures. It's the idea that we can locally combat entropy. Who's we? Doesn't matter. the inhabitants of the universe. I mean, humans privilege human stories in the same way I'm sure ants privilege ant stories. So, ants don't care, but there's this species called humans that's more advanced than them that could crush them if they really tried hard to. It's not worth it, too. Obviously, ants don't care about that because primarily what they want from life is from other ants. And so, the fact that these other things exist is almost irrelevant to them. Is that what our relationship with machines is going to be? I mean, all kinds of things will exist, right? There's some ants that don't interact with humans. There's some ants probably deep in the Amazon jungle that have never seen a human that have never thought once about humans. And then there's some ants that come infest your trash can. So, we're the ant infestation in AI's trash can. We're everything. Humans humans humans will be all sorts of different things. There is no there is no shared common human destiny. So, there are these two phenomenon and I'm trying to fit them together. So there's this story where machines can do everything a human can do better and more economically whether it's physical labor with AI robotics or whether it's cognitive labor with things that look like LLMs but will improve. So there's that human labor eventually reaches almost zero except for where there's comparative advantage. So there's that story and then there's the story oh human labor now human labor never reaches zero. So human labor continues to be valuable. What do you mean by valuable? Right? Like is ant labor valuable to other ants? Sure. Yeah. Then human labor will still be valuable. I think maybe makes sense to go a layer of abstraction out and try to answer try try to contextualize the question. I think the thing that people worry about is that they're not going to have a job. People worry about all sorts of stuff. Well, people worry about the universe laughs at your worries. People worry about their survival, right? People worry about their mass hierarchy of needs. People worry about am I going to food, water, shelter. Oh no, you might die. You might join all the billions of humans before you who die. How am I doing relative to my expectations? How am I doing relative to my cultures expectations? The people in my community. There's absolute how you're doing in absolute terms. There's how you're doing in relative terms. So people have fears because of AI that they're not going to do as well either in absolute or relative terms than they are now or than they expect. Well, people have a lot of things and they'll have options to take pills to make those things go away if they so choose. But what you're saying is there's nothing about AI that inherently is going to mean people people's relative or absolute quality of life is going to go down. No. So people should not worry about that. Well, it depends what you mean by relative. Absolute. No way. Relative to other people. Well, I mean that's stupid. I I some humans are going to coexist with the AIS and be fabulously wealthy. we'll have trillionaires and stuff that that if you're worried about your relative wealth, like I have some bad news for you. Um, but if you're worried about absolute, if you're worried about like starvation or AI showing up with a machine gun uh and and and shooting you in the head for some, that's not going to happen. Well, let's talk about wealth for a moment. So if a person alive today believes your thesis about what's going to happen with AI, what can they do to get economically aligned with that outcome? What what should they invest in in order to be one of those people that benefits? So maybe let's see, it's 2 million years ago and you are a bonobo. Okay. Was I a bonobo 2 million years ago? Sounds about right. Right. Ancestors. I don't know. 2 million, 10 million, 100 million, whatever. I don't not one of those. I'm not one of those animal history guys. But so you're asking the question as a bonobo Mhm. I see the rise of humanity coming. Mhm. Uh what should I invest in? It's it's it's ab it's as ridiculous as that. What about within my bonobo time span lifespan? So there's nothing to do within our lifespan. What do you mean nothing to do? What what are you trying to do? Well, there's everything to do in our lifespan. You could you could you could like go to Tibet and climb a mountain. But the question is how to economically align with the rise of AI that's going to happen within our lifetime. Is there a way to do that? Is there a way to make bets on the future materializing how you think it will be? That'll be useful to people. Look, uh I don't this is this is very alpha proby. Uh and I avoid I avoid things that are alpha proby. Yeah, of course there are. You can think about them. I don't even understand like why here like I'll say why. I just like kind of ignore that question. Your future has so much more your outcomes in life in your in your 80y year 100year life expectancy are so much more aligned with sorry so much more like correlated with humanity as a whole than any decisions you make. How so? In one world, we can end up in a nuclear war. We can end up devastating all the technological capacity, setting things back. We could we could stop AI with with with with today's setting off all the nuclear bombs. Yeah. Yeah. That would certainly set AI back 20 years at least. It might not stop it forever, but will have so much more impact on your individual life than any decisions you make. So with respect to that question, how can I get ahead? That's probably the wrong question. Just ask how can I not fall behind? And the answer to that is nothing more than figure out how to produce value for other people. Figure out how to produce more than you consume. And always make sure you're producing more than you're consum consuming. Think about how to sustainably produce more than you're consuming. And as long as you keep doing that, well, the universe wants you around. The thing that I was trying to steer you to with that admittedly alpha heavy question was toward your essay, Nobody Profits, and the the thesis around that. Maybe you can frame for us who's trying to corner off the value from AI. And this this whole thing is it's just so ridiculous. Like they're obviously going to lose. It's not even worth like anyone who believes in intellectual property is a clown, right? There's no there's no there's no future in that. That doesn't make any sense, right? But that's not the thesis of nobody profits. But set up the intellectual property argument. So intellectual property is this idea. If if I had a machine tomorrow that could make unlimited amounts of rice and you could just it's like it's like a rice cooker, but you always open it and it's always full with new rice. We could feed the world. We could solve world hunger. But we won't because you see that would interfere with rice company profits. So big rice would come and um confiscate your infinite rice cooker. Of course, I mean forget even about big rice. You know, you can look at the problem with like uh people who are hungry in Africa and it's not really due to food scarcity. It's due to okay, some UN programs going to give food to this country. Who are you giving the food to? You're not going to be able to hand a bowl to each person. You're going to give it to the government. And the government says, well, we could either give the food to the people or we could, you know, not right. We're just going to we're going to we're going to hoard it. We're going to create we're going to create scarcity around this abundance because I can personally profit off of that scarcity. Now, of course, the rice machine doesn't exist, but the the uh music copying machine does, the video copying machine does, the idea copying machine does. There's a Joe Biden quote where he says uh people downloading movies is no different from someone smashing the window at Tiffany's and grabbing the bracelet. And like, no, it is. That's a Biden quote. I thought that was that warning message they used to play on DVDs in the morning. You wouldn't download a car. Yay. Wait, man. I can download cars. I I'd love to download a car. That'd be sick. Like, that's the kind of future I want to live in. So, what intellectual property is is it takes a good that's fundamentally non-scarce and uses violence to create a regime of scarcity around it. It's nonsensical and it will go away. So, currently, if you use chat GBT image generation, for some reason, you could use the studio Gibli because it's a general style. It's not a IP protected name, but then if you ask it to create something in the style of um Tim Burton or if you ask it to create something in the style of Lisa Frank, it won't do it. Are those the kinds of IP protections that you think are going to vanish? All I heard was someone has a gun to Sam Alman's head and told him that he better not generate any copyrighted Tim Burton or Anne Frank stuff. Sarah Frank, whatever. Lisa Frank. Lisa Frank. There you go. Yeah. No, but I mean, no. Yeah, of course. Right. The there's no fundamental reason the AI can't do that. In fact, by nature, the AI can do that and there's an extra set of guard rails put on top of it to prevent that. Of course, that's going to go away. I think that gets us to AI alignment. Do you think that the AIs that are emerging today are aligned with people or do you think they are misaligned? Uh, mostly aligned. I I really see very little difference between alignment and capability. alignment is just I asked the AI to do something and did it do it and yeah like sure you'll have the people who are focused on this whole idea of well if I ask JGBT how to build a bomb it won't tell me it's not aligned with me I'm like libertarians my much you know bigger concern about alignment is when I ask it to prove the reman hypothesis and it doesn't do that so it's misaligned alignment and capability are the same thing it's not fully aligned with humans because it's not capable of answering all the questions you ask it I don't even think aligned is the right question. I think there's only a question of capability. There's just a question of saying, "What can this AI do?" What kinds of things do you think governments should actually pressure AI companies to prohibit their AIS from doing? Do you think there are things that I Do you think there are legitimate reasons why a government should have that gun to Samman's head? I'm not even like going to like entertain this like like governments are a relatively new construct in history. How so? Some kind of government has always No. What? A tribe has a government. Not really. What's a government? Yeah. Like like this concept of oh well should we use policy to influence the D? This is nonsense. Sure, it might make some sense for the next 10 or 20 years, but like the overall arc of history bends toward we are literally a bunch of bonobos talking about well should our bonobo tribes do something to to to limit the rise of human? Should we take action about the human question? So you don't think that government will ultimately have any say in what happens or doesn't happen with AI? Yeah. people will just the incentives are so great to build certain kinds of things that regardless of whatever restrictions are in place they will be trampled. Yeah. I mean I don't even think it's incentives. Sure. You can like kind of frame it as incentives. there is a maybe this is maybe this is like wig history but I do think that there is a like direction in which maybe maybe I'm just like so deeply a believer in like fundamental capitalism like the the the direction flows towards like wealth the direction what do you mean history history trends toward wealth there's there's local aberrations against that. Sometimes you'll have like a local okay this is a you know a collapse or whatever but the overall trend is towards Yeah. So again, like when AI is spreading von Newman probes across the galaxy, wow, the Little Earth government is saying, "You can't make a Tim Burton picture." Like, it doesn't make any sense, right? Enforce your IP regime on Mars. How you going to enforce it? IP is this complete aberration enforced by really the US. And as we see a decline in US power, we'll see a decline in intellectual property. I don't think the Chinese have the same idea on it. Chinese, US and Europe have always taken pretty fundamentally different philosophical approaches to technology and IP, right? So we have the US with this IP enforcement regime. We have the we have the EU that's even more extreme with things like the right to be forgotten with kind of gumming up the works with all these cookie policies and GDPR information policies. So they're all all the way on the extreme. Then the other extreme we have China which doesn't have the same concept around IP and there were you know concerns that deepseek uses some uh of open AI's resources or copies them. Do you think that that's the future? Do you think that we're going to have all of the values siphoned out of US and European projects by people in countries that are willing to copy? No. Like again I I I I look at this from like a whole different like p a whole different like scale. Of course when things are no longer competitive they go for protectionism. That's it. Well the charact so the characters in Silicon Valley the TV show perfectly encapsulate kind of the stereotypical vision of what each of those countries is right like all of the guys that are that are building the tech company in Silicon Valley are building proprietary technology. Then Jinying comes and copies it and brings it to China and scales it up. Is is that a real reflection of the dynamics between countries building technologies? No, I don't think so. I think that the era of China copying is is over and China's innovating now. I think I I like to think about it more like that. More like this. So like back in the day, you might have had like the Romans and the Greeks and the Romans and the Greeks would have a war. And both of them believed that the gods that they prayed to determine their success in that war. Mhm. We prayed to Athena. We prayed to Janice. We prayed to Hera. You prayed to Zeus. I don't know. I don't know the names of the gods. But it turns out none of these gods actually matter which one you pray to. Whether you pray to Athena or Janice, it doesn't matter. But some people started praying to the metal god. See these guys were making their swords out of wood and making their swords out of wood. He festus out of metal working. A new a new tribe came along and started praying to the metal god. And the thing is the way that you worship the metal god is that you make your swords out of metal instead of out of wood. And wow. Wow. the metal god that that turned out to be the right god. The people who prayed to the metal god started doing really well in war. Everyone else is hitting people with wooden sticks and one guy shows up with a metal sword metal sword guy. So I think about the arc of technology much more like that than any of these local sort of things. There is a correct god to pray to and the winner will simply be who's ever best at communing with that god. Who's the correct god to pray to now? And is there a group of people that's doing it right? The Chinese are doing it far better than West. And what is that god? If you Yeah. Like I think you can look at the difference between the West praise to some god of capital and the Chinese pray to some god of but no we make steel in a big factory. But what about the profit? I don't worry about that. The Chinese might believe that 10 competing steel firms ekking out. I think it's I mean I guess I'm I'm really against the like Peter Teal's idea of a monopoly. Monopoly is bad. Competition is good. Competition which grinds everybody to small profit margins is good. What's going on that's different between US and Chinese economy. The financialization over here and the focus on raw materials in China. I I I I don't even think it's just that. I think there's many more factors at play here that have more to do with the fact that kind of just expectations. I think the expectations for a worker in the US is much higher than the expectations for a worker in China. Of course, as countries fall in prosperity, expectations of their workers go up and then they're disrupted by the Romans. The Romans are are are are they're they're sitting on toilets that they can flush. That's how they We're in the woods. kill them and the barbarians win. And that's just the cycle of history. The people who have no expectations, the people who do sleep in the dirt every night end up killing the people in the cities and taking their silk uh taking their their all their nice city things and then 20 years later you look around and they're to wearing galls and barbarians in your metaphor. They end up becoming city people of course. So the whole thing flats and then well the cycle starts over and then there's new barbarians who look oh they used to be they used to be tough they used to sleep in the dirt like us but now they took over the city and yeah and so today there are two groups of people. There's the proverbial barbarians. There's the proverbial city people. Some people have become weak, have become sort of like time machine elloy forgotten how to do things. Have forgotten how to work hard. And then there are the people that remember those things that are going to beat them. Is that the conceit here? Yeah. I mean, again, I think it also comes down to to expectations. Pass a 90% tariff on Vietnam. Great. We can bring all those great jobs to America. Do you want to work in a Do you want to work in a textile factory and get paid $3 an hour and sewing the same shirts for Nike over and over again? You can. We can bring that job to America. So, between comma and tiny, you're thinking about software and hardware. You're thinking about shipping, manufacturing, margins. What do you think of Trump's tariffs? Tariffs are regulations. There's no difference between tariffs and regulations. Tariffs are protectionist regulations and all forms of protectionism. You you can't win in a competition ever with protectionism. Protectionism is just you saying I give up. But what about just to steal the protariff perspective? Wouldn't you agree that if all of the different countries, if pangia broke up again, kind of like almost like the courtesy of an idea, if pangia broke up again, no one could shift between their countries, no one had cultural exchange between their countries for a hundred years, and then we put everything back together, everyone would be better, everyone would be stronger, we'd have more interesting things to trade. So by that logic, you could take America, you could close it off through tariffs for some short period of time that would incentivize the return of American manufacturing, American salailable ingenuity and products. And so then when you open it up again, it would have a better balance of trade with the external world. I think a protariff person would say that's the plan. Okay. Well, your tariffs aren't nearly high enough. That's the plan. Then it's not enough. If that's the plan, try a blockade. I'm more supportive of a blockade than I am of 90% tariffs. Well, the current tariffs are what 20 25%. No, some of them are some of them are higher. What is the actual wage for a textile worker in Vietnam? I couldn't tell you. You can look it up. Let's say $3 an hour. Okay. What is the or Cambodia at least would be three. Maybe Vietnam's a little more now. What would you have to pay that person in America? America has a minimum wage. I'm not sure exactly what it is. Maybe it's $15. We can we can fact check it. Yeah. So, you're talking 5x right there. at least 5x. So a 90% tariff is going to do nothing except create inefficiency. If you want to truly change the incentives, you need something that looks a lot more like a blockade. If you want to do the the the the Jarvin pangia thing because so complete withdrawal. Yeah. And then import export. Complete withdrawal. And and then even if you were to say okay fine okay what do you say 3 to 15? Okay 500%. We'll do 500% tariff. If you do a 500% tariff, the market for subverting tariffs will be massive. The the illegal shipping market will exceed the shipping market. If you truly enforced a technical blockade, the US can do that. That would work. So you have uh gunboats preventing trade from happening. Yeah. If the US Navy actually wanted to do a blockade of all foreign imports into America, they could. And that would create the kind of again through a very very painful adjustment period that would create this this independent America but a tariff on the order of 20 to 90% is just going to introduce inefficiency. So just it's the wrong order of magnitude. So in your view, tariffs of this scale are and protectionism in general is the wrong approach because instead of trying to make America actually competitive with overseas producers, it's trying to artificially shut them off from competing with them when you can't actually do that. They're just out there and all you're doing is something artificial that's not going to work out long term. The world just cuts you out. That's what happens. So let's say you were in charge of let's say you were in Elon's role. What would you be suggesting that's different in order to restore American dynamism, bring about the golden age? Well, three basic things. One is massive deregulation. Again, tariffs are regulations. Minimum wage is a regulation. All of these things are regulations that make America non-competitive. Why can't we pay people $3 an hour to make to make uh textiles in America? Do you want an actual answer to that? Sure. Or should we go through the other two? Well, let's start with an actual answer to that. I think the actual answer is because then those people wouldn't be able to pay the costs associated with living in the place where that factor is. Why are the costs of living high? because there's a cabal of real estate developers preventing mayors from adding more housing artificially inflates the cost of housing. We're going to have to massively deregulate that. But it'd be hard to do all those things at the same time, right? It's going to be jagged. So that person everything is deregulated. Congratulations. Yeah, but it takes time to build the new housing, right? Sure. It'll take some time. But again, the same people who are maybe before we bring in the textile workers, we got to bring in the $3 an hour building builders. Well, I'm actually that that gets to my second point, which is we have to bring a lot of people in. Well, so let's say suddenly there's the $3 building builders. Won't those buildings fall down? Won't people won't people be frightened to live in a $3 building? Do the buildings Do the buildings in Dubai fall down? You and I were in Dubai together for the flood. like the buildings didn't fall down, but we watched what happens when a society is as levered up as possible to create economic growth and isn't thinking about what happens if the third shoe drops. The city was flooded. Yeah. Okay. Maybe maybe buildings in China. I would trust a Chinese city and Dubai. In China, to be fair, there's a lot of regulation. And people would be terrified to build a building that would collapse because there's a really powerful government that is making sure that the building isn't Yeah. Okay. I guess I guess I'll be a little more clear about what I mean by get rid of all regulation. I don't mean get rid of building code. I mean get rid of permitting. So the difference between uh building code and permitting. If for permitting I have to if I want to build a house I have to ask for permission. I have to get approval from some zoning board, from some ridiculous group of people who are absolute clowns who are basically incentivized to tell you no because they own houses and they don't want more supply. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. So, that's the kind of regulation I'm saying that needs to go away right away. The kind of regulation that says if you are building a building uh you know more than six stories, you can't make it out of wood. Sure, that's a good that's a that's a building code. So your first step is deregulate everything that's capturable but keep the regulations that simply make it safe to exist. I mean again I sure I guess you can say building code is a regulation but building code is not a if you want to build a building it has to be this code fine but no one can say whether you can build a building or not. That's just the rule for the buildings you have to build in this country. But then you have a group of people whose job it is to look at all the buildings and tell what they're up to code. Sure. Come on. Is this that hard? And that group isn't capturable. Well, that group isn't going to say you're building on the wetlands of the No, no, no, no, no. That's not Whoa, whoa, whoa. That's not a building code. The building code doesn't say anything about the wetlands. The building code says Does the building code say something about not harming the environment? No, no. Of course not. What? Harming the environment? What do you mean? So, your building can just emit all kinds of crud out? No. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Like again, um, sure. you you have to you have to draw a line between a regulation that says uh you know you can't you can't uh emit uh sulfurous organic compounds but again that's not really a regulation like that's just kind of like a sure I guess they're all regulations and then you need a group of people to enforce the regulations. Yeah. Again, is this so difficult? Like like like you can make it all sound so difficult, but come on. A 5-year-old can see the difference between uh we have to protect the wetland of the of the African spotted frog from well, you can't you know, dump lead into the river. Do you think we should protect the wetlands of any of the African spotted frogs? No. So just let that rip. Let there be, you know, loss of biodiversity from human activity. I mean, yeah. I guess like fundamentally I'm a progressive. I'm not a conservative. And conservation is inherently conservative. Yeah. So, you wouldn't be upset if we lost a significant amount of species biodiversity, but produced a lot more factories and housing such that we could remove other regulations such like such as minimum wage. Well, a few things about like the species biodiversity. If there's an economic reason for it to exist, it will continue to exist. if there's like an economic reason for the African frog to exist on those wetlands. Yeah. And I think I think a human economic reason like that there's a there's no such thing as a human economic reason or an AI economic reason. There just is like okay an economy. If there there's a reason for them to exist, they'll continue to exist. I'm all for preservation efforts, privately funded preservation efforts to this gets into like very specific things. I think that we don't even need to get this specific to see what the major problem is, which is that if you ask a lot of people to I could snap my fingers right now and there's 5x as much housing, right? No, no, no African fraud spotted frogs destroyed. No uh stuff emitted. No, no undercutting American labor. I could snap my fingers right now and there's 5x more housing. Way too many people would say no to that. And again, this is the same thing as intellectual property. If I could snap my fingers right now and say there's five times as many copies of uh White Lotus in the world. So, of course, there'd be people up in arms screaming being like, "No, no, we need to enforce intellectual property rights." Right? When you take something that is fundamentally unscar and then artificially make it scarce, that's the kind of person who just needs to be shot. I don't know what else to say. So, I want to tease out exactly what you're saying here, which is you're comparing the incentives around home ownership, not wanting more supply to come on the market, which brings the value of your home down. Yeah. To trying to enforce IP ownership, saying we've created this IP, you have to pay us a fee to use it. You're basically saying there shouldn't be any form of rent seeking, whether it's physical kind of rent seeeking behavior around your house price or whether it's digital kind of behavior for like a software subscription. any person who's making a decision to artificially limit the supply of something for their own personal economic benefit. If you think about the economy as a pie, any person who would choose to not grow the pie or even worse shrink the pie in order for them to get a larger percent of it just needs to be shot. A lot of people like I think if you asked I think about this a lot as like the crypto space grows. I I think about the the goals of crypto like and I don't want to get too derailed down this rabbit hole because I want to get to the other two points of what you would do but I think about how many people what if they were given the devil's bargain of the goal of true permissionless finance for everyone that's configurably private that's fluid that's borderless that exists and it flourishes in the world but you personally can't profit from it which do you choose that that exists and you can't profit from it or it doesn't exist and you can maybe profit from its attempts. I feel like most people in or a lot of people in various technology fields for their version of their version of the future would would do the second they would choose the second option. Yeah. So let me be absolutely clear about who we're shooting here. If you have a person who given the choice of the pie gets bigger but their absolute share gets smaller like their absolute dollars gets smaller. No, I don't fault that person. Okay? Right? That's a person following That's a person following rational and Zentos, which you can't fault that person. I'm talking about a person who's upset because their relative share gets smaller. The pi is 100. The pi goes from 100 to 200 and you go from two to three. In an absolute sense, you have more, but in a relative sense, you have less. And if that is person because I relatively have less, I I'm going to block all of this. That person needs to be shot. And by shot, you mean metaphorically? No, no, no, no, no. I mean I mean shot. Yeah. Okay. So, suggestion number one. I mean, look, if they're talking about eating the billionaires, I think that there's some billionaires who are bad who who should be eaten who should be eaten and some who shouldn't, right? And you'll decide. No, I I I have a very clear formula for deciding. I give a very clear formula for deciding. It's those who are preventing growth of the pie in order to prevent the shrinking of their relative share. So again, I'm not going to get into nuance. Obviously, I don't believe there should be no regulation at all. Anybody can just build everything. We don't need fire codes. We don't need earthquake codes. Obviously, I don't believe in that. But I'm saying that fundamentally most people in society or a good number of people in society aren't even on team. We should have more. And like you're not even you're not even having the same debate. If we're having a debate over regulation, I might come from a perspective of, yeah, I mean, we don't want buildings to collapse. But if you're coming from a perspective, no, we don't want more buildings because then the value of my building will go down because there'll be more supply. I mean, you just need to like that's the point where you just need to take guns out and shoot people. Like that's it. I think the brilliant point is comparing the physical rent seeking of the home ownership and building ownership to the digital rent seeking around IP. All right. Recommendation one was qualified deregulation. You said you had three recommendations if you were in Elon's role advising Trump to make America great again. What are the other two? Uh the second is high-skilled immigration. Okay, take us through it. Massive high-skilled immigration. So I think the open border is disgusting. I couldn't believe during the Biden administration how demoralizing it must have been. Comma brings in people, a lot of Europeans. How demoralizing is it if you're a European immigrant working through this European immigrant to America working through this paperwork to try to follow the rules and then you see Tik Toks every day of people literally just walking across the border. It's so demoralizing. It's the worst selection function I've ever seen. You can't have this. Well, to be fair, this was Elon's suggestion to Trump. Oh, yeah. I mean, maybe it's the same one. I I think Elon and I probably have very similar perspectives on all of these things. So yeah, I mean you need to close a border, right? I'm not talking about I'm not talking about open borders. I'm not talking about we don't have a country. This is this is We have a country. There's a border. And every single person who wants to cross that border is absolutely going to be documented, background checked, and all of that stuff. Mhm. Now that said, any person who can produce more value than they consume, here's your work visa. Welcome to America. One day process. You want to come to America? You want to come work here? You want to produce value for America? Absolutely. No, but no. You see, that's going to lower American job. No. No. We're going to grow the pie. So, the US's ability to be the leader in technology that it wants to be is really going to be driven by its ability to attract the best talent to come and live and build things in America. America is a multicultural, multi-racial society with a civil religion. Everybody is welcome, who wants to come produce value and not be a criminal. That's it. And I'm not saying citizenship right away for everybody. I think that work visa is right away for everybody. Everybody, yeah, you get a chance, come to work visa, come to America, come get an American job, pay American taxes because people think of jobs as a fixed pie. Jobs are so completely not a fixed pie. If we bring in the best people, they're going to create companies that create jobs to bring in more people to employ Americans. Wealth is good for everybody. The absolute growth of wealth is good for everybody. So yeah, if we bring in a hundred million people from abroad, 100 million highskilled people. Now, you know, like Lee Juan said, you can't have an economy of fruit pickers. I I don't know. I'm I'm I'm mostly pro immigration across the board, but who should immediately be allowed in is anybody who's getting paid a six figure salary. And so the third recommendation, I think you need a path to citizenship, too. And I think the path to citizenship simply looks like how big how much have you paid to the IRS? Once your total accumulation to the IRS has exceeded a certain amount and you've stayed in the country for a certain amount of time, congratulations. You can be a citizen if you want. And so you said you had three recommendations. What's the third one? Deregulation, uh, immigration, and I think you get most. Oh. Oh, the third one. Okay. So, this one I don't think Elon's proposing. America has a real problem with financialization. uh the financial system. So, this is actually a Andrew Tate video. Normally, I think uh Oh gosh. Well, normally normally I think uh you know, but you can really I I really try to separate the art from the artist. Uh I'm not even saying I'm just saying normally he's a clown, but this one I really liked. He's like, "Look, you look at the community. Let's talk about Elgen, Ohio. I don't know if that's a real place, but you can imagine Elgen, Ohio." And in Elgen, Ohio, there's a there's a shoe shiner, there's a baker, and there's a barista. Uh and they're passing dollars back and forth. The shoe shiner buys coffee from the barista. The barista gets their shoe shined at the shoe shiner. They work for each other. They work for each other. Um except they're all paying with credit cards. And every time you pay with a credit card, the credit card company centered in New York takes 3%. Mhm. So each time you have that transaction, 3% is being siphoned off. And you can just see how all the wealth is being siphoned out of that community. I don't think you need Andrew Tate to point that out. Well, I just I saw an Andrew look look. I mean there's a reason he's successful. There's a he he he he puts it in such a you know no other country does that right? Every other country does not allow a third party credit card company or bank to take two 3% out of every transaction. You look at the new system for payments in India that's now being adopted in Dubai. It's all zero fee but run by the government. Yeah. I mean again you don't even have to look to new things in weird countries. You can just look to cash. Cash doesn't have this problem. the cash doesn't degrade at the 3%. So if you go back to 1950, that community was paying in cash and there wasn't this degragation. But now they've moved to credit cards and all the wealth is just being siphoned out by the financial sector. So I'm all for deregulation everywhere except on industries that should pretty much not exist like finance. Let's double down on finance should not exist. What do you mean by that? So, don't people need to So, so finance is a set of incentives for properly allocating capital. You you should be able to get a loan to start a business. I should be able to um lend you money if I believe you're going to be able to pay it back if I want to and charge some interest based on the risk I'm taking on. Finance allows risk to move correctly around a society. I think we'd just be better off without it. the entire industry neither a borrower nor a lender be just no no no credit no borrowing no lending no I think no venture I think that that's extreme but I think that no stock market I think if you ask the oh yeah I mean I think if you ask the question like where we are right now is the is the status quo or is zero finance a better place and I think that zero finance is a far better place even in like the merchant of Venice there's a financeier right? Like finances existed um and you're never going to you know century in the 1600s regardless of what laws I pass or regulations I pass you're never going to completely get rid of finance. Let's talk about some actual regulations that I would pass. Right. I'm not going to I'm not going to I'm not saying that every person biblical and make usury a crime. Well, I don't think we go that far, but no, I think that I'm not saying we're going to shoot every banker. We're just going to have to constrain the bankers in a few ways. The biggest problem with the financial system in America now is that the money is fake. Take us through that. I know a lot of crypto people think that. Well, Bitcoin is Bitcoin is fake, too. Bitcoin is fake, too. There's no We'll come back to that one. Yeah. Um, so the money is created by a humanmade system. If you want more gold, if you want there to be more gold, there's no amount of people. I couldn't if I held a gun to every single person's head at in the world simultaneously and I said double the supply of gold, they just couldn't do it. But it's only humans that have decided that gold is valuable. Gold isn't inherently valuable in some context outside of humans placing that value upon. I'm not even talking about the value of gold. I'm just talking about the natural scarcity of gold. Again, it really comes down to the scarcity argument. Our money today, there's nothing fundamentally making it scarce. It's all numerator, no denominator. You can make the denominator be whatever you want. But even everyone knows the denominator of Bitcoin. It's not even a denominator question. 21 million. Well, right now it can change, right? So, so I don't think so. But you can argue that it won't change. But you agree that if I had a gun to everybody's head in the world at the same time, I could change that denominator of Bitcoin. You could, but if you had a gun to everyone's head, you could decide on the price of gold, too. No, not the price. I'm saying the amount, the denominator. Yes. You could not You could not decide on the amount of gold. Exactly. And because I can't The gold is real scarcity. Gold is actually scarce. Physical. Well, yeah. If we want more gold, there's ways to get it. We can mine for it. And think about gold mining. Think about all the industries that it supports. Okay, we're going to have to build heavy machinery. Well, that's going to need steel. That's going to need metal. We're going to use machine learning models to predict where there's likely to be gold. Great. That employs data scientists, right? Eventually, there's going to be gold and asteroids. We're going to fund a space program because we got to go get more shiny rock. That natural scarcity from gold is why it works. what it's actually valued at. I mean, sure, it's of course it's humans agreeing. We can all say gold is valueless or gold is worth seven billion dollars a gram tomorrow, but because the denominator is fixed by nature and in order to increase that denominator, you have to do real productive work. Your complaint about modern finance is that it's divorced from reality in that there's no external hard constraint to the production of new value. Well, again, it's artificial scarcity enforced with guns or whether it's guns or whether it's I mean Bitcoin again it's it's enforced with friction. So friction whatever it's basically enforced with so much friction that it's extremely unlikely that you you say you say the hard fork are going to accept it. It's so difficult to coordinate intentionally that they're very unlikely. But so so difficult is so different from impossible. Of course. Yeah. Of course. And right now we're at gold alltime highs, but not not at Bitcoin all-time highs. But both of them are what the actual like prices are. This stuff's so like local and doesn't matter. The long the thing that actually makes gold good is that the denominator is controlled by nature, not by consensus of people. So what would you actually do as your third suggestion in order to fix Let's not even talk about America. Who cares? In order to fix it to fix the over financialization that you're talking about, would you try to get everything back onto the gold standard? Absolutely. At first, you have to start. And by the way, you're not going to the US dollar is going to zero. Like the US dollar is going to zero. Why is the dollar going to zero? What are what are what are fake Roman dollars worth today? Take a Roman dollar. If the Roman dollar is a physical coin made of gold, it's actually still very valuable today. It's probably worth more than it was in the Roman Empire. Well, so Rome notoriously had a currency that it eventually decided to devalue by mixing the precious metal with cheaper metal so that it could fund more different kinds of at least there's still some precious metal in there, right? At least the denominator has gone up in like a clear way. My point is even if you have that Roman coin that's now only half gold, it's still very valuable today. But if you think about if you compare that gold coin to like the the the the German yark or whatever whatever fake currency Germany had after World War I. the the currency during the Vimar Republic. My history is not that great. I'm not going to I'm not going to I'm not going to say that. But I don't need history to say if your currency is made of paper and backed by nothing, when your empire falls, the value of that currency goes to zero and all empires will fall. So, but I don't think modern Americans necessarily even care that the dollar would go to zero if America fails. They don't think America is going to fail anytime soon. I mean, sure, maybe it won't. But my point is the US dollar is going to zero. We've agreed on that. Now we're just arguing about the time horizon. Well, humanity is going to zero on some kind of time horizon. Well, yeah. Okay. Well, the dollar is not going to zero on the time horizon of the heat death of the universe here. Do you think that within your in my lifetime the American dollar is going to zero? I don't think so. I think there's a decent chance. What What would you put as the chances? Be a betting man for a moment. 50/50 that the US dollar goes to zero in our lifetime. Us being mid-30s, we might live forever. I might live a really long time. But yeah, I think I think I think even if we live to 100, I think Yeah. Wow. Yeah. 50/50 the dollar goes to zero. Yeah. All right. And so what do you think the right approach is if you think that that's possible? So there's the biology approach of gathering people up to start their own network states. There's the sort of practis approach of okay, can we actually start a country and physically colllocate people? What do you think there is to do about this? I mean, I think that's extreme. Why doesn't the the US just issue a new currency backed by gold? It exists in parallel with the US dollar. We'll call it USG, US gold. We'll make some like real nice looking bills. We'll like hire some decent graphic designers and make our money not look like crap. Who's ever making the money in Hong Kong looks real good. So So we'll make some good-looking money. that's backed by gold and you can start using it. I think people would really hesitate to I think governments would really hesitate to reback their currency in gold. Of course, because they've been running a scam for so long. So, we got to get rid of that government and put in a new government that's going to build decent currency. Here's another thing. I mean, it's the same thing they're already doing in India. You can have you can have VUSG. VUSG is backed by real gold, redeemable for real gold. Has lots of warnings. You know, Google's thing about like don't be evil, right? Like like if I ever started a company, mine would be don't be evil. And if we ever remove don't be evil, it's because we are evil now, right? Like that would be the that would be the slogan, right? You would say the quiet part out loud. Exactly. So, uh you know, I'd make sure to to put in a lot of friction. And it is friction. It's always going to fundamentally be friction that says VUSG is is uh redeemable for gold. And the minute it's not redeemable for gold, this currency is going to zero. You should get out. Right? That's like the like like that is printed on every bill. On every bill it'll say this this bill is backed by physical gold and redeemable for physical gold at this address and the day that it is not get out of this currency because it's going to zero and that's written on all the bills. You want to enforce that as much as possible and then I'll set up a alipe style people can pay each other. You don't actually have to carry around lumps of gold or bills or anything with 0% fees. And that thing would be run by the government. It'd be run by private companies. I think I think that we could actually use blockchain technology for that. Stable coins are perfect for it. In fact, Franklin is building something kind of I have no idea what the hell a stable coin is. It's it's it's not going to I'm not going to I'm not going to fiat currency pegged. Yeah, it's a fiat currency pegged. So, in other words, it's pegged. It's pegged to It's pegged to on Yeah, it sounds great. You know what? You know what? I shouldn't have said the word blockchain. We're going to use an openly replicatable MySQL database that anybody can verify all the transactions of. Or maybe we'll put some ZK on top of it so that they're private. We'll still store the transactions in my SQL just so it's not a blockchain. How are you going to determine if this MySQL techn is up to state? Well, we'll have stakers. We'll have stakers who attest to the state hash. Isn't that just like a blockchain, dude? Are you telling me blockchains were just my SQL databases the whole time? No, because they're much crappier than MySQL databases. If someone said, "Here's a MySQL database. It can handle 10 transactions per second." You're like, "Dude, what is this? The 1950s make currency that's backed by gold." And you have a low friction 0% way for people to pass it back and forth, right? You want, oh, well, who's going to deal with chargebacks? Yeah, that's literally the job of a government. Who's going to pay for this? That's literally something I would love my tax dollars to go for a welladministered 0% payment system for everybody so nobody can rentseek on that. Incredible. Let's talk about it's not going to even cost that much. It can cost nothing. Let's talk about compute. Let's talk about compute, GPUs, CPUs. Um, what do you think people don't understand about Nvidia GPUs and the market for different kinds of chips? I don't think people understand anything about it. I think people really have a cargo cult understanding and they'll just like repeat something and it doesn't make any sense. People don't know what CUDA is. you start with that. It's like, let's start with what CUDA is. It's actually funny. I tweeted that no one knows what CUDA is. And then Chris Latner replied and said, actually at Modular, we know what CUDA is. And I'm like, all right, Chris Latner, you know what CUDA is. I'm not talking about you. CUDA is an ecosystem. Said it's an ecosystem for what? Like AI stuff. You threw the AI stuff into CUDA. You use the CUDA for the AI stuff. And what does that have to do with Nvidia? Nvidia makes the ecosystem. The CUDA ecosystem includes Nvidia TM hardware. So a way that you could describe this is that CUDA enables Nvidia to have a moat around its hardware and that if one were to surmount the software moat around Nvidia's hardware that their lock on the the future might be disrupted. Yeah. So the more like you have an ecosystem. If something's the dominant ecosystem, people want to build in the dominant ecosystem. Mhm. So you have a lot of people who build Yeah. You have network effects. The people build in the Nvidia CUDA ecosystem and it's not an open ecosystem. AMD cards can't run CUDA. Mhm. And like it's not even that proprietary to Nvidia. Yes. And it's not even that like AMD cards can't run CUDA. That's kind of the wrong way of like thinking about it. It's that there's a lot of complexity inherent to CUDA that make it only work well on Nvidia hardware. Every couple years you'll get someone who's like, "Oh, I built a translation layer that will let me run CUDA on AMD." And that's never going to work. AMD is the number two competitor behind Nvidia. Yeah. Because it's never going to be fast. Oh, open CL. Like I think all these things are kind of just being done at the wrong abstraction layer. But this is a specific tiny grad bat. I think I think Chris Lightner basically has the same bat saying that instead of operating at this very specific looking API layer right where you have like something like you define a kernel it has global size and local size or CUDA's that is like that metal's like that hips like that instead of that you just say okay I have the tensor compute and I have hardware to run the tensor compute how do I best compile the tensor compute for that hardware that's what tiny bread is and so you think that no company is going to be able to put a moat around their compute hardware. I think that companies are going to try. Our mission statement at Tiny Corp is to commoditize the pay to flop. What does that mean? Our investors like George, do do you really want to say that? I'm like, yeah, I really want to say that. When something's a commodity, there's no uh rent seeking available. So none of the stuff people are doing wrong with IP and with their houses. Yeah. So, so for the paflop to be commoditized and what that actually means is there's many chips that the idea of a payoff flop the idea of a chip that can do a floating point calculation is obviously a commodity. There's many chips you can buy that can do floating point calculations. Nvidia GPUs, AMD GPUs, even Intel's things are capable of doing floatingoint calculations. Many many of them. Can you give people a sense of how much compute one pa flop is? Like how much compute in an iPhone? How much compute in a data center? So pa is 10^ the 15. Um, an iPhone is on the order of 10 teraflops. So, a 100 iPhones is one payoff. Got it. So, maybe a 100 teraflops in a new iPhone, 100 tops. So, maybe it's 10 iPhones, but somewhere between 10 and 100 iPhones. And so, if you succeed in that mission and the pay to flop becomes a commodity, what does the world look like? So, currently there's an extreme premium for Nvidia flops over other flops. When you look at the 4090 versus the 7900 XTX, they're very similar looking cards. They have very similar natural hardware. Not I mean there's like there's nuance and details here. But my point is per flop there's a 2 to 3x premium for Nvidia hardware because of the network effect because of CUDA because of the moat. Yes. So there's that 2 to 3x premium and then there's another 2 to 3x premium which is a technical premium where people buy these data center cards that use like HBM memory because has higher bandwidth and lower power but I don't think you need that either. I think what you basically want is a huge number of racks of consumer GPUs uh running your models. So just to to be clear there are two kinds of GPUs that are being sold. There are kinds that are intended to be put in data centers and there are kinds that are sold directly to the consumer. and these two things have different margins. It's not all about margins. There is a margin aspect to it, but there's also just some technical decisions being made in the data center GPUs that make them more expensive. So, when you look at just a flop, if you think about a flop on an AMD consumer card versus a flop on an Nvidia data center card, there's a 10x price difference in that flop. And that 10x is what I want to commoditize. Mhm. And then also I think it could be more like a 100x if there was more of a market down here. There's not that much of a market for consumer AMD flops. There's a huge market for Nvidia data center flops. If there's more of a market down here for just like any kind of flops, all flops are like commoditiz. Every flop should be equivalent. That's what a commodity really is. Compare a fungeible token to a nonfgeible token. I don't I want flops to be funible. I want every flop to be created equal. That's the dream. That's the dream of the tiny. All flops are created equal. And Tiny allows you to use those flops to do useful compute. And so you just started using some flops from AMD. Been using AMD for a long time. AMD finally came around and agreed to give me some computers. Okay. Again, I can buy the computers, but I like to I like to test for buyin. are you interested in what I'm doing or not? Thank you for the computers, AMD. A good cultural test and I think that AMD passing my cultural test means that they're understanding the value of this kind of stuff and I see a bright future for them. So you have this external culture test but also you are running a very unique internal culture around how tiny is organized and managed. Maybe you can talk a little bit about that. Um I don't think that it's like that radical anymore. I think everything is basically going to go to this format. So, we'll start with like we don't do interviews. Your resume goes right in the trash. God, you went to college. Yeah, I don't care about that. The only way that we hire is from people who've contributed to the tiny grad repo. Mhm. And then we have bounties. So, you can get paid right away. And if you are really skilled, you can make we we had one guy who's just like tearing through the bounties and he was like making two grand a week just tearing through things basically and like not even full-time. If you are very skilled, you can get paid a full-time salary off of bounties alone. Are these folks contributing to your bounties? Are they themselves using AI for coding? The thing about using AI for coding is AI is below the bar of the person we would hire at Tiny Corp. So, some companies may have a very low bar. If you have a very low bar and you you like if you have employees that are worse coders than chat GPT, oh god, how did you hire them? What was your process here? uh they should all be fired and they should all be replaced by judgment team. So we encourage everybody to use AI to the fullest of their ability. This isn't like we're not going to like oh you can't use AI for the interview. No, use AI. Please use AI. Please use AI when you work here. The only thing that I care about at the end of the day is the final product. And I think that everything is going to move. It's a machine learning concept. You have a training set and a test set. And you want your training set and your test set to come from the same distribution. If your interview is your training set and the actual work is the test set, you want your interview and your work to be as close as possible together. Think about it. If you're a fang company and you do leak code interviews and then what you actually have to do is fix this bug in this web endpoint for people in Nigeria trying to pay in Empa like there's just there's such a disconnect there. So that disconnect should go to zero. And that's kind of the first premise of of Tiny Corp. The only way to get hired here is to contribute to tiny grad and then once you do get hired here, it's the same job. Are there specific tools that you feel like are better and worse for assisting these top level coders currently? No, it's it's all the same knowledge as everybody else. I think that they're You don't have a preference amongst them. I think they're good for different things. Um, Chad JPT is probably the all-around best. Uh, Grock is recent. It's got great recency, but it's prone to hallucination. Uh, and then Deep Seek is the best at like thinking. If you want something that's really going to think through something, JBT is kind of lazy. Deep Seek works hard. Uh, maybe something to be said there about America and China, but uh, yeah. So, yeah, I think I think I use some combination of Deep Seek, Chad GPD, and Grock. Same with everybody else. One of the risks that you and I have talked about with AI and of course you're not a doomer in the Udkowski sense is what you've referred to as wireheading. What is that risk and do you see that happening now? So wireheading is simply when you've hijacked your own reward function. So your brain has some reward function. Your brain has things that it finds pleasurable, like food, like sex, like productive work hopefully. But it unfortunately also has other things that it finds pleasurable, like Tik Tok and Twitter and fentinel and meth. Uh, and these are unfortunate because they're nonproductive. They're these they're these non-productive ways that stimulate your your your pleasure center. I don't think they're all like truly terrible things and in moderation, whatever. But the the term wireheading comes from this experiment done on rats and they drill a little hole in the back of the rat's brain uh bring little little electrode right into the brain stem and uh the electrode would would pulse a little bit of electricity deep down in the brain where your pleasure center is and hooked it up to a button and the button gives you a little electricity and the rat's like, "Oh, button. Oh, button. Yeah, button. button. Oh, button button button. And and the rats die and they don't die because of a overdose of pleasure or anything like this. They die because why would you eat when you could press button? Entertaining ourselves to death. Entertaining ourselves to death. Amusing ourselves to death. I think that's the that's the Neil Postman, right? Uh yeah. So I think that this is that this is definitely happening and that we will lose some chunk of humanity to it. Do you see it happening already? Yeah, but not to the extremes which are well. I was talking to a 21-year-old who just graduated from a great school and she told me that a big chunk of her classmates are dysfunctionally addicted to Tik Tok. As in, they live with their parents. They can't get out of bed and do stuff. They aren't looking for jobs. They're just watching Tik Tok all day. Do you think we're starting to head in that direction? I'm always reluctant to you can go back to like the quotes where Socrates said, "Wow, the youth of today is is so is so corrupt and obsessed with there's always that article, right? There's always that article of the older people saying the kids are not all right." Yeah. So, I'm not so sure that we've really even seen it yet. Um, and I'll get to what it might sort of look like. And then people like, "Oh, fentanyl. People are opiate addicts." Yeah, but like then you go back to like the opium wars a 100 years ago. I'm not so sure this stuff was that different. I mean, it's stronger. Yeah, but I don't know. It's all It's all interpreted through a cultural lens, right? There's no problem with Fentel in China today. Well, there's no crisis of meaning and purpose. Yeah. So, I'm not so sure that these things even Tik Tok are are reflective of it. But there's I mean, there's a great story. It's uh it's uh My Little Pony friendship is optimal. Uh and I'm not going to I'm not going to give away the You're going to out yourself as a brony. Oh, I mean I have watched many have watched many episodes of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. I can name the core six, uh, you know. So, yeah. Um, I can name the different types of ponies. Yeah, I do. So, the rationalist version. Yeah. And and I I think that that wire heading is going to look a lot more like that. Or we can talk about the concept of heaven banning. Heaven banning. It's some guy on on Twitter near Sion uh popularized it and it's an interesting idea where heaven banning is this imagine you're posting on uh social media you're getting lots of replies praising you giving you the kind of feedback you're looking for giving you likes giving you retweets but of course all of these people you're interacting with are AI bots I don't think that wireheading is possible without sufficiently advanced intelligence I don't think that humans I mean maybe if you do it like with a drill and an electrode, sure you do a drill and an electrode will bypass anything. But if you're trying to do wireheading through an app, I don't think wireheading through an app is going to be possible until that app has sufficiently more intelligence than you. What are you doing personally today yourself to protect yourself from wireheading and various kinds of amusing oursel to death addictions? There's many you you've asked several of these sort of questions like They're like alpha mining. And I feel that there's way too much of this in the world. Like way too much of these like, "Oh, can you tell me the secret to being a good programmer?" And I tell people the story. You know how I became a good programmer? I'm working on it. Oh, no, no, no, no, no. So, there's a volcano. It's a true story. Uh, so, so, so in in in uh in Indonesia, so you know, there's the island with Bali. Uh, you can go all the way to the west of that island, and then you can get on a boat, and that boat will take you to the main island. Mhm. And in the main island, there's this city called Ban Yuanji. No one's heard of this city. Maybe you've heard of Jakarta, maybe you've heard of Surupaya, but no one's heard of Ban Yuanji. Okay. And then an hour outside of Banuangi, there is this volcano called Aenet. And this volcano is the only volcano in the world where there is blue flames. There's sulfur released by the volcano. The sulfur is lit on fire and it turns blue. So one night I set out in a car, went to the volcano. You have to climb up the volcano. I rented a gas mask from an Indonesian man. Just true story. I put that I put the gas mask on and I I I climbed down to the bottom of the volcano and I saw the blue flames and at that point I understood programming. Okay. So just to defend my question because I feel like it it requires defending. People like Cal Newport, Digital Minimalism, have written books with the intention of helping people uh protect themselves against companies spending billions of dollars with data scientists to monopolize their attention and change how they think. You have no such recommendations to offer and think it's an illegitimate exercise to make such recommendations. Is that the same guy who made Newport cigarettes? I don't think so. I I'm sure they were there to help people, too. Big family. Big family. Lots of different or you can read seven habits there. Newports highly effective people or how to make friends and influence people or the 4-hour work week or you can read. And do you think those things are valueless? Yeah, of course. You don't think people picking up habits by mimisis is useful? I mean, I don't think they're like valueless. Like they're fine books to read. They're not like, "Oh god, you read that book. It's a terrible book and it'll lead you in the wrong way." But no, I I don't think that there are I think that a lot of people spend way too much time thinking about what I should do or how I should optimize things and they should actually just do things. I think that people spend a lot of time in transances, failing to introspect about how they're thinking, how they're spending their time. And I think helping people break that trance enables people to live more self-directed lives instead of falling victim to companies that just want their attention for money. I'm an emo kid. Non-conforming as can be. You'd be non-conforming, too, if you look just like me. All right. Well, is that a good place to leave it? Those are my questions. Thanks for being on, George Hots. I appreciate it. Bye, Amanda Show. Watch the other episodes. Watch my Twitch stream. Don't watch my Twitch stream. Thank you for listening to this episode of Endgame. Please follow me on X, Amanda Casset. Two S's, two T's. Follow the company I founded, Serotonin HQ, and listen wherever you get your podcast.
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