Speaker 1: Also media, step up to the slop trough. It's time
Speaker 1: for better offline and I'm your host ed ze Tron.
Speaker 1: As ever by the merchandise sign up to the newsletter
Speaker 1: message me on goot. I'm everywhere. But today I'm joined
Speaker 1: by the author of a book about how much I
Speaker 1: should be punished, what punishments I deserve, and how long
Speaker 1: I should be punished. I'm of course talking about more
Speaker 1: Everything Forever, written by astrophysicist Adam Becker.
Speaker 2: Adam, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me ed,
Speaker 2: It's good to be here. What's the book actually about?
Speaker 2: I apologize now, it's okay. The book is actually about
Speaker 2: the horrible ideas that tech billionaires have about the future
Speaker 2: that they're trying to shove down our throats, and why
Speaker 2: they don't work.
Speaker 1: You're an astrophysicist, right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, by training, what is that? Well, I did a
Speaker 2: PhD in astrophysics looking at how much we could learn
Speaker 2: about what was happening right after the Big Bang by
Speaker 2: looking at what was happening in the universe. You know
Speaker 2: what's happening in the universe right now.
Speaker 1: So how did you get into the touching in the
Speaker 1: world of Silicon Valley because you have to talk about
Speaker 1: some of the damnest bavots I've ever done.
Speaker 2: Sane. Yeah. Well, I started out my career as a
Speaker 2: science journalist straight out of grad school and was writing
Speaker 2: mostly about physics.
Speaker 1: Why are you writing?
Speaker 2: I was writing for pretty much everybody. I started at
Speaker 2: New Scientists and then moved on to writing for the BBC,
Speaker 2: wrote a book about quantum physics, wrote some stuff for NPR,
Speaker 2: the New York Times, very co American. Yeah, and you know,
Speaker 2: like was sort of having a normal science journalist career,
Speaker 2: and then in twenty sixteen, the weirdest fucking thing happened.
Speaker 2: What happened? You know? We elected a fascist? Oh right, yeah,
Speaker 2: that thing, yeah, that thing.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And I thought, oh, you know I should be doing
Speaker 2: something more to, you know, directly combat this. If I
Speaker 2: write another book, I would like it to have a
Speaker 2: more directly political angle, right, and uh. I live in Berkeley,
Speaker 2: I live in the San Francisco Bay area and just
Speaker 2: surrounded by tech bros constantly and was getting tired of
Speaker 2: their bullshit and it seemed more and more directly connected
Speaker 2: to the disintegration of American politics. And I thought, Okay,
Speaker 2: you know, somebody needs to write about how they have
Speaker 2: these insane ideas about the future and how that informs
Speaker 2: their terrible politics. So how long have you lived in
Speaker 2: the Bay? God, oh, thirteen years?
Speaker 1: Okay, so you've got like a good backing of where
Speaker 1: the bay has been in that time as well, because
Speaker 1: I think a lot of these people are transplants. And
Speaker 1: I say this is someone who literally moved to the
Speaker 1: Bay for two years in twenty fourteen. Yeah, like and
Speaker 1: even then it was weird watching what they were doing.
Speaker 1: Yeah but wait, so that was so you've been there
Speaker 1: thirteen years. But when did the book get started? Like,
Speaker 1: how did all this because it's this kind of came
Speaker 1: out of no way in a good way.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, No, I got started on the book probably
Speaker 2: the first inklings of it were around twenty nineteen or
Speaker 2: twenty twenty, right before the pandemic. I uncovered a online
Speaker 2: magazine that was trying to sanewash creationism and climate denial
Speaker 2: that was being funded by Peter Teel. Hell yeah yeah,
Speaker 2: And I broke that story and thought, oh, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: these these tech bros are awful and everybody thinks they
Speaker 2: know a lot about science and technology. Even the people
Speaker 2: who don't like them seem to think that they know
Speaker 2: a lot about science and technology, right, and it's just
Speaker 2: not true. Like they don't know anything about physics, they
Speaker 2: don't know anything about biology. Peter Teel thinks that creationism
Speaker 2: is you know, plausible, or that evolution isn't the whole story.
Speaker 2: That's nonsense, you know. Elon Musk thinks that we can
Speaker 2: live on Mars. That's nonsense, or at least he says that.
Speaker 2: Whether he actually believes it, I don't know.
Speaker 1: But that's actually kind of my question. Yeah, how much
Speaker 1: of this shit do you actually think they believe? Because
Speaker 1: I know Bezos is tied up with the long Now Foundation. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and they do make nice tea over there. However, the
Speaker 1: rest of the stuff not so good. But how much
Speaker 1: do they really believe in this? Because I just I
Speaker 1: you've said that this is kind of a homecoming for them.
Speaker 1: This is kind of them coming back to the things
Speaker 1: they truly believe. I don't think they believe in anything thing.
Speaker 1: I think some of them don't believe in anything. Go
Speaker 1: into I'm not saying, I'm you know that's really right here?
Speaker 2: Absolutely. Yeah. So, like, for example, I think it's very plausible. Obviously,
Speaker 2: we can't know for sure, but I think it's very
Speaker 2: plausible that, say, Sam Altman doesn't believe in anything. Yeah,
Speaker 2: that's quite possible. Yeah right. Karen Howell makes a good
Speaker 2: case for that in her reporting and in her.
Speaker 1: Books Excellent, being a guest on the show, she's fantastic.
Speaker 2: She's amazing. But at the other end of the spectrum,
Speaker 2: I think it's very plausible that Jeff Bezos really really
Speaker 2: does believe that we need to go to space. And
Speaker 2: the reason I say that is he when he was
Speaker 2: the vale edictorian of his high school down in Florida
Speaker 2: in like nineteen seventy eight or something like that, he
Speaker 2: gave a speech about how we need to go to space,
Speaker 2: we humanity need to go to That.
Speaker 1: Doesn't feel as ludicrous as a belief like we go
Speaker 1: to space. But what does go to space mean for
Speaker 1: this guy?
Speaker 2: Well, that's the thing. The specifics of that belief that
Speaker 2: he professed at the time are pretty similar to what
Speaker 2: he's saying now, and it is pretty ridiculous, like he
Speaker 2: has said very recently, and it echoes the stuff from
Speaker 2: his valedictorian speech when he was like eighteen, that we
Speaker 2: need to move into you know, hundreds of thousands or
Speaker 2: millions of enormous cylindrical space stations. Oh, of course. And
Speaker 2: have you know a trillion people living in the Solar.
Speaker 1: System tubes, yes, of trillions of peach exactly, do just
Speaker 1: work really well, like the hyperloop for example, Yeah, a
Speaker 1: successful tube.
Speaker 2: Yes, or you know the Internet itself a series of tubes. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And because those tubes in the Internet worked, of course,
Speaker 1: the tubes work in space.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's I think that the bongo.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, this is science. I believe I failed all
Speaker 1: the sciences. I'm really sorry. I'm really sorry, but no,
Speaker 1: keep going.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So you know, he said, then we can like
Speaker 2: make Earth into a beautiful park that you know, allows
Speaker 2: us to you know, save the environments. I know. And
Speaker 2: he said, when we have a trillion people living in
Speaker 2: the Solar System, we can have a thousand Mozarts and
Speaker 2: a thousand Einstein's. I'm like, buddy, we probably already have
Speaker 2: people who are just as talented as Mozart and Einstein
Speaker 2: and all the other geniuses of history who are living
Speaker 2: and dying in poverty. Yes, and you know you don't
Speaker 2: care about that, And you don't seem to care about
Speaker 2: climate change because you know, the carbon footprint of the
Speaker 2: Blue Origin rockets and the Amazon warehouses and all that stuff, right,
Speaker 2: But instead of that, he's like, no, no, no, the solution
Speaker 2: is to go to space. Like, why that's not gonna work.
Speaker 1: Because more space is up in space, Adam, you put
Speaker 1: cube and sp It's really it's funny because these people
Speaker 1: are insanely rich but also sound very stupid. Yeah, when
Speaker 1: you really get down to the trumps of its life,
Speaker 1: what's your solution, Jeff of Gold, the money in the
Speaker 1: world tubes yep, tubes of space tubes, yep, trillion people,
Speaker 1: mozarts more mozarts, just sweating.
Speaker 2: Profusely, exactly. Yeah, And he does try to give an argument,
Speaker 2: but the argument is hilariously bad. He says that we
Speaker 2: need to go to space, among other reasons, like he's
Speaker 2: all that environmental stuff, but he the thing he keeps
Speaker 2: harping on and coming back to is he says, we
Speaker 2: need to keep using more energy per capita?
Speaker 1: Right, why?
Speaker 2: Right? Why? Exactly? He never says exactly WHOA Okay, Yeah,
Speaker 2: he says. The only defense he gives for that is
Speaker 2: he says, if we don't do that, we'll have a
Speaker 2: civilization of stagnation and stasis.
Speaker 1: As opposed to now when there's tons of innovation happening
Speaker 1: and all of big tech is focused on a diverse
Speaker 1: series of options rather than one big expensive dogshit thing.
Speaker 2: Precisely, he nailed it. Yeah, and he says we have
Speaker 2: to go to space because like otherwise, we're gonna run
Speaker 2: out of energy here on Earth. We won't be able
Speaker 2: to keep expanding the energy we used per capita. What
Speaker 2: does the energy do?
Speaker 1: Well?
Speaker 2: Yeah, first of all, what does the energy do? And second, uh,
Speaker 2: this is this is actually my favorite part. Hell yeah,
Speaker 2: he is right that if you just like idiotically kept
Speaker 2: that trend going in a way that's physically impossible, you know,
Speaker 2: for for hundreds of years, you would run out of
Speaker 2: energy here on Earth. Like you, you wouldn't be able
Speaker 2: to keep the energy users per capita growing at the
Speaker 2: exponential rate that it has been in about three hundred
Speaker 2: years of be using all the energy that we get
Speaker 2: from the Sun here on the Earth. But if you
Speaker 2: keep that trend going, if you try to do that
Speaker 2: by you know, going out and living in tubes in
Speaker 2: the solar system, right, that only gets you like another
Speaker 2: few hundred maybe one thousand years. Then you're using all
Speaker 2: the energy that comes from the sun.
Speaker 1: Right, and we've still not really established what we're using
Speaker 1: the energy for. Nope, nope, no, so Beata sentus Yeah, finally.
Speaker 2: Right, and this and this brings us to like the
Speaker 2: bullshit that Sam Altman said about building a dice and sphere.
Speaker 1: Exclaim what a dice sphere is? I thought it was
Speaker 1: the ball on the fucking vacuum.
Speaker 2: But yeah, no, that's the only kind of dice and
Speaker 2: sphere that actually exists. No, a dice in sphere is
Speaker 2: a giant, mega construction project, you know, beyond anything that
Speaker 2: anyone's ever actually built or probably could build. That just
Speaker 2: encloses a star and captures all of the energy from
Speaker 2: that star.
Speaker 1: Right, and if we ever built anything like that, no,
Speaker 1: of course, okay, just making sure we So it's building
Speaker 1: a big.
Speaker 2: Around the star to capture all of the energy from
Speaker 2: that star to use it for data.
Speaker 1: Where would the energy How would the energy get from
Speaker 1: the star to Earth?
Speaker 2: I mean, oh, tubes, yeah, toobes exactly. Yeah, so I battery.
Speaker 1: Yeah, like, it's so safe, it's so cool. We live
Speaker 1: in a site. I wish I could do what he does.
Speaker 1: I would be saying shit all the time. I just
Speaker 1: I'd be like, yeah, actually, you need we can change
Speaker 1: the world if we just create a series of tubes
Speaker 1: that just gave me money every day. No, wait, that's
Speaker 1: too that's that's too obvious. I'd need to come up
Speaker 1: with the best.
Speaker 2: Well no, I mean, I just think it's pretty interesting
Speaker 2: that these guys are spouting obvious bullshit and the only
Speaker 2: reason people listen to them is that they're rich. Like
Speaker 2: if if they weren't saying this stuff, but then I
Speaker 2: went around saying this stuff, nobody would listen to me
Speaker 2: unless they funded me.
Speaker 1: If a guy on the street who smelled kind of
Speaker 1: bad walked up to you and said, the price of
Speaker 1: intelligence is getting too cheap to meet her, you'd be like,
Speaker 1: all right, mate, yeah, can't do anything but clammy Sammy
Speaker 1: says it and everyone loses their fucking shit.
Speaker 2: Well yeah, and that that Actually, that brings me to
Speaker 2: something else that we were plenty to talk about, you know,
Speaker 2: speaking of weird dudes on the street who are not
Speaker 2: billionaires making insane claims. Ellie azer yod Kowski.
Speaker 1: That's how you say his name, don't even Liza, I
Speaker 1: don't really. Here's the thing. He's a disrespectful sex is
Speaker 1: more on Grift. So I really don't give a shit.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, it is rather bizarre that anybody listens to
Speaker 2: anything he has to say about anything he's So, who
Speaker 2: is the fuck this fuck? Nun? No? No, the the
Speaker 2: alternate title for my book, like in my head the
Speaker 2: head Kennon was these fucking people. Yeah, I love that.
Speaker 1: No, No, I write these fucking bosses a lot. Right,
Speaker 1: Ellie's a Yudkowski?
Speaker 2: Yes, who what does he do? Why does what does
Speaker 2: he do?
Speaker 1: And why does so many seemingly smart people believe this tipshit?
Speaker 2: So Ellie as a Judkowski, I'm gonna give you, like
Speaker 2: the formal version of who he is, what he might say,
Speaker 2: what would be in like his online bio, and then
Speaker 2: I'll tell you the reality. Okay, so uh. Ellie as
Speaker 2: a jud Kowski is the co founder of the Machine
Speaker 2: Intelligence Research Institute, which has been around for about twenty
Speaker 2: five years, and he has been researching artificial superintelligence for
Speaker 2: all of that time and mostly going on about how
Speaker 2: dangerous it could be if anybody built it without ensuring
Speaker 2: that it would serve human.
Speaker 1: And this is just to be clear. He has no
Speaker 1: scientific knowledge. Can he even code? Like? Does he have
Speaker 1: any kind of.
Speaker 2: He doesn't even have a high school diploma.
Speaker 1: So I won't judge people for that, but I'll judge
Speaker 1: him for all the rest of here's the thing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, no, I'm not judging him for not but that
Speaker 2: it doesn't really make Filly full of confidence. No, no, no, no,
Speaker 2: he has no formal qualifications. And again, that's fine. You know,
Speaker 2: there are many people who've made major contributions to many
Speaker 2: fields of human endeavor without any formal qualifications. Right, that's fine.
Speaker 2: The thing is, if you make extraordinary claims like he's making,
Speaker 2: you need extraordinary evidence, and not having those qualifications, like
Speaker 2: you said, doesn't really inspire confidence. He has made a
Speaker 2: series of really outlandish claims about what the future of
Speaker 2: AI could be, right, based on essentially nothing, based on
Speaker 2: like reading a bunch of science fiction. He explicitly cites,
Speaker 2: uh science fiction. There's like verner VINGI, as you know,
Speaker 2: oh verner Vingie wrote a bunch of books like Marooned
Speaker 2: in Real Time and uh god, I'm trying to remember
Speaker 2: the names of the others. It doesn't matter. Point is, yeah,
Speaker 2: he's a fiction writer who's also I think a scientist
Speaker 2: of some stripe I don't remember what, but still writing
Speaker 2: fiction and VINGI came up with this idea, or was
Speaker 2: one of the originators of and popularizers of an idea
Speaker 2: called the singularity. Right, So the singularity is this idea
Speaker 2: that the rate of technological change is just going to
Speaker 2: keep getting faster and faster, and specifically, the rate of
Speaker 2: intelligence of AI is going to keep getting smarter and smarter, uh,
Speaker 2: until we reach this sort of point of no return
Speaker 2: where we have a singularity accompanied by an intelligence explosion that.
Speaker 1: Leads to like the singularity moment.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the singularity moment is very ill defined.
Speaker 1: Oh and the I can't fucking believe this. Yeah, I've
Speaker 1: heard this bollocks so many times. I thought they had
Speaker 1: a moment. I thought they had a point.
Speaker 2: No, not really, oh you yeah, So like Kurzweil, right,
Speaker 2: the patron saint of evangelizing the Singularity, the guy who
Speaker 2: read the Singularity is Nearer, and then the sequel last year,
Speaker 2: the Singularity is Nearer, which is the real fucking title. Bro,
Speaker 2: I know that's the real title of the book.
Speaker 1: But his next books just called sorry, yeah no, it's
Speaker 1: his next books, Like it's here again, you see, it
Speaker 1: is the Singularity in the room with us, Yes, exactly,
Speaker 1: but he doesn't.
Speaker 2: He tries to, but it's incredibly vague. He says, like
Speaker 2: Kurzweil says, the singularity is going to be here in
Speaker 2: twenty forty five. He also said in two thousand and five,
Speaker 2: and the singularity is near that, you know, we would
Speaker 2: have all kinds of nanotechnology by now. They love nanotechty,
Speaker 2: they love nanotechnology. They use it as a synonym for magic.
Speaker 1: It was, I swear to God. Also, there was a
Speaker 1: nanotechnology bubble briefly like ten years ago. I vaguely remember
Speaker 1: them trying.
Speaker 2: It didn't really go any I mean, there was also
Speaker 2: a nanotech sort of hype bubble back in the eighties
Speaker 2: and nineties, and it also didn't go anywhere. And it
Speaker 2: didn't go anywhere because it turns out that like this
Speaker 2: idea of nanotech is like magic pixie dust that fixes
Speaker 2: everything is nonsense and it's a real like it's being
Speaker 2: echoed right now in the AI bubble. Yeah right. It's
Speaker 2: the same kind of hype, often pushed by the same
Speaker 2: people with the same logic, sometimes working at like the
Speaker 2: same nonprofits. I mean, Yudkowski talks about nanotech constantly. It's
Speaker 2: in his new book it's all over you know, the
Speaker 2: website that he's created. Uh.
Speaker 1: And his book is called if You Buy this book
Speaker 1: called Mike Money. Yeah, that's sorry, It's called if They
Speaker 1: Built This Everyone. It's such a stupid fucking title.
Speaker 2: Sorry. Yeah, no, it's a very stupid title. I will
Speaker 2: say the one thing I'll say about Yudkowski. I am
Speaker 2: sure that he is a true believer. He is not
Speaker 2: a Yes, he's not a grifter. Why because, like it's
Speaker 2: it's hard to explain, but I am so much more
Speaker 2: sure about him than I am about anybody else, even base.
Speaker 1: I trust your judgment. It's just he gives off the
Speaker 1: air of like a despot for a mad men.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I would say the best way to think about Yudkowski,
Speaker 2: like the way that I often think about him, is
Speaker 2: imagine like a really smart, self educated fifteen year old.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, and like, you know, because if a fifteen
Speaker 2: year old was running around saying the stuff that Yudkowski
Speaker 2: is saying right now, I'd be like, wow, bright kid.
Speaker 1: I hope he grows out, and I hope his parents
Speaker 1: have a lock on the gung capin.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, yeah, well, and also like I hope he
Speaker 2: you know, I hope he grows up.
Speaker 1: Yes, and I'm still thinking that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And like, and I don't think jud Kowski did.
Speaker 2: I think, you know, I think like.
Speaker 1: I also think everybody fell for it.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, and that's the thing, Like he got a
Speaker 2: lot of support online. He you know, he got money
Speaker 2: from Peterman.
Speaker 1: Sam Moltman said that he could, he should, he may
Speaker 1: win the Nobel Peace Prize.
Speaker 2: One yeah, yeah, sam Moltman said that he should win
Speaker 2: a Nobel Peace Prize.
Speaker 1: Falling down moment if that happens.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, that's not happening.
Speaker 1: Defense.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, there's no way. But like, look, he got
Speaker 2: a bunch of money from Peter Teal because Teal thought that,
Speaker 2: you know, j had Kowski was saying smart stuff about AI, right.
Speaker 2: Teal now doesn't much like jud Kowski because he thinks
Speaker 2: jud Kowski is too pessimistic. But the sort of the
Speaker 2: damage has been.
Speaker 1: The ultimate Oh yeah yeah, classic old grins and smiles
Speaker 1: of that foul.
Speaker 2: Yeah no, too pessimistic for Peter Teal.
Speaker 1: That's actually bad.
Speaker 2: Yeah no it is, no, it's but no, he's he's
Speaker 2: a true believer. He's just kind of nuts.
Speaker 1: So what does he do all day? I say this
Speaker 1: as a blogger pr person news, newsletter writer and podcaster
Speaker 1: and all this ship Like I realize I have an
Speaker 1: email job, Fine, but at least I can tell tell
Speaker 1: you what I do all day. What does he do
Speaker 1: with like go to parties with people at Kevin Rusan
Speaker 1: going the computer's going to kill us all.
Speaker 2: I think that's a good chunk of it. And I
Speaker 2: also think he writes an enormous amount right, Like, this
Speaker 2: is a guy who wrote that, you know, Harry Potter
Speaker 2: fan fiction that's longer than War in Peace. Right, he
Speaker 2: wrote like a one and a half million word BDSM
Speaker 2: decision theory novel.
Speaker 1: I say this as someone who writes a lot, a
Speaker 1: lot of words. That's an unhealthy amount of words.
Speaker 2: I agree, and it does help. I think for him
Speaker 2: being able to write that many words, he's not a
Speaker 2: very good writer.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean even again, I write fifteen thousand word blogs,
Speaker 1: so I can't really judge him too harsh. But one
Speaker 1: point five million words, how do you even know what
Speaker 1: it's about?
Speaker 2: At that point? I only know what it's about because
Speaker 2: that's what he said it's about. I haven't read that one.
Speaker 2: I did read most of the Harry Potter one research. Yeah, bad,
Speaker 2: it was really really incredible.
Speaker 1: Any any sexism or racism in there, it's just strange.
Speaker 1: I mean it's JK.
Speaker 2: Rowling, So yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's a good question. I
Speaker 2: don't remember anything specif big good.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean it's just strange.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I mean, he's definitely got a heart on for
Speaker 2: eugenics and.
Speaker 1: These and this is somewhat paraphrasing the comic book Preacher,
Speaker 1: but it's like, why do these fucking guys always look
Speaker 1: like that?
Speaker 2: If you're gonna claim.
Speaker 1: You're like a eugenicist, you should not look like an
Speaker 1: egg with a hat on. And I won't get into
Speaker 1: but I don't generally get into personal appearance because I'm
Speaker 1: self conscious myself. But it's like, if your whole thing
Speaker 1: is like, yeah, we need to make the perfect human beings,
Speaker 1: it's like, you can't look like that, mate, I'm sorry,
Speaker 1: you can't do that.
Speaker 2: Well I don't.
Speaker 1: I guess you can. You'll be in the New York
Speaker 1: fucking Times.
Speaker 2: Yeah. No, it's it's crazy. It is really crazy that
Speaker 2: anybody listens to him. But no, he's really into eugenics.
Speaker 1: Why do they listen to him?
Speaker 2: He's really into evolutionary psychology, and he's got like the
Speaker 2: sexism and racism that's like tied up in that. Why
Speaker 2: do people listen to him? I mean part of it
Speaker 2: is that he got that money from those billionaires, right.
Speaker 2: He was hanging out in the bay saying the kind
Speaker 2: of insane contrarian shit about AI that attracts the kind
Speaker 2: of like brain dead billionaires like Peter Thiel. And then
Speaker 2: you know, he became the guy and started, you know,
Speaker 2: a series of online platforms that attracted a following, right,
Speaker 2: like you know, Less Wrong, and then that spun off
Speaker 2: this whole rationalist subculture. Yeah, that's a very good question.
Speaker 2: Less Wrong is an online platform that serve slash maybe
Speaker 2: served as a home and like epicenter for this movement
Speaker 2: called the Rationalists, right, which are sort of formed around
Speaker 2: Yudkowski's writing, include this set of writings he has called
Speaker 2: The Sequences where he lays out, Oh he's a cult leader,
Speaker 2: yeah in a way. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: The rationalists are just people, I'm guessing, guys with triobies
Speaker 1: who say that we need to focus on ration, rational
Speaker 1: thoughts and logic.
Speaker 2: And there's a lot of it. I mean, some of
Speaker 2: them are women, but some of them are non.
Speaker 1: Baring, really surprising yeah.
Speaker 2: I mean, look, there are nerds of all stripes.
Speaker 1: Yes, And also he's very much playing in the older Internet. Yes,
Speaker 1: but the idea of a large forum with any kind
Speaker 1: of following is actually kind of adorable these days, except
Speaker 1: when it's less wrong, it's not adorable. Well.
Speaker 2: Also, less wrong's been around since the somewhat older Internet, right,
Speaker 2: it's not been around since the nineties, but it's been
Speaker 2: around since like the mid to late two thousands. Okay,
Speaker 2: And Yudkowski is you know, a lot of the rationalists
Speaker 2: are in their twenties and maybe early thirties, but Yudkowski
Speaker 2: himself is in his mid forties, right, because you know,
Speaker 2: he he is terminally online. And I'm sure, like obviously
Speaker 2: he'd be unhapy be with many of the things I've
Speaker 2: said about him, but that one I'm sure he'd agree with.
Speaker 2: You know, like he's been online since he dropped out
Speaker 2: of school at age what like thirteen or fourteen. He's
Speaker 2: been online since the mid nineties on like butta yeah,
Speaker 2: and like you know, he was on transhumanist forums like
Speaker 2: like you know, since the mid nineties, like email threats
Speaker 2: and stuff like that.
Speaker 1: God, yeah, he really he is like the detritus of
Speaker 1: the Internet in a way brought to like Katamari of
Speaker 1: center right freaks.
Speaker 2: Yeah, bearing ever right. I wouldn't even say center right.
Speaker 2: I would say techno libertarian. But that is just that's
Speaker 2: just right. Oh, no, it is right wing. It's the
Speaker 2: center part that I disagreed with.
Speaker 1: Yeah, perhaps he started that when he was fifteen, before
Speaker 1: he learned yeah, the wrong things.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I will say he like I don't get the
Speaker 2: sense that like he likes Donald Trump, but he certainly
Speaker 2: like will parrot a lot of standard libertarian talking saints
Speaker 2: along the way to you know, making his The one thing.
Speaker 1: I keep thinking though, is I don't know if I
Speaker 1: can shake this thing he's a grifter just because you're
Speaker 1: taking a bunch of twenty year olds, you've got all
Speaker 1: of this writing thing. He's either a grifter or a
Speaker 1: true cult leader. He may actually just be a cult leader.
Speaker 2: Why I would say cult leader is.
Speaker 1: Closer, Yeah, because he seems to I mean, dangerous is
Speaker 1: probably the wrong word.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that's straight.
Speaker 1: He's not.
Speaker 2: I wouldn't call him dangerous, but he is.
Speaker 1: You think the only dangerous to like a hot topic worker,
Speaker 1: a very nerdy hot topic No, No, no, no to them,
Speaker 1: just just that he'd speak to them. It's just peculiar
Speaker 1: as well, because and this actually gets into some of
Speaker 1: your science background when you got my continual frustration because
Speaker 1: I am self taught with all this economic stuff which
Speaker 1: is insane, I probably shouldn't criticize you had Kowski quite
Speaker 1: as much, but I will. I'm a hypocrite. I looking
Speaker 1: through financial journalism and tech journalism. The thing that I
Speaker 1: keep noticing is that people keep accepting things that I've
Speaker 1: just patently wrong. There's just shit that they say, like
Speaker 1: even with this in video Open AI deal, people saying
Speaker 1: and Video invested one hundred billion dollars. They didn't. They're
Speaker 1: investing progressively. When they do the first giga what gigawatts
Speaker 1: of take like gig what of data center will take
Speaker 1: about a year and a half two years. That though,
Speaker 1: it's just bollocks. I imagine the last few years have
Speaker 1: been a little bit mind bending for you hearing all
Speaker 1: this stuff about Agi and the future and all that.
Speaker 2: Yeah gobshite, Yes, yeah, I mean the AGI stuff, which,
Speaker 2: like I started working on this book before chatch Ept
Speaker 2: came out right, and it.
Speaker 1: Was twenty nineteen, a few years into Open a eyes.
Speaker 2: Yeah exactly. So like I knew about open AI, and
Speaker 2: I knew about like transformer models, but like you know,
Speaker 2: chat GPT comes out and and suddenly, you know, the
Speaker 2: public conversation shifts in a way that I didn't anticipate.
Speaker 2: I realize, oh, this book is going to have to
Speaker 2: be a little bit different than I thought it was
Speaker 2: going to be. But also, you know, all of this
Speaker 2: conversation about AGI, right, like in a way it helped
Speaker 2: me for writing the book because I thought I was
Speaker 2: going to have to spend a lot of time in
Speaker 2: the book explaining what AI is, what people think AGI is, right,
Speaker 2: There's gonna be a lot more explanation, And then all
Speaker 2: of this stuff came out and I'm like, oh, actually, this,
Speaker 2: you know, I can I can spend more time in
Speaker 2: the meat of the book. This is this is helpful
Speaker 2: for me because you could just quote them directly exactly. Yeah.
Speaker 2: But the thing is, AGI is this hopelessly ill defined
Speaker 2: thing like super intelligence, this thing that that yed Kowski
Speaker 2: is on about. Uh you know, what does it even mean?
Speaker 2: Like have you looked at the definition of AGI in
Speaker 2: the open AI charter like the original one? Oh yeah, no,
Speaker 2: it's great, Like the original charter from way back. It
Speaker 2: says something like AGI is a machine that can reproduce
Speaker 2: any economically viable or economically productive activity that humans engage in.
Speaker 2: That's a bad definition.
Speaker 1: That's anything. Yeah, I mean that could just mean anything
Speaker 1: that could. It's it's a machine that can do anything.
Speaker 2: It's both vague and really narrow, right, because it's like, Okay,
Speaker 2: I thought AGI was supposed to be like, you know,
Speaker 2: commander data on Star Trek, right, and so that means
Speaker 2: you know, it's gonna be sort of like humans. It
Speaker 2: can do the things that.
Speaker 1: Humans do, also economically viable work. And the first thing
Speaker 1: they start with is fucking writing. Yeah, like Jesus Christ.
Speaker 1: That's like, oh my god. Yeah, the first and the most.
Speaker 1: We're gonna build boats and sell like we're gonna buy
Speaker 1: boats as an investment vehicle, like like what the fuck?
Speaker 2: Yeah, these people don't do any real work.
Speaker 1: It's it's so strange as well, because the AGI conversation
Speaker 1: almost never happened. It's about AGI. It's because my favorite
Speaker 1: thing to do is media.
Speaker 2: Go.
Speaker 1: Isn't this slavery? Because it is. It's like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: we'll do an autonomous thing. We'll make do things, but
Speaker 1: it will be conscious, which will allow it to work better.
Speaker 2: Yep. And so then you get people talking about like
Speaker 2: a data center filled with geniuses, and like, oh, okay,
Speaker 2: wouldn't a data center filled with geniuses not want to
Speaker 2: work for you?
Speaker 1: Wouldn't a dat ascent of full of geniuses that can't
Speaker 1: leave and have to work be cold to prison?
Speaker 2: Yep? Yeah? Cool, yeah, exactly. No, I I get into
Speaker 2: this in my book. You know, the inspiration for a
Speaker 2: lot of these ideas ultimately traces back to mid twentieth
Speaker 2: century science fiction, right, And so you get people like
Speaker 2: Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clark, right, Asimov's robot stories in particular.
Speaker 2: If you go back and look at Asimov's robot stories,
Speaker 2: it is very hard with like a modern eye to
Speaker 2: look at them as, especially certain ones of them. It's
Speaker 2: hard to see them as anything other than like kind
Speaker 2: of being about slavery and race relationships, because you get like,
Speaker 2: for example, there's this one short story I think it's
Speaker 2: called Oh God, I think it's called Catch that Robot,
Speaker 2: but I might be confusing it with a different one.
Speaker 2: It might be a little Lost Robot. I get those
Speaker 2: two confused. But either way, it's about a robot that
Speaker 2: is trying to escape gain its freedom. And in that story,
Speaker 2: the humans are like addressing a bunch of they're interviewing
Speaker 2: a bunch of seemingly identical robots to try to find
Speaker 2: the one that they're looking for that's trying to escape.
Speaker 2: And they interview these robots and when they're interviewing them,
Speaker 2: they address them as boy, and the robots called the
Speaker 2: humans Master. Yeah, And these stories are from like nineteen
Speaker 2: fifty five, like you know, the Jim Crow South is
Speaker 2: alive and well, it's really bad, it's really really uncomfortable.
Speaker 2: And then like forty years later, in the nineteen nineties,
Speaker 2: you get Werner Vingi writing about the singularity and how
Speaker 2: great it's going to be when we all have these
Speaker 2: robot assistants, and he refers to Asmov's wonderful dream of
Speaker 2: and this is a direct quote from Vingi. Willing slaves
Speaker 2: Jesus fucking Christ. Yes, And that's something that someone wrote
Speaker 2: in like nineteen ninety one. I mean, but that's what
Speaker 2: this is.
Speaker 1: And this is an uncomfortable topic because that's what this is.
Speaker 1: It's what pisses me off, other than like nineteen other
Speaker 1: things about Kevin Bruce at the time, because he's written
Speaker 1: several things about AI and AGI and one thing about
Speaker 1: AI welfare, and it's like the AI welfare begins with slavery.
Speaker 1: And if you can't write that, you're a fucking coward
Speaker 1: and a bitch. I'm sorry you can't write. Yeah, everyone
Speaker 1: is excited about slavery because that's what it is, and
Speaker 1: it's nothing else. It's not oh well, it's like they
Speaker 1: wouldn't be. They wouldn't be. They like doing it, and
Speaker 1: it's like, fuck you man, that it's slavery. What I
Speaker 1: really hope happens is if AGI happens, it's just a
Speaker 1: just a regular dude, yep, and he's lazy and he's
Speaker 1: a yeah, like you just do this. What I think
Speaker 1: that's way more likely is I don't think AGI is possible.
Speaker 2: Yeah. No, Actually that's a good question. Do you think
Speaker 2: it's possible? Not really? No likely?
Speaker 1: I say this is a non scientific person.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, no, I don't think that you can build. Well,
Speaker 2: first of all, I think AGI is just hopelessly ill defined, right,
Speaker 2: But if we want to say, like an artificial machine
Speaker 2: that has the cognitive capacities of a human, like they
Speaker 2: can do all of the tasks, like all of the
Speaker 2: things that humans do. First of all, I think you're
Speaker 2: gonna need a completely different kind of machine. I don't.
Speaker 2: I don't think certainly. I don't think that you know,
Speaker 2: scale is all you need. And if just scale attention, yeah,
Speaker 2: give it, give it more data. And if you don't
Speaker 2: have enough data to make more synthetic data with more LLM,
Speaker 2: like dude, that why why wouldn't know? Absolutely not? But
Speaker 2: but I also think that like there is, there's is
Speaker 2: very simplistic set of ideas behind the idea of AGI, right,
Speaker 2: and and the two that I keep coming back to
Speaker 2: are the idea of the brain as a computer and
Speaker 2: the idea of our bodies as like meat spacesuits for
Speaker 2: our brains. And both of those are just wrong. The
Speaker 2: brain is not really very much like a computer. It
Speaker 2: is more like a computer than it is like say,
Speaker 2: a clock. But there was a long history of comparing
Speaker 2: the brain to you know, the most complex piece of
Speaker 2: machinery that humans have at the time, right before it
Speaker 2: was a brain, or before the brain was like a computer,
Speaker 2: it was like a telephone network. Before that, it was
Speaker 2: like a hydraulic system. Before that, it was like a
Speaker 2: clock or a windmill, right, And it's not really actually
Speaker 2: like I mean, it's a little like some of those things.
Speaker 2: But the brain is like the brain, and the main different.
Speaker 1: We don't understand thinking, no, and we don't.
Speaker 2: Understand exactly how the brain works. And part of that
Speaker 2: is that the brain was not built. The brain evolved. Right.
Speaker 2: But also we are not our brains. We are our
Speaker 2: bodies in our environments. Right. The brain is inextricably connected
Speaker 2: to the body, and the body works in an environment
Speaker 2: surrounded by other bodies, in a culture, a society, a world. Right.
Speaker 2: You need all of those things in order to get
Speaker 2: the human cognition that you know. These guys are so
Speaker 2: you know, determined to reproduce inside of a computer. If
Speaker 2: you just take a human baby and like leave it
Speaker 2: with a bunch of food in the woods, even if
Speaker 2: you get rid of all the predators and everything, that
Speaker 2: baby's gonna starve to get a bunch of books, man, right, yeah,
Speaker 2: like the baby books. Yeah, if you give the if
Speaker 2: you somehow, if you feed the baby but don't talk
Speaker 2: to it, the baby will not grow up being able
Speaker 2: to think properly.
Speaker 1: Or Speakit's thinking will be vastly different.
Speaker 2: Exactly. Yeah, and so like you need so much more
Speaker 2: than just the brain.
Speaker 1: It also compresses human experience. They can play experience with learning.
Speaker 2: Yep.
Speaker 1: When we don't know how we learn, like we learn,
Speaker 1: we learn intentionally but also unintentionally societal yup conditions around us,
Speaker 1: how we felt in a particular moment. Vastly memory is
Speaker 1: also insane yep, yep. We experience the world in this
Speaker 1: is my personal experience. My experience of the world is
Speaker 1: vastly different to my memory. My memory is like crystal
Speaker 1: clear and beautiful, and my real life is a mixture
Speaker 1: of slops. Yeah, and it's it's frustrating as well. Books
Speaker 1: of these people also donut pits are like people. They
Speaker 1: don't they don't like the human brain is kind of
Speaker 1: like human bodies, even the dumbest dumb dumb it's kind
Speaker 1: of amazing yep thing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, And one of the things that's amazing is, Yeah,
Speaker 2: we don't know how the human brain works. We don't
Speaker 2: know how thinking or learning works. But what we do
Speaker 2: know is that we don't do it in anything like
Speaker 2: any way anything like on LLM. Yes, right, because the
Speaker 2: amount of you know, material that we take in over
Speaker 2: the course of the first three years of our lives.
Speaker 2: When we go from not knowing a length which to
Speaker 2: knowing a language, maybe multiple languages, is nowhere near the
Speaker 2: amount of material that is, you know, force fed into
Speaker 2: these llms, And yet we get the trick done, and
Speaker 2: three year olds know things that no LLM knows.
Speaker 1: Also, there's no affordance for the fact fact that some
Speaker 1: people can't learn stuff like I cannot learn languages.
Speaker 2: I've really tried. I'm pretty trash of that too.
Speaker 1: But I also was really bad at like I was
Speaker 1: uniquely bad at a lot of things. I have my
Speaker 1: various no but I have ADHD, dyspraxia and other stuff
Speaker 1: I won't get into. But it's I can't like certain things,
Speaker 1: don't like the things that I pick up insanely quickly.
Speaker 1: Other people can't. Other people can't even see the connections.
Speaker 1: It doesn't Robert Evans actually had a really good point
Speaker 1: on the subreddit Yes Robert, I read all your stuff,
Speaker 1: where he was saying that like he is very good
Speaker 1: at like picking up stuff like almost to me, he
Speaker 1: can read fast than most people as long as it's
Speaker 1: about conflict and it's no, but it's true, and it's
Speaker 1: one of the remarkable things about the human brain. And
Speaker 1: I think that it's actually kind of disgusting how little
Speaker 1: appreciation that is for like human bodies and the brain,
Speaker 1: how incredible the average busts, even average people are.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, and this is this is the thing. These
Speaker 2: guys don't have a proper appreciation for the human brain
Speaker 2: and the human body. And going back to the tech billionaires,
Speaker 2: and I guess Yodkowski as well, they don't have an
Speaker 2: appreciation for how remarkable Earth is in particular, right, you
Speaker 2: know they you know, especially when you talk about somebody
Speaker 2: like Bezos or Musk, they talk about Earth like it's doomed,
Speaker 2: Like we need to get off of this planet. Yeah,
Speaker 2: like this is this is our home. It's a remarkable place,
Speaker 2: and there is nowhere that we could get to in
Speaker 2: the Solar System. There's nowhere else in the Solar System
Speaker 2: that's remotely as as hospitable as the Earth.
Speaker 1: I also think that they want more. They want their
Speaker 1: own land, they want their own countries, they want they
Speaker 1: want to escape governance.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, they see they see spaces and escape from
Speaker 2: politics because they they're like living a libertarian wet drenk, which.
Speaker 1: Is really funny.
Speaker 2: Because when they get that, they'll immediately do fascism.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's what's on the agenda.
Speaker 2: Second, can't you cannot run away from politics to minute
Speaker 2: you have more than one person in a room, there's good.
Speaker 2: It's just really sad.
Speaker 1: And I actually think on a grander scale, they don't
Speaker 1: have an appreciation for tech. I was just writing something
Speaker 1: last night. It was on the way to New York
Speaker 1: where it was like the actual state of technology is
Speaker 1: kind of fucking amazing. Yeah, like we can message I
Speaker 1: could message you happen to be in town, you message
Speaker 1: me on blue Sky hundreds of miles thousands of miles away.
Speaker 1: I was like, I'm able to write a note that
Speaker 1: was on my computer, that's on my iPad here. I
Speaker 1: know that this sounds like boosting, but it really isn't.
Speaker 1: We have the raw tools that are just fucking incredible. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and these people do not appreciate them. They don't appreciate them,
Speaker 1: which is why general if AI is so fucking ugly
Speaker 1: because it's bad technology. It's not even good technology. It's
Speaker 1: poorly run, inefficient, endlessly expensive, and directionless.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and it inflicts harms on users that like we
Speaker 2: would not accept from anything that was not subjected to
Speaker 2: such an enormous hype cycle.
Speaker 1: Right literally nothing, yeah, nothing, No, if ten.
Speaker 2: Years ago you you know, took any you know person
Speaker 2: off the street and said, hey, there's this cool new technology.
Speaker 2: It takes up enormous amounts of electricity. It can do things.
Speaker 2: It can do things that you know, no other piece
Speaker 2: of technology you've ever seen can do. Also, it's very
Speaker 2: good at talking teenagers into killing themselves. Yes, should we
Speaker 2: release it into the you know, wider.
Speaker 1: World, And they'll say, well, no, but can do anything else?
Speaker 1: And you, of course would say yeah. It can sometimes
Speaker 1: write code, yeah exactly. And sometimes it also gets things
Speaker 1: horribly wrong and.
Speaker 2: It writes bad pros. Yeah like, and it just kind
Speaker 2: of makes everything feel kind of mediocre and smeared out,
Speaker 2: yes exactly, like, yeah exactly, and it makes some people
Speaker 2: go crazy.
Speaker 1: And yeah, it drives people to actually, yeah, how do
Speaker 1: you feel about that? Like, how do you like did
Speaker 1: you see this coming? Because this really jumped out No.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, no, this surprised me. This did surprise the hell
Speaker 2: out of me because I think that you know, these machines,
Speaker 2: I don't even like calling them AI right, because I
Speaker 2: think that's a marketing term. It is. Yeah, like if
Speaker 2: you go back in time to you know, nineteen ninety
Speaker 2: and tell me when I'm a kid, Hey, I have
Speaker 2: a little device in my pocket that lets me talk
Speaker 2: to an AI and and then you know, I would
Speaker 2: have thought, oh, like that lets me talk to you know,
Speaker 2: like command or data from start exciting, And instead it's this,
Speaker 2: and I would have been like, what the hell is that? No,
Speaker 2: AI is this marketing term. It's it's a text generation engine.
Speaker 2: It it it produces you know, homogenized thought like product.
Speaker 2: I was.
Speaker 1: Also, I'm in the midst of a long one as usual.
Speaker 1: It also conflates doing stuff with outputs. I know that
Speaker 1: sounds kind of flat, but it's like that everything is
Speaker 1: a unit of work rather than actually creating stuff. Well
Speaker 1: that you pay an you pay a person for their
Speaker 1: experience too. And it's just also not very good at
Speaker 1: Stuff's pissing me. No, really, it's really bad at stuff.
Speaker 2: It is. And I think, and I think that's where
Speaker 2: you know, this sort of driving people insane is coming from, right,
Speaker 2: Like I I like what I missed. The reason I
Speaker 2: think I didn't see that coming is I failed to
Speaker 2: think about how like I knew that these things just
Speaker 2: generate text and in a lot of ways they just
Speaker 2: sort of spit out back to you what you put
Speaker 2: in right, right, which is which is an old thing
Speaker 2: with chatbots that goes way before the LMS, goes all
Speaker 2: the way back to Eliza, right.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, and that was the first the first AI computer.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the first chapter. I wouldn't even call Eliza AI, right,
Speaker 2: And even.
Speaker 1: The creator of Eliza, god huz. Yeah, this is from
Speaker 1: Karen Howe's Empire of AI. Great bit about it in there.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly, Yeah, no, no, no, Eliza. Eliza was just
Speaker 2: like a one hundred or so lines of code that
Speaker 2: you know, you'd say I'm having a bad day, and
Speaker 2: it would say, oh, I'm sorry to hear that. Yeah,
Speaker 2: why are you having a bad day? Right?
Speaker 1: But like the gassing engine, the yeah.
Speaker 2: Like that's the thing I didn't think about. Oh wait,
Speaker 2: if it just repeats back what you put in, but
Speaker 2: it does it in a way that's compelling and convincing
Speaker 2: to some people, that's going to just get them sort
Speaker 2: of caught in this like dope meine self validation loop,
Speaker 2: and that could drive them off the edge.
Speaker 1: And I think that there is a condescension. I judge
Speaker 1: myself for this where I was like, oh, this doesn't
Speaker 1: fool me, and it's like, but the harm also of
Speaker 1: I'm very I'm blessed to have tons of people who
Speaker 1: love me who also you give me clear feedback, which
Speaker 1: is not just what I want to hear. But I
Speaker 1: definitely when I was younger and very depressed, like crave
Speaker 1: validation and crave someone to just tell me what I
Speaker 1: want to hear, I definitely never thought what if someone did,
Speaker 1: and the actual danger of having every fucking thought validated,
Speaker 1: and also just the sheer horrors Like Matt Hughes, my
Speaker 1: editor just did a great story about this kind of
Speaker 1: horrible story where he's simulated someone going through a mental
Speaker 1: health episode, and Claude was very clear to go, yeah, man,
Speaker 1: you don't seem so good, chatchip. It's like, no, everyone
Speaker 1: is not to get you made. Yeah, actually, it's in
Speaker 1: any other tick in the world did this. You'd shut
Speaker 1: the ship down immediately. Yeah, exactly, close it, you know,
Speaker 1: But where's fucking Eliezer on this bullshit?
Speaker 2: Because this feels like.
Speaker 1: If you write a book about how everyone dies, this
Speaker 1: should be the thing that if he actually believed in anything,
Speaker 1: would he should be up saying like, hey, look, this
Speaker 1: is what I was talking about.
Speaker 2: Oh, I mean I I do think that he thinks
Speaker 2: this is like an incipient version of what he's talking about.
Speaker 2: I think, like a baby version. I think he loves it.
Speaker 2: I think I think it helps him out well. I
Speaker 2: think that he finds that useful for making the argument
Speaker 2: that he made exactly. But he is not again the
Speaker 2: argument he's making. And this is the only nice thing
Speaker 2: I'll say about him. He means it, seriously, He's not
Speaker 2: a grifter. He's three anxiety disorders in a trench coat.
Speaker 1: Damn you put that on a fucking book, coach, stupid ass.
Speaker 1: I can't think of any other movement in tech ever, Yeah,
Speaker 1: there is anything like this, specifically because of how much
Speaker 1: it sucks us, Like, I can't think of any maybe
Speaker 1: the metavers and crypto, but even then, I don't like
Speaker 1: the comparison. Yeah, they're so much smaller.
Speaker 2: Honestly, what I keep thinking about is is that in
Speaker 2: a way, it is taking the daily experience of the
Speaker 2: tech billionaires and like bringing it to the masses, right,
Speaker 2: because what is it?
Speaker 1: Low?
Speaker 2: Yeah, what is it like to be Sam Altman?
Speaker 1: Right?
Speaker 2: You've got billions of dollars and you're surrounded by people
Speaker 2: who will never tell you no and validate your every thought.
Speaker 1: And they'll convince you that you understand every subject exactly.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and now, well.
Speaker 1: I've been saying this as well, because if you're an executive,
Speaker 1: a machine that can write emails, readium and otherwise you
Speaker 1: go to lunch, it's kind of magic. Yeah, but no,
Speaker 1: I like this idea that it's the extension as well,
Speaker 1: just this completely like separate thing that just as Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's completely right, man, I fully agree.
Speaker 2: Right, And so of course they don't see the harm
Speaker 2: because that's their entire goddamn all that happens, and so
Speaker 2: the well, but if this were bad for people, that
Speaker 2: would mean that, you know, I'm in a bad environment.
Speaker 2: That's unhealthy for me, and like, yeah, actually it is,
Speaker 2: but they don't think they don't think that. But I
Speaker 2: genuinely believe that like the best thing for the tech
Speaker 2: billionaires themselves that could happen to them would be to
Speaker 2: lose all their money, would be the best thing for
Speaker 2: their mental health, put man of them.
Speaker 1: Yeah, no, let me get them on the show. I
Speaker 1: think that I could have a great chat with any
Speaker 1: of them. Sure, just because I went to a private school.
Speaker 1: Like a lot of these American billionaires as well, they
Speaker 1: would get destroyed by the average scum aristocrats of old
Speaker 1: in England, like the real blood drinkers.
Speaker 2: They're amateur vampire.
Speaker 1: No they really are though, like like they It's the
Speaker 1: classic thing why British colonialism and American colonialism have never
Speaker 1: matched up, because Britain was just evil. They just fucking
Speaker 1: murdered people and destroyed communities. And they're like, why are
Speaker 1: we're doing this? Of course we're British. This is what
Speaker 1: we do here. What do you mean, what's a moral?
Speaker 1: I've not heard of that.
Speaker 2: No, what do you mean?
Speaker 1: No? No, send my send my eighth cousin to to Africa,
Speaker 1: shoot whoever you see. Like that was the horrifying stuff.
Speaker 1: But they knew they didn't care about what people think.
Speaker 1: I still think the billionaires care.
Speaker 2: Oh, they definitely do. Like this is this is the
Speaker 2: thing that which.
Speaker 1: Is insane to me. If I had had one billion dollars,
Speaker 1: I would no longer care.
Speaker 2: Well, if I had a billion dollars, I would just
Speaker 2: try to make sure that nobody knew my name and
Speaker 2: that you know, it's the same amount.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well I would be posting.
Speaker 2: No, I think I think I'd just be done. Man,
Speaker 2: I'd be like, okay, cool, you know, I'm gonna donate
Speaker 2: to a bunch of causes that mattered to men, and
Speaker 2: you know, like I still think it's bad for them
Speaker 2: to be billionaires, and I try to try to change that,
Speaker 2: but also like I'm just just gonna, like, you know,
Speaker 2: hang out in a nice house with my friends and
Speaker 2: have a good time.
Speaker 1: That's the problem though they don't have those.
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, because you've heard that.
Speaker 1: Have you ever heard the really depressing story about Elon
Speaker 1: Musk and this guy called here was this investor who
Speaker 1: got really cooked by COVID Peter something, and he know
Speaker 1: this story of going over to Elon Musk's house and
Speaker 1: there was a decanter of wine and Elon Musk picked
Speaker 1: up the wine before it's done decanting, and then something
Speaker 1: said something along the lines of honey, badger, don't care.
Speaker 1: And I just want to say, that's one of the
Speaker 1: saddest fucking things I've heard in my life, just absolutely,
Speaker 1: just unfathomably depressing. Because you can get things like a
Speaker 1: coravan that can kind of aerrate it. There are various
Speaker 1: ways around ourration. If you're really feeling it and you
Speaker 1: have hundreds of billions or what, however many many dollars
Speaker 1: Elon has liquid, you could just have someone whose job
Speaker 1: is to make sure the wine is errated. They could
Speaker 1: make two hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year. It
Speaker 1: wouldn't matter to you. That's what you lose in the couch.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but I think that what matters to Elon is
Speaker 2: not doing what he's supposed to do, right. Yeah, he
Speaker 2: can be seen as cool.
Speaker 1: Or just drinking as quickly well, because otherwise he might
Speaker 1: feel something.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, I just he desperately wants to be
Speaker 2: liked and it's never gonna happen.
Speaker 1: It's so funny as well, because it could be so
Speaker 1: easy for him. I know, he could just post this
Speaker 1: lunch every day and nothing else. Then would be like,
Speaker 1: look at this is actually what pisses me off as well, though,
Speaker 1: because people like el must fucking sucks. It's like he
Speaker 1: was sending people off to Aaron Bieber, a science reporter.
Speaker 2: In twenty one's a friend of mine.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's p and like when that happened, not a
Speaker 1: single Kara Swisher didn't say shit, then here Kevin Rouse
Speaker 1: Case and you and on these fucking people I thought necessary,
Speaker 1: but now.
Speaker 2: Like must have such a bad guy. He's such a
Speaker 2: bad No, he's always been like.
Speaker 1: And also he called a guy a pedophile for saving
Speaker 1: children yep, because he wasn't allowed to send his submarine.
Speaker 2: No, he's never been good like this is this is
Speaker 2: the thing that I.
Speaker 1: Don't think any of these people enjoy anything as much
Speaker 1: as I enjoyed diet coke. Like I'm one hundred percent
Speaker 1: sure of that, because I love these things. Like it's
Speaker 1: if this kills me, if this shit's meant to like
Speaker 1: in three years, they're like, it's rat blood, Like I'm like,
Speaker 1: I will.
Speaker 2: Keep drinking offline brought to you by Diet Coke.
Speaker 1: It's rap blood. I really hope that you spokes the
Speaker 1: show at one point, so that's the commercial. But that's
Speaker 1: the thing, Like I'm only kind of joking because it's
Speaker 1: I really enjoyed that coke. I'm sitting down chat and
Speaker 1: chew with my friends. I love watching football with chat
Speaker 1: with my friends. Like it's like there are very basic
Speaker 1: things I enjoy. What do these people Like? These people
Speaker 1: just must walk around in this haze of anger, yeah,
Speaker 1: or like emptiness.
Speaker 2: I think they're they're really cut off from their own emotions,
Speaker 2: right and like and again, that's gonna happen if you
Speaker 2: just constantly get validation, right, you know. One of one
Speaker 2: of the many tweets from back when Twitter was less shitty,
Speaker 2: before Musk bought it. There are many tweets that just
Speaker 2: like live rent free in my head, and one of
Speaker 2: them is about the cognitive impact of being a billionaire. Yeah,
Speaker 2: it ends. It's like, you know, like everything around you
Speaker 2: is really expensive. It's just a constant every chair fifty Yeah,
Speaker 2: in terms of the cognitive impact, it must be you know,
Speaker 2: roughly equivalent to being kicked in the head by a
Speaker 2: horse every day exactly. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I think I'd be fine, but that's my pathology, I guess,
Speaker 1: but it no, but it's they have this weird isolated thing.
Speaker 1: And even Benioff, who used to seem okay.
Speaker 2: Well, I mean he his whole game was like to
Speaker 2: be the best of the billionaires.
Speaker 1: Which love are, and then he was just like, ah,
Speaker 1: fuck it, yep, just fuck it. I don't give a
Speaker 1: shit anymore. Yeah, Agent Force, it doesn't sell to anyone.
Speaker 1: No one likes it, but it's the future agent for
Speaker 1: us Jesus, he's.
Speaker 2: Donated to all. I know, it's so cool.
Speaker 1: It must be really cool being a guy who actually
Speaker 1: has qualifications and from from proving things to watch the
Speaker 1: world like all these guys being like, yeah, this is
Speaker 1: the future and just because want to go it doesn't work.
Speaker 2: No one likes it. Yeah, I mean cool is one word.
Speaker 2: Incredibly frustrating is another.
Speaker 1: Right, this is this is stymying real innovation.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I know there's opportunity costs and and also
Speaker 2: just like actual stifling of real innovation in the effort
Speaker 2: to achieve even possible ends that would be bad even
Speaker 2: if we could achieve them.
Speaker 1: So slight directional shift. Is there anything within like science
Speaker 1: and tech innovation that you're actually excited about? Anything you
Speaker 1: look at and like that's fucking cool.
Speaker 2: I mean mRNA vaccines are the first thing that comes
Speaker 2: about exactly. Yeah, they're really awesome.
Speaker 1: Tell them.
Speaker 2: I mean, like, look, you know the fact and what is.
Speaker 1: An mri NA vaccine said flawlessly.
Speaker 2: Yeah, an m now I'm able. Yeah, and mRNA vaccine.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's the kind of thing that that you know,
Speaker 3: we have with the COVID vaccines, right, Basically, the thing
Speaker 3: that's so exciting about them is that they are so
Speaker 3: much easier and faster to synthesize, right than previous vaccines.
Speaker 2: You know, I think the previous record before the COVID vaccine,
Speaker 2: for you know, how long it took to develop a safe,
Speaker 2: widely deployed vaccine with something like five to ten years, Jesus,
Speaker 2: And then this vaccine. Most of the time delay, most
Speaker 2: of that year that we were waiting for the vaccine
Speaker 2: was actually a little less than a year. Most of
Speaker 2: that was testing. The actual time that it took to
Speaker 2: synthesize the damn thing was I believe on the order
Speaker 2: of weeks.
Speaker 1: And what's crazy is I believe that was venture backed, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: some of it was venture backed, which is like, see
Speaker 1: venu capital can be useful.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it can be, but once Yeah, some of it
Speaker 2: was venture backed. Some of it was backed by you know,
Speaker 2: NIH grants. We do need those, yeah, we surefucking do.
Speaker 1: No.
Speaker 2: Government funding of basic research is important and not just
Speaker 2: because it leads to amazing technological breakthroughs like mRNA vaccines,
Speaker 2: but also because, like basic scientific research is an important
Speaker 2: thing for humans to do, like the same way that
Speaker 2: art is important, right, right, but it also does enable
Speaker 2: a massive scientific and technological breakthroughs. And I you know,
Speaker 2: there's promise for MR and A vaccines to like open
Speaker 2: up a whole new class of vaccines that you know,
Speaker 2: for things that were previously very hard to vaccinate against.
Speaker 2: I am not an expert in the field, but like
Speaker 2: everyone I know who works in biomedicine, they they're all
Speaker 2: very excited about this, and they're all really depressed by
Speaker 2: the fact that, you know, we have an antifactor who
Speaker 2: sounds like a fork that got stuck in a fucking
Speaker 2: garbage disposal as the Health.
Speaker 1: And Rise from your Grave guy from that one video. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: very depressing. I I just wish we were like green
Speaker 1: energy as well. Feels like an oh.
Speaker 2: Yeah, green energy was the next thing I was gonna say, Yeah, batteries,
Speaker 2: solar panels. It's incredible.
Speaker 1: Uh, this opportunity is there. Yeah, it's we need to innovate,
Speaker 1: Like we are innovating.
Speaker 2: But like, yeah, and also like we even had the
Speaker 2: legislation that we needed, right or some of it right,
Speaker 2: like the you know Biden's big bill, the Build Back
Speaker 2: Better It uh, you know, was not a perfect bill,
Speaker 2: but it was the best environmental bill in American history. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and and now you know, it's being destroyed because we
Speaker 2: have a government in this country that that you know,
Speaker 2: does not believe in climate change and doesn't believe in
Speaker 2: anything other than short term profits at the expense of
Speaker 2: everybody else, and also doesn't believe in democracy.
Speaker 1: That feels that feels like a big problem though, the
Speaker 1: growth it all cause, Yeah.
Speaker 2: I mean, that's that's the thing. And that's why my
Speaker 2: book has the actual title that it does, rather than
Speaker 2: going with the title these fucking people.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so these fucking people or just the Bostards. I
Speaker 1: think it is also very good too.
Speaker 2: I think so too. I mean, like there's ah, it
Speaker 2: would be so easy for them to do better, No,
Speaker 2: like you know, to forget forget the best thing that
Speaker 2: they could do. They're doing some of the worst things
Speaker 2: that they could do. Doing better than they are right
Speaker 2: now is just an incredibly low but.
Speaker 1: Even through like very poorly guided generosity, they could very easily. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they could just fund media outlets versus whatever it is
Speaker 1: they're doing to them, tearing them down.
Speaker 2: But that would mean, you know the possibility of losing
Speaker 2: control and losing you know, losing some of their power
Speaker 2: and money, and they just are not willing to do
Speaker 2: that because they've got something broken in their hearts.
Speaker 1: We need to heal them. No, now I think that,
Speaker 1: I think.
Speaker 2: I think we need to tax their money away.
Speaker 1: I think that too, but I think we actually true.
Speaker 1: My truth here is that we need to change how
Speaker 1: we do that though. We need to start doing executive
Speaker 1: liability hmmm. We need to make it so if like
Speaker 1: CrowdStrike happens again, like a bunch of people potentially get
Speaker 1: diye in the NHS system because the computer shuts down,
Speaker 1: that satch and a DELA can lose something because it
Speaker 1: isn't enough to find the companies. Finding the company is
Speaker 1: not going to do shit unless you do scaling revenue
Speaker 1: percentage of revenue. This is this and more and how
Speaker 1: I become the FTC.
Speaker 2: No, they I'm not kind of let me.
Speaker 1: But it's just I feel the one of the wonderful
Speaker 1: things of having you on is you're able to come
Speaker 1: at this from a science communicator perspective. You're actually able
Speaker 1: to because it's not just about what these people want.
Speaker 1: It's the practicality of it, which is the nothing's really
Speaker 1: happening yep. But that's the actual weirdest thing about the
Speaker 1: real nihilism of this is that nothing seems to actually
Speaker 1: be occurring.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and they also act like there's not going to
Speaker 2: be any accountability for like, forget their actions, just even
Speaker 2: their words. Right, you know, Sam Altman says, you know,
Speaker 2: like this this thing that just drove me up a
Speaker 2: wall that he said about a month ago, he said that,
Speaker 2: you know, in ten years, college graduates are going to
Speaker 2: have really cool jobs going out to explore the solar
Speaker 2: system in the spaceships enabled by AI. That is not happening,
Speaker 2: like on the list of things that are not happening exploration. No, No,
Speaker 2: that's not happening. He is just wrong. He's lying, right,
Speaker 2: and he is probably still going to be alive in
Speaker 2: ten years, and you and I are also likely still
Speaker 2: going to be alive in ten years. And then we're
Speaker 2: gonna say, hey, remember when he said that that, you know,
Speaker 2: now we we can show he's just wrong and he
Speaker 2: and nothing's gonna happen to.
Speaker 1: Him and what these like this is why I'm so
Speaker 1: harsh on media criticism as well. Yeah, the one thing
Speaker 1: you can do is at least say area man full
Speaker 1: of shit. Yes, stupid bastard wanks off again.
Speaker 2: Well, this is my this is what I attempted to do.
Speaker 2: What you do?
Speaker 1: Well, yeah, and it's I think that the change that
Speaker 1: we need in our hearts is to just regularly say
Speaker 1: this stuff. I regularly say on the show. I don't
Speaker 1: care if you quote me, just say this shit about them. Yeah, clammy, Sammy.
Speaker 1: He's been promising. He said that this was the year
Speaker 1: of agents. He said that. I don't, but now I
Speaker 1: read in the Information dot Com the next year is
Speaker 1: the year of agents, So maybe I do. Actually, here's
Speaker 1: a question for you. Yeah, AI twenty twenty seven. Do
Speaker 1: you read that.
Speaker 2: He've read a little bit of it. It's nonsense. It's nonsense. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Why do you think things like that fool so many people?
Speaker 2: Though?
Speaker 1: Why do you think it got the media coverage it did?
Speaker 2: See? Sh I mean? Part of it is bad journalism, right.
Speaker 2: Part of it is is that Kevin Russ has confused
Speaker 2: Kevin and Russ has confused reiterating the views of the wealthy,
Speaker 2: influential and powerful with taking a brave contrarian stance. And
Speaker 2: how he made that mistake I don't know, but you know,
Speaker 2: I really get the sense that he thinks he's being
Speaker 2: very brave when he's doing exactly what journalists are not
Speaker 2: supposed to do, which is just uncritically parroting powerful.
Speaker 1: And it feels like it's the large language model again.
Speaker 1: It's just the affirming thing. It's like, oh, I'm being
Speaker 1: contrarian by stepping out against these people who say it
Speaker 1: isn't making any money and isn't very good at stuff.
Speaker 2: And it's like, look, buddy, if there's you know, if
Speaker 2: there's a two sides to a debate, I mean, obviously
Speaker 2: there's more than two sides, but like if on one
Speaker 2: side you have the wealthiest people in the world and
Speaker 2: on the other side you have people who say mean
Speaker 2: things about you personally online, and you think that you know,
Speaker 2: it's the first side that's the contrarian underdog. Yeah, something
Speaker 2: is wrong with your brain, and that's the thing.
Speaker 1: But this is, and this, I think is a weird
Speaker 1: thing in our society that we just people trust the
Speaker 1: rich and the media has got to a point where
Speaker 1: they've just bred out the real cynicism because I swear,
Speaker 1: like ten to fifteen years ago, you used to have
Speaker 1: some tech journalism, Like I read a thing about Amazon
Speaker 1: web services that Kevin Ross wrote and it was actually
Speaker 1: pretty cynical about it. Really, yeah, it was actually pretty critical.
Speaker 1: He then he made I feel bad for him because
Speaker 1: this can't be in his fault. He basically said at
Speaker 1: the end, Yeah, they'll never be profitable. No, no, no,
Speaker 1: it gets worse at a month later, Amazon announced that
Speaker 1: AWS is profitable for the first time. Just like Buddy
Speaker 1: miss the bean.
Speaker 2: Come on, whoa, Yeah, maybe that's the origin story. Maybe
Speaker 2: he was like, oh wow, I screwed that up.
Speaker 1: I guess I believe the origin story is actual social media.
Speaker 1: I think I think he felt. I actually think a
Speaker 1: lot of journalists think that they missed the boat on
Speaker 1: social media. I have been in media relations since two
Speaker 1: thousand and eight. I have read and this sounds insane, yeah,
Speaker 1: but it's true. I think I've read just about everybody's
Speaker 1: work since then within the tech media, at least, including Kevin's,
Speaker 1: and he has always had a little bit of anxiety
Speaker 1: that he missed social media. Nobody missed social media, not
Speaker 1: a single fucking one since two thousand and eight. Everybody
Speaker 1: was on Zuckerberg's zuck. He sucked him off at hardcore.
Speaker 1: Sorry sorry, but nevertheless, they were on top of this,
Speaker 1: they wrote about some social media was written about immediately.
Speaker 1: If anything, I think the media was a little slow
Speaker 1: to get on apps. Then they gone on hardcore. I
Speaker 1: know the history of this shit. I have been taking
Speaker 1: detailed notes. They sound crazy, but I think that there's
Speaker 1: just there is this weird thing of like the powerful
Speaker 1: would never lie to us. And then Prism came out,
Speaker 1: and then Cambridge Analytic happened and people are like, maybe
Speaker 1: Zuckerberg's bad, but he wouldn't lie to us. He would
Speaker 1: and they're like, well they know things we don't know.
Speaker 1: And that's actually another that's my favorite. AI think when
Speaker 1: it's like the secret things they're working on, secret things,
Speaker 1: secret things, sitting in the waiting in the wings, you'll
Speaker 1: never believe what's coming. And it's just I actually think
Speaker 1: it's just what's his name, Iliasuitskeva just goes to Bar's occasion.
Speaker 1: He's like, you'll never guess when I said, you never get.
Speaker 2: A okay, okay, no, I I have a thing to
Speaker 2: say about when like this is this is me just
Speaker 2: being petty and making a point that other people have
Speaker 2: made that yeah, of course.
Speaker 1: No.
Speaker 2: When he when he announced that he was you know,
Speaker 2: putting together a team to you know, just go straight
Speaker 2: for safe super intelligence. He meant to say when he
Speaker 2: posted this on social media, that he was putting together
Speaker 2: a crack team, but that's not what he wrote. What
Speaker 2: he right, He wrote that he was putting together a
Speaker 2: cracked team. Hmmm, crack ed, cracked, and like, yeah, actually
Speaker 2: you know what, Yeah, I think that's true.
Speaker 1: I agree, yeah, exactly. I also think him and Mary
Speaker 1: Moralty I can't. And so for the for the listeners, Illocitskava,
Speaker 1: one of the co founders of OPE and I, raised
Speaker 1: two billion dollars at a thirty billion dollar valuation. Mira
Speaker 1: Mourati did a billion some amounts some bullshit. Neither of
Speaker 1: these companies have told their investors how they will spend
Speaker 1: the money, or what on or what they will build.
Speaker 1: And you may think I'm being facetious. Mira Murati literally
Speaker 1: said to investors, I will not tell you, and then
Speaker 1: said I and has board rights where she can veto everyone,
Speaker 1: I will be honest, go for it. Fuck yeah, I
Speaker 1: think I think at this stage, if these people are
Speaker 1: so fucking stupid that you're just like, I promise you
Speaker 1: literally nothing. I won't give you you hogs a single
Speaker 1: oinc You're not gonna get anything from me. Give me
Speaker 1: money now, fuck yeah, go for it. But on the
Speaker 1: other hand, I cannot wait for the investigation.
Speaker 2: I just hope there is one. Right. These people are
Speaker 2: acting with impunity like and and also like again accountability
Speaker 2: just for their words. Right. The most basic criticism of
Speaker 2: the wealthy in media like this is to shift just
Speaker 2: a little bit. Eric Schmidt right said about about a
Speaker 2: year ago, shortly before the election, he said, we're never
Speaker 2: going to meet our climate goals anyway, so we might
Speaker 2: as well just burn as much carbon and use as
Speaker 2: many resources as possible to get to AGI, and then
Speaker 2: that will solve climate change for us, which is ridiculous
Speaker 2: because we don't so cool.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, Like we have no responsibility for our actions
Speaker 1: until we hand them off to someone else.
Speaker 2: Right, So he said this, which is ridiculous for lots
Speaker 2: of reasons, and echo stuff that Sam Altman has said, right,
Speaker 2: It's it's ridiculous among other reasons, because like AGI is
Speaker 2: not a thing, and also because we don't need like
Speaker 2: we know what we need to do to solve global warming, right,
Speaker 2: we know what we need to do to solve the
Speaker 2: climate crisis is just a matter of actually getting everybody.
Speaker 1: I don't need to do it, but may sam Oltman
Speaker 1: said that they know what they need to do to
Speaker 1: get to AGI, and then said a few months later
Speaker 1: that agi wasn't a useful term.
Speaker 2: Q D, Well, no, this is this is exactly what
Speaker 2: I was about to say about right. He repeats this
Speaker 2: claim about like just pushing as hard as we can
Speaker 2: about a month after the last time he said it,
Speaker 2: maybe two months. Only a few weeks ago he comes
Speaker 2: out in the New York Times with this op ed saying, oh,
Speaker 2: AGI is not really a thing and we shouldn't care
Speaker 2: about it. It's like, buddy, you were saying just a
Speaker 2: few weeks ago that this was gonna save the world
Speaker 2: from the biggest emergency of our time, and now you're
Speaker 2: saying it's not a thing. Do you think we're all stupid?
Speaker 2: Are you that stupid? What the fuck is going on?
Speaker 1: I can actually tell you. I think he thinks the
Speaker 1: meteor is that stupid and will write and we'll publish anything.
Speaker 2: He says. I mean to see that the New York
Speaker 2: Times published it.
Speaker 1: I wasn't Yeah, I would be honest. That's the least
Speaker 1: we've got fucking Ezra Klein being like, hey, geis the
Speaker 1: fucking Ezra Ezra? What a peculiar fella, What a peculiar fella,
Speaker 1: Ezbra Klein is? What's going on there? You ever run
Speaker 1: into mister Klein.
Speaker 2: I've never met him directly, I know people who know him,
Speaker 2: but now I think I think he just hung out
Speaker 2: with too many tech billionaire as while he was living
Speaker 2: in the Bay Area. He's this fucking mind poison. These
Speaker 2: people are boring. Yeah, these people are bored.
Speaker 1: You sit down.
Speaker 2: They have amounts of money. And like, if you're if
Speaker 2: you're someone who's never been cool and they have been cool,
Speaker 2: and I've also never been cool, love it, don't I know?
Speaker 2: But like, if you've never been cool, one of two
Speaker 2: things happens to you as you grow up. Either you
Speaker 2: desperately want to be cool and that can, you know,
Speaker 2: go wrong in many different ways, like Musk and possibly
Speaker 2: like Klein. I don't know, maybe like I'm willing to
Speaker 2: believe that something else is going on with him. I
Speaker 2: don't know. But or you become like us and you
Speaker 2: stop giving a shit yeah, and you accept oh, I'm
Speaker 2: just permanently uncool. Whatever, I'll make my way through life.
Speaker 1: And that's the thing. It's these people are just disconnected
Speaker 1: from humanity. None of these people seem to have friends
Speaker 1: or loved ones, because there's just if I did any
Speaker 1: of this whack of through shit, I would get takes
Speaker 1: from Casey or there or any number of people love
Speaker 1: me just like, hey, man, are you okay? Sound insane? No,
Speaker 1: Casey would definitely not be just. But hey, yeah, what
Speaker 1: the fuck you you okay? That doesn't make any sense.
Speaker 2: What do you mean?
Speaker 1: What do you mean a Dyson sphere? Do you know
Speaker 1: what that is? A dice in sphere. It's just they
Speaker 1: don't have friends, and I don't know if they want them.
Speaker 1: I think it could require a certain level of vulnerability.
Speaker 1: Have you talked twenty Have you met up with any
Speaker 1: of them?
Speaker 2: With the billionaires, no, I tried. There's a list at
Speaker 2: the end of my book of all of the tech
Speaker 2: billionaires I tried to interview and they all said no.
Speaker 2: The only one who I successfully interviewed was like a
Speaker 2: lower tier billionaire guy named jan to Lynn who's in
Speaker 2: deep with the effective algist was Skype and Speaza. Yeah
Speaker 2: yeah that's right, christ Yeah, yeah, yeah. Actually, can't hate
Speaker 2: him for those are two pretty good ones.
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly, though I will say Skype definitely one of
Speaker 1: those inventions that I've never seen something just stop. Yeah, no,
Speaker 1: Scott just got like no, just no, I mean trapped
Speaker 1: in Amber. It was the same product for fifty oh yeah.
Speaker 1: And the Microsoft are just like what Box are an
Speaker 1: animal farm banged, it's at a glue factory with Skype.
Speaker 1: We fucked this up well enough, It's just it's also
Speaker 1: it's also sad. But this has been such a wonderful conversation.
Speaker 1: Oh where can people find you?
Speaker 2: Well, I'm on blue Sky because I don't want to
Speaker 2: be on a platform like Ext's filled with Nazis now,
Speaker 2: so blue sky is the best place to find me.
Speaker 2: I'm Adam Becker dot blue sky dot social, orgy dot social.
Speaker 2: And yeah, I got a book, is the main thing. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I got a book called More Everything Forever linked to
Speaker 2: it in the notes. Yeah, it is available wherever fine
Speaker 2: books are sold. And if you liked what I had
Speaker 2: to say on this episode, I think you'll like the book.
Speaker 1: And if you like what I have to say on
Speaker 1: this show, you're a sick puppy, you know where to
Speaker 1: find me. Thank you so much for your time as ever,
Speaker 1: I love you all. Thank you to beahet of course
Speaker 1: here in New York City, here for producing this episode,
Speaker 1: and of course the Madisowski, the wonderful producer at home.
Speaker 1: I will catch you with them monologue in a few days.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much, Thank you for listening to Better Offline.
Speaker 1: The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song
Speaker 1: is Matasowski. You can check out more of his music
Speaker 1: and audio projects at Matasowski dot com, M A T
Speaker 1: T O S O W s ki dot com. You
Speaker 1: can email me at easy at Better Offline dot com
Speaker 1: or visit Better Offline dot com to find more podcast
Speaker 1: links and of course my newsletter. I also really recommend
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