Treat Your Life Like A Science Experiment - Mark Rober

Mark Rober is an engineer, science communicator, and YouTuber known for viral experiments and STEM education. How do we rediscover curiosity? Somewhere along the way, many adults lose the spark that once drove us to explore, question, and experiment. How do we cultivate our inner child again, and what do we lose as a society when curiosity fades? Expect to learn what it was like to work on the Mars Rover for NASA, how NASA rewired the way Mark thinks, what Mark’s relationship with failure is like, which engineering heuristics transfer best to everyday life, how can grown-ups rebuild the natural curiosity that gets pruned out of them, how you can avoid losing the curiosity when you need to deliver views, and much more… - 0:00 Lessons From the Mars Rover 10:02 Gamifying Life 19:11 How to Harness Your Obsession 28:21 The Reality of a Virtual Road 33:22 Why You Can’t Change a Conspiracy Theorist 40:05 Why We Lose It Behind the Wheel 48:25 The Impending Robotics Revolution 59:46 The Catalyst for the Glitter Bomb Series 01:11:25 Engineering How We Approach Life 01:18:04 Why School is Failing Curious Minds 01:23:05 The Problem with Growing Up 01:32:20 Is an AI Apocalypse Imminent? 01:52:26 Learn Before We Burn - New pricing since recording: Function is now just $365, plus get $25 off at https://functionhealth.com/modernwisdom Get 35% off your first subscription on the best supplements from Momentous at https://livemomentous.com/modernwisdom Get a free bottle of D3K2, an AG1 Welcome Kit, and more when you first subscribe at https://ag1.info/modernwisdom Get a Free Sample Pack of LMNT’s most popular flavours with your first purchase at https://drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom - New pricing since recording: Function is now just $365, plus get $25 off at https://functionhealth.com/modernwisdom Get 35% off your first subscription on the best supplements from Momentous at https://livemomentous.com/modernwisdom Get a free bottle of D3K2, an AG1 Welcome Kit, and more when you first subscribe at https://ag1.info/modernwisdom Get a Free Sample Pack of LMNT’s most popular flavours with your first purchase at https://drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom - Get access to every episode 10 hours before YouTube by subscribing for free on Spotify - https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn or Apple Podcasts - https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic here - https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  I never knew that you worked on the Mars rover for NASA. That's so fucking cool.

• 0:05Speaker 01

  Well, what's really wild is my name, Mark Rober, is only two letters off from Mars rover. If you change the K to a N and the B to a V. And honestly.

• 0:14Chris Williamson?

  It was meant to be.

• 0:15Speaker 01

  It took me like four years working at NASA to realize that. And just one day, I'm like, oh dang.

• 0:21Chris Williamson?

  What did you do?

• 0:21Speaker 01

  So I'm a mechanical engineer.

• 0:25Speaker 01

  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 designed 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.

• 0:53Chris Williamson?

  This sounds like some Gandalf the White. Like you need to go and pay homage to the dude at the top of the mountain.

• 0:59Speaker 01

  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 chunk on the top of the rover. The arm go digs in the dirt, takes that sample, puts it into the belly of the rover. And like, I designed the hardware to accept that. And it's still working, fingers crossed on Mars.

• 1:20Chris Williamson?

  That's still going.

• 1:21Speaker 01

  Yeah. Which is wild when you look up at the sky, you know, all the stars look the same, Mars has a little bit of red tint to it, right?

• 1:29Chris Williamson?

  You know, your baby is.

• 1:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it's like, that's 90 million miles away and I have, I've touched and integrated, 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, 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'd 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 just gonna be sitting there, spaced.

• 2:13Chris Williamson?

  Your shit's gonna still be there.

• 2:15Speaker 01

  And it's like, where the hell did this come from?

• 2:18Chris Williamson?

  What did you learn? That you didn't understand about payloads going into space? What's interesting about that?

• 2:28Speaker 01

  You know, one thing that's interesting about space is like, there's no air resistance. So, once you get up there and you, you, you start, you just, you just thrust at the beginning, essentially. You get up to about twenty five, twenty five thousand miles per hour. That's like five times faster than the 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 ninety million miles away and you're just getting that initial thrust at the beginning, you know, fractions of a degree mean you missed the planet by, you know, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, a million miles. So

• 3:12Speaker 01

  it's just this tiniest little poof, just to the side. And because of that, okay, now you're gonna hit, now you're gonna 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, it's pretty easy to do. And then we, we eventually learn 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?

• 3:40Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 3:40Speaker 01

  So it's, it's a really fascinating, you know, science. But it's the equivalent of, of hitting a golf ball in New York City and getting a hole in one in LA. That's the scale of landing a planet on, landing something on Mars.

• 3:58Chris Williamson?

  Have you ever read Seven Eves by Neil Stephenson?

• 4:00Speaker 01

  Uh, no.

• 4:01Chris Williamson?

  Really cool, really cool book. Great. Anyone that wants a sci-fi recommendation.

• 4:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, sci-fi.

• 4:05Chris Williamson?

  Should read it. Um, the moon explodes in the first land, uh, the first line, sorry, that like the first line of the, the, the book, it's the moon exploded.

• 4:13Speaker 01

  That's a hook.

• 4:13Chris Williamson?

  And, um, during that, you learn a lot about orbital dynamics because they repurpose the ISS into what will be the habitat for Earth. Cause if this happened, and Neil Stephenson's hard sci-fi technically, so it should be correct.

• 4:28Speaker 01

  Love it.

• 4:29Chris Williamson?

  Basically what would happen, it breaks apart and you'd never find out why it broke apart, it just did. And there's, uh, seven pieces. It breaks into, but they realize that over time, those seven pieces would all be orbiting around each other. And they would crash into each other and they would make fourteen and twenty eight. 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 five thousand years or whatever it is, um, that it's inhospitable. So you need to go up there. So they, I think they have three hundred 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.

• 5:10Chris Williamson?

  Like, how many people want to go from, and obviously all of the politicians are using every bit of fuckery that they can to get their family off.

• 5:16Speaker 01

  Right.

• 5:16Chris Williamson?

  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 at the airlock? And one of the things I was learning about were, um, uh, apogees and Zeniths.

• 5:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:28Chris Williamson?

  And the way that orbital dynamics and orbital, um, uh, 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, it's, even if it is easy for a computer, uh, it sounded pretty fucking hard.

• 5:45Speaker 01

  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, five thousand pieces of debris. Now you have to track all five thousand of those and you could have a runaway problem where just stuff just starts crashing.

• 6:04Chris Williamson?

  Like when the moon exploded.

• 6:05Speaker 01

  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.

• 6:14Chris Williamson?

  Cause there's no vacuum cleaner to just go up and.

• 6:16Speaker 01

  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 in the 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, uh, 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, they you have to prompt, you have to have a de-orbit plan.

• 6:58Speaker 01

  So in five, about five years, it will come back down and burn up.

• 7:02Chris Williamson?

  Wow, that's like being allowed into a country on a visa.

• 7:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:07Chris Williamson?

  Them saying, and when do you intend on leaving?

• 7:08Speaker 01

  That's a hundred percent. When do you present on like suiciding yourself?

• 7:12Chris Williamson?

  Crash landing this this thing back.

• 7:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, it burns up, right? So the friction is so high.

• 7:17Chris Williamson?

  Oh, that would be enough.

• 7:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, so most stuff, there's very few.

• 7:20Chris Williamson?

  Disposable.

• 7:21Speaker 01

  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.

• 7:33Chris Williamson?

  Wow, okay. I learned about astropolitics.

• 7:38Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 7:39Chris Williamson?

  Now that, I think, is so who owns the moon? Who owns this particular meteor? Is the geostationary territory directly above your country yours?

• 7:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 7:49Chris Williamson?

  How far out?

• 7:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:51Chris Williamson?

  What if I create something that's geostationary and is a little bit further out than that? And I think I so 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.

• 8:01Speaker 01

  Yeah. And what's even 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?

• 8:11Chris Williamson?

  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?

• 8:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:21Chris Williamson?

  What happens to the stock market? What happen? What does it mean? Because almost all of the way that those resources are put together is done based on a closed system.

• 8:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:30Chris Williamson?

  And then if you start adding stuff into the closed system, all the maths breaks.

• 8:35Speaker 01

  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.

• 8:45Chris Williamson?

  But like.

• 8:46Speaker 01

  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 end up having to go to the factories, right? And I think we're we're going to see that in the next 10, 20 years. Like a similar change, uh, 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 kinds of things are coming down the pipeline.

• 9:26Chris Williamson?

  There was a whole industry, I think it was muck shovelers in New York City, the horses. Cause everything was horse drawn carriage.

• 9:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:35Chris Williamson?

  So it's not just the main thing. It's all of the ancillary industries that trickle down from it.

• 9:40Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 9:42Chris Williamson?

  And that's gonna go.

• 9:43Speaker 01

  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?

• 10:02Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 10:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it's this idea of just like, you know, of, you know, I like building things, right? And the the number one mistake people make when they try and make something is trying to make, 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, uh, prototypes. You just do something quick and dirty first. In fact, did you like four of them? And you you tweak and try and and those, they shouldn't be pretty, they're ugly. They're meant to just be tests 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.

• 10:58Speaker 01

  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 on to 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.

• 11:42Speaker 01

  I know exactly why it is and the full limits of it, like what it's capable of.

• 11:46Chris Williamson?

  What's your relationship like with failure?

• 11:50Speaker 01

  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 we trusted 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, 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.

• 12:29Chris Williamson?

  How?

• 12:30Speaker 01

  Uh, because you just have three points. We're tracking at 500 hertz.

• 12:34Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 12:35Speaker 01

  Uh, or sorry, uh, 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, a half of a blink of an eye and it's already in spot.

• 12:52Chris Williamson?

  It feels like it probably hasn't even left his foot.

• 12:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right. And when we know, and then it takes a little bit of time, even at 40 miles an hour.

• 13:00Chris Williamson?

  Tiny bit of wobble, yeah.

• 13:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, just.

• 13:03Speaker 01

  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 you deliver your 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. And we want them to tweak and to change and to move this rubber band here and to push this a little bit. Oh, and now, oh, now I'm getting to go farther.

• 13:45Speaker 01

  And that victory feels so much better than if it just worked out of the gate, right?

• 13:50Chris Williamson?

  You know, the Ikea effect?

• 13:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think I've heard of this.

• 13:53Chris Williamson?

  Same thing.

• 13:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:54Chris Williamson?

  It's the difference between pick your own strawberries and cheap strawberries, right? I pick my own strawberries. I really care about this thing. People, 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.

• 14:14Speaker 01

  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.

• 14:22Chris Williamson?

  I spent an afternoon with it. We had an argument about that. Not going to give it away.

• 14:26Speaker 01

  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, 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. Like, what did I learn? And 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.

• 15:10Speaker 01

  And you're focused on, you know, rescuing Princess from Bowser. You're focused on the end goal. And so if you could treat your life challenges and his 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 your buddy, 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.

• 15:55Speaker 01

  But you're like, you know what? Let's get back on it, let's try again.

• 15:58Chris Williamson?

  What do you think's 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?

• 16:15Chris Williamson?

  You're right, the fundamental is the same, that 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?

• 16:30Speaker 01

  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 in any other period. Cause 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.

• 17:15Speaker 01

  Like, I really wanna get the public speaking is 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 wanna 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 result of literally like a video game leveling up. Sometimes some stuff doesn't work, sometimes does. Like, I crave those opportunities. And I've lost, I've gained like 30 pounds of muscle, lost 15 pounds of fat in two years now.

• 17:54Chris Williamson?

  Those noob gains, dude.

• 17:56Speaker 01

  The new day.

• 17:57Chris Williamson?

  Oh, man, I remember them so well. Difference is it was twenty, nearly twenty 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.

• 18:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:13Chris Williamson?

  The fact that if I try to build a car.

• 18:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:18Chris Williamson?

  I'm not as good as I will be at building cars in six months' time now. Hmm. Because I just tried to build a car.

• 18:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:25Chris Williamson?

  But if I go to the gym and I get a pump on, that is me flat in six months if I keep going.

• 18:31Speaker 01

  I love that. I've never heard of that.

• 18:32Chris Williamson?

  One of the few things that you get a preview of the future. Trying to learn Italian.

• 18:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:36Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 18:41Speaker 01

  That's so good. I've never heard of that or thought of it that way. Does that still work then? If 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.

• 18:49Chris Williamson?

  Uh, 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, 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.

• 19:02Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 19:02Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 19:10Chris Williamson?

  What a, talk to me about that mastery thing. I think that you're right. We, me and you both have a eye for detail, um, degree of obsession.

• 19:22Chris Williamson?

  How have you come to learn balancing that? Because there's a lot of benefits that come from it.

• 19:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:28Chris Williamson?

  Um, but there's also, it can be a painful compulsion to have.

• 19:33Speaker 01

  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 fifty kind of good friends. A similar thing. Um, 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.

• 20:05Speaker 01

  But yeah, I mean, I think there's a cost for everything. Like, I probably.

• 20:11Speaker 01

  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, um, he's like, you could be me, or you could be happy, like, choose which one. And he admits, like, he is 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.

• 20:54Speaker 01

  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, and 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.

• 21:35Chris Williamson?

  It's very adaptive, right, to keep on pushing. Because you only need one or two people like that in a tribe.

• 21:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:40Chris Williamson?

  And they will find the new valley that's got the bushes that have the fruit.

• 21:44Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 21:45Chris Williamson?

  And some of them will die, but so what? Like, only a few of them will die. But the ones that do decide to, I think about Brian Johnson.

• 21:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 21:51Chris Williamson?

  Like this. He, I think of him, or like an Elon, or even a Mr. Beast. They're kind of like scouts in an army.

• 21:57Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 21:58Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 22:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:07Chris Williamson?

  Uh, but they'll go up there and tell us, they'll come back and tell us what they've seen.

• 22:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I told-

• 22:11Chris Williamson?

  We all benefit from that.

• 22:12Speaker 01

  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. Yep. 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 trod in 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 benefits a lot of others. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I, I do think though, that, that feature of sort of the dopamine wearing off. I, I do feel like that is a, that is a feature and not a bug of our brains, right?

• 22:54Speaker 01

  In the sense that like, let's say at a, 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 move. I'm the fucking LeBron James. I'm the LeBron James, just sitting back relaxing. Eden. Thinking about that immediately, those genes are removed from the gene pool because they, they basked in that.

• 23:35Speaker 01

  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, I could, 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. Like there was a time in the YouTube algorithm where like,

• 24:20Speaker 01

  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 fourteen years later, you've got like seventy two million subscribers.

• 24:34Chris Williamson?

  And still going.

• 24:35Speaker 01

  And still going and still stoked and like I'm as far away from burnout as I as I've ever been.

• 24:41Chris Williamson?

  You know, the Red Queen effect.

• 24:42Speaker 01

  No.

• 24:43Chris Williamson?

  With that. 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 know, have to run as fast as you can just to stay in the same place. And I think about when people over complicate their lives, which everybody falls prey to, like, this is me speaking to me. Fucking speak down.

• 25:11Chris Williamson?

  But when people over complicate their lives, you're able to, I think humans are pretty good at dealing with.

• 25:20Chris Williamson?

  Pace.

• 25:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:22Chris Williamson?

  They're able to deal with difficulty, but not complexity. And I think that it's what 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 mum'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 for it. 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 if that was all you did with your life.

• 25:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:53Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 26:11Speaker 01

  Right.

• 26:11Chris Williamson?

  Which is not the way that it works. In the same way as no matter how delicious the buffet is. Your stomach isn't going to just infinitely expand to be able to fit the food in.

• 26:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's only twenty four hours in a day.

• 26:19Chris Williamson?

  Correct. And then the same thing for the complexity point that your system is built to handle. Work, but it's not built to handle complication. We'll get back to talking in just one second, but first, if you have been feeling a bit sluggish, your testosterone levels might be the problem. They play a huge role in your energy, your focus and your performance. But most people have no idea where theirs are or what to do if something's off. Which is why I partnered with Function, because I wanted a smarter and more comprehensive way to actually understand what's happening inside of my body. Twice a year, they run lab tests that monitor over 100 biomarkers. They've got a team of expert physicians that analyze the data and give you actionable advice to improve your health and lifespan. And seeing your testosterone levels and tons of other biomarkers charted over the course

• 27:02Chris Williamson?

  of a year with actionable insights to actually improve them gives you a clear path to making your life better. Getting a blood work drawn and analyzed like this would usually cost thousands, but with Function, it's just $499. And right now, you can get $100 off, bringing it down to 399 bucks. Get the exact same blood panels that I get and save that $100 by going to the link in the description below or heading to functionhealth.com/modernwisdom. That's functionhealth.com/modernwisdom.

• 27:29Speaker 01

  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?

• 27:39Chris Williamson?

  Hundred percent.

• 27:40Speaker 01

  To be fair, like, I mean, say what you want about Elon, but like, I think that is something his brain does well with.

• 27:46Chris Williamson?

  Parallel processing king.

• 27:47Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 27:48Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that 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 COO.

• 27:57Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 27:57Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 28:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:05Chris Williamson?

  Apart from the fact they work for the same company.

• 28:06Speaker 01

  That's me in my COO gym, a hundred percent. 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.

• 28:21Chris Williamson?

  You also secretly worked at Apple.

• 28:23Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 28:24Chris Williamson?

  What was that like?

• 28:25Speaker 01

  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.

• 28:35Chris Williamson?

  That's fucking sick. So you went NASA?

• 28:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:39Chris Williamson?

  Apple?

• 28:40Speaker 01

  Uh, technically, there was two years in there where I worked for a Halloween company.

• 28:44Chris Williamson?

  Like costumes?

• 28:45Speaker 01

  Yes, costumes.

• 28:46Chris Williamson?

  Okay, that feels a little bit like a pivot.

• 28:50Speaker 01

  I think you can say that from NASA, from NASA engineer to making Halloween costumes.

• 28:55Chris Williamson?

  Brief hiatus in between NASA and Apple.

• 28:57Speaker 01

  It was like an entrepreneurial thing because my first video ever was a Halloween costume wearing 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. Uh, 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,

• 29:41Speaker 01

  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.

• 30:12Chris Williamson?

  The rover's on Mars.

• 30:13Speaker 01

  Yeah. What are you gonna do?

• 30:14Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 30:22Speaker 01

  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? And 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.

• 31:08Speaker 01

  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 gonna be in these self-driving cars, but we're 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, I still think that's coming down the pipeline.

• 31:39Chris Williamson?

  Could you do something like, because it's typically the back of cars, not the front, right? The people have with motion sickness.

• 31:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, but that's only because you can't see what's going on.

• 31:48Chris Williamson?

  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, opposed to having to worry. I'm trying to work out how you integrate it into the car itself.

• 32:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, but I mean, imagine though, virtual reality in augmented, they're gonna get to a point where it's essentially wearing sunglasses. So it's not this big luggage thing. And as long as then, you know, as long as you have things in your visual field showing the motion of the car and where it's gonna go, you can solve a lot of motion sickness.

• 32:18Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 32:18Speaker 01

  And so then you can have your computer screen there and be worrying 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. Cause it knows your destination.

• 32:44Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 32:44Speaker 01

  And so when, in the game, you're coming up in 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 pothole or a speed bump, it's, it feels a lot like running over a zombie. But in the game, right, there's actually, you wear the potholes are.

• 33:08Chris Williamson?

  Driving for this because there's gonna be some people that are really not focused on the road.

• 33:12Speaker 01

  It's autonomous driving. This is virtual reality combined with autonomous driving and what is the implication?

• 33:16Chris Williamson?

  I was just thinking about if somebody was to do this whilst trying to drive normally.

• 33:20Speaker 01

  Yes, that's bad.

• 33:21Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 33:38Chris Williamson?

  Go, which was the all in one. Fuck, it's eight years ago, something like that. And 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 gonna come. Apple Vision Pro, we'd like to, I think, as many people returned them as bought them. Which for Apple is like, oh. And maybe it's the V one and it's gonna be expensive and the trickle down, it's three grand, but then it's only gonna be five hundred 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?

• 34:19Speaker 01

  They just don't have the killer app, right? Like, it's, everyone who puts it on is like, this is the most 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.

• 34:41Chris Williamson?

  What's the killer app?

• 34:42Speaker 01

  I don't know, be like courtside at a basketball game, right? Give you access to, like, I wanna watch the basketball game in real time, like, I'm courtside. Or even better, in a seat you can't even get, put it on the crossbar at a soccer match, right? You can't sit there, but now I get to watch everything, 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.

• 35:10Chris Williamson?

  I'm very non-conspiratorial. That's a, like, my tendency, I tend to believe the, like, mainstream to a degree. Skeptical of most people, but.

• 35:21Speaker 01

  Do you, okay, so what is your opinion on conspiracy theorists? Like, why, why do, why do they exist? Like, what is?

• 35:28Chris Williamson?

  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 of 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

• 36:10Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 36:33Speaker 01

  So like having a reason. If the Illuminati exists and is running everything, it's a nice, it's a nice model that just explains everything.

• 36:41Chris Williamson?

  Absolutely.

• 36:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:42Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I mean, it's not everything. There's, I'm sure there's a million reasons. I've had some really great guys on that, that do a conspirituality. Derek Berris from that podcast was real interesting. They know, they wrote a book about the psychology of conspiracism. But I'm a, 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. Yeah. It's kind of interesting to watch this. What do you think? What's your perspective on conspiracy theorists?

• 37:11Speaker 01

  I think similar. I think as humans, we're just hardwired to recognize patterns. Like 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?

• 37:32Speaker 01

  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.

• 37:53Chris Williamson?

  Belonging.

• 37:53Speaker 01

  They belong. And guess what? Like. Pretty much everyone listening to this, myself included, all have some beliefs like that.

• 38:01Chris Williamson?

  Just want that.

• 38:02Speaker 01

  Well, 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 maybe 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.

• 38:45Speaker 01

  We all have elements like this in our life that that serve us and we're not incentivized to look at like, how true they are.

• 38:53Chris Williamson?

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• 39:38Chris Williamson?

  Best of all, Momentous offers a 30 day money back guarantee. So you can buy it and try it for 29 days. If you don't love it, they'll just give you your money back. Plus they ship internationally. Right now you can get 35% off your first subscription and that 30 day money back guarantee by going to the link in the description below or heading to livemomentous.com/modernwisdom and using the code MODERNWISDOM at checkout. That's L I V E M O M E N T O U S dot com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom at 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?

• 40:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, what is?

• 40:11Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, so somebody cuts you off in traffic.

• 40:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 40:15Chris Williamson?

  You cut somebody off in traffic because you were late.

• 40:16Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 40:17Chris Williamson?

  This sort of attribution to motive.

• 40:20Speaker 01

  Right.

• 40:20Chris Williamson?

  And like, in a sense, as opposed to for us, our shortcomings are because of situation circumstance.

• 40:30Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 40:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:46Chris Williamson?

  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 at the feet of your parents.

• 40:58Speaker 01

  That's great. Wow, that's great.

• 41:00Chris Williamson?

  I think that calls out a lot of people.

• 41:02Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 41:02Chris Williamson?

  That you want to be able to own your wins.

• 41:06Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 41:06Chris Williamson?

  But hand off your losses. And let's not forget that sometimes your wins and losses are just two sides of the same coin.

• 41:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:14Chris Williamson?

  So, yeah, you're hypervigilant, but that's your obsession to detail, which has allowed you to become a fantastic musician.

• 41:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:20Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, perhaps you are 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.

• 41:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, and if you need a constant need for approval, like, actually has motivated you to accomplish a lot in your life.

• 41:33Chris Williamson?

  Absolutely. Your.

• 41:36Speaker 01

  That's me, but.

• 41:37Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 41:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:51Chris Williamson?

  But at other times, you've just been given a bit of a mixed bag. And you're like, this coin is kind of dark on both sides, but in the same bag.

• 41:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:59Chris Williamson?

  As some that are light.

• 42:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:00Chris Williamson?

  You know, your parents taught you something else as well.

• 42:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:03Chris Williamson?

  And, yeah, sure, some people's bags are a bit lighter or a bit darker than others. But for the most part, if you're going to say my shortcomings are because of my parents, you have to say your strengths are too. And you, it's okay. Don't mind if people go, no, everything is self altered by me. I think it kind of denies behavioral genetics, which is a bit of a shame. But everything is self altered 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.

• 42:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:33Chris Williamson?

  As a go strengths.

• 42:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:34Chris Williamson?

  Or the inverse, which is everything is laid at the feet of the parents. So yeah, parental attribution error.

• 42:39Speaker 01

  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.

• 42:57Chris Williamson?

  Oh, that's a good point.

• 42:57Speaker 01

  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 gonna kill your family.

• 43:07Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I'll fucking shoot you. Um, 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.

• 43:21Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 43:22Chris Williamson?

  No, I'm a very comfortable driver. I'm sure you are too. We're still very maladapted to doing that at that speed.

• 43:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:30Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 43:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, relative.

• 43:37Chris Williamson?

  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, the reason that we have anger, the reason that it's adaptive is that before laws, I needed to have a way to say to you.

• 43:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:51Chris Williamson?

  You've crossed a line.

• 43:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:53Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 44:01Speaker 01

  Right.

• 44:01Chris Williamson?

  The um, externality of somebody cutting in front of you in line. Is not great, but usually not life and death.

• 44:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:11Chris Williamson?

  The difference, kinetically, it's way more dangerous. The final thing is that, like, when somebody cuts in front of you in line. If they turn around and notice and they see you.

• 44:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 44:21Chris Williamson?

  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, not, 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.

• 44:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 44:34Chris Williamson?

  But the same isn't true when driving.

• 44:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:37Chris Williamson?

  If someone flashes the hazards, you're still pissed.

• 44:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It helps. I mean, if someone does this, you're like, okay, but still you, you suck.

• 44:44Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, exactly. There's a little bit of you in the back of your mind that's like, oh, I'm gonna keep an eye on that guy.

• 44:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I think that's probably right. There's something about the disconnection, the anonymity. Cause 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.

• 45:02Chris Williamson?

  Well, there's no collateral damage, right? You can say whatever you want. Like, there's no repercussion.

• 45:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:08Chris Williamson?

  That Jordan Peterson says the problem with the internet is that the proximate price of being a prick has fallen to zero.

• 45:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Whereas in real life, yeah.

• 45:17Chris Williamson?

  You might get punched in the face.

• 45:19Speaker 01

  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. Cause there's like a new policy. And we literally had to cut to the front of the line. Look at my partner's like, she's very good at talking to people.

• 46:04Speaker 01

  I was like, oh gosh. It's like, that's the worst thing for me. I'm a.

• 46:07Chris Williamson?

  I'm a moron.

• 46:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, but other people were cutting not as good as us, cause we didn't get booed. And they were just like booing and yelling and like, it was chaos. It was primal.

• 46:17Chris Williamson?

  Wow.

• 46:18Speaker 01

  Because everyone's in this stressful situation, but like you could just hear like, it was just, it just like deteriorated to like base human emotion.

• 46:26Chris Williamson?

  Watching somebody sprint through the airport is a special type of pain. Cause 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 seventy two and it's twenty four.

• 46:37Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, I think that's why traveling is so stressful is the cost for mistakes are so high. Right? It's like.

• 46:44Chris Williamson?

  I'll all, I mean, this is a life hack. Whenever booking something that's got connections, if it's under ninety 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 ninety minutes, I won't do. There's a connection. I'll always have a ninety minute connection at an airport. Is it too much? Yeah. But the price is I maybe have to walk around and get a coffee.

• 47:09Speaker 01

  Always though, if it's like, if there's ten flights in a day, it has to be a function of that, right?

• 47:13Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 47:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:18Chris Williamson?

  I'm doing.

• 47:18Speaker 01

  Or international.

• 47:19Chris Williamson?

  Exactly.

• 47:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:20Chris Williamson?

  Um, but then, yeah, watching, we were on a flight the other day coming back from tour and um, it'd 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.

• 47:47Speaker 01

  Really?

• 47:48Chris Williamson?

  Nine times increase.

• 47:49Speaker 01

  Really?

• 47:51Chris Williamson?

  It's huge.

• 47:51Speaker 01

  That's fascinating. Past those assholes just on their laptops already.

• 47:55Chris Williamson?

  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 uh, yeah, the poverty parade, nine times increase in passenger violence.

• 48:07Speaker 01

  And it's just on planes. That's what he calls it, the poverty parade.

• 48:09Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that's what I called it.

• 48:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, I see. That's so. And is it, the violence is from the folks who are sitting in the back?

• 48:15Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 48:16Speaker 01

  But the ones in the front at least, it's like nine times less.

• 48:19Chris Williamson?

  Probably.

• 48:19Speaker 01

  If they're like.

• 48:21Chris Williamson?

  Fucking peasants behind me. Yeah, exactly.

• 48:22Speaker 01

  I've made it.

• 48:23Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 48:25Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 48:39Speaker 01

  AR is coming, though. Like, AR is getting there. I think that's the future for sure.

• 48:43Chris Williamson?

  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?

• 48:50Speaker 01

  Uh, no, like, I mean, Google's and Meta's latest, have you tried those on?

• 48:55Chris Williamson?

  Uh, no.

• 48:56Speaker 01

  Little bulky sterile, but getting there where it's like, it will, you know, illuminate the path. You're getting directions. It's pretty functional. I mean, there's.

• 49:05Chris Williamson?

  That's the one with the little bands that you can do that you.

• 49:08Speaker 01

  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.

• 49:23Speaker 01

  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.

• 49:39Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, you've got the best assistant researcher ever.

• 49:41Speaker 01

  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 there, that is, that makes more sense to me than VR at this point.

• 49:57Chris Williamson?

  Well, certainly the Meta glasses. I've got, I've got two pairs in the house. I bought, uh, two pairs as gifts this year as well, including the Oakley's ones, the wraparound ones.

• 50:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:07Chris Williamson?

  And, um, being able to take a photo without having to get your phone out.

• 50:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:12Chris Williamson?

  Being able to track what you're doing, just to press a button and it hold and it do the thing.

• 50:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:16Chris Williamson?

  Is.

• 50:18Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 50:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 50:30Chris Williamson?

  It's not high at all. And 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, uh, 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 thought that's the best use case. I don't like the meta, hey, matter, tell me what I'm looking at. Like, I know what I'm fucking looking at.

• 51:10Chris Williamson?

  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. Yeah, they're really cool.

• 51:19Speaker 01

  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, fireworks on the Fourth 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.

• 51:36Chris Williamson?

  You just need one, I think, from those sorts of situations.

• 51:38Speaker 01

  A hundred percent.

• 51:39Chris Williamson?

  Where was I? Remind me what it felt like. I can fill the rest in.

• 51:42Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 51:42Chris Williamson?

  You just need one.

• 51:43Speaker 01

  That's a hundred percent.

• 51:44Chris Williamson?

  So anyway, ARVR, eh, like, maybe it's getting there, whatever, whatever. Robotics, yeah, I think when you compare with AI, robotics is a promise that everybody had expected. Does this new home bot thing with the fucking knitted jumper as a, it's got like your jumper on as 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.

• 52:13Chris Williamson?

  What's going on in the world of robotics? This is much closer to your.

• 52:17Speaker 01

  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. Um, I don't know what it mean. 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,

• 53:03Speaker 01

  what's the chance our sun is covered in a Dyson sphere? Meaning a Dyson sphere.

• 53:08Chris Williamson?

  To Khadishov.

• 53:09Speaker 01

  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.

• 53:28Chris Williamson?

  Really? Fucking do it on Kalshi, dude. Put it on polymarket. Put your money where your mouth is. Don't give me a bullshit around the. I, I don't understand.

• 53:38Speaker 01

  But no, but the point is to get there, you need robotics.

• 53:40Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Okay.

• 53:41Speaker 01

  Like, this is my point.

• 53:41Chris Williamson?

  Right, right, right, right, right.

• 53:43Speaker 01

  Cause you need robotics to, if you can make a million workers in, you know, 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.

• 53:58Chris Williamson?

  So that does seem to be on the cusp, at least for some people.

• 54:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:01Chris Williamson?

  And even if it's not get it up, do the Dyson sphere Khadishov two thing.

• 54:05Speaker 01

  The point is, is that again, going back, like, society is at a pretty fundamental changing point. If you can have, you know, 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.

• 54:24Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, you know, walking around with appendixes and pancreas and stuff like.

• 54:28Speaker 01

  And like, yeah, coccyx and toenails.

• 54:31Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, stupid idea. It'll be interesting, man. If we can get to the stage where AI programs, robotics, that's when we're.

• 54:39Speaker 01

  This is my point, right? And then robotics builds more robotics.

• 54:43Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 54:44Speaker 01

  So you're turning the wrenches is now.

• 54:46Chris Williamson?

  Bro, I had Elliot there on the show and he was telling me about how one of the ways that a super intelligent general AI would be able to.

• 54:58Chris Williamson?

  Accumulate compute power without taking it away from servers that people would realize is it could reprogram the leaves of trees.

• 55:06Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 55:07Chris Williamson?

  It's like bio bio trans computation or something. And he had this book, 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.

• 55:42Speaker 01

  I, I do feel like anthropomorphizing robot. 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.

• 56:16Chris Williamson?

  Oh, wow. Yeah, that's a good, that's a great point because how many people want, need and can afford?

• 56:23Speaker 01

  And those who can afford it already have a staff of people who do it.

• 56:27Chris Williamson?

  It's a person. Yeah. Cause it's not that cheap.

• 56:29Speaker 01

  No.

• 56:30Chris Williamson?

  That thing was maybe 500 bucks a month.

• 56:32Speaker 01

  No, that's right. And it doesn't do it that well.

• 56:35Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 56:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:46Chris Williamson?

  And you still have a hundred bucks to save on this.

• 56:50Chris Williamson?

  Robot Academy.

• 56:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, the addressable market is very small versus, hey, I'm gonna 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 ROI for a company that has money to pay for it, right?

• 57:19Chris Williamson?

  I saw a new type of warehouse robot. So instead of warehouses being built upward,

• 57:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 57:26Chris Williamson?

  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 that 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 it was, I can't, it's some absurd space-saving efficiency. 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.

• 58:09Speaker 01

  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 to address like factories first. And then there'll be knock-on effect.

• 58:24Chris Williamson?

  They'll bootstrap it from there.

• 58:25Speaker 01

  Then how do you perfect that for the home? Not the other way. I'm surprised we're starting with the home.

• 58:30Chris Williamson?

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• 59:14Chris Williamson?

  Right now, when you first subscribe, you can get a free bottle of D3 K2 and AG1 Welcome Kit, plus bonus AG1 Travel Packs. And for a limited time, US customers also get a sample of AGZ and a bottle of Omega 3s. Just go to the link in the description below or head to drinkag1.com/ModernWisdom. That's drinkag1.com/ModernWisdom. 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 Glitter Bomb series, please explain that.

• 59:52Speaker 01

  Well, like a lot of my idea, 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 stole a package from my porch and I felt really sad. Have you had a package stolen from your porch?

• 1:00:11Chris Williamson?

  No. Well, actually maybe, but I haven't known.

• 1:00:15Speaker 01

  It's very, it's an American thing, apparently. Apparently this doesn't happen a lot in other countries. But you do 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 I was, the police obviously won't do anything about it. But then I was like, you know what? Like I don't build the Mars Rover for heaven's sakes. Like I could probably do something about this. So I designed a bait package, basically, that had four phones in it that could, 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

• 1:00:56Speaker 01

  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, shh, package, you know, we have a report of a, 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've had the same thing. To make a viral video. You just have to evoke a visceral response. Like, that is the key to making up, 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, it has to be funny, has to make you feel angry.

• 1:01:39Speaker 01

  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 cra- eventually we had drones that came out and sprayed the glitter in the house. And they opened the lid. Each year I would 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 that, because cars get stolen from there all the time. And I would, I would work with the police, you know? Anytime I got footage, I would, 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.

• 1:02:24Speaker 01

  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-

• 1:02:33Chris Williamson?

  Who signed a release?

• 1:02:34Speaker 01

  Every single criminal whose face isn't blurred in the glitter bomb.

• 1:02:38Chris Williamson?

  Where did the release form go to?

• 1:02:40Speaker 01

  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 got you. Are you cool if we show you in a YouTube video? And you might be like, well, why would they agree to this?

• 1:02:53Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:53Speaker 01

  And you just have to offer them the correct compensation, which in most cases was like a Starbucks gift card.

• 1:03:01Chris Williamson?

  You're kidding?

• 1:03:02Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:03:02Chris Williamson?

  You, you got people to admit to having their face on one of the biggest YouTube channels in the world as a criminal.

• 1:03:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:12Chris Williamson?

  By offering them a Starbucks gift-

• 1:03:13Speaker 01

  Like, by the way, like a $10 Starbucks gift card. This wasn't like 200.

• 1:03:17Chris Williamson?

  Wowee.

• 1:03:19Speaker 01

  But it's just, 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.

• 1:03:33Chris Williamson?

  Well, I mean, you thought that you were gonna get a parcel, you didn't. You got sprayed in fart spray. Now you go to Starbucks, you know?

• 1:03:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's kind of a.

• 1:03:41Chris Williamson?

  Came for the stars, land in the clouds. Land in Starbucks. Uh, yeah, I mean, that's one of my favorite series that you've done. I thought it was so great. And I, another one, your, um, like scam phone call.

• 1:03:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:54Chris Williamson?

  A broad, taking advantage of old people thing. The relationship that you have with technology, you're 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?

• 1:04:19Speaker 01

  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. Um, and my job, you know, is to use some of the good to try and outweigh the bad. And in that case, uh, 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 warranty is 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.

• 1:04:52Chris Williamson?

  How did you access the security system?

• 1:04:54Speaker 01

  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 is he's very good at computers. And you don't just get access to their CCTV, you get access to like 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 gonna do a month, like pizza parties.

• 1:05:30Chris Williamson?

  I was gonna say, you know what's happening for lunch that week?

• 1:05:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. It's kinda hilarious, but we'd see how much, you know, they're making, I think, like thirty million dollars a year, running three shifts twenty-four hours a day. They'd been doing it for a decade, three of these. So we went there with, you know, our glitter bombs. Well, 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.

• 1:05:54Chris Williamson?

  To work there?

• 1:05:55Speaker 01

  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 in 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 the wall would move forward. So basically, these cockroaches would start getting squished and then a door opened. So all the cockroaches would run out at once. We had a smoke bomb in there, of course, we sent them a glitter bomb, and then we filmed it all in the 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.

• 1:06:40Speaker 01

  That wouldn't have evoked a visceral response. That would have got a hundred 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 gonna share that video. And sunshine is a great disinfectant. And eventually, 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 eighteen officials arrested from this.

• 1:07:20Chris Williamson?

  This real, real world impact.

• 1:07:22Speaker 01

  This is from a stupid YouTube video.

• 1:07:24Chris Williamson?

  Do you know the Greek god Hephaestus? You heard of that?

• 1:07:27Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:07:28Chris Williamson?

  So he was the god of craftsmanship, fire, metalworking and stuff. He's kind of the archetype of the tinkerer, in a way, Hephaestus.

• 1:07:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07:39Chris Williamson?

  Or Hephaestus. And um, he's the only Greek god that was crippled. So he's like a chubby guy and he'd 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. And the 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 girl stolen by the sort of Chad bully.

• 1:08:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:16Chris Williamson?

  Uh, so he gets back at her and him and he designs this unbelievably strong cage.

• 1:08:21Speaker 01

  Glitter bomb?

• 1:08:22Chris Williamson?

  Ah, it could have been cockroaches. This really strong cage that 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's the, it kind of reminds me of your story that there's this sort of tinkerer who uses innovation and ingenuity to sort of righteously, um, even the scales.

• 1:08:47Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:09:08Chris Williamson?

  Attention.

• 1:09:08Speaker 01

  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?

• 1:09:21Chris Williamson?

  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?

• 1:09:31Speaker 01

  Probably Jimmy Kimmel.

• 1:09:34Chris Williamson?

  That's a good one.

• 1:09:36Speaker 01

  Like he is, he is, he is, we're good friends, like we vacation together. First, he saw one of my videos and 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?

• 1:09:53Chris Williamson?

  I got some friends that are ex-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.

• 1:10:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a challenge.

• 1:10:14Chris Williamson?

  But it's just, you know, this person doesn't need permission. They can think on their own feet. They'll be able to.

• 1:10:19Speaker 01

  Oh, is this like them coming in actively rescuing you? Or just like pulling the strings to make it happen?

• 1:10:24Chris Williamson?

  I guess both.

• 1:10:25Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:10:25Chris Williamson?

  In a way, but I mean, Jimmy's got to be involved. He's gonna have to project manage.

• 1:10:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:10:29Chris Williamson?

  Unless he hands it off to an assistant, in which case ring the assistant. But yeah, it's just who's the highest agency person.

• 1:10:34Speaker 01

  Ah, I see.

• 1:10:35Chris Williamson?

  It's a way to identify who the highest agency person is.

• 1:10:38Speaker 01

  I love it. That's great. Yeah, maybe it's Jimmy.

• 1:10:41Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:42Speaker 01

  That's funny, because you're probably somebody's and I'm probably people's in my life as well, right?

• 1:10:46Chris Williamson?

  I think I would be, unfortunately. I'm too busy, sorry.

• 1:10:49Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:10:51Chris Williamson?

  But yeah, there's, 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.

• 1:11:16Speaker 01

  That's Jimmy Donaldson for me, Mr. Beast.

• 1:11:18Chris Williamson?

  Of course.

• 1:11:19Speaker 01

  So, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's between the two Jimmys.

• 1:11:21Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, if you want to launch a YouTube channel with your captors, go in.

• 1:11:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:11:23Chris Williamson?

  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, to looking at human problems? Like tolerances or failure budgets or like 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?

• 1:11:54Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:12:05Speaker 01

  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

• 1:12:49Speaker 01

  you build a garden in your backyard. Right? It all it starts with that. That it's that same process and it 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. There's 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?

• 1:13:20Chris Williamson?

  Okay, what about the reverse? What about emotional intelligence skills like 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.

• 1:14:00Speaker 01

  So, no, for sure. I mean, that's what makes our species and 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, you, 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, 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, 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?

• 1:14:45Speaker 01

  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, like, that's going to connect people. And, you know, currently with Crunch Labs, like, that is our mission. We want to reach as many brains as possible and affect, infect them with this passion for learning and curiosity. And we have a hundred 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

• 1:15:30Speaker 01

  creating. Yeah, they're toys, which makes a great last minute Christmas gift, by the way.

• 1:15:34Chris Williamson?

  Crunchlabs.com.

• 1:15:35Speaker 01

  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, it's that same, we, you have to attach the learning to some emotion and some feeling.

• 1:15:55Chris Williamson?

  In other news, you've probably heard me talk about Element before, and that's because I am frankly. Dependent on it. And it's how I've started my day every single morning. This is the best tasting hydration drink on the market. You might think, why do I need to be more hydrated? Because proper hydration is not just about drinking enough water. It's having sufficient electrolytes to allow your body to use those fluids. Each grabbing your stick pack is a science backed electrolyte ratio of sodium, potassium, and magnesium. It's got no sugar, coloring, artificial ingredients, or any other junk. This plays a critical role in reducing muscle cramps and fatigue while optimizing brain health, regulating your appetite, and curbing cravings. This orange flavor in a cold glass of water is a sweet, salty, orangey nectar,

• 1:16:38Chris Williamson?

  and you will genuinely feel a difference when you take it versus when you don't, which is why I keep going on about it. Best of all, there's a no questions asked refund policy with an unlimited duration. Buy it, use it all, and if you don't like it for any reason, they give you your money back and you don't even have to return the box. That's how confident they are that you'll love it. Plus, they offer free shipping in the US. Right now, you can get a free sample pack of Element's most popular flavors with your first purchase by going to the link in the description below, heading to drinklmnt.com/ModernWisdom. That's drinklmnt.com/ModernWisdom. Dude, look at Ken Burns's 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.

• 1:17:23Chris Williamson?

  So the same topic displayed in two different ways.

• 1:17:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:17:27Chris Williamson?

  Made all the difference.

• 1:17:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, and that's actually what we're doing. This is something I'm only starting now to talk about. We haven't talked about it publicly, but it's like releasing, making a full school curriculum, third to eighth grade. It covers all the tricks I've learned on how to have vegetables on YouTube. We're making like really exciting, cool science. It's got me, all your favorite YouTuber, Cristiano Ronaldo's in it.

• 1:17:51Speaker 01

  It's, it's, 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 teachers forever. And I feel like it's the most important work I'll do my whole life.

• 1:18:04Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 1:18:21Speaker 01

  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 firestarter in your brain, especially for young kids because the clay isn't hardened.

• 1:18:31Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so if what you're doing is trying to kickstart the curiosity.

• 1:18:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:18:36Chris Williamson?

  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?

• 1:18:48Speaker 01

  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, on this cool thing, Class Crunch Labs, we're calling it, is where we, 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?

• 1:19:33Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:19:50Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:51Speaker 01

  Of adult kids.

• 1:19:52Chris Williamson?

  They were able to sort of dictate the attention. You will listen to me.

• 1:19:55Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:19:55Chris Williamson?

  And if you don't, the class goes on anyway.

• 1:19:58Speaker 01

  The class goes on.

• 1:19:58Chris Williamson?

  Like, the kids can get up and walk out, like they switch off the YouTube video.

• 1:20:01Speaker 01

  That's right. And so it's.

• 1:20:04Chris Williamson?

  Got attention.

• 1:20:05Speaker 01

  Attention. So I would say like.

• 1:20:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, like attention and the toys too, just they're first and foremost, they are fun. Like, I'm not gonna make a boring, if it's fun, now we'll figure out how to attach the learning on to that. So start with the attention and all the times that comes with fun. And the same thing, getting a visceral response, like I'll make a video about a 15 ton Jell-O pool. Which is really hard to do, by the way.

• 1:20:27Chris Williamson?

  Why, why?

• 1:20:28Speaker 01

  Because you've never made Jell-O before.

• 1:20:31Chris Williamson?

  You gotta heat it up.

• 1:20:31Speaker 01

  You gotta heat it up where it's almost warm and then you have to cool it down.

• 1:20:34Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 1:20:35Speaker 01

  And so to do that at scale, we're like, how are we gonna do that?

• 1:20:37Chris Williamson?

  Couldn't just make lots of little ones?

• 1:20:40Speaker 01

  Uh.

• 1:20:41Chris Williamson?

  It'd have to be an insane amount of little ones.

• 1:20:43Speaker 01

  Then it's not like, you wanna belly flop on it, right?

• 1:20:45Chris Williamson?

  Understood.

• 1:20:46Speaker 01

  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 Jell-O pool. That is clickbait. You wanna click on it and then pretty soon I'm teaching you about the scientific method in chemistry. So hiding those visuals, sneaking in the learning. Once you're like stoked about the story.

• 1:21:32Chris Williamson?

  Sick, man. What's this? What have we got?

• 1:21:34Speaker 01

  This is creativity kit. So this is just one of the things that we offer is 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.

• 1:21:43Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 1:21:44Speaker 01

  And then this one starts at age like six, where it really teaches the ideas of creativity.

• 1:21:48Chris Williamson?

  What's the state of like kids toys at the moment? Cause I remember Meccano, do you have Meccano over here?

• 1:21:53Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:21:53Chris Williamson?

  So Meccano was like metal Lego, I guess, but uh, much more involved, way more complex.

• 1:22:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:22:01Chris Williamson?

  And that was, I found that fascinating. You'd make trucks and cars out of, there would be braces and bolts and it was really, it was sick.

• 1:22:09Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:22:11Chris Williamson?

  But is that still, or are you guys kind of really breaking through with it? You and Lego, is that it for when it comes to constructing shit?

• 1:22:20Speaker 01

  I mean, this is like, we are currently, we sell these as a, you know, direct to consumers. But I will say, we are launching in, like with retail products in stores like Target and Walmart. In the STEM aisle, the STEM aisle sucks.

• 1:22:36Chris Williamson?

  What's the STEM aisle?

• 1:22:37Speaker 01

  Like STEM is like.

• 1:22:38Chris Williamson?

  Of course.

• 1:22:39Speaker 01

  Science.

• 1:22:39Chris Williamson?

  What is in?

• 1:22:40Speaker 01

  Every Target Walmart has either four or eight feet dedicated to like STEM type toys. And it's like the baking sort of volcano or like Geo, make, grow a crystal. It's been the.

• 1:22:52Chris Williamson?

  Stuff that's been the same for decades.

• 1:22:54Speaker 01

  Thirty 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.

• 1:23:04Chris Williamson?

  I'm really happy to hear that. Okay. What about grownups who feel like the curiosity has been pruned out of them?

• 1:23:10Speaker 01

  Well, I mean.

• 1:23:11Chris Williamson?

  It's gonna be harder for them to get the Crunch Lab subscription and feel that, you know, excitement.

• 1:23:17Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:23:31Chris Williamson?

  What's that?

• 1:23:31Speaker 01

  Arduino is like a microprocessor, like it's like a Raspberry Pi or.

• 1:23:37Chris Williamson?

  Oh, yeah, I know that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:23:38Speaker 01

  Yeah. So it's a simple form of like a Raspberry Pi. 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, we'll hold your hand with Hack Pack. It's gonna be super fun and you're gonna, you're gonna grow and learn. And then hopefully you take that and do that to other parts in your life.

• 1:24:06Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that is cool. I think certainly one of the things that I've seen is people's time has got squeezed more. We don't have much time to play Otinka. 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 to watch and, you know, games and social media and stuff.

• 1:24:32Speaker 01

  Which is all inputs, right? I feel like we are drowning inputs and sort of starved for outputs.

• 1:24:37Chris Williamson?

  Great.

• 1:24:38Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:24:45Chris Williamson?

  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?

• 1:24:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:24:56Chris Williamson?

  Well, kind of, kind of nothing. There's code and there's, you know, numbers on a 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 had a professional coach who was trying to teach him a little bit of humility and to be able to chill out. And his, uh, his task for a month was to start doing something new, but he wasn't allowed to try and get better at it.

• 1:25:29Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:25:29Chris Williamson?

  So he was told that he had to try and, he decided to take up water coloring. He's always wanted to paint. And after he did it once, so 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 gonna 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 gonna do it. I'm just gonna 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.

• 1:26:04Speaker 01

  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 gonna try and win, but my real goal is to lose 10 times.

• 1:26:21Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 1:26:21Speaker 01

  Right? And I'm not gonna feel like I checked that box until I've lost 10 games. And it really flipped it for me and then normalized and 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.

• 1:26:38Chris Williamson?

  Have you looked at rejection therapy?

• 1:26:41Speaker 01

  No, but it's basically this thing, right?

• 1:26:45Chris Williamson?

  Hundred days of rejection. Uh, hundred days of rejection. My goal is to desensitize myself from the pain of rejection and overcome my fear. Uh, three criteria I set for myself. One, ethical. Two, legal. Three, doesn't deny the law, laws of physics.

• 1:27:00Chris Williamson?

  Um, rejection, one, borrow a hundred dollars from a stranger. Uh, number two, request a burger refill. Uh,

• 1:27:10Chris Williamson?

  number fifteen, be a live mannequin at Abercrombie. Uh, number thirty-two, get my own free room at a hotel.

• 1:27:18Speaker 01

  So the idea is he did all of these?

• 1:27:20Chris Williamson?

  Uh, number thirty-six, trim my hair at a PetSmart. Um, hug a Walmart greeter, bike race at Toys R Us. Um, my only day at a new job, if you change a job for a day. Um, buy a quarter of shrimp, name my own price at Dollar Tree.

• 1:27:38Chris Williamson?

  Uh, change a coffee shop's wifi password.

• 1:27:42Chris Williamson?

  Uh, try and fix a PC at the Apple Store.

• 1:27:45Chris Williamson?

  And, um, what was this? What was day one hundred? Interview President Obama, um, or try. And I just thought, like, what a cool, such a cool idea.

• 1:27:55Speaker 01

  That's so good.

• 1:27:57Chris Williamson?

  Uh, rejection therapy.

• 1:27:58Speaker 01

  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 are the record levels of depression may have to do with just like all these inputs that are so attractive that just led us sitting in a chair as opposed to like building, doing stuff with our own hands and getting out and moving dirt around.

• 1:28:27Chris Williamson?

  The pace that you're forced to, uh, operate at, pace that your brain is forced to operate at is really, really, really aggressive. And, um, I certainly know the times when I've been able to, and e- even think about what meditation is. Meditation is kind of like. It's 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.

• 1:29:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:29:08Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 1:29:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:29:19Chris Williamson?

  So that you then put them down again. And 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 make sense?

• 1:29:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it's also like, it's crazy how hard it is to not think thoughts. Like, you know, meditation, I've dabbled in a little, and 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 it feels worth building once I try and do it and see the benefits.

• 1:30:12Chris Williamson?

  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?

• 1:30:25Speaker 01

  I mean, there's something about like hitting flow state, 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?

• 1:30:36Speaker 01

  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?

• 1:30:53Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, you are right. I mean, certainly stuff that captures the front of your brain while the back of it's still thinking is 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.

• 1:31:10Speaker 01

  It's my favorite chore.

• 1:31:12Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:31:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:31:12Chris Williamson?

  Uh, and well, it's just driving, another one. I fucking love driving. I'm happy to drive.

• 1:31:18Speaker 01

  So do you listen to stuff? Are you listening to your podcast?

• 1:31:21Chris Williamson?

  Sometimes, sometimes I'll be listening to stuff, uh, but other times if I'm just thinking, it's a great place to.

• 1:31:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, but I guess that's my point. You, uh, you say, hey, I'm not going to turn on the radio because.

• 1:31:32Chris Williamson?

  When I'm being good.

• 1:31:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:31:33Chris Williamson?

  I had a, a period where for about six months, when I first started the podcast, I always put my phone in the trunk of the car.

• 1:31:41Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:31:41Chris Williamson?

  So I couldn't listen to anything. There was no AirPods, no nothing. And even if I was going to the gym and it was only 20 minutes away.

• 1:31:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:31:48Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 1:32:00Speaker 01

  Well, it's like the case for boredom, right? Like, I, I feel like raising kids is like, I would want, 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? When, again, it's just, it's the opposite to all of these inputs. Like, cut those off and then what happens?

• 1:32:20Chris Williamson?

  Have you noticed? I, I certainly have. I'm not an avid AI user, but ChatGPT gets a good bit of daily use, you know, between 10 and 20 times a day, something like that, probably.

• 1:32:31Speaker 01

  For you, you mean?

• 1:32:31Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 1:32:44Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:32:45Chris Williamson?

  Because I can just go to ChatGPT and work out exactly what it is. Uh, I haven't done this, but like similar stuff, if I, if I had to write a difficult email, uh, 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, the maid to do it. Instead of having to put your clothes away, the assistant does it.

• 1:33:17Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, I think this is the argument that we are becoming cyborgs. The fact like, how many phone numbers do you have memorized now?

• 1:33:24Chris Williamson?

  Three.

• 1:33:25Speaker 01

  Right? And and and fifteen years, you know, thirty years ago, growing up, we had everyone's memorized. Like, we don't need to because the information's there. And obviously, that 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.

• 1:33:45Chris Williamson?

  Reduced friction by such a huge margin. Now, I think even with Google, you had.

• 1:33:51Speaker 01

  For sure.

• 1:33:52Chris Williamson?

  You had to do the reading.

• 1:33:53Speaker 01

  For sure.

• 1:33:54Chris Williamson?

  I mean, look at us talking about searching on Google like it was fucking foraging for berries.

• 1:34:01Speaker 01

  Like, that's friction.

• 1:34:02Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:03Speaker 01

  I I 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 L L M 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 now. I've now learned that behavior.

• 1:34:22Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:34:23Speaker 01

  And now it's like, oh, now when I need to find something difficult, this is what I'm going to do.

• 1:34:26Chris Williamson?

  If you use, uh, what'll come next will be Gemini integrated into Chrome.

• 1:34:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:34:30Chris Williamson?

  Atlas already exists for Chat G P T.

• 1:34:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:34:33Chris Williamson?

  So thi- this will just become one form.

• 1:34:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:34:37Chris Williamson?

  Isn't? You must know about this. I might need to bleep this out. You must know what the Open A I products are. Do you?

• 1:34:43Speaker 01

  Uh, I I I have like, uh, 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.

• 1:34:52Chris Williamson?

  What's his face on, right? The dude that did.

• 1:34:53Speaker 01

  Johnny Ive.

• 1:34:54Chris Williamson?

  Johnny Ive.

• 1:34:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:34:55Chris Williamson?

  And they said they're releasing three products.

• 1:34:58Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 1:34:58Chris Williamson?

  By the end of the year.

• 1:34:59Speaker 01

  This year?

• 1:35:00Chris Williamson?

  Or or by the something. Maybe it can't be the end of this year. It can't be.

• 1:35:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:35:04Chris Williamson?

  But at some point, and they said that one of them has never been seen before and doesn't exist. And somebody asked, is it a pin? And they said, no.

• 1:35:12Speaker 01

  My guess is it's just like a 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 it like, do you have a, your personal assistant or someone like that ish? 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, okay, here's, they'll be at your porch tomorrow morning at eight AM, right?

• 1:35:54Speaker 01

  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. My guess is it's, and I have like a s- one or two slight clues that that's true that aren't in the public domain, but that would be my guess.

• 1:36:12Chris Williamson?

  Wow, wow.

• 1:36:13Speaker 01

  What do you like, what do you think it would be?

• 1:36:15Chris Williamson?

  I was, I was gonna guess glasses, because that would have made so much sense. Some kind of badge type thing or yeah.

• 1:36:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, just on your wrist, almost like a watch, but it's, it's a camera and a microphone.

• 1:36:30Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. And it's just tracking everything at all times. And you set it down, it charges at night.

• 1:36:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:36:34Chris Williamson?

  So, but you need a way for it to communicate back to you, which means it would need a screen or it's gonna have to be audio.

• 1:36:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, the audio, just like an assistant, you know, you just talk to them and they.

• 1:36:43Chris Williamson?

  Then it's gonna have to have Bluetooth and you're gonna have to have headphones. So it's gonna have to link them with some headphones.

• 1:36:46Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:36:53Chris Williamson?

  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 Zajukowski, Tristan Harris, you know, whoever it is that I speak to from that side of the fence, they have

• 1:37:11Chris Williamson?

  vague despondency. They're like apocalyptic, but in a kind of a ephemeral way.

• 1:37:16Speaker 01

  Well, I know what I think like the best case scenario is.

• 1:37:19Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 1:37:19Speaker 01

  Have you heard the

• 1:37:22Speaker 01

  you, 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 gonna fight over that scarce resource, which is the food. There's gonna be one big dog who's gonna be the number one, but constantly fighting their, you know.

• 1:37:43Speaker 01

  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

• 1:38:28Speaker 01

  aren't even scarce. But in sent like, 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 overlord.

• 1:38:37Chris Williamson?

  Some sort of a value. Oh, they're cute dogs. Like, let's look after them.

• 1:38:40Speaker 01

  Value in our, our species.

• 1:38:42Chris Williamson?

  Well, you know, Bostrom's idea of the urn and you pull out different technologies and sometimes it's white and it's good. 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 humans.

• 1:38:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, like if you could, if putting sand in your microwave was an A-bomb.

• 1:38:59Chris Williamson?

  Correct. We'd be done. We've read, we've read the same.

• 1:39:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:39:03Chris Williamson?

  So I kind of think about the same, but instead of it being an urn where you're bringing out different technologies, it's urn, it's balls where you're bringing out alignments. And, but it's inverted and there's only a very, very small number of ways for it to be benevolent.

• 1:39:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:39:19Chris Williamson?

  But there's a, 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, they seem to think that it's on route. What's the best estimate that you've heard for advent of AGI?

• 1:39:55Speaker 01

  I mean, the truth is nobody really knows. So, but I don't know. I don't know. I, I can't really answer that. I will say.

• 1:40:05Speaker 01

  Oh, hold on. I just wanted to make a point. You cut this out while I'm thinking of this. I wanted to make a follow up point to that, which is, um.

• 1:40:12Speaker 01

  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, AGI is going to be so great because like he's so heavily incentivized.

• 1:40:27Chris Williamson?

  Maybe some motivated reasoning.

• 1:40:29Speaker 01

  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, 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 is going to happen. So like, of course.

• 1:40:48Chris Williamson?

  Might as well roll the dice to be the guy.

• 1:40:49Speaker 01

  Might as well roll the dice.

• 1:40:51Chris Williamson?

  What's that line about it's very difficult to make a man disbelieve something that his wage relies on him believing?

• 1:40:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. Right. Like he's incentivized to have this Pollyanna attitude.

• 1:41:05Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 1:41:16Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:41:18Chris Williamson?

  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, I have glimmers.

• 1:41:43Speaker 01

  But does he work for Sam?

• 1:41:45Chris Williamson?

  He did, but he had this.

• 1:41:48Chris Williamson?

  Way of fact checking relies on even those relieving it. Maybe, fuck, yeah, I'll use my own rule against. Maybe, look, I'm trying to find a silver lining in the, the stream of shit here.

• 1:41:58Chris Williamson?

  But yeah, I.

• 1:41:59Speaker 01

  The one, the one thing I think we both agree on probably is 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.

• 1:42:13Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:42:18Chris Williamson?

  You're on the roller coaster, right? We're all on the roller coaster.

• 1:42:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:42:21Chris Williamson?

  It's gonna happen. You can try and do the Elliot, Elliotza thing and ring the bells 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, that's not gonna happen, which creates this weird, like, 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, uh, 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?

• 1:42:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, 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 length. Is sort of gonna determine the future of humanity and our space. And then my next thought was like, if I'm a, a government that's on the other side of this.

• 1:43:22Chris Williamson?

  Plink.

• 1:43:22Speaker 01

  Where do I wanna put that A-ball?

• 1:43:25Chris Williamson?

  I mean, it's also probably one of the closest places to China, right?

• 1:43:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. I didn't love that thought. 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.

• 1:43:39Chris Williamson?

  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, uh, 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-ChachiPT, so maybe 2019, 2020, something like that. And, uh, they'd sat down at this dinner and there's sort of a weird atmosphere. It feels like the kind of a holding pattern going on in the conversation. You just don'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? Well, for the bunker.

• 1:44:24Chris Williamson?

  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?

• 1:44:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:44:35Chris Williamson?

  And what do you think about how we control the Marines that work for us? Cause 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.

• 1:44:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:44:59Chris Williamson?

  And maybe he was making it up, but it sounded.

• 1:45:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, man, I kind of like at that point, and I've heard this, like, yeah, New Zealand, cause 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.

• 1:45:16Chris Williamson?

  Like, you know. Hands up and put some more fucking Crunch Lab stuff together.

• 1:45:20Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:45:32Chris Williamson?

  That was exactly why, I mean, that was, that was the exact reason that he gave, which was, what do you think they're going to do with all that Bitcoin?

• 1:45:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:45:40Chris Williamson?

  Like, what are, what are they spending it on?

• 1:45:41Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:45:42Chris Williamson?

  You have access to the food.

• 1:45:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:45:44Chris Williamson?

  What is the, what is there that's left?

• 1:45:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it's almost like.

• 1:45:47Chris Williamson?

  How precarious human civilization is when you start to think about this, eh?

• 1:45:50Speaker 01

  Right, and 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, they're, 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, the question then becomes of these CEOs, and I've been in circles where people have told me about this, where they're like, this is awesome, we're going to do all this. But then quickly they realize like, but who's going to buy our thing? Because no one's going to have money, because no one's going to be employed, right?

• 1:46:31Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Well, then you get onto UBI and there was a couple of studies done on UBI test cases.

• 1:46:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:46:36Chris Williamson?

  You get to look at these.

• 1:46:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, seems like mixed results, right?

• 1:46:39Chris Williamson?

  Well, yeah, not, not super positive. And. Yeah, man, we may be, this is, this is the fear, I think, the fundamental fear that everybody has always had. This is what Cassandra's are, that they're seeing some future apocalypse and that nobody's listening. And at each generation, uh, reading is going to ruin the youth. And television is going to ruin the youth and the whole, 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.

• 1:47:23Chris Williamson?

  And 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.

• 1:47:41Speaker 01

  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, to use and the technology to go to other solar systems, there's, you, 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 and it's just a glass ceiling in civilizations. And I, as we, as things get closer and closer, you realize like, oh, maybe there is a glass ceiling effect and that's what we're approaching.

• 1:48:24Chris Williamson?

  There's a, a book, I tried to bring this guy on, Stephen Webb, uh, if the universe is teeming with aliens, where are they all? And he's got 50 solutions to the Fermi paradox. And I should, I should still try and bring him on it, that I was obsessed.

• 1:48:39Speaker 01

  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?

• 1:48:47Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, well, what's that question? There's two answers to where are they? And they're both equally terrifying.

• 1:48:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:48:54Chris Williamson?

  There's nobody else out there or there is.

• 1:48:56Speaker 01

  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, you know, Enceladus and the core's lava.

• 1:49:07Chris Williamson?

  Where's that?

• 1:49:08Speaker 01

  It's like a moon around, um, uh, 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, it's fascinating and almost terrifying.

• 1:49:48Chris Williamson?

  You know, David Kipping from the Cool Worlds Lab? Seen Cool Worlds on YouTube? Bro, you would fucking.

• 1:49:54Speaker 01

  Oh, really?

• 1:49:55Chris Williamson?

  You know, um, Brian Cox.

• 1:49:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:49:57Chris Williamson?

  So imagine Brian Cox.

• 1:50:01Chris Williamson?

  15 years younger, big like Chad jaw, like young dude. And, um, he got 72 hours on the James Webb Telescope.

• 1:50:10Speaker 01

  No way.

• 1:50:11Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, they, uh, it gets allocated to different projects. Obviously it's like a shared resource. And, um, he looks for exoplanets. He looks for, likes to plan. And he's got this amazing YouTube channel, the Sunday Chute.

• 1:50:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, please.

• 1:50:22Chris Williamson?

  Sick. And, um, this is the sort of stuff that he talks about a lot on his channel.

• 1:50:27Speaker 01

  Oh, really?

• 1:50:28Chris Williamson?

  Really, really, really.

• 1:50:29Speaker 01

  Well, this is the point though, because if life exists twice in our own solar system.

• 1:50:32Chris Williamson?

  Like, but then you get onto Robin Hanson's Great Filter Hypothesis. Have you heard that one?

• 1:50:37Speaker 01

  Which is, I mean, is it, it's one of the glass ceiling, the great filter.

• 1:50:41Chris Williamson?

  Oh, yes. Yeah, yeah.

• 1:50:41Speaker 01

  This is one of the nine example, or very paradox, explanations.

• 1:50:44Chris Williamson?

  Okay, yes.

• 1:50:46Speaker 01

  Filter of a civilization.

• 1:50:47Chris Williamson?

  There's something, but what you actually don't want to find is. Life in our solar system. That's a very bad sign.

• 1:50:55Speaker 01

  Agreed.

• 1:50:55Chris Williamson?

  Because it suggests that the filter is in front of us, not behind us.

• 1:51:00Speaker 01

  Yes. And so the filter could be our own doing. That's the glass ceiling. The filter could also be potentially, this is what you're referring to. They are aware of us.

• 1:51:09Chris Williamson?

  Dark forest.

• 1:51:09Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:51:15Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Is it nuclear energy? Is it type two Khadishv? Is it into?

• 1:51:20Speaker 01

  Is it AI?

• 1:51:21Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:21Speaker 01

  Right?

• 1:51:22Chris Williamson?

  Fuck, that would be lame. Imagine if.

• 1:51:23Speaker 01

  That would be lame. Totally. What destroys us isn't AI itself, but the fact that it developed.

• 1:51:28Chris Williamson?

  Holy shit.

• 1:51:30Speaker 01

  Aliens come for us.

• 1:51:31Chris Williamson?

  There's SETI, but there's also METI, right? Messaging Extraterrestrial.

• 1:51:34Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:51:35Chris Williamson?

  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?

• 1:51:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:51:47Chris Williamson?

  And what's the, the tracking, the sphere

• 1:51:51Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:51:51Chris Williamson?

  of the first ever radio signals moving through space to go, oh, you go, fuck, how much?

• 1:51:56Speaker 01

  Remember the movie Contact? Do you remember that movie?

• 1:51:58Chris Williamson?

  I didn't watch it.

• 1:51:59Speaker 01

  Oh, it's great. It's like from the, I just rewatched it. But the first signal they get back from the aliens is Nazi. Uh, it's Hitler.

• 1:52:07Chris Williamson?

  Nah.

• 1:52:08Speaker 01

  And it's because the, the Olympics from Germany was the first, like, broadcast television signal that had gone out.

• 1:52:16Chris Williamson?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:52:16Speaker 01

  So it was their way of saying like, hey, we hear you. We're repeating this back to you. And it's Hitler.

• 1:52:23Chris Williamson?

  Fuck.

• 1:52:24Speaker 01

  So, yeah.

• 1:52:26Chris Williamson?

  Well, what an apocalyptic way to finish, Mark.

• 1:52:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Dude, I normally don't talk like that.

• 1:52:31Chris Williamson?

  No, you rule. Um, 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.

• 1:52:40Speaker 01

  I mean, and you go to crunchlabs.com or just, I have a lot of, or just checking out the YouTube channel. If, if you like, if you're curious and you like to learn without feeling like you're learning, then we've got a lot of content there.

• 1:52:52Chris Williamson?

  You're great, man. I appreciate it.

• 1:52:53Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me.

• 1:52:55Speaker 02

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