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

I never knew that you worked on the Mars rover for NASA. That's so fucking cool. Well, what's really wild is my name, Mark Rober, is only two letters off for Mars rover. If you change the K to an S and the B to a V. And honestly, it was meant to be. It took me like four years working at NASA to realize that. Just one day I'm like, oh, dang. What did you do? So I'm a mechanical engineer.

uh by trade i got my bachelor's and master's in that and i worked on the rover that's on mars for like seven years so the way it works they just throw you into the deep end and like i'm i was responsible for a chunk of the rover And so, you know, I design what it should look like. I, you know, you test it, you integrate it, you put it together. You have a team of people working with you. They have gray beers. They call them at NASA.

who look at your design and tell you all the reasons it sucks. So you go back and change it. This sounds like some Gandalf the White. Like you need to go and pay homage to the dude at the top of the mountain. That's effectively what it is. But they're smart. They know what they're doing. They've put stuff in.

space before and so they give it to the young the young folks who are just coming up to and they literally you're i was in charge of a trunk on the top of the rover the arm go digs in the dirt takes that sample puts into the belly of the rover and like i designed the hardware to accept that And it's still working. Fingers crossed on Mars. That's still going. Yeah. Which is wild when you look up at the sky. All the stars look the same. Mars has a little bit of red tint to it.

right you know where your baby is yeah and it's like that's 90 million miles away and i have i've touched an injury i've touched something that's rolling around on on that dot in the sky and what's really cool is on earth things oxidize and break down. So they crumble and go away, right? So let's say, you know, thanks to AI or whatever you want to say, a million years from now, our species is done.

There won't be any, if you came here, you would just see nature. Like at that point, everything's broken down and crumbled and rested and gone away. So the aliens would come and they just see this lush planet. And then they'd go to Mars and be like.

what the hell are these? Because on Mars, there's no oxygen and stuff doesn't break down. So a million years from now, those rovers are going to be sitting there spaced. Your shit's going to still be there. And it's like, where the hell did this come from? What did you learn? that you didn't understand about payloads going into space. What's interesting about that? You know, one thing that's interesting about space is like there's no air resistance.

So once you get up there and you start, you just thrust at the beginning, essentially. You get up to about 25,000 miles per hour. That's like five times faster than a bullet. And then you just coast. for the rest of the period right you just accelerate and then you go to where mars will be in nine months and they have and you get like three or four times do little course corrections but those motors we call them mouse fart motors

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

Just to the side. And because of that, okay, now you're going to hit Mars when it comes around. So it's really interesting, the math orbital mechanics. It seems really complicated, but because there is no friction, it's like, you know. For a computer, it's pretty easy to do. And then we eventually learned tricks of like orbital slingshots. So you actually go around planets and you pick up speeds, kind of like, you kind of slingshot around, right? So it's a really fascinating...

you know, science. But it's the equivalent of hitting a golf ball in New York City and getting a hole-in-one in LA. That's the scale of landing something on Mars. Have you ever read Seven Eves by Neil Stevenson? No. Heard of it. Really cool. Really cool book. Great. Anyone that wants a sci-fi recommendation should read it. The moon explodes in the first line of the book. The moon exploded. That's a hook.

During that, you learn a lot about orbital dynamics because they repurpose the ISS into what will be the habitat for Earth. Because if this happened, and Neil Stevenson's hard sci-fi technically, so it should be correct. Love it. basically what would happen, it breaks apart. You never find out why it broke apart, it just did. And there's seven pieces that it breaks into, but...

they realized that over time those seven pieces would all be orbiting around each other and they would crash into each other and they would make 14 and 28. And then it would basically turn into what they called a hard rain, which would be... all of this material when it was no longer able to sustain itself in orbit would come down to earth and it would just be, so it's 5,000 years or whatever it is, that it's inhospitable. So you need to go up there.

So they, I think they have 300 days to get themselves off the planet and they're using all of these pods and there's all the diplomacy, there's all of the politics of what's happening down on earth. Like how many people want to go from there? And obviously all of the politicians are using every bit of fuckery that they can to get their family.

off right you know playing with the system and then they have to have new laws in space what does it mean if you kill someone in space is that prison do you just put them out the airlock and one of the things that i was learning about were um uh apogees and zeniths and the way that orbital dynamics and orbital getting two things to come together because it's not it's not just

three dimensions it's also the angle and the speed and the map it's so even if it is easy for a computer uh it sounded pretty fucking hard yeah and it's a real problem like the concept of space junk

of like if to your point if two satellites crash into each other in space and they each create you know 5 000 pieces of debris Now you have to track all 5,000 of those and you could have a runaway problem where just stuff just starts crashing. Like when the moon exploded. Yeah, exactly. But with our own satellites. So that's why we track everything over the size. I think it is a golf ball. we know where it is at all times orbiting our planet. There's no vacuum cleaner to just go up and...

No, not yet. But there are missions of like, how do we clean up space junk? They're actively working on ways to go up and like clean defunct satellites. And now if you put something up, we just, I just built a satellite, which is wild. You could do that where you.

We put it into space. You can upload your picture to it. And there's a screen that will display a picture. And then there's a camera that will take a picture of that. So basically you get a selfie in space. You go to spaceselfie.com. We did it for free. as like an outreach to kids to get stoked about space. And we built this and launched it like six months ago. We have a million pictures people have submitted. We're actively taking them every day.

But part of that is when you put that up, you have to have a de-orbit plan. So in about five years, it will come back down and burn up. Wow. That's like being allowed into a country on a visa. Yeah. And them saying, and when do you intend on leaving? That's 100%. When do you present on, like, suiciding yourself? Crash landing this thing back then. Yeah, well, it burns up, right? So the friction is so high. Oh, that would be enough. Yeah, so most stuff, there's very few. It's disposable.

Yeah, essentially. Yeah. So that's why as long as you decommission means you come to a low enough altitude, there's enough air molecules there that you start getting more and more drag. It starts heating up and nothing makes it to the ground. Wow. Okay.

I learned about astropolitics. Oh, yeah. Now that. I think is, who owns the moon? Who owns this particular meteor? Is the geostationary territory directly above your country, yours? How far out? What if I create something that's geostationary and is a little bit further out than that? And I think that sort of stuff to me is it's the perfect intersection of this should be sci-fi, but it has to be real life. Yeah.

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

we captured some asteroid and managed to double the entire planet's lithium or gold. What happens to the stock market? What does it mean? Because almost all of the way that those resources are put together is done based on a a closed system yeah and then if you start adding stuff into the closed system all the maths breaks well this is where like ai gets weird right it's just like all the rules that have normally applied just like don't and i don't know

There's a world where we see some pretty fundamental changes. Well, I mean, just like going, you know, for this analogy before, but, you know, going from the, you know, farming agriculture to the industrial revolution. Like, that was a big change for society. To go through that was kind of painful. There was a lot of farmers that ended up having to go to the factories, right? And I think we're going to see that in the next.

20 years, like a similar change, where it's just a big, instead of just like, oh, here's a better way to farm, here's a better way to farm. Those are incremental changes over time. Farming to the factories was a big, massive step change. And I feel like those kind of things are coming down the pipeline. There was a whole industry. I think it was muck shovelers in New York City. The horses.

Because everything was horse-drawn carriage. So it's not just the main thing, it's all of the ancillary industries that trickle down from it. That's right. And that's going to go. Yeah, but almost potentially even more because it's like the computers can do just all of the jobs. You know, it's like generally you can go from, oh, there was this hill, the water rose. Okay, now let's go over to this other hill, you know.

At some point, are there hills left, right? And what does that mean? What are some of the things you learned from working at NASA that sort of permanently rewired the way that you... approach projects or productivity or efficiency there must be some fundamental principles that were pretty novel there yeah i think it's this idea of just like you know you know i like building things right

And the number one mistake people make when they try and make something is they try and make the final version first. Like, I want to build a bird feeder. I'm going to build the bird feeder, but I'm going to build the final version of it out of the gate. As opposed to, which is how you put stuff on Mars and really make anything, prototypes. You just do something quick and dirty first. In fact, you do like four of them. And you tweak and try, and those, they shouldn't be pretty, they're ugly.

They're meant to just be tasks and you learn from them. And then once you've established all those learnings, and by the way, some of those prototypes, you break. You intentionally fail them to learn the limits. And then once you've done all that learning, now you know enough to attempt the final thing.

and so really ingrained in the philosophy of nasa which is something i've now taken into my life and how i make builds for my youtube channel even approach youtube is like i don't know like i don't know the answer but you know what i could test to find out so Whenever we do anything, it's like there's so many versions that fail before you get to the final output. And failing is the goal. Like you want to break this thing. So if I know I have to design the wheels for the rover.

You know, I'm going to make them out of three materials. I'm going to do some analysis on a computer and then I'm going to have a bunch of different thicknesses and I'm going to test it and I'm going to smash it. I'm going to break it because now I'm confident when I have my final answer. I know exactly why it is and the full limits of it, like what it's capable of. What's your relationship like with failure?

I like I embrace failure and I like I teach that so in my videos so we just did a video where we made a goalie robot that goes back and forth at like 40 miles an hour and then you track the soccer ball the football And then the goalie will move to stop the shot from going in. And Cristiano Ronaldo tried to go against it. And the punchline is he has no prayer. Even from the penalty kick spot, kicking it.

80 miles an hour, this thing, in the first six milliseconds, we knew where the goalie needed to be. That means the ball goes from here. Once it's moved an inch, we know exactly where we need to be. How? Because you just have three points. We're tracking at 500 hertz. Right. Or sorry, yeah, 500 hertz. So it's like every two milliseconds, we take a snapshot, snapshot, snapshot.

and so you just three points make two points make a line connect that line okay we need to go right there so literally it's it's less than a blink and half of a blink of an eye and it's already in spot it feels like it probably hasn't even left his foot yeah that's right When we know, and then it takes a little bit of time, even at 40 miles an hour, takes some time. Nine in a bit of wobble. Yeah. Yeah, just whoop. So in that, though, we failed so many times, right?

And to me, failure is part of the process. And I want to show, you know, especially kids who watch the video, I want them to know that, that this is the case, right? We started a company called Crunch Labs that is like basically these toys that deliver your money.

porch every month you put them together and then there's a video for me where i teach you like the juicy physics that make the toy work a lot of times with those toys they don't quite work perfectly like we intentionally make it so right when you put it together like the disc launcher is the first one

It's not optimal flying. If we want them to tweak and to change, to move this rubber band here and to push this a little bit, oh, and now, oh, now I'm getting to go farther. And that victory feels so much better than if it just worked out of the gate, right?

You know the IKEA effect? Yeah, I think I've heard of those. Same thing. It's the difference between pick your own strawberries and cheap strawberries, right? I picked my own strawberries. I really care about this thing. You can go to IKEA, which is... nice budget furniture, I guess. And people love their IKEA pieces more than nicer, more expensive pieces.

that were prefabricated and made for them. And I think they measure that by like how long you hold on to it, right? You're much less likely to give away the IKEA furniture because you put that. I can spend an afternoon with that. We had an argument about that. I'm not going to give it away.

So to me, like I treat my, I treat challenges sort of like a video game. It's like gamification where, you know, a lot of times what happens is people internalize failure and they say like, you have a bad test. I'm just. I'm bad at school. A bad breakup, I'm not good at the love thing. Business fails, I suck at business. But in like video games, you know, if you pick up the controller and you go and you fall into a pit, you're not like, oh, I'm bad at video games.

And I don't want to do this. This sucks. Immediately you're like, oh shoot, I want to try this again. What did I learn? I'm going to go a little faster. I'm going to jump a little earlier, right? You're excited because you're not. you don't view it you're not viewing the failure as internally and you're focused on you know rescuing princess from bowser you're focusing on the end goal and so if you could treat

Your life challenges and failure like that kind of gamify it. It's a framework that really works. And I feel like this is my approach. For the videos we do, like this Ronaldo one, or really any one that I've attempted, we did another one of a dartboard. Same thing, that moves, tracks the dart. Although in that one, if you give the dart to your buddy, then it can register that it's his dart, and then the board...

moves the opposite way. So instead of getting a bullseye, he can't even hit the board. And there again, tons of failures, but it wasn't like I suck at this. It's like, okay, I know one more way not to do this.

It stings. It still stings, just like it stings in a video game. But you're like, you know what? Let's get back on it. Let's try again. What do you think is the difference between people that play video games and happily will have a go at the same level over and over again and people that... go through a breakup or try to give a presentation at work and it doesn't go well or apply for a job. You're right. The fundamental is the same. This is an iterative game.

You have multiple lives at this thing. How successful have you been at being able to take the learnings from science experiment across into real life? I mean, I think it works in real life too. Like you see this, for example, with kids, like toddlers, right? When they're learning to walk, when they don't like successfully walk.

they're not like, oh, I suck at this, right? They're immediately excited to try again. And as a result, we learn more in the ages of zero to five than we do at any other period. Because we're just like, failure isn't in our brains. We're just excited to learn and do cool stuff, right? And I do genuinely feel like in my life, I love opportunities for mastery and opportunities to...

get better at something and to view it like a video game. Like I don't like public speaking. Truly. I hate it. It makes me really nervous. And that's one of my goals right now that I'm working on. I've got like a speaking coach. I've got a Ted talk coming up in April. Like. I really want to get the public speaking as like something I actually enjoy, right? And I feel like I'm really good at it. Or like, you know, going to the gym. I'd never worked out really at all in my life.

two years ago about i was like i think i just want to try this thing and it's an opportunity every day for an hour where i could just be perfect i could just give it everything i can And to see the incremental results of literally like a video game leveling up. Sometimes some stuff doesn't work, some stuff does. I crave those opportunities. And I've lost. Gained like 30 pounds of muscle, lost 15 pounds of fat in two years now. Those noob gains, dude. Oh man, I remember them so well.

nearly 20 years ago for me now when I started training. Yeah, I mean, it's great. It's one of the few things in life where you get a preview of what you will be like if you keep doing this in the future. The pump preview. So the fact that if... I try to build a car. Yeah. I'm not as good as I will be at building cars in six months time now because I just tried to build a car. Yeah. But if I go to the gym and I get a pump on, that is me flat in six months.

If I keep going. I love that. I've never heard of that. One of the few things that you get a preview of the future. Try to learn Italian. Yeah. You don't briefly become better at Italian before becoming worse at Italian. Like you just accumulate it over time and over time and over time. That's so good. I've never heard of that or thought of it that way. Does that still work then?

You said the noob gains. Now what happens when you get the pump on? You're like, I will never be that. That's only my pump self. I suppose. Well, I guess it depends how consistent you're training. That is one of the reasons it's so addictive that people keep going. Even if you think I've hit my limit, this is as much muscle as my body's going.

to be able to carry without adding in some you know uh enhancement uh you still want to chase it because even if it's just for the rest of the day you know i still look pretty jacked um what uh

Talk to me about that mastery thing. I think that you're right. Me and you both have a eye for detail degree of obsession. How have you come to learn? balancing that because there's a lot of benefits that come from it. But there's also, it can be a painful compulsion to have. yeah i mean it's like with everything it's like moderation like taking it to a limit i think i am good at saying no to a lot and which can help so it's like i don't take a lot on like if

You know, I've got like five really close friends as opposed to like 50 kind of good friends. A similar thing. So I'll pick a handful of things that I will go deep on. I think where it can get tough is you're trying to go deep on everything. And then you're going to get overwhelmed and burn out. Um, but yeah, I mean, I think there's a cost for everything. Like I probably, yeah. Where it's like, if you, if you are.

If you're too focused on a thing at the cost of a lot of other things, then it can be a challenge. And I do have some, you know, I have this conversation with Mr. Beast. He's another YouTuber. He's like the biggest YouTuber in the world. And he's like, you could be me or you could be happy. Like, choose which one. And he admits. Oh, Jimmy. He has a very dopaminergic brain. And, like, dopamine.

isn't enter dopamine isn't interested in having things dopamine is interested in getting things like that's the reward chemical right and he loves leveling up but it's really hard for him you know if he gets a video that gets 300 million views he's like why couldn't that have been 330 million right and i'm quoting him here like he's self-aware but it doesn't change the fact that it's like

You know, and so when you look at someone like that, or like an Elon Musk is sort of a similar brain, it's like, you don't want their brains. And like, they'll tell you, you don't want their brains. Like they can't. There's a level where they can't be satisfied because they just need more. And it leads, I think, a lot of the amazing change that has come in our world historically, you know, if you look back, was kind of people with similar brains who are just so driven for more.

that they affect history it's very adaptive right to keep on pushing because you only need one or two people like that in a tribe yeah and they will find the new valley that's got the bushes that have the fruit yes and

Some of them will die, but so what? Like only a few of them will die. But the ones that do decide, I think about Brian Johnson. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like this. I think of him or like an Elon or even the Mr. Beast. They're kind of like scouts in an army. Totally. Wouldn't do to have an army filled with scouts.

frankly i don't want to be a scout i don't want to climb up that cliff that's probably treacherous and very well may die yeah uh but they'll go up there and tell us they'll come back and tell us what they've seen yeah and we will benefit from that

That's right. And I tell Jimmy this and he's aware of it. He's like whacking through the bush. And so many times he waxed on a path that was just terrible. Mr. Beast Burger, right? Whatever. He's had a lot of admitted like dead ends. But what's beautiful.

is that then I see the ones that work and it's like, oh, thank you. Now I could trodden this path that's hacked down basically. Yes. And obviously do my own versions of that, but like the main path, people like that help break these glass ceilings and that benefit. It's a lot of others. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I do think, though, that that feature of sort of the dopamine wearing off, I do feel like that is a...

that is a feature and not a bug of our brains, right? In the sense that like, let's say there's like a coyote chasing a bunny and like, The bunny leaps out of the way and makes this amazing move and survives that, right? You're going to get a lot of reward chemicals to your brain being like, good job, you lived. Now I have a chance to...

continue to pass this DNA on that's inside you, you're going to get rewarded. And there was probably some bunnies in the population who had that dopamine last for like, three weeks just being like resting on the laurels of this sick mood I'm the fucking LeBron James I'm the LeBron James just sitting back relaxing eating thinking about that immediately

Those genes are removed from the gene pool because they basked in that. So there's this like sweet spot of like, I'm going to make you feel good about this, but then I'm going to make it go away. So you want to try again. And I think that's a mistake people make with burnout.

is like, it's kind of like running on a treadmill. When you get on the treadmill, it's exciting. You're getting those reward chemicals. This is really fun. And what happens eventually, though, is like those reward chemicals subside, but you're still sprinting. because you crank this treadmill because you could because it's exciting and i think burnout is when you know you're still putting in the same input but you're not getting the reward chemicals for it and so

One thing I really try and do is like keep my treadmill at like a jogging pace. Like I can do this. There was a time in the YouTube algorithm where like they wanted, if you did daily vlogs, that was like what you need to do to be successful. and i was like i can't do that i can do like one a month and i've just kind of like tortoise in the hair of this thing and now 14 years later we have got like 72 million subscribers and still going and still going and still stoked and like

I'm as far away from burnout as I've ever been. You know the Red Queen effect? No. So there's a scene in Alice in Wonderland where Alice is running around the tree. and she has to run faster and faster and faster and faster and faster and doesn't get anywhere. And the queen says, you see, my dear, you now have to run as fast as you can just stay in the same place.

And I think about when people overcomplicate their lives, which everybody falls prey to. Like, this is me speaking to me. Fucking speak dumb. But when people overcomplicate their lives, you're able to... I think humans are pretty good at dealing with pace. Yeah. They're able to deal with difficulty, but not complexity. And I think that it's the complexity. complication really is damaging to the system.

If you've got a day and you look at it and there's five different things that you need to do and it's got to finish my taxes. I've got that really important call to do with the team and that my mom's coming around. I'm going to have to have that conversation with her and that's going to be awkward. And then I need to write that thing.

it feels horrible. Whereas if you just had a full day of one of those things back to back, it feels a little bit more simple. And that was all you did with your life. So a couple of things like putting too much on your plate would be like going into a buffet.

and piling, literally piling up all of this workload and then assuming that your stomach would expand to be able to fill it. Like, oh, I'm going to be able to fit all of this in because I said I would do it. I will be able to do it, which is not the way that it was in the same way as no matter how delicious the buffet is.

is yeah your stomach isn't going to just infinitely expand to be able to fit the food yeah there's only 24 hours in a day correct and then the same thing for the complexity point that your system is built to handle uh work but it's not built to handle complication We'll get back to talking in just one second, but first, if you

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The link in the description below or heading to functionhealth.com slash modern wisdom. That's functionhealth.com slash modern wisdom. That's an interesting point. I wonder if there's a correlation to like really successful human beings who can like.

handle like a lot of complexity like certain brains probably can just handle it better right 100 to be fair like i mean say what you want about elon but like i think that is something his brain does well with parallel processing king yeah that the the executive function thing but this is why you have sort of maker mode and manager mode in paul graham language or you know you tend to have a a coo that's right and then you have like a chief innovation

officer or something and the two they might be friends but they've got fuck all in common yeah apart from the fact they work for the same company that's me and my COO Jim 100% like he is very I'm good at like

building a train and he is good about like keeping the trains running on time and just like you know all the things with the train station that i'm not good at and not interested at you also secretly worked at apple yes what was that like I was there for like five years. I was working in their special projects group doing product design on the Apple car. I don't know if I'm supposed to say that. That's fucking sick. So you went NASA? Yeah. Apple?

Technically, there was two years in there where I worked for a Halloween company. Like costumes? Yes, costumes. Okay. That feels a little bit like a pivot. I think you can say that from NASA, from NASA engineered to making Halloween costumes. Brief hiatus in between NASA and Apple. It was like an entrepreneurial thing because my first video ever was a Halloween costume wearing an iPad on front and iPad in back.

of me you like cut a hole in the shirt and it looks like you have a hole in your body if you do a facetime call because the facetime camera pointing forward will record the hand and it shows it on the back and it went really viral that was my first ever video

And I was like, dang, I have more ideas than this. So I basically done one video a month since then. But part of that were people like, cool idea, bro, but I don't have $1,200 for Halloween costume. So the next year I was like, oh, we just had a design on the shirt.

let's say it was like some guy's scary guy looking eye. And then I made a free app that had an eyeball that I filmed that was moving around. If you cut a hole in the shirt, duct tape your phone to the back of the shirt, it looks like you have this like animated t-shirt that looked wild.

And that was pretty successful. So I did that like nights and weekends, grinding, made this free app, made the t-shirts. And it went well enough that like a year later, I sold the whole thing to these guys in the UK who make morph suits, Halloween. costumes and then i worked for them for two years and so that was like it was more of like an entrepreneurial opportunity and people were like how could you leave nasa for that but like

It was, you know, it's one of those things that in the moment, it made a lot of sense. It wasn't the rovers on Mars. Yeah. What are you going to do? Okay. Then you do Apple. I went and looked at all of the patents that you've got registered online.

It's not a small number. There's quite a few. Well, there's one that I was like lead author on, which is actually a funny story because someone at Apple was like, hey, you have all these cool ideas for YouTube. Where's your banger idea for Apple? And literally like a week and a half later, I'm in a meeting about some stupid software tool. And then I had this idea of like, what happens when you combine a virtual reality with a self-driving car? Like, what are the implications of that?

i literally started shaking because i was like whoa there's so much here essentially like a car is the world's greatest motion simulator so if you go to an amusement park and you have motion simulators to simulate moving forward, they just tilt you back like this. But then your butt's like, wait, but now there's no pressure on my butt. That doesn't feel quite right. But in a car, you could actually simulate moving forward by moving the car. So it's like, there's a lot of entertainment and...

just ways not to get motion sick, right? Because like 40% of people struggle for motion sickness. We're going to be in the self-driving cars, but we're having all this time, but you can't use it if you still have to stare out the window. So is there a way with virtual reality?

that you can actually be way less motion sick and actually watch movies or work on your computer. And there's a lot in the patent and we got like everything we asked for, which means we're sort of the first ones to really look at this. And I still think that's coming down the pipeline.

Could you do something like, because it's typically the back of cars, not the front, right? That people have with motion sickness. Yeah, but that's only because you can't see what's going on. So my point being, I wonder if you could somehow make the windows. project the whatever you need in order to be able to help people feel better, as opposed to having to wear it. I'm trying to work out how you integrate it into the car itself.

Yeah, but I mean, imagine though virtual reality in augmented, they're going to get to a point where it's essentially wearing sunglasses. So it's not this big luggy thing. And as long as then... As long as you have things in your visual field showing the motion of the car and where it's going to go, you can solve a lot of motion sickness. Right. And so then you can have your computer screen there and be working on it as long as you're getting the inputs.

but you could also do like gaming stuff where it's like you pull up you know you're leaving your house but it's like a grand theft auto insane where it's like you put this on suddenly your buddy just robbed the bank

They're coming down the steps. They're like, go, go, go. And you're accelerating in real life and feeling that. But in the game, you're actually like feeling that's actually happening because it knows your destination. And so when in the game, you're coming up an alley and it's like, oh, there's nowhere to turn. You're hosed.

But at the last second, it's like, oh, you make a right. In reality, that was just a right turn. But in the game, it was like this insane thing. Also, you have all these other cars out. You know where all the potholes are. If you close your eyes, I've done this test. If you go over a paw or a speed bump, it feels a lot like running over a zombie.

But in the game, right, there's actually, you really need autonomous driving for this because there's going to be some people that are really not focused on the road. Oh, no, no, this is, it's autonomous driving. This is virtual reality combined with autonomous driving. And what is the implication? I was just thinking about if somebody was to do this whilst trying.

to drive normally you're not allowed to do that so okay what's your perspective given that you've done a lot of work in the ar vr space you've thought about it a good bit What's your perspective on kind of how it's delivered? Because I think I had a XXX girlfriend got me an Oculus Go, which was the all-in-one. Fuck.

years ago something like that and uh i remember thinking wow i mean this is like pretty not bad it's a bit pixely but this is not bad surely surely no time at all this is going to come yeah apple vision pro I think as many people returned them as bought them, which for Apple is like, oh, and maybe it's the V1 and it's going to be expensive and the trickle down, it's three grand, but then it's only going to be 500 in a few years' time and so on and so forth.

How do you think the world of AR and VR technology has sort of delivered on the promises that we assumed and what's gone on? What's the journey there? They just don't have the killer app, right? Like it's... Everyone who puts it on is like, this is the craziest thing I've ever experienced. And they love it, and then they put it on the shelf and never take it off the shelf. Myself included. I've had a Go, a Rift, and an Apple Vision Pro.

And I never use them. And it's like, I wish they just had the killer app. Like I would want. What's the killer app? I don't know. I mean like courtside at a basketball game. right give you access to like i want to watch the basketball game real time like i'm courtside or even better in a seat you can't even get put it on the crossbar at a at a soccer match right you can't sit there

But now I get to watch everything. I mean, Messi's coming down and it goes in, right? I don't understand why they haven't just attacked that aspect of it. But like live sports seems like a great first place to start. I'm very non-conspiratorial. That's my tendency. I tend to believe the mainstream to a degree. Same. Skeptical of most people, but...

Okay, so what is your opinion on conspiracy theorists? Like, why do they exist? Like, what is... My opinion on conspiracy theorists, I think that they're exciting. Like the theories are exciting. A much more exciting way to think about the world. A big part of it is this idea called compensatory control. So if you... get people to imagine an uncertain medical diagnosis, they're more likely to see patterns in random meaningless static. The same thing happened, I think, during COVID.

Before there was enough evidence to know that the lab leak was legitimate, a lot of people hooked into that because it's way easier to think that... this global pandemic is because of some malign scientist than the chance mutation of some silly little microbe. If it's up to chance, what control do I have over this?

But if I can personify it, it's myth, it's archetype, right? It's mythology. It's like a personification of this. There's good and there's bad and there's evil. And, oh, I could have, I think a lot of it is to do with control. So like having a reason. If the Illuminati exists and is running everything, it's a nice model that just explains everything. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, it's not everything. I'm sure there's a million reasons. I've had some really great guys on that.

that do uh uh conspirituality uh derek bearers from that uh podcast was real interesting they know they wrote a book about the psychology of conspiracism but i'm uh

I'm kind of fascinated by it. Even though I'm not, I get to watch it. It's like, I don't know, someone else loving a sport and you not being a fan of it. It's kind of interesting to watch this. What do you think? What's your perspective on conspiracy theorists? I think similar. I think as humans, we're just hardwired to recognize patterns.

that's probably evolutionarily like been good and helped us survive if you you know every time those bushes moved you know four to five times a tiger came out i'm going to make a pattern that that's what's happening right um I think, I think I have empathy for them, really. Like when people, even like flat earthers and stuff, and they're like, you idiot. Like, you know, they're not willing to look at.

evidence that goes counter to what they believe because they're incentivized to keep those beliefs they have a community they have friends belonging they belong and guess what like pretty much everyone listening to this myself included I'll have some beliefs like that. Just want that. And we have those, right? Where it's like, if you can't tell me five things that you agreed with with Charlie Kirk, or take it the opposite way, that you agree with with like AOC.

If you really think everything, you've never actually listened to what they say. You just know they're the bad person on the other side. You're in the same camp. Like you haven't investigated truly what someone on the other side thinks, right? You know, I think there's an argument made for religions, right? Where it's like, if you have your religious belief, are there, you know, you're really incentivized to keep those beliefs. It works for you. And that's great.

But you can't be making fun of flat earthers and say they're morons and idiots because they're not willing to look at the truth. We all have elements like this in our life that serve us and we're not incentivized to look at like how true they are. A quick aside, you've probably heard experts like Dr. Rhonda Patrick talk about the benefits of omega-3s that reduce, hello, omega-3s.

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A checkout. That's L-I-V-E-M-O-M-E-N-T-O-U-S dot com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom. A checkout. You know, one of the ones that I've seen recently, which I thought was really cool. You know what the fundamental attribution error is?

yeah what is yeah yeah so somebody cuts you off in traffic you put somebody off in traffic it's because you were late this sort of a attribution to motive right and um like an inner sense as opposed to for us our shortcomings because of situation circumstance um something that i noticed was an equivalent but around people's parents, called it the parental attribution error, which is, it's kind of a rite of passage in pop psychology to

blame your parents for your anxious attachment style or your hypervigilance or your obsession or your depression or whatever it might be. But unless you're prepared to lay at the feet of your parents, your strengths as well. You can't lay a defect. That's great. Wow. That's great. I think that calls out a lot of people that you want to be able to own your wins, but hand off your losses.

And let's not forget that sometimes your wins and losses are just two sides of the same coin. So yeah, you're hypervigilant, but that's your obsession to detail, which has allowed you to become a fantastic... musician yeah uh yeah perhaps you are um

overly concerned about upsetting other people, but that's made you a really great friend, which means that people really care about you a lot. Yeah, and if you need a constant need for approval, like, actually has motivated you to accomplish a lot in your life. Absolutely. You're, um... That's me. Feeling that nobody supports you.

has made you isolate yourself which makes you a little bit lonely but it's also meant that you're very self-sufficient so that you can work in solitude and you went and started a business like you know just keep on rolling that's one version of this which is where the coin is the same yeah

But at other times, you've just been given a bit of a mixed bag. I mean, like this coin is kind of dark on both sides, but in the same bag as some that are light. You know, your parents taught you something else as well. And yeah, sure, some people's bags are a bit large. lighter or a bit darker than others but for the most part if you're going to say

Shortcomings are because of my parents. You have to say your strengths are too. And it's okay. I don't mind if people go, no, everything is self-authored by me. I think it kind of denies behavioral genetics, which is a bit of a shame. But everything is self-authored by me and nobody gets to tell me what I did. Okay.

That's fine. But you have to own your weaknesses too. That means that your hypervigilance and anxious attachment and athlete's foot and daddy issues are your fault. Yeah. As are your strengths. Yeah. Or the inverse, which is everything is laid at the feet of the parents. So yeah, parental attribution error.

I love that. I think that's great. On the attribution error, it's interesting if someone cuts you off in traffic. If someone does that in real life, stands in front of you, like in line. We're so much more willing to like forgive them or I guess give them grace and stuff. What is that? You think you're just, you lose the anonymity and you like, you see the human in front of you. Oh, that's a good point. You know what I mean? Like if someone cuts you off and you're waiting in a queue.

And you're like, oh, excuse me. Oh, it's okay. Like you're a lot more patient than in a car. You're like, I'm going to kill your family. Yeah, I'll fucking shoot you. Well, a few things there. First off, humans still have not fully...

gotten used to being in a three-ton missile that moves at, you know, multiples of the speed that we ever have before. Sure. I'm a very comfortable driver. I'm sure you are too. We're still very... maladapted to doing that at that speed yeah and when you're in a car you're kind of in a bubble

And it feels like nothing. You're standing still and the rest of the world's moving past you. And then when something happens, you're kind of reminded of the precariousness. So that's one part of it. I think another part of it is the reason that we have anger, the reason that it's adapted. is that before laws, I needed to have a way to say to you, you've crossed a line. You have encroached on some sort of boundary that you shouldn't do. And my response to you is going to, oh.

shock you into not doing it again. The externality of somebody cutting in front of you in line is not great, but usually not life and death. The difference. Kinetically, it's way more dangerous. But the final thing is that when somebody cuts in front of you in line, if they turn around and notice and they see you. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

almost nobody has an issue. You have to be a real dick for somebody to cut in front of you, not knowing you were there or making some sort of a mistake. I didn't realize you were waiting. And for you to still have a problem after they've said sorry and then stood behind you. But the same isn't true when driving. If someone flashes the hazards, you're still pissed. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It helps. I mean, if someone does this, you're like, okay, but still, you suck. Exactly. There's a little bit of you in the back of your mind that's like, oh, I'm going to keep an eye on that guy. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, I think that's probably right. There's something about the disconnection, the anonymity. Because you see this online, too, where there isn't the danger of driving a kinetic missile, where we're a lot quicker to make judgments if it's just some anonymous name and you're commenting anonymously.

Well, there's no collateral damage, right? You can say whatever you want. Like there's no repercussion. Jordan Peterson says the problem with the internet is that the proximate price of being a prick has fallen to zero. Yeah, yeah. Whereas in real life, yeah. You might get punched in the face. Exactly. I like that. Yeah. I think, yeah, there is something too about like, I mean, you said anger where you.

There's something about like, if someone cuts in line, let's say 20 paces in front of you, isn't that funny how like your, your sense of justice is just like, that is not what we do. And that has to be evolutionary because it's like, we have rules in this tribe.

we have rules in this tribe and if we don't all enforce them then bad things happen but it's so funny how some people just like we were at the airport recently and we had to make this flight actually to come back and film for a sesame street thing and there was there was lines that was like quadruple what they were because there's like a new policy and we literally had to cut to the front of the line looking my partner's like she's very good at

talking to people, I was like, oh gosh. It's like, that's the worst thing for me. I'm a real follower. Yeah. But other people were cutting, not as good as us because we didn't get booed. And they were just like, booing and yelling and like it was chaos it was primal wow because everyone's in this stressful situation but like you could just hear like it was just

It is just like deteriorated to like base human emotion. Watching somebody sprint through the airport is a special type of pain because we've all been there. We've all been there. The connection got delayed and the next thing. They're holding the gate, but you're at 72 and it's 24. Yeah, I think that's why traveling is so stressful is the cost for mistakes are so high.

Right? I mean, this is a life hack. Whenever booking something that's got connections, if it's under 90 minutes, I know that the airport says that you can make it, but the increase in stress is just not worth it. For me, the risk... anything less than 90 minutes i won't do there's a connection i'll always have a 90 minute connection at an airport is it too much yeah but the

prices i maybe have to walk around and get a coffee always though if it's like if there's 10 flights in a day it has to be a function of that right i'll think about that a little bit more but typically i'm doing stuff that's a little bit more of a quirky route yeah i'm doing international exactly yeah um but then yeah watching we were on a flight the other day coming back from tour and um

It had been super delayed and it was real annoying and it was late and there were loads of people and it would have been the last flight out. And we did that thing where everybody stood to one side and you just saw this stream of people. Oh, let me give you this one. the poverty parade on planes. So there is a nine-time increase in passenger violence on planes where economy has to walk past first. Really? Nine times increase. Really? Yeah, it's huge.

That's fascinating. Pass those assholes just on their laptops already. What are you reminded of? You're reminded of your place in the hierarchy. This is status, right? You're reminded of the status hierarchy. This is from Michael Easter's second book. And yeah, the poverty parade, nine times increase in passenger violence. And it's just on planes. That's what he calls it, the poverty parade. That's what I called it. Yeah, yeah. And the violence is from the folks who are sitting in the back. Yep.

But the ones in the front, at least, it's like nine times less. Probably. I'm sure. Fucking peasants behind me. Yeah, exactly. I've made it. Lots of excitement around AI and stuff at the moment. One area that I...

Again, AR, VR, I don't mean to shit talk on the engineers. I'm sure they're trying hard, but I've been disappointed. Like I'm a bit sad. I wanted super cool glasses. I haven't got super cool glasses yet. AR is coming though. Like AR is getting there. I think that's the future for sure. And what will that...

look like something that can project up into a space so we could watch something 3d in front is this like tony stark style stuff uh no like i mean google's and meta's latest or have you tried those on uh no little bulky sterile but getting there it's like it will you know illuminate the path you're getting directions it's pretty functional i mean there's that's the one with the little band that you can do that you

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But like, it gives you pretty good, like, I'm going somewhere walking directions. Okay, turn here. It's like actually mapping it onto your real world. It's decent. I mean, getting there. Also, like, real-time translations for, like, if you're traveling. You know, there's an argument. There's a lot of if you didn't have to pull your phone at and you want to like, hey, show me a restaurant around here, you know, or even talking to someone. There's a lot of like.

where reminding the name of the people you're looking at, right? Like at a party or something. Yeah, you've got the best assistant researcher ever. Yeah. Like, yeah, like there's a lot of use cases where I think it would be really people would find it very useful, whether or not that's good for society. That's a different conversation, but like.

I think that makes more sense to me than VR at this point. Well, certainly the meta glasses. I've got two pairs in the house. I bought two pairs as gifts this year as well, including the Oakley's ones, the wraparound ones. and um being able to take a photo without having to get your phone out yeah being able to track what you're doing just to press a button and it hold and it do the thing yeah is

Oh my gosh. It is so wonderful. I went to a gig in LA the other night at the Roxy. I saw President play. 500 people, real small, real intimate, and the stage is three feet high. It's not high at all. There was a girl, a woman in front of me, 30s or something, and the entire show she watched through her phone. And this is so trite for me to say. There's that famous, was it the...

Champs-Élysées in Paris on New Year's Eve a couple of years ago, and it's just this single shot from the back, and it's just a sea of phones, which is, it is what it is. But people want to take memories. They want to be able to recall this thing. how much better would it be if you didn't have to sacrifice? And I think that's the best use case. I don't like the meta, hey, meta, tell me what I'm looking at. Like, I know what I'm fucking looking at. I don't need you to do that for me. But...

At the moment, those Ray-Bans, being able to take a photo, being able to press and hold and take a video up to three minutes now, they're really cool. Yeah, that is cool. I know. Like for me, I've kind of had my own moment with this. Like how many times have I ever gone back and looked at my, you know, fire?

works on the 4th of July videos, right? And yet every year you'd be like, no way, right? Or like concerts are a great example. Like you never go back and look at those. You just need one, I think, from those sorts of situations. 100%. Where was I? Remind me what it felt like.

I can fill the rest in. That's right. You just need one. That's 100%. So anyway, AR, VR, like maybe it's getting there, whatever, whatever. Robotics, I think when you compare with AI, robotics is... a promise that everybody had expected there's this new homebot thing with the fucking knitted jumper as a it's got like your jumper on as a a home assistant and somebody put a video of it trying to close the dishwasher and said it looks like a guy on ketamine at an after party.

What's going on in the world of robotics? This is much closer to your wheelhouse. Yeah, that's right. I mean, look, AI still needs humans right now to like push buttons, especially when you say like AGI. Like once you have robotics, there's an argument that like... Now humans are truly redundant as like, it makes sense that we're going into robotics. I think it pairs naturally with AI.

i don't know what it means i don't know how great it is for our species i was i'll i'll tell you this i don't want to say a name here but i was talking to someone who's like you know in silicon valley He said he was at a dinner at his house with like 10 other people who are like leaders in Silicon Valley with AI. You would know half the names very well. They had a vote that said by the year 2050.

What's the chance our sun is covered in a Dyson sphere? Meaning a Dyson sphere. Type two Kaddyshev. That's right. It's a type basically, it's basically a solar panel that goes all around the sun. So you capture all the energy and then you could use that energy then to. populate the solar system in the universe, ostensibly. And of this group of folks, eight of 10 said greater than 50% chance by 2050, our sun is covered. Really?

Fucking do it on Kalshi, dude. Put it on Polymarket. Put your money where your mouth is. Don't give me your bullshit around the... I don't understand. But the point is, to get there, you need robotics. This is my point. This is the connection. Because you need robotics to, if you can make a million workers in 20 days, and then those workers make factories that make more,

that's when you truly go crazy exponential. So like the only way to get to that is a robotics revolution. So that does seem to be on the cusp, at least for some people. Yeah. And even if it's not, get it up. do the Dyson Sphere, Kardashev 2 thing. The point is that, again, going back, society is at a pretty fundamental changing point if you can have the thinking machines and the doing machines.

who are going to be more specialized than us humans who have all this like vestigial traits of millions of years of evolution that just aren't necessary for today's world yeah you know walking around with appendixes and yeah and stuff like and like yeah coccyx and yeah we do toenails yeah yeah stupid idea uh it'll be interesting man if we can get to the stage where ai programs robotics that's when we're this is my point

right and then robotics builds more robotics right so you turning the wrenches is now bro i had eliezer on the show and he was telling me about how one of the ways that a super intelligent general ai would be able to accumulate compute power without taking it away from servers that people would realize is it could reprogram the leaves of trees. Whoa. Biotranscomputation or something. And he had this series of books behind him on...

the biology of trees. It's like, oh, well, it's a relatively simple process. If you were to, you do this and then you do this and then you reprogram to this thing and then you reprogram this thing and then all of the trees are doing your compute for you. And you're just using the trunks and the roots and you just...

draw up all of this power and that would be the way and it would just slowly seep its way into the biosphere and before you know it the shrub in your back garden is working out how to kill you

I do feel like anthropomorphizing robots. I get the argument for making robots that looks like humans because the world is basically built for humans. But I think it's like a first cut, like trying to make that where you. I think it makes a lot more sense to make like factory robots, like robots who you could sell to a car manufacturer. They can move around their factory that could in one year save them.

the cost of 12 of your fleets of robots you're selling. Like, I feel like the winner of the robotics revolution will be the one who goes after manufacturing businesses first, not homes for people who could afford it. Oh, wow. Yeah, that's a good, that's a great point. Because how many people want, need, and can afford? And those who can afford it already have a staff of people who do it. It's a person. Yeah, because it's not that cheap. No. I think that thing was...

maybe 500 bucks a month. No, that's right. And it doesn't do it that well. Like what's a cleaner? Like to get a maid to come around is maybe even for a good sized home, 200 bucks. Okay. So you can get them every other week. Yeah. And you still have a hundred bucks to save on this robot academy. Yeah, the addressable marketing is very small versus, hey, I'm going to make a robot that can wheel around your factory floor. It is, by the way, its torso can stretch.

eight feet to screw in that thing and then come down like make a specialized robot for that factory still kind of probably looks like a human but give it six arms because it's all its job is to drill in the six bolts on the bottom right

and then make those robots, like that immediately will have a massive ROA for a company that has money to pay for it, right? I saw a new type of warehouse robot. So instead of warehouses being built upward, this... begins the warehouse high and builds it low so all of these things run over the top of like tubules that come down so imagine you've got your warehouse and you don't stack shit from the bottom up you have the robots running over the top and they

get stuff bring it up to the top and then they run around here with like a little grid formation and below each grid so not only does it restock stuff it also then goes and pulls it out and um it was i can't it's some absurd space saving

This warehouse is eight times denser than a normal one because everything is just packed side by side. You don't need... any space to run between the stock because the stock is the floor the whole floor is just stock oh wild i see yeah i think i think the winner of the robotics

the first big winner takes all the NVIDIA of the robotics will be ones who address like factories first. And then there'll be knock on effect. They'll bootstrap it from that. Then how do you perfect that for the home? Not the other way. I'm surprised. We're starting with the home. Before we continue, I've been drinking AG1 every morning for

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Modern Wisdom. That's drinkag1.com slash modern wisdom. I guess it's just a sexy idea, right? It's a cool, it's attention grabbing, but yeah, total addressable market is just, it's not.

Yeah. It's not that. Okay. For anyone who hasn't seen your Glitterbum series, please explain that. Well, like a lot of my ideas, people are like, where do you come up with your ideas? And it's like... I don't know. Like my brain's just always on in the sense of like thinking of like, oh, that's a good idea. Right. And so someone sold a package from my porch and I felt really sad. Have you had a package stolen from your porch? No. Well, actually.

Maybe, but I haven't known it's happened. It's an American thing, apparently. Apparently, this doesn't happen a lot in other countries. But you really feel violated. And this was like a $3, I don't even know what it was, something from Amazon. It doesn't matter, right?

And at first, the police obviously won't do anything about it. But then I was like, you know what? I don't build a Mars rover, for heaven's sakes. I could probably do something about this. So I designed a bait package, basically, that had four phones in it.

that I could track the phone so I knew where the package went, but they were also recording so it could upload that footage to the cloud. So even if they destroyed the package, I would have footage of the theft. But more importantly, when you lift it off the lid... it had a cup that used centrifugal force to spray like a pound of the world's finest glitter and then to make sure we got the package back after like two minutes it sprayed just a

uncharitable amount of fart spray. So they were incentivized. And then I played fake police chatter, like, you know, we have a report of, you know, and so we always got the packages back. Sometimes in better shape than others. And I don't know. I think it was it just really struck a chord for a lot of people who have had the same thing to make a viral video. You just have to evoke a visceral response like that is the key to making that is.

That is the key. Like if you want to know how to, that's it. So you have to feel vindicated. It has to make you feel, you know, it has to be funny, has to make you feel angry. That's a trick that's used a lot these days and making people angry to get them to share. And so this one just.

it checked a lot of those visceral response buttons. And yeah, and so I did it for like, each year I would improve and go, eventually we had drones that came out and sprayed the glitter in the house, you know, and they opened the lid. Each year I was like, as an engineering challenge, how can I take this to the next level? And I did it for like, I think six or seven years. Eventually went to San Francisco. I had like fake luggage because cars get stolen from there all the time.

And I would work with the police, you know, anytime I got footage, I would, if the police wanted it, I'd give it to them. And also, this is a crazy fact, probably about half the people's faces are blurred, half of them aren't. And people will be like, well, how do you make that decision? If you're not blurred, you signed a release. Which means they were willing to let me put their face on. Who signed a release? Every single criminal whose face isn't blurred in the glitter bomb.

Where did the release form go to? I gave it to them because I would like know the houses, right? They took it to their house. So we would knock on the door and be like, okay, we gotcha. Are you cool if we show you in a YouTube video?

And you might be like, well, why would they agree to this? And you just have to offer them the correct compensation, which in most cases is like a Starbucks gift card. You're kidding. No. You got people to... admit to having their face on one of the biggest YouTube channels in the world as a criminal by offering them a Starbucks. Like, by the way, like a $10 Starbucks gift card. This wasn't like $200. Wowee. But what you'd find is just like, we value our reputation a lot. And you think...

You think other people have the same frameworks and think like you. But some of them are like, hell yeah. Like, let's do this. I mean, you thought that you were going to get a parcel. You didn't. You got sprayed in fart spray. Now you go to Starbucks. You know? Aim for the stars, land in the clouds. Land in Starbucks. Yeah, I mean, that's one of my favorite series that you've done. I thought it was so great. And another one, your scam phone call.

yeah a broad taking advantage of old people thing the relationship that you have with technology obviously very pro technology it's something that you is your love it's something that you're working on you're trying to encourage other people to do their own Have you got, when you see things like that, when you see phone centers that are trying to scam old people out of money, does that become conflicted for what technology sort of enables?

For you? I mean, at the end of the day, I think technology is amoral and it can be used for tremendous good. It could be used for tremendous bad. And, oh, you hope the good outweighs the bad. and my job you know is to use some of the good to try and outweigh the bad and in that case

Literally that video was born. I was making one of the glitter bombs and I got one of those like Microsoft scam calls, you know, or like your car warranties expired. I'm like, who's behind these things? So eventually I worked with another YouTuber, Jim Browning. we hacked into some of these scam centers in kolkata india so we got access to their how did you access the security system so their trick is that when they come to take over your computer

So you pretend you're an old, you know, some, I don't know what's going on. And they're like, okay, ma'am, let me help you with your computer. Well, that's a two way connection. So when that happens, if you know what you're doing, you can remote into their computers. So that's what Jim Browning does. He's very good at computers. And you don't just get access to their CTV. You get access to their mainframe. So we know exactly...

It's kind of a normal business, by the way. It's kind of boring. They have like scam training. They have like HR, right? They have like goals of how many scams you're going to do a month, like pizza parties. I was going to say, you know what's happening for lunch that week? Yeah, exactly. It's kind of hilarious, but we'd see how much, you know, they're making, I think like $30 million a year running three shifts, 24 hours a day. They'd been doing it for a decade, three of these.

So we went there with, you know, our glitter bombs. First of all, I hired like eight people to work undercover for eight months just to learn. Just to like find out what the week. To work there? At a scam center, yeah. I wanted to learn their weaknesses. And one of them, it turns out, is you can bring lunch boxes out onto the floor. You can't bring phones, you can't bring anything else, but they let you bring your lunch and like a water bottle. So we designed like a lunch box.

that we put like a hundred cockroaches in but then it had a ball screw and a remote timer on a trigger so the the wall would move forward so basically these cockroaches start getting squished and then a door open so all the cockroaches would run out at once We had a smoke bomb in there. Of course, we sent him a glitter bomb. And then we filmed it all in these CCTV footage. And it's hilarious footage. And, you know, my thing is like, I could have made a PSA on what these scams are.

and how to avoid them, that wouldn't have evoked a visceral response. That would have got 100 views. But if I can wrap this in a story and entertain you and make you feel a lot of things, well, now you're going to share that video. And Sunshine is a great disinfectant. And effectively, that's what happened. We released this video. It has like hundreds of millions of views now. And because what was happening is you had a few bad Apple police officers in these cities who were being paid off.

they didn't have that spotlight on them. But now it made it impossible to defend them because the Times of India is covering it. All these people are up in arms and like protesting. And all three of those scam centers got shut down. The top, I think there was like 18 officials arrested. From this stupid... This real...

real world impact. This is from a stupid YouTube video. Do you know the Greek god Hephaestus? Have you heard of that? No. So he was the god of craftsmanship, fire, metalworking and stuff. He's kind of the... archetype of the tinkerer. Your way, Hephaestus. Yeah. Or Hephaestus. And he's the only Greek god that was crippled. So he's like a chubby guy and he sort of needed crutches and he needed a wheelchair. And I think he was...

He was betrothed or maybe even married to one of the most beautiful of the gods. super Chad God was sleeping with his wife behind his back. And he knew that this thing was happening and he discovered them and he was heartbroken. And it's kind of a tale as old as time that the nerdy tinkerer has his good-looking girls stolen by the sort of...

Chad Bully. So he gets back at her and him, and he designs this unbelievably strong cage. Glitter bomb? Ah, it could have been. Cockroaches. This really strong cage. is positioned over the bed and he waits until they get down into bed and then this thing drops and he invites all of the other gods and all of the other gods come in and laugh at them. And it kind of reminds me of your story that there's this sort of tinkerer who uses...

innovation and ingenuity to sort of righteously even the scales. Yeah. I love that. That's great. Yeah, it's like... I don't know. It's this, that was so lovely to see because it's kind of like this, what can I do? Like if I would have, if we would have got that information from the scan centers and given it to the police, nothing would have happened. Right. But if I make a story.

that makes you feel something and evokes an emotion, now suddenly, right, now suddenly something happens. And I think, I don't know, it's like a powerful example of like agency. It's like, what can you do in your spot, in your position? you know, to affect the world. Best question about agency. You're stuck in a third world jail and you've got 24 hours to get out and only one phone call. Who'd you ring? Probably Jimmy Kimmel.

that's a good one like he is he is he is we're good friends like we vacation together he saw one of my videos i went on his show and since then we've just had a friendship and he's so loyal but also connected that it would be Jimmy. Who do you call? I got some friends that direct Special Forces. Tim Kennedy would probably be pretty fun. Evan Hafer from Black Rifle Coffee would be...

And Andy Stumpf would also be interesting. Like dudes that are, you know, 40s and 50s that would really probably revel in it. They'd have a lot of, they'd really enjoy it.

It's a challenge. But it's just, you know, this person doesn't need permission. They can think on their own feet. They'll be able to- Oh, is this like them coming in actively rescuing you or just like pulling the strings to make it happen? I guess both. Okay. In a way, but I mean, Jimmy's got to be involved. He's gonna have to-

project manage yeah yeah unless he hands it off to an assistant in which case ring the assistant um but yeah it's just who's the highest agency person ah i see so it's a way to identify who the highest agency person i love it that's great yeah maybe it's jimmy yeah That's funny because you're probably somebody's and I'm probably people's in my life as well. I think I would be. Unfortunately, I'm too busy. Sorry. That's right. But yeah, there's two groups. There's one group that is.

If you want somebody to break you out of the third world prison, who is it? And then there's another one, which I've got at least a few in my life. I think everybody needs somebody like this as well, which is if you want to go into business with your captors.

Like if you want to not only have you be gotten out, but before you know it, somehow you now own the jail and you've actually turned the jail into a really wonderful amusement park. And you need a couple of people like that that can kind of... That's Jimmy Donaldson for me, Mr. Beast. Of course. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Between the two Jimmys. Yeah, if you want to launch a YouTube channel with your captors, go with Jimmy. Okay, so your engineering brain, you're looking to apply engineering logic to some human problems as well. What are the thinking tools or heuristics that you try and apply when it comes to looking at human problems like tolerances or failure budgets?

iterative testing or something, is there something that you realize, huh, in my daily life, I can apply this engineering principle here and it works out pretty well? I think the engineering design process is something that's just so applicable for real life problems, which is just like you start with an objective. I want to get a rover to Mars, right? I want to build a glitter bomb that thieves will take.

That is your end goal. Again, it kind of comes down to life gamification. And I know I'm not going to get it right. I know there's a lot of questions I need answered. I mean, step one is really just breaking it down. If that's the end goal. Here are the main four chunks that need to happen to accomplish that, right? I need to do some research. I need to do initial prototype. I need to have a feedback loop and iterate a bunch. And you do the final thing.

And I think that's how you launch a business. That's how you make a microphone like this. This is how you build a garden in your backyard, right? It all, it starts with that, that it's that same process. It helps make things feel not daunting, right? Because at the end of the day, if you're going to climb Mount Everest, it's just literally one step at a time and people get overwhelmed. They're just like, how do I get up there? That's so far.

And so the engineering design process allows you to break it down into those bite-sized pieces. And then as failure comes, quote-unquote failure, you know that's part of the process. And it's almost exciting. It's more flavorful, right? Okay, what about the reverse? What about...

uh emotional intelligence skills like uh frustration tolerance or kindness or humor or collaboration how important are they when it comes to doing the engineering thing because i think a lot of people really love the idea of raw talent, innovation being able to be enough. But I certainly know from hearing you speak about your time at Apple being kind of a shock to the system of how important communication and collaboration is.

Unfortunately, even engineering doesn't occur inside of a sterile box. It's not just input, process, output. There's human psychology in here. So, no, for sure. I mean, that's what makes our species different than every species on the planet is our ability to collaborate at large scales and have shared goals. And that happens through stories that usually are fictional, but that's part of, you know.

You share a vision. And if you can, and that is, you know, at Apple, I did find people were not only smart, maybe not quite as smart as at NASA, but they were better communicators across the board. And... That is almost that's equally important because if you actually want to accomplish something meaningful, it can't be just by yourself. Like you need a team. If everyone's pushing in the same direction.

incredible things happen. How do you get everyone to push in the same direction? They have to believe in a shared vision. And that ability to convince someone of something to understand your vision is a superpower. And you want to know how you do that? It's the same way you make a viral video. You have to evoke a visceral response. Sharing the facts and being like, well, if we build this, it'll be 20% faster in the processing speed, right? Nobody cares.

But if it's like, hey, if we build this, that's going to connect people. And currently with Crunch Labs, that is our mission. We want to reach as many brains as possible and infect them with this passion for learning and curiosity.

And we have 100 employees now. And we are mission driven. and we get up and we're just like so stoked about what we're building and what we're creating and yeah they're toys which makes a great last minute christmas gift by the way crunchlabs.com crunchlabs.com but it's like You're learning and they're so fun. First of all, they're so fun, but we hide the vegetables. And before you know it, you're learning all these really cool things, but you have this emotional connection to it, right? It's...

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Ken Burns' documentaries. What's the Vietnam documentary series? Maybe 20, maybe 30 hours. And history in school for me wasn't that fun because of the way it was taught. So the same topic. displayed in two different ways. Yeah. Made all the difference. Yeah. And that's actually what we're doing. This is something I'm only starting now to talk about. We haven't talked a lot publicly, but it's like releasing, making a full school curriculum, third to eighth grade.

It covers all the tricks I've learned on high vegetables on YouTube. We're making like really exciting, cool science. It's got me, all your favorite YouTuber. We just, Cristiano Ronaldo's in it. It adheres to the standards, and it's going to cost us about $50 million to make, and then we're going to make it free for all Teaches Forever. And I feel like it's the most important work I'll do my whole life.

So basically, Crunch Labs is you productizing curiosity in a way. That's what you've tried to do. You've tried to make a monthly box of curiosity. You don't know what it's going to be on the other side, and then...

you try to instill that into kids afterward by getting them to go through these experiments. Yeah, because I can't teach you, my YouTube videos aren't going to teach you everything you possibly know, but like what I can be is a fire starter in your brain, especially for young kids because the clay isn't hardened. Okay, so if what you're doing is trying to kickstart the curiosity, what have you learned from watching kids interact with the experiments that you've done?

that schools don't understand like what do you wish that schools understood that you know like every teacher will tell you like i can't teach you if i don't have your attention and i think they do a very bad job of getting kids' attention. So for example, this cool thing, Class Crunch Lobs, we're calling it, is when we're talking about electricity and magnetism, I'm in front of an MRI machine, I put a watermelon in there, I'm holding a 10-pound hammer.

flip on the MRI machine, it just rips it from my hand and just obliterates this watermelon. And that, those eyes right there, I love that. And guess what? I have your attention now. And you're like, what the hell was that?

It's like, oh, well, there's these invisible fields called magnetic fields that are around us all the time. And now let me tell you about them, right? Versus like, here is a diagram of the Earth's magnetic field and a compass aligns with it, right? And like the curriculum writers, bless their heart.

except not because they charge for it for these poor teachers don't have the money to buy it. And it's really, really bad. They never had to have a YouTube channel where they had to earn the attention. Yeah. of adults and kids. They're able to sort of dictate the attention. You will listen to me. That's right. And if you don't, the class goes on anyway. The class goes on. Like the kids can get up and walk out. Like they switch off the YouTube video. That's right. And so it's... So attention.

attention so i would say like yeah like attention and the toys too just they're first and foremost they are fun Like I'm not going to make a boring, if it's fun, now we'll figure out how to attach the learning onto that. So start with the attention and a lot of times that comes with fun. And the same thing, getting a visceral response. Like I'll make a video about a 15 ton jello pool.

which is really hard to do, by the way. Why? Because you've never made jello before. You've got to heat it up. You've got to heat it up where it's almost warm, and then you have to cool it down. And so to do that at scale, we're like, how are we going to do that? Can we just make lots of little ones? Yeah, but then it's not contiguous. Then it's not like you want to belly flop on it, right? Understood.

So what I did to find a refrigerator, I just found the right place in the country at the right time that I wanted to film this. That got to almost refrigeration temperatures at night, but not cold enough to freeze. which happened to be where my brother lived in like Mapleton, Utah. So we dug out a hole and then we had six 55-gallon drums that we boiled all of the gelatin in and then piped it.

through potential energy into the pool and over with layers over seven days and then finally we got it and we got that shot of a kid belly flopping on it but the point is is that video says 15 ton jello pool that is clickbait you want to click on it and then pretty soon i'm teaching about the scientific method in chemistry so hiding those visuals sneaking in the learning once you're like stoked about the story

Sick, man. What's this? What have we got? This is creativity kit. So this is just one of the things that we offer. It's the newest one. So we, you know, we had the build box. That was the original one. Then we had hack pack and that's kind of robotics. Right.

And then this one starts at age like six, where it really teaches the ideas of creativity. What's the state of like kids toys at the moment? Because I remember Meccano. Do you have Meccano over here? No. So Meccano was like... uh metal lego i guess but uh much more involved way more complex yeah and that was i i found that fascinating you'd make trucks and cars out of there would be um braces and bolts and it was really it was sick

Um, but is that still, are you guys kind of really breaking through with it? You and Lego, is that it for when it comes to constructing shit? I mean, this is like, we are currently... We sell these as a script, you know, direct to consumers. But I will say we are launching in like with retail products and stores like Target and Walmart in the STEM aisle.

the stem aisle sucks what's the stem like stem is like of course what is in every target walmart has either four or eight feet dedicated to like stem type toys and it's like the baking soda volcano

or like geo-grow a crystal. Stuff that's been the same for decades. 30 years. It's just ripe for... being disrupted and we have some we have like some really really cool stuff that is completely going to disrupt that aisle i'm really happy to hear that okay what about grown-ups who feel like the curiosity has been pruned out of them well i mean it's going to be harder for them to

get the crunch lab subscription and and feel that you know excitement i don't know if that's true though because we have again it's now it's ages six to 106 where like hack pack is for it's kind of robot even if you've never coded before you can put it together it's a really fun build

And then we encourage you to like hack it and swap the, it's Arduino based. What's that? Arduino is like a microprocessor. Like it's like a Raspberry Pi or Arduino. Oh yeah, yeah, I know that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, so it's a simple form of like a Raspberry Pi.

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

So if you've always wanted to learn to code but never have, well, hold your hand with Hackback. It's going to be super fun and you're going to grow and learn. And then hopefully you take that and do that to other parts in your life. Yeah, that is cool. I think...

Certainly one of the things that I've seen is people's times got squeezed more. We don't have much time to play or tinker because all of the additional hours of boredom that would have allowed you to do something a bit slower, a bit smaller, a little bit more quiet.

has been squeezed out because there's a very attractive, well, there's YouTube videos and podcasts, you know, games and social media and stuff. Which is all inputs, right? I feel like we are drowning inputs and sort of starved for outputs. Agreed. Right. Actually doing something with our own hands. That time is now just like.

passively feed my brain. And you can only learn so much. You haven't constructed anything on the other side. Even the biggest YouTube channel in the world, had it not have been for the fact that you did physical experiments, like, show me where your YouTube channel is. Show me it. What have you built? Well, kind of.

kind of nothing there's code and there's you know numbers on the screen and i think they kind of correlate to real humans that pressed a button but no i uh i think that the opportunity to do something slow one of my friends I had a professional coach who was trying to teach him a little bit of humility and to be able to chill out. And his task for a month was to start doing something new.

but he wasn't allowed to try and get better at it. So he was told that he had to try and... He decided to take up watercoloring. He always wanted to paint. And after he did it once or a couple of times and he really enjoyed it, he found that he wanted to go on YouTube and look up...

watercolor tutorials and then he was going to go and research what the best reddit thread said about the specific brush he needed nope nope nope i can't do that i'm just going to do it i'm just going to allow myself to do it and uh

I thought that was so interesting. It was the first time I'd ever heard of anybody saying, I have this thing that I'm trying to do. and I'm actively not trying to get better at it. I did one version of that where it's like, I love chess, and I found I wasn't playing chess because...

going back to internalizing failure, I felt like if I lost, that means something about me. So I made a goal of like, I am going to play chess, but my goal, I'm going to try and win, but my real goal is to lose 10 times. Right. And I'm not going to feel like I checked that box until I've lost 10 games. And it really flipped it for me. And then normalizing, I acclimated to losing. And it was like, oh.

Wait, I'm back to loving this and I don't attach these negative feelings to it because I won because I lost 10 times. Have you looked at rejection therapy? No, but it's basically this thing, right? 100 days of rejection. 100 days of rejection. My goal is to desensitize myself from the pain of rejection and overcome my fear. Three criteria I set for myself. One, ethical.

Too legal. Three, doesn't deny the laws of physics. Rejection one, borrow $100 from a stranger. Number two, request a burger refill. Number 15, be a live mannequin at Abercrombie. Number 32, get my own free room at a hotel. So the idea is he did all of these. Number 36, trim my hair at a PetSmart. hug a Walmart greeter, bike race at Toys R Us, my only day at a new job, so I need to join a job for a day.

buy a quarter of shrimp, name my own price at Dollar Tree, change a coffee shop's Wi-Fi password, try and fix a PC at the Apple store. and um what was this what was day 100 interview president obama um or try and i just thought like what a cool such a cool idea that's so good rejection therapy

But like going back to just like making stuff, like I would imagine we've evolved to be digging in the dirt and to be building and to be working with our hands. Right. And I do feel like there's probably some part of that, you know. This is me being an armchair expert here, but like the record levels of depression may have to do with just like all these inputs that are so attractive that just lit us sitting in a chair as opposed to like building, doing stuff with our own hands and getting out.

moving dirt around. The pace that you're forced to operate at, the pace that your brain is forced to operate at is really, really, really aggressive. And I certainly know... the times when I've been able to, and even think about what meditation is. Meditation is kind of like, it's great and I love it and I've done it an awful lot. But it's a really unnatural way to try and achieve what we're doing. It's the same way as...

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

You know, even as an Amazon driver, you're probably lifting less than our ancestors would have done. And your job is to lift things. So we build this building that has stuff that you purposefully lift in very specific ways so that you then put them down again. meditation is kind of like going to the gym for slowing down. Because your life is so intense most of the time, you need to have this weird holiday from that. That's a portion of your day.

That is you doing something else. That makes sense. Yeah. And it's also like, it's crazy how hard it is to not think thoughts. Like, you know, in meditation, I've dabbled in a little bit. My partner's like really big in it and I've been doing it more, but.

It's amazing how much I suck at it. You know, just like going to the gym for the first time. It's like, wow, I'm not conditioned to do this. It's wild how hard it is to not think and to clear your mind. Right. And just like focus on the breathing. I find it.

incredibly difficult and it's certainly a muscle you have to build and a muscle that feels worth building once i try and do it and see the benefits have you not you know if you've been tinkering with some glitter bomb for hours and hours is there not a crossover toward a mindfulness practice with regards to that i mean there's something about like hitting flow state for especially for writing i still write all my own videos

And it's really hard until it's not. And then it just all pours out really quickly. Right. But no, I think the opposite is true where it's like if I'm writing a thing or trying to solve a problem, it's like it's always on. repeat and just in the back of my brain like we could be having this conversation and I could have like not a breakthrough but it's like oh I'm gonna try that as soon as I get home you know what I mean yeah you are right I mean

certainly stuff that captures the front of your brain while the back of it's still thinking. It's lovely. I love doing the washing up. It sounds like such a dumb thing, but doing the dishes for me is so great. I have an unusually high. volume of good ideas while I'm doing the dishes. It's my favorite chore. Yep. Yeah. Uh, and well, it's just, you're driving another one. I fucking love driving.

I'm happy to drive. So do you listen to stuff? Are you listening to your podcast? Sometimes. Sometimes I'll be listening to stuff. But other times, if I'm just thinking. It's a great place to... Yeah, but I guess that's my point. You say, hey, I'm not going to turn on the radio because... When I'm being good. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I had a period where for about six months...

When I first started the podcast, I always put my phone in the trunk of the car. So I couldn't listen to anything. There was no AirPods, no nothing. And even if I was going to the gym, it was only 20 minutes away. It sounds, I mean, what a revolution. You don't listen to something or even try and use your phone while you're driving. And you have this wonderful mini break from the world. Well, it's like the case for boredom, right?

Like, I feel like raising kids is like, I want to give them like two presents for Christmas. And like the goal is to be bored every day. Like that's where the creativity, I think that's a whole movement towards that now, right? Again, it's the opposite to all of these inputs. Like cut those off and then what happens? Have you noticed, I suddenly have, I'm not.

avid ai user but chat gpt gets a good bit of daily use you know between 10 and 20 times a day something like that probably for you you mean yeah yeah like i need to sort this thing out how do i do this thing one of the things i have noticed is now i'm beginning to get an aversion to having to overcome questions myself. Because I can just go to ChatGPT and work out exactly what it is.

I haven't done this, but similar stuff. If I had to write a difficult email, I'm trying to say this to this person, and as opposed to wrestling with the problem, it's kind of like having a...

you know, team of staff on hand. Instead of having to do the dishes, you just get the dishwasher or the maid to do it. Instead of having to put your clothes away, assistant does it yeah i mean i think this is the argument that we are becoming cyborgs the fact like how many phone numbers you have memorized now

right and and and 15 years you know 30 years ago growing up we had everyone's memorized like we don't need to because the information's there and obviously there was the case with google and i think this is just one more step in that direction and Yeah, these are an extension of our brain in some sense, right? As we learn to use them and work with them and adapt to them being part of us. Reduced friction by such a huge margin. Now, I think even with Google.

For sure. You had to do the reading yourself. I mean, look at us talking about searching on Google like it was fucking foraging for berries. Like that's friction. Yeah. I resonate with this so much. You're completely right. Like even I needed to find like the right Christmas lights the other day and I found myself Googling. I hate this. I was like, wait, why am I not using an LLM for this? I gave it exactly what I wanted. Sure enough. I had four websites. I was like, oh.

And now, guess what? I'm never searching for anything. I've now learned that behavior. Yep. And now it's like, oh, now when I need to find something difficult, this is what I'm going to do. What will come next will be Gemini integrated into Chrome. Atlas already exists for ChatGPT. So this will just become one.

form yeah isn't you must know about this i might need to bleep this out you must know what the open ai products are do you uh i i i have like a probably a tiny bit more of a view than the average person but i don't fully know

But I think it's, my guess is... He brought what's-his-face on, right? The dude that did that. Johnny Ive. Johnny Ive. Yeah, yeah. And they said they're releasing three products by the end of the year. This year? Or by the something. Maybe it can't be the end of this year. It can't be. Yeah, it'd be so bad. But at some point. And they said that one of them has never been seen before and doesn't exist. Somebody asked, is it a pin? And they said no.

My guess is it's just like a camera that can see the world and hear the world, but it's very minimal, however that is, whether it's a ring or it's a... And then... if it's capturing all the information and visually could see stuff, it's like the world's greatest assistant, right? Because it remembers this conversation. It remembers every conversation you have. It helps you follow up. And then, like, do you have a personal assistant or someone like that-ish? Yeah.

What an unlock that was when you got one of those. And so now everyone gets this of like now when I want to buy those Christmas lights, to your point, it going agentic, I just have to say, hey, I'm looking for these kind of lights. And then two minutes later, it's like, OK, here's. They'll be at your porch tomorrow morning at 8 a.m., right? Whereas I have an assistant. I can tell that to the assistant and give them that problem, and they do the same thing. Now imagine...

But you still have the assistant with you everywhere. So getting the context of your life. Yeah. My guess is it's, and I have like a one or two slight clues that that's true that aren't in the public domain, but that would be my guess. Wow. Wow. What do you think it would be? I was going to guess glasses because that would have made so much sense. Some kind of badge type thing or yeah. Yeah, just on your wrist, almost like a watch, but it's.

It's a camera and a microphone. Yeah, and it's just tracking everything at all times. And you set it down, it charges at night. Yeah. But you need a way for it to communicate back to you, which means it would need a screen or it's going to have to be audio. Yeah, I think audio, just like an assistant, you know, you just...

talk to them and then it's going to have to have bluetooth you're going to have to have headphones so it's going to have to link them with some headphones or it could just be through your phone right it could just be the sensors the eyes and the ears then you talk to the phone but it has all the info yeah i think how do you feel about the future

Because everyone that I speak to, whether it's like a Toby Ord, Nick Bostrom, Elliot Jukowski, Tristan Harris, you know, whoever it is that I speak to from that side of the fence, they have... vague despondency. They're like apocalyptic, but in a kind of a ephemeral way. Want to know what I think like the best case scenario is? Yes. Have you heard the idea of like...

if you had 10 dogs in a house, if you have like 10 dogs in a house and there's a pile of food, those dogs, and they're just on their own, they're going to fight over that scarce resource, which is the food. There's going to be one big dog. Who's going to be the. number one, but constantly fighting. They're, you know, wounded. Some are dying. And that's not a great situation, but they are eating because there's a big pile of food. Just some eat better than others.

Now, if a human goes into that house and be like, okay, hey guys, I bought you 10 cages. You're all going to be in the cages, but I'm going to give you food every day and all the water you need. You're going to be able to go to the vet. We're going to go on walks every day. And they'll basically helps distribute those resources.

Those dogs objectively, even the top dog, are happier because the resources are being allocated in a way because there's someone who can kind of map the whole situation. Our best hope is for like a benevolent overlord. In this sense, someone who comes to the house and can help us balance the scarce resources or just create enough resources that they aren't even scarce. And the reason we do that for dogs is we think they're cute and we think they have value.

And we just have to hope the AI overlords. Some sort of a value. Oh, they're cute dogs. Let's look after them. Value in our species. You know Bostrom's idea of the urn. and you pull out different technologies and sometimes it's white and sometimes it's gray and it's kind of

bad and then every so often there's a black ball and the black ball is a true existential risk and it kills humanity. Yeah. Like if you could, if putting sand in your microwave was an A-bomb. Correct. We'd be done. We've read the same stuff. Yeah, yeah. So... I kind of think about the same, but instead of it being an urn where you're bringing out different technologies, it's a balls where you're bringing out alignments, but it's inverted, and there's only...

a very, very small number of ways for it to be benevolent. But there's a really, really small number of ways that you could align. And they wouldn't all be the same. There's not only one alignment that would make for a great world. It's definitely not an infinite number either. There are way more ways to break something than to fix something or make it better. That means that even if you just go by fucking proportion, like the likelihood that you don't get it right is pretty high.

And yeah, according to these guys that are way smarter than me and even you, they seem to think that it's on route. What's the best estimate that you've heard for advent of? AGI. I mean, the truth is nobody really knows. But I don't know. I don't know. I can't really answer that. I will say...

Oh, hold on. I just wanted to make a point. You cut this out while I'm thinking of this because I wanted to make a follow-up point of that, which is... Oh, yeah. So I will say those who are the most optimistic about it...

are the ones who kind of have the most to gain. Like, you look at Sam Altman, and he's like, oh, it's going to be a perfect world. You know, everything, Agai's going to be so great. Because, like, he's so heavily incentivized. Maybe some motivated reasoning. Yeah. Because, like... Even if it's a 1% chance it is that amazing utopian case, in the new world, he's a god, right? And in the 99% chance, unless if I'm just assigning values to it, that bad things happen, whether he does it or not.

Someone else is going to do it and the bad thing's going to happen. Might as well roll the dice to be the guy. Might as well roll the dice. What's that line about it's very difficult to make a man disbelieve something that his wage relies on him believing? Yeah, yeah, exactly. He's incentivized to have this Pollyanna attitude. Now, look, a very good friend of mine is Sam's coach and is the head of human culture at OpenAI. And I trust him implicitly. It's Joe Hudson who's been on the show a ton.

He is as fucking legit as they come, Joe. And... he's such a good judge of character and he works with Sam. And I've heard a couple of things from Sam with regards to his meditation practice and what he's done. I'm like, I'm trying to square this circle where there definitely are some. like really scary potential externalities coming from this thing. And there's just this bit of me where a few people that I really know and trust. So I have glimmers. But does he work for Sam?

Uh, he did, but he had this, he had this way fake check and realized I don't even know if it's relieving it. Maybe, fuck, yeah, I'll use my own rule against it. Maybe, look, I'm trying to find a silver lining in the stream of shit here. Um, but yeah, I, The one thing I think we both agree on probably is like whether it doesn't matter what I think about it, it's going to happen. There's like a small set of the humans that are driving this forward and you can't unring that bell.

so it's like i'm not i don't stay up at night because of it you know what i mean like i don't let it i'm still just you're on the roller coaster right we're all on the roller coaster yeah happen you can try and do the elia thing and ring the bell sufficiently loudly but the only way that this works is if you're able to somehow put a global moratorium on all ai development

I just think that's not going to happen, which creates this weird inverse arms race where everybody thinks, well, I'll do it, but I'll do it right. And if I get there first, so yeah, if you do have this sort of... Pollyanna, God complex attitude. Well, no, no, no, no, we can do, we got the engineer and the alignment and the word that, and you think, well, fucking.

What, dude? Yeah. I had a weird thought the other day. We were hiking. I live in Silicon Valley. We were hiking up. We could see all the way to San Francisco and then all the way down to Silicon Valley. It's about a 50-mile stretch. And I was like... what's crazy is like this 50 mile stretch of land is sort of going to determine the future of humanity and our space. And then my next thought was like, if I'm a government that's on the other side of this. Plink.

Where do I want to put that A-bomb? I mean, it's also probably one of the closest places to China, right? Yeah. I didn't love that thought. And I'm like, oh, right. That could, even if it just buys you four months. That could be the difference of being the first to hit AGI, and then that's everything. Bro, there was a guy who I brought on the show. I can't remember his name. I wish that I could. And he told me this story. He wrote a really successful tech book.

decade and a half ago and then he wrote another one the opening story of this book is him being invited by a bunch of these tech leaders billionaires pre-chat gpt so maybe 2019 2020 something like that and uh They sat down at this dinner and there's sort of a weird atmosphere. It feels like there's kind of a holding pattern going on in the conversation. He doesn't really know why. And then sort of the whole room changes a little bit and they say, right.

New Zealand or Greenland? He's like, what? New Zealand or Greenland? What do you mean? For the bunker? What are you talking about? Oh, the post-apocalyptic. war bunker, is it more effective for us to have them in New Zealand or is it in Greenland? And what do you think about how we control?

the Marines that work for us. Because what we're thinking is that we'll use shock collars and that we'll pay them in crypto, but that the ledger will be associated with biometrics. And if they betray us, if they try to do that, then we can just kill them with the.

and he was like it's this sounds like a absolute movie scene yeah and um maybe he was making it up but it sounded yeah i'm kind of like at that point and i've heard this like at new zealand because like they have everything you need to self-produce and there's all these reasons why it makes sense but it's like if like if that's what

things have devolved to it's like I'm good like I had we had a great run like you know hands up and put some more fucking crunch lab stuff together yeah well just like if we're in a world where just like everyone is like killing each other and it's just like total apocalypse like do you what are you looking to survive for like you come out of that bunker i mean that was the exact reason that he gave which was

what do you think they're going to do with all that Bitcoin? Yeah. What are they spending it on? Right. You have access to the food. Yeah. What is there that's left? Yeah, and it's almost like... See how precarious human civilization is when you start to think about this, eh? Right. Well, it's also like even with...

The AI, where for the first time in human history, like generally the more money you made, it equated to the more employees you have, right? As you made more money, you would hire more people so you could do more stuff. And now for the first time.

Not only are they decoupled, but there's almost an inverse relationship where you could save a ton of money if you lay off all these people and now your profit's going to go way up. And the question then becomes, are these CEOs and I've... been in circles where people have told me about this where they're like this is awesome we're gonna do all this but then quickly they realize like but who's gonna buy our thing because no one's gonna have money because no one's gonna be employed right

But then you get onto UBI and there was a couple of studies done on UBI test cases. You get to look at these. Yeah. It seems like mixed results, right? Yeah. Not super positive. Yeah, man, we may be, this is the fear, I think, the fundamental fear that everybody has always had. This is what Cassandras are, that they're seeing some future apocalypse and that nobody's listening. And at each generation,

reading is going to ruin the youth. Television is going to ruin the youth. And the car will destroy the horse and so on and so forth. And at each level, we felt like it's apocalyptic. What's coming next? That it's going to be something that's really, really worth us saying you shouldn't do this. But dude, this is a step function difference. This is not a difference of degree. It's a difference of kind. It is an entirely different world that we are moving toward.

even if it isn't that one it's the one that that enables and it really does feel like sort of the musical chairs and the music is

slowing down to come to a stop now maybe the song on the other side of it is way better but it's definitely a different fucking song i think well this is i think one of the most plausible you know are you familiar with fermi's paradox So it's like of all the nine reasons there could be, the one I've always kind of and feels more and more plausible is just like by the time you develop the energy to use and the technology to go to other solar systems.

You've developed that, you've harnessed a lot of energy that then you could use against yourself or other people. You have to assume life is always going to be competitive if it's evolving in other spots. So there's going to be competition built in. It's just a glass ceiling in civilizations. And as things get closer and closer, you realize like, oh, maybe there is a glass ceiling effect and that's what we're approaching.

There's a book. I tried to bring this guy on, Stephen Webb. If the universe is teeming with aliens, where are they all? And he's got 50 solutions to the Fermi paradox. And I should still try and bring him on. I was obsessed. That's like one of my favorite, just like you're camping, you're looking at the stars and just like, just to make your brain go like, ah, it's crazy. Where is all the life? Yeah. Well, what's that question?

two answers to where are they? And they're both equally terrifying. Yeah. There's nobody else out there or there is. Yeah. And then, yeah, yeah, exactly. And we are like one of NASA's projects we're working on is like going to one of the moons.

that's Enceladus. And the core is lava. What's that? It's like a moon around, I think, Jupiter or Saturn. But it has geysers of fresh... water coming out the top so the top is obviously it's really far away so it's frozen it's cold the the core is molten and so at some point between that icy surface and the and the core there's like a 70 degree ocean

And life, we know, formed in water here on this planet. And we've never found life exists that doesn't need water. So we're basically building something. We're going to go out there. We're going to drill into the ice, send a submarine down there and see what eats it. And if like... If there's life in that nice ocean out there, it's fascinating and almost terrifying. You know David Kipping from the Cool Worlds Lab? He's in Cool Worlds on YouTube.

you would fucking oh really you know um uh brian cox yeah so imagine brian cox 15 years younger big like chad jaw like young dude and um he got 72 hours on the james webb telescope no way yeah they uh it gets allocated to different projects. Obviously, it's like a shared resource. And he looks for exoplanets. He looks for exoplanets. And he's got this amazing YouTube channel. It's fucking sick. And...

This is the sort of stuff that he talks about a lot on his channel. Oh, really? Really, really, really. Well, this is the point, though, because if life exists twice in our own solar system. But then you get onto Robin Hanson's Great Filter Hypothesis. Have you heard that one?

which is i mean is it it's one of the glass ceiling the great filter oh yes yeah yeah this is one of the nine example or very paradox explanation okay yes yeah there's something there's something but what you actually don't want to find is

life in our solar system that's a very bad sign agreed because it suggests that the filter is in front of us not behind us yes and so the filter could be our own doing that's the glass ceiling the filter could also be potentially if this is what you're referring to

They are aware of us. Dark Forest. But we're just, yeah, right. We're just not enough of a threat. But as soon as we figure one or two things more out, they're like, all right. Yeah. Is it nuclear energy? Is it type two Kardashev? Is it into... Is it AI? Yeah.

Right? Fuck, that would be lame. Imagine if... That would be lame. Totally. What destroys us isn't AI itself, but the fact that you develop... Fuck, chat GPT. Holy shit. Aliens come for us. There's SETI, but there's also METI, right? Messaging Extraterrestrial. Mm-hmm. And I had...

a dude on that wrote an entire book about that but the history of it too and there's been since the beginning of time a concern about how much bleed have we got from radio signals yeah and what's the this uh the tracking the sphere of the first ever radio signals moving through space to go. Remember the movie Contact? Do you remember that movie? I didn't watch it. Oh, it's great. I just re-watched it. But the first signal they get back from the aliens is Nazi. It's Hitler.

And it's because the Olympics from Germany was the first broadcast television signal that had gone out. So it was their way of saying like, hey, we hear you. We're repeating this back to you. And it's Hitler. Fuck. So, yeah. Well, what an apocalyptic way to finish. Yeah, yeah. I normally don't talk like this. No, you rule. I'm so happy for everything you've got going on. The Netflix, the Sesame Street, the Crunch Labs. Tell people what they should check out.

I mean, go to crunchlabs.com or just checking out the YouTube channel. If you're curious and you like to learn without feeling like you're learning, then we've got a lot of content there. You're great, man. I appreciate it. Thanks for having me.

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