#1230 Christian Keil on What is Effective Accelerationism or e/acc?

Christian Keil is the Chief of Staff at Astranis. In this conversation we talk about effective accelerationalism, what is it, why is it important, and why have so many people in tech industry grabbed onto it? Technology can be a force for good, and the world can improve, that is ultimately what affective accelerationalism is all about, and Christian does a good job of breaking it down. ======================= Backed by world-class investors, including Google's AI Fund, Range has redesigned wealth management from the ground up. Range delivers a tech-first experience that provides fast, high-quality, transparent wealth management services making it simple to optimize and grow your wealth. With Range, you get comprehensive services like tax optimization, investment management, and estate planning with no hidden fees. That means no AUM fees. Get started today with code POMP15 for 15% off any quarterly plan for your first year at ⁠⁠⁠range.com/pomp⁠⁠⁠ ======================= Pomp writes a daily letter to over 250,000+ investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://pomp.substack.com/

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

• 0:02Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Many of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, which is my effort to find the most interesting people in the world and sit with them for hours while I ask questions in an effort to learn. So it would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to the show on your favorite audio platform, watch episodes on YouTube, and tell your friends and family about the podcast. My goal is to help millions learn from the world's most interesting people. So let's get into today's episode. Christian Kyle is the Chief of Staff at Astronis. In this conversation, we talk about effective accelerationism. What is it? Why is it important? Why have so many people in the tech industry gotten a hold of this movement and decided that they want to accelerate?

• 0:43Anthony Pompliano?

  Technology can be a force for good, and the world can improve. That's ultimately what effective accelerationism is all about, and Christian does a great job breaking it down. I really hope that you take a second to listen to this episode and digest all of the information here. The world can be better, and each one of you has the individual agency to be able to contribute. Here is my conversation with Christian Kyle. This episode is brought to you by Range. Are you day trading, a crypto enthusiast, or a tech worker? Or are you just an overall investing enthusiast? Listen up, you need Range. Backed by some of the world-class investors, including Google's AI fund, Range has redesigned wealth management from the ground up specifically for us. They deliver

• 1:24Anthony Pompliano?

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• 2:06Anthony Pompliano?

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• 2:27Speaker 01

  Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

• 2:53Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got Christian here with me. Today's entire conversation is around effective accelerationism. And it's this brand new movement that's kind of taking the tech world by storm. There's lots of people who are supporters, lots of people who are critics. And I thought Christian had a bunch of content that he put out online that really kind of laid out what is it? Why is it important? And why should people think about supporting a kind of this entire movement? So Christian, maybe we could just start with like, what is effective accelerationism?

• 3:20Speaker 02

  Absolutely. Yeah, thanks for having me on. So effective accelerationism is a lot of different things that are combined into one, which I think is sort of inevitable with this sort of internet meme that has taken on a life of its own. I think you saw, if you looked at it in the very early days, it was sort of a response to effective altruism, which was this belief that you could take about money and you could allocate it correctly to make the things that you want to happen in the world happen. The EAC movement started as saying, well, if you take that logic and apply it to AI, then we're going to, you know, be very, very directed. We're going to be very controlled in terms of what we want to do. We're going to take it slow. We're going to take the right steps at the right times. But EAC is the opposite of that. They say just let a thousand flowers bloom. Let's try everything. Let's see what works and see what doesn't.

• 4:04Speaker 02

  And therefore, it's the techno capital machine will take care of it for you. It'll just, you know, we'll gradient descend our way into the right outcomes as opposed to predetermining them ahead of time. So that was the beginning was sort of this movement that was focused on AI and it was focused on, you know, let's let AI go and not try to control it. I think that recently you've seen it take on more of a kind of all encompassing role within the Twitter world where it's kind of a banner for accelerationism as a whole. So rather than it being just a specific AI thing, just a specific, you know, utilitarianism thing, it's about how do we accelerate technology? How do we make it so that, you know, we create the world that we want to create? Well, we do that by letting the reins loose and letting people take it wherever they want to go.

• 4:49Anthony Pompliano?

  One of the pieces that cracked me up early on is it just seems like it's free market, right? Like at the end of the day, accelerationism is like let people do what they want to do and allow them to figure out how to solve people's problems. And it seems like the folks who are anti-free market, anti kind of competition, they tend to be the doomers, right? They're the ones who are like, wait, everyone slow down, like the world is going to get worse, or there's some huge problem that looms, you know, on the horizon. Whereas this whole like effective accelerationism is just basically taking the idea of a free market and now saying like, let's bring it to the tech role, put it on steroids and like, let's roll.

• 5:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, this has happened for hundreds of years. I mean, like, I think your, your audience would know this, like back in the, this is a classic example used by folks that are folks, proponents of crypto, the red flag laws, you ever heard of that? Where back at the creation of the automobile, like they were afraid of the automobiles rolling through town and like hitting kids or something. And so the strategy was they can't go any faster than a horse. Whenever any automobile goes through town, it has to have this red flag that's waved out in front of it. It says, watch out, an automobile is coming. Like, that's one way to make sure that people are safe from automobiles. Another way is to invent your way out of it, to invent seatbelts, to invent, you know, road lines, to invent stop signs, to invent traffic enforcement. So I think that, I mean, this has been happening forever. It is interesting that the, this specific movement EA has broadened

• 6:07Speaker 02

  the way it has. I think that's sort of a symptom of when you get a ton of different people contributing to a movement that kind of, you know, dilutes it down to just its core elements. And so I think that that is one of the reasons why my post about EA went so well is because I sort of identified what are those core elements. And to me, it's really three things. It is a belief that things can get better over time. Not that they will, but that they can. The second one is that technology can make things better. So technology has a force for making the world the way we want to make it. And then the final one, which I think is actually maybe the most important is individual agency. So just the belief that you personally could have a say in making this world come about. And if you personally do something, then things can happen. That's like, that is the Silicon Valley ethos at its most central. And so that's why I think people, you

• 6:52Speaker 02

  know, like Marc Andreessen, like Gary Tan, like these very seminal figures in Silicon Valley have latched on to EA so hard is because it's just the perfect like hacker, I can do this, let's change the world mindset.

• 7:03Anthony Pompliano?

  So the three things you just said don't sound that crazy individually, but obviously there are controversy and critics around kind of this effective accelerationism. And so let's just take the first one of like, things can get better. Is there evidence that that hasn't happened in history? Like, have there been things where sure, on maybe a small vertical or one piece of life, yes, it didn't get better over some period of time. But overall, humans live at the safest, most prosperous time in human history. And like, the best time to be born is literally today. The next best time to be born would be like, yesterday, right?

• 7:38Speaker 02

  Or 100 years from now.

• 7:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it's just kind of like, yeah, of course, you want to be born as far into the future as possible, because the world's only gonna, seems to be only getting better. What is so controversial about that idea of like, the world could get better?

• 7:51Speaker 02

  I think, so if you were, if you're truly trying to like, steel madness and trying to make the case against like, how could the world get worse? I think there's sort of two arguments to it. The first argument is really simple, which is, we just don't know. Like, we have no idea what the future will hold. So it could go this way, and it could go that way. It could be great, it could be horrible. If we're unleashing a new power out into the world, which is kind of how people think of AI now, it's this new thing, didn't exist before, has immense capability. Who knows what it's gonna do? If it's more intelligent than us, if it's this artificial general intelligence that's super intelligent, who are we to say what it's gonna do? It's smarter than us by definition. So that's sort of one argument, which is just an argument from uncertainty. I think the, the historical argument that people would point to is that there have been times

• 8:32Speaker 02

  in the past where we've like, lost knowledge, or we've lost order. I think like, the simplest example of that is the Dark Ages. Like, we went from whatever, Roman Empire, glorious golden age, to this, this era where basically, like, nothing was written down. Like, historians don't even know what was happening in the Dark Ages, because civilization kind of went into this, you know, this lower state, this worse state than it was, that it was at before. So I think that there are arguments that could say we could get worse, but I agree with you 100% that, you know, this is the best time to be alive. We have, the general trajectory of the universe has been towards things being great. And so, yeah, especially, you know, over the past 100 years, over the past 50 years, over the past 10 years, you've been seeing this

• 9:13Speaker 02

  Exponential increase in the amount of technology that's being built and I think it all just builds on each other, obviously. Now that we've discovered, you know, glass, we can make iPhone touchscreens. Now that we've discovered electricity, we can create however many types of new things. These innovations build on each other. And I think the EAC argument would be that AI is this new building block that is going to unlock an unfathomable amount of new innovation that we've never seen before.

• 9:37Anthony Pompliano?

  So going to technology can make the world a better place or kind of help us build the world we want to be. Not even just a better place, which I think now is kind of this like terminology that people laugh at. But also there's like a hint of truth in it.

• 9:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Again, it seems like history would suggest that that is exactly what happens over and over and over again is technology. And again, technology could literally be like shoes on your feet, right? Like, like I always go back to this idea of people think technology has to be AI or it has to be, you know, some amazing quantum computer or, you know, some genomic sequencing. Like, yes, that is technology, but also we are talking about literally basic things like a belt to hold your pants up. Right? The shoes on your feet to not, you know, kind of ruin your feet. And when you walk around, like, these things are all technologies that we grew up. They were just a part of life and we don't really put that much kind of value on them today. But man, there's a lot of people around the world that wear shoes and belts, right? And so kind of talk, talk a little bit as like, what is the counter argument or like, why is that controversial?

• 10:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I think so, you tell me how far down this rabbit hole you want to go.

• 10:37Anthony Pompliano?

  To the bottom, to the bottom.

• 10:39Speaker 02

  Okay, great. So in my mind, technology goes way, way, way more basic than even that. So yeah, like belts or whatever, it doesn't have electronics in it, but it's still technology. I think ideas are also technology. And if you think about it, like the furthest back that you can go, the first way that we ever, like we, meaning like life or we, meaning kind of the universe, the first way that the universe ever made sense of what was around it was genetic material. So genes in, you could argue were the first technology. It was the first way that the world captured information and was able to store it and pass it down in kind of its own finite bunch. So, you know, that was captured, of course, in DNA and a replicator and a replicating molecule that took in information from the environment.

• 11:23Speaker 02

  And then passed it down to the next generation. Some of that information was really helpful. So, you know, if you're a proto DNA, whatever, like maybe you encode the information into your DNA that, hey, there are seeds out here in the environment. Maybe you encode the information, hey, there's, there's nothing out there. There's no food. We can't, we're doomed, we're dead. There's nothing we can do. Which of those two genes do you think was more likely to survive in the future? The one that gave true helpful information to the next generation? So that was the first technology that allowed sort of, you know, growth to happen that allowed, you know, excel, well, acceleration, that allowed information to get passed down from one generation to the next, which then accelerated over time to create these super elaborate creatures, these, you know, these amazing civilizations and communities, and then ultimately humans.

• 12:09Speaker 02

  And that was the emergence of what we think of as technology, which is, you know, deliberately passing down those lessons or those pieces of knowledge down to the next generation. So, I mean, what is, what is that technology? What is a belt? Belt is an idea. Belt is an idea that says if you take a strip of something and you tie it around your waist, then you can, you know, pull up your pants. Like, what are shoes? Shoes is the idea that if you strap something to your feet, then you're not going to get hurt as much. And maybe you're going to live longer and maybe you can travel further. So the, the first wave was genes. The second wave was memes. Memes are just ideas that replicate. They're ideas that are passed down from generation to generation. And really, it's much faster than that. You know, a gene only replicates once per, like, somebody having a baby.

• 12:55Speaker 02

  A meme replicates, you know, today's speed, like how fast? Well, like, there's been multiple different movements in the past week on our, in our part of Twitter that we've been talking about, you know, these super conductors, we've been talking about, you know, the, yeah, everything. So memes replicate much faster than genes. And that's the new kind of technology that is, you know, propelling us forward.

• 13:15Anthony Pompliano?

  So as we look at this, like, you know, take something like Facebook. I worked there in the early 2010s. And one of the big kind of debates was like, is Facebook good for the world or not? Right? And at the time, like, I think most people would say yes, and then it kind of changed over time. And I just always laughed to myself. I'm like, wait a minute, hold on a second. Like, there's definitely downsides. Like, people will use tools to do bad things, right? There's guns that can save lives. There's guns that can kill people. And so like, the tool sometimes can be used for good or bad, and doesn't necessarily mean the tool itself is good or bad. But something like a Facebook, I used to just crack up because I'm like, we've connected billions. Literally, Facebook today has 2 billion daily active users that are able to communicate with friends and family and learn and do, you know, message each other and like, do all this stuff.

• 13:57Anthony Pompliano?

  And what we do is we almost like go as a society, we look for like, what's the one bad negative thing? And then just like blow that up like, see, I told you it's bad. And like, again, that doesn't mean that that bad thing is should like not be called out or not be critiqued. But it's looking at things on a totality, and we almost take the good stuff for granted. Because it's like, you know, I'm complaining on Twitter about this thing that Twitter is doing. And you're like, hey, genius, like, pay attention, right? And so is that just human nature? Or is that something that is unique to maybe like the tech industry today? Where like the proponents and the critics have almost like lost the idea of like, tech enables the conversation and the debate, which is actually a key piece of it.

• 14:36Speaker 02

  No, I mean, you see that in like politics and everything too. Like the famous quote of like, what is conservatism is people standing athwart history and yelling, stop. You know what I mean? Like that, like there, there, that, there's that sort of energy everywhere. And I think honestly, it's sort of healthy. It's like, you know, you want some people to be restraining, you want other people to be pushing forward. If we went pure, unadulterated chaos mode, like, we wouldn't ever build order. And that's ultimately the goal of what technology is. It's order that we're passing down from generation to generation. So yes, we need to try like a million different things. But then ultimately, we need to find some that are good to pass on to the next generation. I mean, I 100% agree with you about the, the people picking out the, the small parts of technology and using that as a, you know, trying to defeat the whole thing.

• 15:19Speaker 02

  The example that really is personal to me is the internet. My company builds internet satellites, and so we're helping Internet to people all over the world, you know, one satellite and one country at a time. And I've actually had friends come to me and they like, they are sort of joking, but they're sort of not. They're like, do we want to bring the internet? Like, is it better for people to be on the internet? Or are they just gonna get, you know, exposed all the, the, uh, the mob, the internet mobs or whatever? Like the, the downsides of the internet. And to me, it's just so obvious. It's like, well, sure, maybe if you're super inundated, like over saturated with internet. If you take anything to its extreme, too, too much of anything is always too much. Like, you know what I mean? But, um, these people that are first getting on the internet and using it for the first time,

• 16:00Speaker 02

  they're not using it to like, you know, yell at their neighbors on Nextdoor or whatever, like whatever on these, on these apps. They're using it to get access to healthcare. They're getting, using it to get access to, uh, education. Like, the basics are incredibly important and ignore and saying that people shouldn't have the basics because eventually someday, really far down the line, someone could use too much of this technology. That is making sense to me.

• 16:21Anthony Pompliano?

  So the first point is like, the world can get better. The second is that technology can be a great, uh, vessel for that improvement, that innovation. The third, though, is individual agency. And this one, I mean, we have two completely different populations in this world today. We have people who literally think that the government is gonna come save them and they don't need to do anything. Uh, and then we've got a portion of the population who's like, literally, everyone get out of my way and I will take, uh, kind of the ball and I'll run with it. Uh, individual agency is a key component and we need it for, uh, effective accelerationism? Or is it something that like, it's a nice to have as part of the movement?

• 16:56Speaker 02

  Um, so I think you would find two different camps of people that would argue both sides of that within the movement, which is, which is again, great, it makes the movement better. Everybody has their own idea of it. That's their, they're kind of a meta movement that says you should figure out your own thing. Um, but I would say there are two arguments. So the first argument is, yes, individual people matter. We, like, we're the only people that can bring about the change. Like, we have to go invent everything, like the individual agency that kind of is core to Silicon Valley. But I think you would probably also find people on the other side of that argument, which would basically say, as long as people are allowed to go experiment, no individual person is necessary to the, the success of the machine. And that, that really, um, is an important point. To them, to the EAC folks, they believe that the machine takes care of itself.

• 17:40Speaker 02

  They don't think it's like my job or Pom's job or whatever to, to decide how we move the machine. How, you know, the, this, the arm can go up in this way and the leg can move that way. Like, they don't think that it's any one person's job to actually. I'd like operate the entire machine that is capitalism, that is, you know, all of us creating a new ideas together. They believe that the machine does that itself. So I think it's sort of you. You asked the question right at the border of where, you know, yes, each individual person has to go out and experiment and do their own thing and figure out the way forward. But no individual person should control the whole machine because they just don't. There's nobody that knows that much. No one's going to make good decisions for 100 years or 200 years or 1,000 years in the future.

• 18:19Anthony Pompliano?

  So when you mentioned machine, I think a lot of people have heard the terminology techno capital machine. It scares the shit out of some of them and it gets some others really, really excited. What is the techno capital machine?

• 18:31Speaker 02

  It's transformers. It's just Optimus Prime. It's just, no, it's, so the technical capital machine is basically a word for how does the economy and society as a whole allocate stuff? How do we allocate our time? How do we allocate our resources? And how do we, you know, come up with new ideas to solve new problems? That's, that's all it is. It's like this, it's sort of like this meta organism, like this thing, this like, this combination of all the different people that are all acting on their own individual agency. So I think it's funny because a lot of these people that work at, or like that think about EAC work at like OpenAI and these other AI companies that are debatably literally trying to create that Optimus Prime like meta organism thing. But no, they're, they're just talking

• 19:15Speaker 02

  about society. It's like a fancy word for society.

• 19:18Anthony Pompliano?

  You also said that EAC is kind of the fight against entropy, right? And what I think is so interesting about that is, are the doomers or the like degrowthers? Like, are they literally, we should just pause, like just freeze the earth today. Don't develop new technology. Don't solve problems like, we're too scared. I almost think of it like helicopter parents, right? Like I'm too scared to let my kid go outside because they may possibly fall and scrape their knee versus the parents who are literally kicking their kids out of the house during the summer and like locking the door, like come back for dinner. It like, what is the end goal for the degrowth or the like the doomer type movement?

• 19:55Speaker 02

  I think the the Duma argument is let's wait until we figure it out like let's not let's not unleash a power we don't understand. I think the the problem with that is that, you know, first of all, we almost never understand things before we invent them. I think this is that's actually like a definition of invention. If you ask me like if you knew what it was before you invented it, then you already invented it. That's like it's one of my favorite authors of all time is Alistair McIntyre. And he writes about that. He says like, I think he was actually quoting Carl Popper, who who originally said or something. But anyways, the examples of a wheel, it's like if me and you are sitting in the Stone Age and we're trying to just like come up with cool stuff around the campfire. And I'm like, dude, I have to, I think that there's this idea about like, I don't know, it's like a circle. And then if we attach to a cart, then maybe we could like roll the cart easier.

• 20:37Speaker 02

  And you're like, you say, what is it? And I say, oh, like, I don't know yet. It hasn't been invented. Like, that doesn't exist. Like, the very act of describing the thing is inventing it. So if we fully understood like what these future systems would be, then we would have had to already have made them. Like, we're not going to be able to predict what's kind of coming up in the future. So it's sort of a self defeating. It says we have to lock in exactly where we are today because that's all we can understand. Let's fully get there before we can move forward. But I don't think that's how the world works. I don't think that, you know, I don't think your kid's going to grow up to be a great kid. If you just like strapped indoor like, you know, strapped to a chair indoors all day because that's like the safest place you can possibly be. I think the the word entropy basically means the intrinsic direction of something. So and everything is trending towards disorder. That's how everything works in the world.

• 21:22Speaker 02

  You know, you unplug your fridge, it's not getting any new energy anymore. So all of a sudden, it just becomes room temperature. Everything is evening out. Stars are burning out over time. You know, the pot on your stove stops boiling if you turn off the gas. Everything evens out, everything goes to, you know, inert, uniform nothingness over time. That's what entropy means. But what that implies is that if you just stop, if you stop making progress, if you stop accelerating, if you just go constantly in the future, you're gonna you're gonna disintegrate into dark ages. Like, that's how dark ages happen, is you stop making progress, you try to stay even, you try to stay even keeled. That's a that's how you end up letting entropy take over. It's just slowly degrades everything as you're just sitting there trying to maintain.

• 22:07Anthony Pompliano?

  How important is it to have a movement that people feel a part of? Like, one of the things that we've seen, you know, through centuries and centuries is the importance of religion as an example. Then if you look at things like in the Bitcoin and crypto community, there's like this tribalism and everyone kind of wants like a flag to wave, right? In sports, we see like your team. I recently read a thing that Ben Affleck, who's a huge Boston Red Sox fan. In a movie, they wanted him to wear a New York Yankees hat and he refused and they literally had to shut down filming. And the like, kind of, you know, conclusion was we'll meet halfway, I'll wear a Mets hat, but I'm not putting on the Yankees hat. And so like, like people have this like identity, right? They get tied into this stuff.

• 22:51Anthony Pompliano?

  In the tech industry, I don't, maybe there really hasn't been one other than like, hey, I'm like part of Silicon Valley, like whatever that meant. But is this really like the first major movement where people are saying like, let's put the flag up and kind of like, just go take on the world with technology, problem solving skills and entrepreneurship and like, we think we can build this better world?

• 23:12Speaker 03

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• 23:36Speaker 02

  I think that it's, it's interesting. I think you're finding that this is an example of us getting better and better technology over time. Like this, the EF movement in my mind is the current pinnacle, but there'll be something else. Like there's going to be another better way to, for us to figure out how to describe technology, describe what we're doing. But we're, we're improving, we're improving our technology at the same time that we're improving the meme, which is how do we describe Silicon Valley and try to encapsulate what we're doing? I mean, I moved to Silicon Valley, I guess it was like seven or eight years ago now. And when I joined, there wasn't all that much to find in terms of like resources that would explain how Silicon Valley works and what is Silicon Valley? And what's like the, the mantra and the mindset and everything like that? I eventually found my way to. You know, Y Combinator and like Y Combinator has these great like startup, like how to build a startup lectures.

• 24:21Speaker 02

  Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, actually was a person who quit that on his personal website. Later became the president of Y Combinator and is now the CEO, he's now the CEO of OpenAI. He's in OpenAI and WorldCoin and a bunch of other projects that your listeners probably know about. And but when I was there, that like, that was sort of the only resource. Like, there wasn't a lot that I could latch on to and figure out. I knew there was something out in Silicon Valley, but I didn't really know what. And over time, over the years that I've been here, I've learned that, or I've seen, we're getting much better as Silicon Valley about talking about ourselves and explaining what it is that Silicon Valley does. I mean, I spent, you know, the last two years or something doing this newsletter called Silicon Valley Outsider, which is basically this idea, like, how do you take this, this thing, Silicon Valley,

• 25:06Speaker 02

  and explain it to someone who's outside of it, who's never heard of any of this tech stuff? Maybe they only know it from Instagram and Snapchat on their phone. So we've gotten better. I think I think is the current pinnacle of like, what is Silicon Valley? Like Silicon Valley, to me, is that individual optimism, that technology can do anything attitude and all of that. And, you know, it comes with a lot of thermodynamics and like other kind of crazy stuff, too, which is really fun and like super cool to think about. But we're going to have other movements that encapsulate Silicon Valley. Our memes are going to improve over time, too.

• 25:37Anthony Pompliano?

  I've always thought that the tech industry in general, one of the things that they've done very well is solve problems. Right? You know, if you look at Uber, like for all of the kind of shit that Uber got over the years, at the end of the day, like you press a button on your phone and a car shows up. Sure, you can complain about the price, you can complain about what the car is, you can complain about how the company is structured, the price, the profitability, you can complain about the driver treatment. Like, there's a whole bunch of stuff that they probably could improve. But at the end of the day, the core idea of like, press a button on your phone and a car shows up. That's fucking cool, right? And it solved a problem. And so like, how, you know, to me, the tech industry has always just been like people who are trying to solve problems. And you mentioned Y Combinator, like literally, like, that's almost like the motto, right? It's just like build shit that people want. And if you do that, like, you can build a company.

• 26:22Anthony Pompliano?

  And so is that the story that needs to be told? It's like, just like, hey, this is a group of people who just want to solve these problems. And by the way, a way to do it is this like free market, you know, kind of structure of, you know, accelerate. Just like everyone go faster and go bigger and just push these technologies to the limit. And we will discover ways to solve it. And yes, some of it won't work, but like, that's okay.

• 26:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. I mean, the thing that originally got me interested in all this stuff that led me to EAC, that led me to all this accelerationism was the idea of asymmetries. And I think that Silicon Valley is built on one extremely key asymmetry, which is limited downside, unlimited upside. It's the idea that you can put in, you know, a year of your time or four years of your time. You can put in however many millions of dollars from outside investors. And the worst that could happen, the absolute worst, is that it's worth zero dollars and you sort of, you know, you wasted your time. You didn't get any more than just your salary when you went out there to work. But the upside of these technologies is like changing the world. Like, you, yeah, you joke, or we all joke that, you know, even it was in the Silky Valley TV show, like, we're building like backend ML models that'll change the world,

• 27:27Speaker 02

  or whatever. But I think it's, I think like a lot of the recent technology that you've seen, all these like hardware projects and all this like AI stuff, like, these things really do have the potential to make a huge impact on everyday life around the world. And it's cool. I think it's, I think it's very cool that you see that, you see that like kind of progression taking place over time.

• 27:47Anthony Pompliano?

  You mentioned earlier that the tech industry is getting better at the memes. And I think, you know, obviously with Twitter, we've seen that happen, and things kind of going viral. But now what we're starting to see is almost that it used to be like, our work will speak for itself. But that isn't how the world works. Like, if you don't tell your story, then someone else will. And so is effective accelerationism, is that really a response to the doomers? Or is that more of us saying, look, let's just come up with something that can describe a point of view of the world, put a banner on it, and then just put it out there so that when people ask, well, what are those people trying to do? It kind of comes in a more tidy, you know, package? Or is it literally just like doomers think that AI is going to ruin the world? So like, we got to come up with something to, to push back on them?

• 28:31Speaker 02

  I don't think it was that deliberate. I think it was much more emergent than it was deliberate. It was people that were, I mean, it started with anonymous dudes on Twitter, who just, you know, they're posting behind these pictures, like their profile picture is like an eagle. And then like, they have some name that's like, like, you know, Jeff Bezos, but Bef Jezos. Like, it's these guys that were anonymous on Twitter and working at these really cool companies like OpenAI and like super ridiculously smart, but just wanted to, you know, shoot the shit with their friends on Twitter spaces. And so they started doing these things and they started talking more and more and they got more and more of a little audience that was going. And then over time, this like emergent thing came out of it, which was EAC, which was like, we're not going to be effective. You know, altruists, we're going to be effective accelerationists.

• 29:12Speaker 02

  We don't think that we can just determine what's right ahead of time. We're going to figure it out as we go along. So I don't think like the, the council of Twitter anon's like sat down and, you know, had the one meeting where they decided like, hey, EX the answer. But it just kind of happened over time as the, as the meme took off, the meme took on a life of its own.

• 29:28Anthony Pompliano?

  So as these people are posting more and more, becoming more popular, I think people are figuring out who they are. And I know the identities of some of them and like, they're super legit people, right? These are not like, for all, for all the shit posting that's going on. And I think at first people were like, you know, who, who is this person just kind of shit posting on Twitter? Now all of a sudden they're like, wait a minute, like I knew who that person is and I see the shit posting and like, man, there's a lot of validity to what they're saying. But the fact that it didn't come with the baggage of who they were, either positive or negative, made people focus on the idea, not the person. Right? And so that, that really allowed the idea to kind of spread. Now you mentioned earlier, um, we have Mark Andreessen, we have Gary Tan, kind of a whole host of people who are kind of breathing, you know, uh, life into this movement. It was already alive, but it's almost like pouring gas on the fire, like, like kind of blowing up a balloon, right?

• 30:13Anthony Pompliano?

  Where people are like, okay, if they're interested in it, maybe I should pay even more attention. How important is it for these movements to get, you know, kind of, I'll call it like Silicon Valley leadership, whatever the fuck that means at this point. But like to get them involved and excited and tweeting about it, putting it in their bios, all that type of stuff.

• 30:29Speaker 02

  No, I think it's all, it's all part of legitimizing and broadening. Like I think you start off, um, like any meme, any idea starts off like super, super concentrated, small group of people who really believe it. And it's most just like essence, like deepest core essence or whatever. It's the most concentrated. And then over time it gets to a wider audience. And as it does, you hope that it maintains those core elements instead of just purely diffusing. Like I think that if, if EAC becomes purely just accelerationism, if it becomes purely just tech is good. Like if that's the ultimate takeaway from EAC, that is like full dilution, like full diffusion, like we didn't actually retain the core element. Of what it was in the very beginning. And so it's really, it's important to have these people that kind of not only, you know,

• 31:12Speaker 02

  sign on their name, like in this case, it's literally in their Twitter names, you know, Mark Andreessen, EAC or whatever. But also kind of give it that re-acceleration and that reinvigoration to keep it close to its core as it grows. I mean, like, I'm a, I'm a company builder, like what I do for, I'm a chief of staff at a, at a startup. Like my job is to make sure that as we scale and as we get more programs going for different satellites around the world, as we add more people to our team, that we retain the awesome DNA that we had in the early days and the, you know, the core of, you know, what it is and what is the bet? And what are we like? And how hard do we work and all that sort of stuff? Naturally, things diffuse, entropy takes over, things, you know, fade out into nothingness over time. So you need these people to not only sign their name and like, kind of give it legitimacy,

• 31:54Speaker 02

  but also to help reinvigorate it and keep it close to that core essence.

• 31:58Anthony Pompliano?

  So when you think about EAC for AI, what is the, the end result here, right? Cause I literally, when I wrote a piece recently, I was telling you before we started recording that, you know, I've been talking about a lot of these topics for a long time, just around like, we can build our way out, like GDP growth is like one of my favorites. It's like everyone talks about debt to GDP and they only focus on the debt side. Like if we just jacked up GDP growth, like 20% a year, which seems, you know, unfathomable at this point, but if we did that, like we could grow our way out of the problem. And so like, maybe we can't get to 20%, but could we get to like five or six, like maybe, right? And so I wrote the piece and I explained kind of the EAC movement, all the stuff.

• 32:37Anthony Pompliano?

  And all of the critics were like, the EAC folks want to replace humans with machines, like fuck those guys. Is that true? I guess like the most bluntly, is that true?

• 32:49Speaker 02

  There are some guys, there are some anonymous eagle dudes out there or whatever that, that, that like the, the endpoint of the argument for them is like, you know, hey, we need to expand the reach of consciousness as far as we can. It's really hard to put a human in a spaceship and send it all the way away from the sun. So let's just put like a computer in there, a conscious computer that we can send really far away from Earth. Like, I don't think I go that far. I don't think, I don't think that's like the, the mainstream EAC or whatever. Think that why you hear that is because the EAC folks are the people that are working at these super awesome AI companies that are trying to build general intelligence, which some people argue like, whatever, some Google engineer already like fell in love with one of these things like there. Some folks think that these things are conscious and think that they're,

• 33:31Speaker 02

  you know, human or a human enough or something. And I don't know, I think that's, that's why you hear it. I don't think it's the, I don't think that's the part that'll stick when this thing goes mainstream.

• 33:41Anthony Pompliano?

  I don't think it'll stick. Well, I take the Google engineer, for example, like, is that a machine problem? Or is that a person problem? We got people doing weird shit all over the place, right? And like, you got to imagine that people fall in love with all sorts of other people, but things too, like, what is the difference between loving a person, loving a dog, right? What's the next thing? Like, like, you can kind of look at it and you're like, you're getting closer and closer. Yeah. And, and again, I'm not saying that, like, loving your dog and loving the machine is the same thing, or even that it's close on that spectrum. But it's very obvious to see, like, there's probably a group of people who were like, hey, human is human. Okay, got it. Then eventually it was like, human to animal. Now, you could argue that there are people who absolutely love inanimate objects, like, talk to a sports

• 34:25Anthony Pompliano?

  collector, yeah, about their car, or like, the baseball bat that Mickey Mantle used to hit a home, like, people are, people are nuts. So like, in some weird way, loving the baseball bat, or loving the, like, quote unquote, intelligent machine, like, actually, maybe the intelligent machine is like closer to the human than the, than the baseball.

• 34:42Speaker 02

  Let me, let me, let me throw this at you then. So this is, this isn't quite like love, but I think that there's a decent argument to be made that AI is sort of like the next thing with intelligence creation. So we talked about it before. It's like genes, and then it's memes. And then like, what's next? Like, I think there's an argument to be made, and the, the, yeah, dudes would surely make this argument, which is that AI is a new way of categorizing information, and a new way of gaining information, and basically, a new way to pass it on. So, today, in our, like, meme world, or whatever, like, in order for me to teach a lesson to my kid, I have to, like, say the words to them, or like, give them a book that has it written down, or whatever, probably one of those two things. But in the future, when we have OpenAI at scale, or whatever, we

• 35:24Speaker 02

  Have like chat GPT seven or like whatever. We don't have to deliberately go find that information and pass it down anymore. The computers will basically pass it down for us. So today I go on Google and I search, you know, how to, you know, how to create a fusion reactor or whatever. Like I have to go through all those links. There's probably a lot of links on Google if I'm actually going to figure out how to make a fusion reactor. But in the future, when we have these AI systems that have seen the entire internet, they've seen the entire scope of everything humans have ever written or, you know, posted. It can go click on all the links for me. It can go to page like I max out and maybe like page two of Google. Like if you find me on page three, how long have I been there? Like hours.

• 36:07Speaker 02

  But this thing can go all the way down as many O's as there are on Google can like go and click on all the links and learn all the things. And then it just spits out to me this nice little summary that says step one, go find a big magnet. Step number two, like whatever. So I think that arguably the AI is like the third wave of that intelligence creation. So maybe not all the way to love. Maybe it's not fully conscious, but it certainly can be a much better way of like passing down lessons to our kids. Or, you know, learn helping us figure out how we're going to like interact with the world.

• 36:35Anthony Pompliano?

  One of the pieces also that I always kind of point to is like the everyone loves a binary situation. They're like, okay, humans or machines? Like we get one or the other. And if you want to replace the humans with machines, then like you're a bad person, right? Okay, maybe, maybe not. But like there is this like middle ground of like, what if we have humans augmented by machines, right?

• 36:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly.

• 36:54Anthony Pompliano?

  Right now you and I are augmenting our conversation by being able to use technology by being in two different places. Like I think there's a lot of people who are like, that's pretty cool. That's good, right? I Google, but like, what is the difference between me being able to just think and get the answer versus having to physically type it out? It's inefficient for me to type out the question on Google or hit these AI models or whatever. And so is that maybe kind of the actual and, you know, kind of game, if you will, of EA is like, it's not about replacing humans. It ends up actually just being like this huge augmentation that would make us much more efficient, much better. Probably would make us happier in many cases and also more productive, which then has all these, you know, great benefits to society.

• 37:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the core EA, the core EA thing is like, let's capture more energy and use more energy. So, you know, right now, humanity isn't that great at consuming energy from the sun. Like, I think it's like seventy-seven percent of our energy comes from oil and gas and like natural gas and coal. So, those are three things that also got their energy from the sun. They were plants or animals or whatever that decomposed and turned into oil and coal eventually. But it captured that energy from the sun like billions of years ago. So, today, we only get maybe like whatever, twenty percent of our energy from the sun as it lands on Earth. Some of that comes from solar cells, some of that comes from wind, some of that comes from, you know, like water, like in the water cycle and rivers and stuff. But it's only twenty percent of our energy today. And that

• 38:19Speaker 02

  as a whole, it's like some, some tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of the total energy that's output by the sun. And so, if you think about it, our entire world, everything we've built up around us, like this entire planet is contingent, is like, is based on being able to use energy. Like, if we couldn't use any more energy anymore, none of this exists. We like, can't do anything anymore. So, the EA argument is, what if AI helps us capture more energy? If it helps us figure out new ways to do better solar cells? If it helps us find ways to, you know, do fusion power, whatever. Like, it'll help extend the, the scope and scale of human consciousness, to use that, you know, Elon Musk phrase. The scope and scale of human consciousness will increase if we get better at capturing energy. And they want to go even further. They want to like, capture stars and they want to, you

• 39:03Speaker 02

  know, build like Dyson spheres around stars, which allows to take in more of the sun's energy, whatever. But the, the simplest answer is, they want to expand the amount of time that we can do all this. So, it's even more than just making us happy in the moment, or, you know, making sure that, you know, we have better belts and shoes. But it's like, let's make sure that ten thousand years from now, we have enough energy to still survive once all the coal and oil and whatever are gone.

• 39:25Anthony Pompliano?

  So, I'm gonna give you an example. A company I invested in is Varda, right? So, similar to kind of space stuff that you guys are doing, just in a different way. And when Delian first told me, he was like, "Yeah, we should like, send up manufacturing facilities up to space." I was like, "Ha ha, like, that's funny. Let's go to那儿." And then he was like, "No, dude, I think we should fucking do it." And I literally was like, "Whatever, man. Like, I'm, I'm in just because you're my friend. And like, that sounds awesome. But like, this is a write-off, right? Like, we're definitely losing all this money."

• 39:52Speaker 02

  This isn't gonna work.

• 39:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, like, I mean, just like, like, maybe we'll like, figure something out along the way, or like, there's like, some launch technology, or, you know, like, whatever. As most of these things go. But like, I do think that there's like, I don't know SpaceX and like each couple of years, there's been a couple of these companies, right? Where people are like, wait a second, that was an insane idea three or four years ago. Like we have a thing in space right now that is manufacturing a drug and then we're going to bring it back down to earth. Like what the fuck is going on? Humans are awesome, right? Like that to me is almost like the perfect example, but it's not controversial. And for some reason, AI is so controversial compared to like, hey, wouldn't it be awesome? If we like send things up to space, manufacture them and brought them back down to earth?

• 40:35Anthony Pompliano?

  Like that's an insane idea too, but for some reason people are like excited and cool with that and almost like, I want to learn more versus this AI thing just seems to scare the shit out of people. And it's like, why do you think it's AI specifically? Is it that the doomers have done a great job of like, kind of reaching the mass audiences and like warning them? Or is it just like, it's something they don't understand and can't wrap their head around?

• 40:58Speaker 02

  I wonder, I wonder how much of it is even just like, you know, we see the doomers on Twitter, but are they even really out there in the real world? Like, I think if I went to my parents right now and I was like, what do you think of AI? They'd be like, I don't know. Like, is that behind Google or something? Like, I think most people are probably not thinking about it. And so, but of the people thinking about it, of the people thinking about AI, I think most of the people that use AI or like interact with AI probably have a positive experience with it. Like, there are people like, I don't know, there was this company that was just sold to Thomson Reuters. That's basically like a legal assistant. And it like can look through all the different texts of like all the different court cases and all the different relevant stuff and just give you, give you stuff to, to help you be a better lawyer, you know? Like, there's very simple applications of AI that people don't think of as like this crazy going to replace humans, you know, future all like

• 41:42Speaker 02

  AGI thing. And they interact with those all the time and we're using it even though we don't know it right now, like in this video call, like it's cleaning out my voice or something like, who knows? And I don't know, I think most people probably aren't doomers. I think probably the doomers are the people who they think that everyone else is going into this blind. They think like, I've seen the future. I am the, you know, I know how this is going to go and it's not going to go well. The EAC argument is the opposite of that. They say, I don't know how this is going to go. Nobody knows how this is going to go. How could we? Possibly like I can't predict that they were going to create like Varda was going to create these space factories before they thought it up like or I would have done it. You know what I mean?

• 42:20Speaker 02

  Like we can't predict the future, but we can trust that we have the ability to solve to save things if it like if this space factory goes way wrong. Like, you know, we can fix it for the second version, that kind of thing. Um, so I don't know. There's there's the one argument is I know the future and it's going to be bad. The other argument is nobody knows the future. Let's make it better together. I like, I think I'm on that side.

• 42:40Anthony Pompliano?

  I do wonder how much of the doomer like psychology is just like, this is a way for me to make noise and like get attention. And so it's like, uh, I want to be famous versus if they sat down and they said, hey, look, I want to share some thoughts with you and no one will ever know. That I'm like the doomer, right? Would they still have those same thoughts? Like if you took away the ability to gain attention and fame? How many people would still believe it? There will be some right for 100% for sure. There there's some that are not doing it for attention and fame. But sometimes you see the the arguments that people are making or the things they're saying and doing. And you're like, man. I don't know if you really believe what you're saying as much as like you really are trying to go viral and like get the attention.

• 43:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Um, and and same, I guess, could be true on the EX side as well, but it but it just feels like, um, the the game of the internet, right? And like of the attention economy has created the incentives for people to have more and more extreme views. And so the doomer extreme view of like, we're going to replace all the people and that's horrible. Like somehow now has life and and people actually like take it seriously.

• 43:44Speaker 03

  Everyone's got a hard question about AI, your job, your kids, where it's going. Anthropic was built to surface those questions and share what it finds along the way, because there's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at claude.ai/spotify and keep thinking. That's claude.ai/spotify.

• 44:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, it is. It is interesting. I'm not sure if it's asymmetric. Like, I think that it probably works in both directions where you have like the the people who are like, everything is perfect and there's no, there's no risk in anything ever and they're rewarded for that because it's a more extreme view, something like that. And I actually think this is really interesting in terms of the whole like entropy thing that the that the EA people bring up in general. You know, most things in the world kind of fade into nothingness and fade into, you know, disorder. It seems like social media is doing this thing with memes where it's making them more extreme and more pronounced and more concrete. And I wonder, like, I think that that's that's part of it that people don't usually appreciate, which is that we are, we are creating new ideas and these new ideas are gaining more, you know, staying power because we can interact with each other in this different way. Like, me and you

• 44:52Speaker 02

  probably never would have found each other to talk with each other if it wasn't for Twitter, if it wasn't for the internet. And, you know, 100 years ago, we never would have, we never would have talked. But now we're talking about these ideas and we're able to, you know, explore them together. So, I don't know. I think it's, I think it's an innate future of the internet. I don't think it's something that has to do with either just the doomers or the the accelerationists, but we're definitely getting more extreme. That's for sure.

• 45:14Anthony Pompliano?

  Somebody has listened or watched this and they're like, cool, this like effective accelerationism thing sounds awesome. I'm in. What should they do? Like, what, what, what is the, what is the call to action? Like, what is the thing that the EA movement, you know, kind of wants it to manifest the ideas into like, action in reality?

• 45:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, it depends. It depends what you have the, like, which levers you have the ability to pull. But if you're an investor, go invest in projects that are trying to create, you know, new energy production or new, you know, new cool, like pushing the the boundaries forward in whatever way they want. If you're, if you're an entrepreneur or a person who wants to be an entrepreneur, move to Silicon Valley. Come out here, go, come interact with these people and start your own company. I mean, I think the the calls to action are just, you know, accelerate. It's to, let's, let's put the foot on the gas. Let's try out of many different experiments. I actually had someone on Twitter message me after I made that post about EA and said, hey, I think this is really cool. Can I join? It's not really how it works, man. Like, I'm not in charge. Like, I don't know. Just if you want to do it, do it.

• 46:17Speaker 02

  And I think that's kind of the whole, the whole thing, the move, the whole thing of the, the whole idea. The idea isn't that you have to get someone's permission. It's just go for it.

• 46:23Anthony Pompliano?

  If people are already acting that way, it's like back in like 2017 or 2018, this guy was arrested in like, I think it was like the Bronx or Brooklyn or something. And he was selling physical Bitcoins, like, like Chuck E. Cheese coins. And he was like selling them out of like a baggie. Right? And so like, of course, like the internet, you know, took it viral. And, uh, I mean, you could definitely see there's going to be some moron who's like, oh, yeah, I'm going to create the EAC Association. It's $20 a month, you know, whatever. Which is the exact opposite to your point of like, of what the movement is like, you don't have to actually even know anyone else to participate. And it is really just like accelerate in your own local community, your own life, whatever. And you are contributing, uh, even if no one knows about it.

• 47:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. I mean, it's the very, it's the very, like, it's actually kind of a tough movement to describe and to capture it because the whole idea of the movement is like, there is no one answer. There is no one set thing that we all have to commit to. It's like, let's just try it. Let a million flowers bloom.

• 47:16Anthony Pompliano?

  If, uh, people want to find out more, uh, I'm going to send them to your tweet, which like, we can call it a tweet. I think now it also might be.

• 47:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's in the middle of like a.

• 47:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Or it could be a blog, or it could be a blog post. Like, I don't know.

• 47:30Speaker 02

  I put it on, I put it on Substack to begin, but then like Twitter and Substack are not getting along these days. And so it got like, I posted it and like five hours later it had like 20 views. And I was like, all right, I guess you can't put subset links in tweets anymore. Turns out.

• 47:44Anthony Pompliano?

  I hope, I hope one day that they play nice. Elon should have a Substack. I think that Elon would do just fine.

• 47:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 47:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Or, or as a shareholder in Substack, maybe Twitter should buy Substack and then we could all play nice together. That'd be even better.

• 47:57Speaker 02

  There we go. Great. Yeah.

• 47:58Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. Where can we send people to find you on the internet if, uh, if they want to follow up, learn more, uh, or find, uh, or find the tweet that you did?

• 48:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, sure. So I have two things that I would send you to. The first one is just Twitter. Come, come find me on Twitter, Christian Kyle, pronounced underscore Kyle, K Y L E. Or you can go, yeah.

• 48:16Anthony Pompliano?

  I saw, when I saw it, I was like, man, he really is gonna make sure people that has pronounced his last name.

• 48:20Speaker 02

  It improved, it improved pronunciation of like 100%. Most people say Keel and I'm like, fine, whatever. I don't care. But I just made pronounce Kyle.com and then it worked. So there's, that's one way. And then the other way is I'm starting a new Substack on this, actually. So I just did it recently. It's called Against the Dying of the Light, for that classic rage, rage, against the dying of the light. I think that's the ethos of fighting against entropy. So find it at dyinglight.substack.com.

• 48:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Awesome. I'm gonna go sign up right now. I appreciate your time today. I learned a lot. We got a couple of good laughs in. If anyone wants to find out more about effective accelerationism, just remember one word, accelerate, accelerate, accelerate. Christian, I appreciate it. We'll do it again in the future.

• 49:01Speaker 02

  All right. See you, man.